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This is how we solve the problem. We can’t expect emerging nations to stay poor and low-energy consumers. That’s asking them to literally chose death for their populations in the near term so as to protect the planet in the long run.

But innovation to capture carbon and new, powerful clean energy solutions like fusion are how we can all have abundance wo killing Mother Earth.

I agree. That has sadly always been the only argument against climate change that makes sense. There is a very real risk of creating greater wealth disparity between nations. This may be one step that allows for an even playing field before we get those countries to catch up with the rest of the world.

Aside from making renewables cost effective on a global scale.

Too bad all fusion will do is introduce more oligarchs, and the cost of energy won't drop enough to force a phasing out of dirty energy. :/

How is that an argument against climate change?

They are not denying climate change. They are simply denying that the sollution put forward is a valid one.

Still more expensive than trees, but getting closer (and surely faster).

If this technology exists already then, regardless of the cost of the current or even earlier versions of it, why is it not already being used? Why doesn't every group or politician fighting against climate change push for it to be implemented?

Edit: Thanks for all of your responses. I'm glad there was an opportunity to learn more information about this. It didn't make sense to me that such a promising solution wouldn't have already been used but now I see putting a plan into action is a little complicated.

The paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.202202369

I’m not an expert but I think not all endeavors in carbon capturing are successful.

I’m also not sure how big this particular group of people are but there are people that see big corporations investing/spending money on carbon capture and because it’s big businesses doing, likely to be able to keep doing business as usual for as long as possible they seem to genuinely want these efforts to fail out of spite for companies. Pretty sure the Guardian ran a piece last week practically gloating that whatever company Microsoft(among other companies) pay to do carbon capturing to offset their output was failing to do so.

The only other reason I can think of is that people want to do this process more naturally. I can understand that but we need all hands on deck and we’re not going to regrow the vast sections of the Amazon overnight. Another solution I’ve seen is increasing the amount of algae in the seawater but this suggestion has several problems. For one thing I’ve never seen an actionable plan to do this. I’ve also seen marine scientists say that this would have an absurdly profound impact on Ocean ecosystems.

Again not my area of expertise, maybe somebody can help explain better. Basically people don’t like the solution because they have doubts as to its efficacy (fair but misguided, solar panels weren’t as efficient as they are now so the current efficiency shouldn’t be a long term consideration), they don’t like the majors players currently pushing this technology or they think a more natural solution is what we should pursue.

I’m an all hands on deck kinda guy myself

Because then they would have to, 1-admit that it is an issue, 2 - stop themselves and others from squeezing every last penny out of the current situation

Once you admit it's an issue you are boxing yourself into solving it or being against solving it. If it's not real than you are not against solving it.......

Edit to clarify what they are currently milking.

On the contrary, if we instead forced billionaires and top businesses to stop overconsuming then it would halt the exploitation of emerging nations AND reduce our environmental impact. Humanity has spent the past 50 years trying to invent our way out of climate change and it hasn't been successful yet, because we are simply treating the symptoms and not addressing the root causes.

In addition to the other response, there isn’t anywhere to put it yet

Let’s do both

What? Most emissions from developing nations are coming from their own consumption now. Forcing companies to do something isn’t going to stop India from building coal plants

The issue with carbon capture is that it takes energy to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Unless every energy transfer from release of carbon to capture of carbon is perfectly 100% efficient it will always result in more than 1 tonne of carbon emitted to capture 1 tonne of carbon using fossil fuel power stations.

The solution to that is obviously to use renewable energy and until the power grid is almost entirely renewable energy carbon capture won't be the best use of our time and effort.

Who do you think owns those coal plants, the people earning $2 a day working in them or the governments/companies running the factories that need most of that power? You forgetting that a significant proportion of those factories are working to produce goods for Western consumers and are contracted out by Western countries. Tomorrow the EU could release a statement saying "we won't allow anything you make to enter our countries unless you follow the same environmental regulations as we do" and these factories would happily charge 3x as much to do that. Asking the workers of a country to be responsible for the negative externalities of things they don't own being produced in factories owned by people that will happily milk them for profit is absurd.

And this capture only works on greenhouse gas energy stations, so it's not particularly helpful once those get phased out.

It doesn’t matter who owns them, they’re still going to emit a ton of carbon…

If the EU did what you’re suggesting it would massively drive up costs for those same workers too. That’s not to their benefit.

I mean yeah I'd rather we spent time replacing fossil fuel with some combination of nuclear and renewables as I think that'd be a better use of our time and money

I know the political process doesn't work this way but it seems like you should just force them to do it in this situation because of what will happen if they don't. Idk, maybe they have so many greedy allies that it would turn into a violent disaster.

Definitely faster, depending on location planting and worse yet, replanting can take up to 20 years to be carbon negative.

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So is it a technology that has to be placed on site to work? The way carbon emissions from specific facilities are affecting the entire world, it almost seems counterintuitive to think you couldn't also set up carbon capture "plants" around the world to offset emissions.

You would think it should be easy, since the down side is we are the leaders in an industry and now have a bunch of new technology around making and storing energy, one of the biggest growing commodities in our current life, but they either don't care or don't think any disaster is coming and they just want to keep making money the way they are rather than try something unknown that they may not have as much control over.

I kinda agree with you. If it works & it doesn't cause some other problem that might turn out to be worse, we should probably be using it even if it's expensive.

Actually it's closer to a century for a forest. :(

But, yes, let's do both...and throw in a whole lot of algae farms to boot!

First of all, 90% of those goods being produced aren't even staying in the local economy. The per capita consumption of the Western world dwarfs the higher population levels of the developing countries in which these goods are produced. This is why I'm arguing that the people in Western countries are responsible for the carbon, because it's their goods and business owners are deliberately producing goods elsewhere instead of locally because its profitable.

Second, let's say the EU really did force any goods to be produced according to their local standards. This would obviously include wage/worker standards in addition to environmental standards, so those factories would suddenly become the best places to work. This would provide pressure on other local factories to improve conditions so as to retain workers, thereby uplifting the local economy and helping everyone.

For the sake of consideration, let's say scenario 2 doesn't play out like that and locally produced goods become too expensive for people to afford. In that case, they can then turn to an even poorer country and start doing the same thing the EU did to them, thereby perpetuating the capitalist cycle.

> First of all, 90% of those goods being produced aren’t even staying in the local economy

Do you have a source for this claim? That isn’t reflected in the research I’ve read

Here's a map showing consumption-based emissions for countries, and you can clearly see that China and India both export their carbon while America and Western Europe import carbon: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

It depends on the carbon capture system being used. Some can be placed wherever others have to be placed at a Powerplant to capture emissions at the source. Again the issue is the energy required to capture this carbon will always result in more emissions than they capture until we have a renewable/low carbon energy grid to begin with and thus what we should really be doing is reducing the carbon output of our energy grid.

Against renewable and climate technologies. I lump climate denial and renewable refusal in the same category.

It's not just a matter of cost. All carbon removal schemes have limited capacities, even tree planting. There are practical realities that will prevent many of them operating anywhere near the scale we need.

I can't see anything in the article about how much carbon they expect to remove, but I am confident it's not a lot, certainly nowhere near the 50 gigatons we need to scrub annually.

In any case the world has no use for 50 gigatons of methanol, and the carbon in that methanol will eventually go back into the atmosphere.

I thought the trees took care of replanting?

We still need to offset all the CO2 pumped in the air by burning fossile fuels.

We need to grow trees that capture co2 fast and efficient in a controlled environment (especially if we genetically alter trees to do just that), then coal them, grind that to powder and dump that in the cavities we left in the earth when we removed the fossile fuels.

I have no idea of this is doable but we have to start asap lowering our output and reversing the damage we have done. We screwed up in about 170 years, that are allmost 6 cycles of 30 year old trees.

There is the problem of squares vs cubes, as in we only have square kilometers to grow trees to fill cubic kilometers.

Look I don’t agree with it but it is the truth.

I mean replanting in the sense trees are cleared and replanted like in forestry. Or tree are cleared and substitute trees are planted elsewhere.

Watch as this doesn't make it to implementation but is used to justify increasing CO2 emissions anyway.

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Each of those “dollars” of input to do the carbon capture are coming from a system that releases carbon. The materials to build the plant, the transport of those materials, the transport for the people to run and maintain it, the clothes on their back, the food on their plate, the bank where their salary is deposited, the studio that makes the movies they watch etc. All those processes release carbon.

You can’t just look locally and say “well, I have green energy capturing carbon so this must be a net positive” because a lot of the carbon cost is externalized. You need to reduce the carbon footprint of a dollar of economic activity.

Otherwise you will be sitting there confused why atmospheric carbon is still increasing despite you building more and more capture systems.

Trees also exist at the whim of whoever manages that property. A lot can happen in 50 years, you can’t guarantee favorable political winds or rule out accidents.

Just look what Bolsonaro did to the Amazon in a short amount of time. Additionally, as global warming increases the severity of droughts, we should be expecting more forest fires.

Unfortunately I don’t think trees alone will be enough, although we should definitely be doing it anyways

That's another point I hadn't considered but it seems like we should have the means to do all of that without causing more carbon emissions. Money can't be the reason we don't do it, that's a copout.

Poppycosh! We won't do anything until we find the one and only perfect solution that fixes all problems. Doing anything less than perfect is basically worse than doing nothing at all!

Methanol is used in A LOT of different chemical/biochemical processes. Not 50 gigatonnes a year, but I'm sure we could find more uses for it or convert it into other chemicals.

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.

As another commenter states this would ultimately cost 1.95 trillion dollars (for the 50 gigatons of emmisions annually) assuming it's scalable.

And this process creates methanol. We'd have to pump it underground or find another way to store it otherwise we are just spinning our wheels.

Yep. Entropy kills us here. With us continuing to emit co2 carbon capture is kinda pointless.

This is interesting because I sort of thought Chart/SES’s CCC (Cryogenic Carbon Capture) was at or targeting implementation at $40/metric ton relatively soon.

I’m going to have to look into this more now…

That’s what I hate when people say we shouldn’t invest in the new small modular nuclear reactors, and should rely only on solar/wind + battery storage. We should do both now and decarbonize as much as possible! We have an insane amount of energy production to replace. Let’s attack it from as many angles as we can.

Not since the entwives left

Clearcutting is not good forestry practice. You want to do selective cutting, so enough trees remain to hold the soil in place and allow natural regeneration from the remaining trees. You can plant some new seedlings if you want to alter the species mix.

Then you need to turn the harvested trees into durable wood products, not cheap particleboard crap that end up in a landfill in a few years. You want to store the carbon.

Depending on the soil types and species, you may need to fertilize to maintain forest production. Removing harvested logs removes nutrients.

Source: used to own a tree farm.

Isn't this a perpetual motion machine? Burn fuel into CO2+H2O to get energy, put in energy to turn CO2+H2O back into fuel? You'd be better off just turning down the power plant instead of installing a scrubber. Smells like misdirection to me.

What threshold value needs met before wide scale adoption/implementation? Who are the contenders for purchasing or investing in these technologies for wide scale usage?

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This is exactly what's wrong with the carbon offset market.

Trees aren't a silver bullet though .They're slow on up take and then eventually die and release the carbon.

Emerging nations are not the problem. The problem is the already-developed nations, who have the money to change to greener infrastructure and choose not to because it isn't profitable. Carbon capturing is another bandaid on the problem of over-growth, and will only serve as an excuse to allow corporations to keep polluting and putting off real change.

They also all come with their own carbon costs.

Can't wait for Ice Age to start again after all this fast crbon removal teheee

Trees release carbon when they die and not every environment is suitable for trees. Trees can actually be detrimental to an environment which never hosted them beforehand causing a reduction in biodiversity.

Trees are not the answer.

I am still rooting for genetically modified trees that grow fast and capture huge amounts of carbon.

Technology will surely save us from our technology

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>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.

Not if you put them underground and compress them to take up less room.

You are right. Various sources indicate humans use about 100 to 150 metric tons per year.

But if a cheap source of methanol is created, we can stop using natural gas to create it. It can be used to create gasoline so we stop drilling for oil, and can be used to make durable things to keep the carbon captured.

Another very promising tool.

Edit: Yes, I dropped the million. 100 to 150 million metric tons per year.

Edit 2: Cool chart about production amounts from just the USA. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38412

Shipping is looking to methanol as the most likely future fuel for their vessels. Existing cars can be converted to run on methanol fairly cheaply and easily; the main issue tends to be cold weather starting. It's probably the most realistic way of reducing our carbon emissions, since both the hydrogen and carbon feedstock for methanol can be made carbon free (or even negative, depending on how you do it), the production process is already in place on an industrial scale, and it doesn't require everyone to fork out for a completely new vehicle.

Releasing carbon into the atmosphere is fine as long as in aggregate your fuel production doesn't use all of the carbon you pull from the atmosphere. When you do that, you're still carbon negative as long as what's left over doesn't oxidize. There are also a number of untapped sources for carbon. Sewerage, for example, contains carbon that was pulled from the atmosphere by a plant. Rather than letting it convert to methane, you can convert some of the carbon to methanol, and sequester the rest, effectively letting the carbon cycle work for you.

And monoculture forests are really crappy for biodiversity and the ecology of the area

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Fusion isn't a thing. And won't be a thing for at least 20 years. And given the neutron problem, might never be.

And carbon capture has historically been more of a money capturing technique. $39 per ton..? We emit ~40 billion tons per year. There's no way to do this to scale, but there are ways to scam people out of their money to invest in it.

We gotta plant more trees. We gotta cut back our power consumption. And more than anything, we gotta convert to clean energy, as you said (but ones that already exist). You'd be amazed at how much solar has progressed.

>Clearcutting is not good forestry practice. You want to do selective cutting, so enough trees remain to hold the soil in place and allow natural regeneration from the remaining trees. You can plant some new seedlings if you want to alter the species mix.

Agreed, you should tell the Brazilians.

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.

You must have made an error. Biodiesel production alone uses like 100 tons per day. You must have mean 100 million tons per year.

Unfortunately petroleum makes a lot more than just gasoline.

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.

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

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Kind of like how the CCCP referred to everyone who was not communist as "fascist". Makes sense... Not.

Edit - Kind of bigoted that you use "gay" as an insult. Not very 2023 my dude...

Let me get this straight: Agreeing that climate change exists, but not agreeing that wind and solar is the solution is still "climate denial"?

This sounds suspiciously close to religious dogma...

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

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.

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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So the remaining ones are incellulose?

Or build a house.

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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.

You can also pump it underground beneath basalt layers and it binds to the basalt as it percolates upwards, forming carbonate rocks.

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.

I've seen turning methanol into gasoline before, but how does that work? Gasoline is hydrocarbon Paraffins, Olefins and isomers plus additives. Not that many oxgenates, or am I wrong?

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.

Have they discovered not freeing that carbon in the first place? Cuz that is surprisingly cheap.

The faster a tree grows, the weaker the wood is, and the more quickly it rots and releases a good amount of that carbon. I doubt there's a genetic hack to change that correlation, tho I might be wrong.

There are species of seaweed that can grow up to 2m in a day. Pulling CO2 from the oceans might be a better long term strategy than pulling CO2 from the atmosphere (since oceanic CO2 comes from the atmosphere), since it's more heavily concentrated. Atmospheric CO2 capture sounds great until you realize that putting it on a smokestack is just inherently better, at which point it just becomes CCS.

The wood wouldn't be allowed to rot, genetically altered or not. It would get stored in some hermetic location and become a permanent carbon sink.

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Tell them what exactly? The rain forest is getting cut down to make room for soy feed for cattle, not because people desperately need wood.

Tell this to the current foresters please. I studied forestry and couldn't agree more.

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I was hoping more for carbon fixation in the form of sugars.

Yea, their nuts are shriveled

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Is the cheap particle board, thrown into a landfill and buried, not "stored carbon"?

What about methane release? More harmful than CO2.

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The SMRs are however more costly then solar plus storage. If we build SMRs a lot of capital gets bound there that could have build more solar and storage instead.

You generally don't turn methanol into gasoline, you just burn it in an gasoline engine instead of gasoline. It may require some modifications in the engine.

Why not turn the CO2 into gasoline then instead of redesigning engines?

I have the feeling the cost shouldn't be in $ but in energy used, right?

Because at the bottom line this is what really matters - we release CO2 to the air because it's getting us energy, so what would be the energy cost of capturing back?

Maybe you think it doesn't matter because we're capturing CO2 with renewable energy, but renewable energy isn't completely carbon-free (when you take into account creating and shipping the equipment) and that renewable energy could have been used to replace carbon generating energy.

It's chemically a lot more complex for very little gain.

The redesign isn't much of one, you need better seals, maybe some different polymers for hoses and different timings. There were experiments done in the 80s.

How is the methanol Synthesis easier than Fischer-Tropsch? Both are energy intensive in and of themselves not to mention the DAC of CO2

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My hungry ass cannot be trusted around carbon C:

I don’t really care. I misspoke on a Reddit post. Kinda gay that you are taking it so personal.

>Burn fuel into CO2+H2O Use solar/wind renewables to get energy, put in energy to turn CO2+H2O back into fuel

How many gigatons would we need to cover annual gasoline usage?

Why would the synthesize it if it s byproduct of carbon capture?

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How are either of those a byproduct of CC? I haven't worked with CC so I really don't know.

according to the article they are able to use a solvent to capture the CO2 from emissions from power or steel plants, and use a reactor to convert it to meth, which is an excellent idea considering how many people are addicted to meth and will want to smoke it right up.

I don’t think the cost of SMRs are settled, but the one thing that I keep hearing is that solar + storage is cheaper than everything. Where are you seeing this because it doesn’t add up. Solar can be cheaper without storage. The battery storage for utility scale systems combined with over building solar to charge the batteries so they are available when the sun doesn’t shine is way more expensive than other sources.

Then you have to look at Lithium mining. Demand is growing and we already will have to produce much more lithium than we do today for the tiny % of EV cars that are produced. Demand is growing and everyone is hoping that new tech will allow us to meet that demand in the coming decades. The problem is that tech is not proven yet. If lithium prices triple due to demand, battery storage is less economical with current tech.

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Yeah, I was doing some rough calculations.

Mass of earth's atmosphere: 5.1 * 10 ** 18 kilos, which is 5.1 * 10 ** 15 metric tons.

Concentration of CO2 in atmosphere: 415 parts per million as of 2021, according to NOAA.

That means the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 2,282,500,000 metric tons, give or take. To get us back to 1960 levels, we'd need to remove a fourth of that.

That 2.3 gigatons seems over an order of magnitude lower than the 50 gigatons you mentioned. How'd you get your number? Have I slipped a decimal place somewhere?

Regardless, this vast scale is why I'm deeply doubtful about the feasibility of industrial carbon-capture solutions.

Edit: Markdown doesn't like programmer-ish numerical expressions.

That's not forestry, that's looting.

Stuff it back into dried up oil wells?

Don't focus on lithium so much. There are other options in the making, Sodium for instance or Iron-Air. At the moment Lithium is just too cheap for high effort.

Solar is cheap and is getting cheaper. Worst case we can store as heat and use a turbine to generate electricity at ~60% efficiency.

https://ieefa.org/articles/ieefa-us-small-modular-reactor-too-late-too-expensive-too-risky-and-too-uncertain

The issue with things like that is they can trigger earth quakes. Pressurized waste water injection wells from fracking water disposals created a series of earthquakes in Oklahoma. Putting new or changing pressures at scale on rocks is going to be a problem

That doesn't address their slow up take.

Farming then Harvesting the trees in a sustainable and scalable way that doesn't destroy forests seems prohibitive. Do you have a citation otherwise?

You likely can't build enough houses to matter as well it will still decay at some point that's too soon

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Environmental benefits aside, I’m curious if there is any monetary value for a metric ton of carbon?

No citation, just a guess that the "fossil fuel" started off as trees that were eventually buried and crushed.

Not sure how you got those numbers, but they are off by about a factor of a million. In 2015 consumption was 75 million metric tons. Current estimates put it at about 125 million metric tons by 2025.

This is a scam. 95% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is produced by the ocean.

Did they unveil anything? This is a weird article, it's about using captured carbon and has a few lines about better solvents and that's the headline? Those certainly aren't the only solvents out there and where are the test results?

More harmful in the short term, and at least some landfills have methane capture which is either sold or used for local power.

Alas, I live in the US state of Georgia, so they won't listen. The most I can do is inform them of a fugitive working in the US Capitol under an assumed name.

So 1.5% of the worlds GDP to break even on carbon emissions in our current state. About 2.5% to turn the clock backwards and bring us back to pre-industrial-revolution levels by 2100.

Not great, but not completely outside of the possible. Provided sufficient political will.

Course this current system and pricing doesn't work via direct-air capture, so we're only looking at breaking even with it, not turning back the clock.

Which foresters? There are ten million private forest owners in the US, not to mention government land. The best I can do is get together with some local people and protect a part of it.

Organic material buried in a landfill tends to decompose. Dry wood, like the frame of a house, can last a long time. But bury it with household trash like food scraps and there is enough water to cause it to break down.

While I understand your skepticism I'm optimistic about the diversity of tactics we're creating between carbon removal and renewable green energy.

Hopefully this trend continues and we won't have to do the full 50 gigatons.

That's why some conservationists collect animal scat to use in their reforestation projects. It's still really crappy but not in the monoculture sense.

https://blog.nature.org/science/2017/05/10/what-happens-when-you-plant-pile-bear-scat/

https://blog.nature.org/science/2014/06/09/coyote-scat-sabal-palm-native-plant-conservation-texas/

The poor entwives. Makes me sad thinking about it.

I like to think this theory is true:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/20ojbk/hobbits_are_entwives/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

It was, but that process took millions of years and compression we likely can't replicate or sustainability

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

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.

This sounds like something that should be publicly funded, everyone/everything would do better with less carbon in the air

>I can't see anything in the article about how much carbon they expect to remove, but I am confident it's not a lot, certainly nowhere near the 50 gigatons we need to scrub annually.

None. They're turning it into an economic intermediary, but there's no actual removal from the environment. They're using CO2 to carry energy, CO2 that's released when the energy is.

Interesting. I always thought having them all be dead was a mistake. The elves at least the Silvan or Sindar would have been close friends and allies and maybe even live alongside each other. They would have had a safe place in elven kingdoms.

My theory based on lore is that when they moved east, they moved too close to Mordor. Which was a deadly mistake. If Mordor didn't finish them off then the people (forgot the name, something riders?) who attacked Rohan from the Sea of Ruhn area finished them off on the way to attack the men.

It’s already being done.

I’m not an expert, but I think you’re talking out your ass.

Hydraulic fracturing is different from pumping gas into the ground because liquids are incompressible. Gasses are extremely compressible.

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is it carbon sequesteration through soil regeneration? Other than that, please keep looking for something that won‘t bite us in the behind in the very near future.

Oxygen goes out in the form of water.

Right now several companies offer this technology. Examples:

Exxon

Topsoe

Methanol is not a byproduct of carbon capture. Converting captured CO2 into methanol is an active step with the intention of creating methanol.

>use a reactor to convert it to meth, which is an excellent idea considering how many people are addicted to meth and will want to smoke it right up.

Is this a joke or are you serious? Methanol is not the same as methamphetamine (aka meth).

I don't think it's chemically as easy as "take oxygen out and connect the carbon" do you have sources for the actual reaction and catalysis? It's probably patented that's why the websites don't tell, but I'm quite curious how they do it.

>I don't think it's chemically as easy as "take oxygen out and connect the carbon" do you have sources for the actual reaction and catalysis?

So are you asking for the actual mechanism and the catalyst used? It's different based on which catalyst is used, and there are also several different mechanisms proposed for the formation of carbon-carbon bonds. So it's still up for debate.

The initial dehydration of methanol is actually the easiest step. Such dehydration is performed with many different oxygenates in the industry using either acid-based catalysts or alumina. What comes after is where the debate exists as to what actually happens. That part has been known to be quite efficient using a specific zeolite as a catalyst.

>It's probably patented that's why the websites don't tell

Exactly. There are quite a lot of patents on the catalysts and the process technology. No matter which is used, converting methanol to gasoline is done in a reactor train, so 2-3 reactors are running in parallel with one of them being stopped for catalyst regeneration every now and then while the other two are running.

So far the way we have been designing these plants is to first convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen (or in the case of blue plants, it's natural gas + carbon capture) to synthesis gas (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen), which is then converted to methanol (or methanol and dimethyl ether) and then subsequently to gasoline. This may also be followed by an upgrading step. The end-result is usually around 85-90% gasoline and 10-15% LPG.

There is plenty of literature if you search for "methanol to gasoline reaction" (example: this), but the source for the overview given above is me. I design this process (and others) for a living.

Edit:

If the technology mentioned in OP can be scaled up and has a high conversion (and rate) for CO2 to methanol, it will bring down the capital costs by a lot. That's why there has been plenty of work on this topic for years now.

The conversion of either natural gas or CO2 to synthesis gas is quite expensive, the most capital-intensive step in the production of gasoline through this route. If it can eliminated (along with another expensive step of separating CO2 from the capture solvent), the economics would become significantly more favorable.

Thanks for the paper, I'll look into it. I'm actually about to start my PhD researching the hydrogenation of carbondioxide over ruthenium so I appreciate the reliable source.

>I'm actually about to start my PhD researching the hydrogenation of carbondioxide over ruthenium

Nice! I have worked on this until I moved quite recently from the R&D organization in my company to the commercial/sales org. I can't reveal the exact information, but maybe a couple of pointers could help you.

Since you said ruthenium, are you gonna be working with Ru-Macho or its derivatives? The focus of industrial R&D has been (heavily) on using catalysts based on Fe, Mn, and Ni. Cost and abundancy are the factors here. I'd suggest, if possible, to design the equivalent catalyst structure using these cheaper metal ions once you do your initial testing with Ru-based catalysts.

We have noticed a spectacular lack of awareness among different research groups in considering the information published by other groups. This is with respect to the mechanism of CO2 conversion to formic acid, dimethylamine, methanol, etc. A couple of prominent groups have proposed their mechanisms and have focused their observations around their mechanisms, but there are reports out there of contradictory behavior that doesn't match with their proposed mechanisms. I have personally done detailed modeling for the entire mechanistic chain and found that the most widely cited mechanisms are only partially correct. They leave out important information and/or are wrong about the rest of the reaction mechanics.

I know it was a very general description, but don't take the published information on its face value (even if it's from "famous" scientists in the domain). This area is still so new that nobody is 100% correct.

It's actually Ru/TiO2 because we've found that using light we are able to produce hydrocarbons to at least C6. These preliminary experiments haven't been done by me that's why I'm not that familiar with the mechanisms that person suspected. The focus will definitely be hydrocarbons, no oxygenates.

I'm definitely planning on using other salts in my preliminary experiments. I think the previous research used Ruthenium chloride so if you got experience with a model component for that I'd appreciate your opinion.

I'm still working on my Masters Thesis (FTS with Co@m-SiO and Co@m-AlSiO) thats why my research into Ruthenium has been sparse so far. I appreciate the heads up about the papers. I also got the impression that the very few results there are, are a bit contradictory.