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Tearakan t1_j5vox7m wrote

Reply to comment by legitsigh in Researchers unveil the least costly carbon capture system to date - down to $39 per metric ton. by PNNL

And doing that kind of transformation would cost 1.95 trillion dollars a year. That's assuming the method can be scaled and as you mentioned the methanol doesn't get used.

Because we need to not use the end product. That CO2 needs to be put back into the ground to actually solve things.

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-Merlin- t1_j5wloev wrote

>And doing that kind of transformation would cost 1.95 trillion dollars a year. That's assuming the method can be scaled and as you mentioned the methanol doesn't get used.

Yes, but you are assuming the idea scales by build numbers and that the cost doesn't scale by dollar value. Most researchers are projecting a significant decrease in costs as these units are scaled. There are also many people who think there is no long term way for humanity to adapt to climate change without learning how to efficiently remove carbon from the atmosphere. We get closer to making this work by discoveries like the one being researched in the article.

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Tearakan t1_j5wzep1 wrote

It doesn't matter as long as we still emmit CO2 at a large scale. This would be great for use after we stopped emmisions.

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-Merlin- t1_j5x5go6 wrote

Agreed; this is how I view carbon capture technology. We need to learn to scale it now so that by the time we are at or near 100% renewables we can begin to remove the massive amounts of carbon we have pumped into the atmosphere over the past x many centuries.

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Superb_Nature_2457 t1_j5x8j4z wrote

No time like the present to start building it out while we work on cutting emmissions, right?

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Tearakan t1_j5x9zg3 wrote

Eh not really if it significantly increases emmisions while building. Once we get emmisionless vehicles and equipment sure. Until then we are just making the problem worse.

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P1xelHunter78 t1_j5x9xc5 wrote

2 trillion in the grand scale of things to literally save the planet as we know it isn’t really all that bad…

I mean it’s not like you can just buy all the carbon out of the air, but if all the governments in the world or at least the developed ones went gangbusters to do this we could at least develop a stop gap methanol fuel that well stop adding new carbon

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Tearakan t1_j5xakw8 wrote

Oh I know. But that's literally 2 trillion less in profit for the capitalists controlling all of our governments.

That's less short term economic growth.

We would still need to not use the methanol fuel or we just dump the CO2 in the atmosphere again.

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realbakingbish t1_j5xiesw wrote

Cycling carbon from the atmosphere into our fuel, burning that fuel, and releasing the same carbon back into the atmosphere is still substantially better than pumping new carbon out of the ground and burning that into the atmosphere. It’s not perfect or ideal, but it’s still so much better than what we’ve got now.

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Tearakan t1_j5xik2q wrote

The issue is we literally can't use that fuel to actually bring the carbon back out of the atmosphere. We run in laws of thermodynamics that stop us there.

Burning something that creates co2 and then using said energy to recapture it will end up in a net energy loss.

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realbakingbish t1_j5xj2vq wrote

It’s not a complete solution on its own, you’re correct there. Combined with renewables and nuclear power to help minimize the use of fossil fuels in energy generation, there may be actual possibilities.

We’re decades out from the “perfect” solution to climate issues, so in the meantime, we have to continue investigating and researching solutions and finding ways to combine and utilize existing technologies to the end goal of minimizing carbon output for our existing societal needs, including energy, food production, transportation, etc.

It’s a multifaceted issue.

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checkwarrantystatus t1_j60obz6 wrote

Really we just need to convince the capitalists that they too can have a piece of the new $2 trillion carbon capture biz.

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Tearakan t1_j60pdqx wrote

That's not enough. As indicated by scientists effectively screaming that we are heading towards doom and our emmisions literally got higher than ever before in 2022.

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