Phrasing is a bit odd, but I read it as that emissions of all US residents are 1% of global emissions.
So as others pointed out, one must divide by about one million to get the effective percentage.
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We’re at a party in a fairly large house. The entire house is not on fire yet, but one room is certainly ablaze. We really should have dealt with it when it was only a fire in the trashcan in the room, but most of the residents dismissed it as just some smoke, or at least only a small fire, so who cares, right? Let the dinner party continue unabated. So right now there’s a whole room on fire and many of us are, in fact, looking for the fire extinguishers and trying to call 911, but many of the other guests are telling us how those fire extinguishers don’t really work anyway (and they do seem to be rather small for the job at hand), refuse to give the address of the house, or are actively arguing that one room on fire isn’t really a house fire, now is it?
Besides, they’re about to hook up with that person over there and if the fire department shows up, that’s going to be off for a while. Now excuse them while they and their friend head upstairs to the room with all the lit candles.
Like the hook up in the story, we’re all so fucked.
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The problem here is that the technology needs:
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Cheap energy
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Abundant water
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A porous soil which is alcaline, so it reacts with CO2 dissolved in water, forming stable carbonates that bind the carbon dioxide for geological times
And aside Iceland, there are not many places where you can find such conditions.
And while one can hope for cheap abundant energy everywhere, the other two conditions are difficult to workaround, since there is a limit on the solubility of carbon dioxide in water, and without the porous alcaline soil you can’t bind carbon dioxide.
I think this plant objective is to market the technology and get more investors. I’m not saying that the technology is useless, but it makes more sense to use it to produce synthetic fuels to be used in place of fossil ones.
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There was a point at which solar power was the same percentage of the energy mix as these things are a percentage of the CO2-suck needed for net-zero. And lots of people who were all in favor renewable energy were saying the same kind of things. It’s a pipe dream, it’s inefficient, it’s a boondoggle, it’s not compatible with how we’ve always done things, it’s more expensive than paying people to reduce energy use, etc.
And you know what? They could have been right! It’s just that they weren’t. As things happened, solar got better and cheaper fast enough to make it a winning bet. But it was always a good bet, because the potential upside vastly outweighed the immediate drawbacks.
Likewise: building these things is objectively harmless from a CO2 standpoint. You could run them on coal and that would still be true. The only cost is a theoretical opportunity cost—what if a better, incompatible solution comes around next year but we’ve already committed to these things?—and that only matters if the Next Big Thing is a tiny smidge incrementally better. (In which case it won’t matter at all.) If the Next Big Thing is much better, than scrap the now-stupid obsolete CO2-suckers and do that instead!
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This is why technolog like this can actually be worse than nothing. There are old leaked documents from the coal industry where they talk about hyping future carbon capture just so they can keep running as before.
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As already mentioned, there are numerous issues with the scale of the problem. It’d be far easier to stop doing things that spew CO2 in the first place. Of course some things are unavoidable, but changing what is feasible to change will make a much bigger difference than shoving a bit of it underground.
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cause that is exactly the same as actually doing it right now.
It’s far easier to do nothing. Unfortunately you can’t solve problems that way.
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This isn’t the first demonstration facility. It’s scaling it up, finding places to deposit the carbon, making it economical that is the problem.
In theory testing different methods to remove CO2 are always good, but not if it leads to reduced efforts to limit emissions. Same as the argument against experiments with geoengineering.
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Geotherapy not geoengineering, please. We can help existing ecosystems draw down much more carbon from the atmosphere with techniques we already know if we use them consistently and globally. Some soil scientists say we can bring atmospheric carbon down to pre-industrial levels (270 ppm) with such techniques by the end of this century if not before.
And that’s just on land. Seagrasses can sequester something like 15 times more carbon more quickly than trees (and grasses sequester more carbon than trees do too). An introduction to the best sources on geotherapy that I know of is at solarray: Geotherapy Not Geoengineering, Please
PS: Eelgrass also produces a perennial grain.
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Came here for this. Thanks.
I wonder how much carbon was emitted in the course of building this facility?
Presumably it operates in carbon… negative(?) manner.
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I don’t see how this is a sustainable solution. Maybe if it was in the middle of the desert and run on solar energy? I just think carbon capture might be something to help slowly reduce levels, but the world is so fucking big, it is just a drop in the bucket. I feel like this is a way to make money getting the project subsidized, vs spending it on other projects like energy production that has low carbon foot prints.
I will say it again - nuclear power. Thorium plants that can be melt down proof, and most of the waste is recyclable. It would be doable with today’s technology, be consistent power, that could be supported by solar and wind, and if/when those and other means and make it obsolete, so be it, but if the goal is dramatic reduction in CO2, that is, IMO, the way to go right now. Yes, its expensive and take years to build - but it is doable. Make them all federal, with the states running them and controlling the utilities. Remove privatized energy production. (gasp, something 10 years ago me wouldn’t have said.)
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Even the earliest electronic computers were capable of performing calculations far faster than human beings could. They were “impractical” compared to the devices that followed, but they were immensely useful tools for accomplishing the tasks they were designed for even in their primitive prototypical form.
This technology doesn’t really fit that criteria, because the amount of resources required to build a device that can capture a significant amount of carbon from the atmosphere is considerably less than the amount of resources required to create alternatives to the practices which are dumping all that carbon into the atmosphere in the first place.
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Well if we instead take 100x those 250 US residents crating all the CO2 emissions, and they also happen to be NIMBYs, which seems likely, and put them underground instead then we’ve solved two problems at once!! Easy!
I was wondering about this myself. I don’t have the scientific background others posting here have, so I probably misunderstood. To me it sounds like they’re saying that much of that 27 tons of water participates in the chemical reaction which creates the carbon-sequestering “rocks.” It ceases to be water. If so doesn’t that mean that although a bunch of carbon is removed (forever?) from the ecosystem, a bunch of water is permanently removed as well? Surely that’s something we don’t want. Can somebody explain this please?
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Iceland has the highest per-capita CO2 emissions in the entire EU/EFTA/UK region with CO2 emissions rising in contrast to the rest of the region. Iceland produces nearly twice as much CO2 per capita as the UK despite not requiring any fossil fuels for energy or heating.
Their high fossil fuel emissions are down to transportation; fortunately the country seems to be on the same trend as Norway[1] in electrifying the vehicle fleet - sometimes you don’t seem to be able to move for Teslas. The huge trawler and marine fleet is more tricky; there were plans about 20 years ago to run a hydrogen economy to power shipping, but that fell apart in the wake of the 2008 crash.
[1] Though for all of its domestic greenness - both the left and right in Norway are committed to continued oil and gas drilling and exploration in the North and Barents Seas. There’s an election coming up in Norway where there is a possibility that the Greens - who would be needed in any centre-left coalition - could block further projects. One to keep an eye on as it is VERY tight indeed.
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Some areas of the economy are way harder to decarbonize than others, to the point that, in 20-30 years, it may actually be most efficient to use this kind of tech. Transportation can be electrified and the grid can become renewable and aviation can switch to synthetic or bio-based fuels, on that timescale. There are several plausible paths to zero- or negative-carbon cement and concrete, at least some of which should work out. Primary steelmaking is likely to be one of the hardest sectors to deal with (which was the topic of a recent thread on BB), for example, as are other high-heat industrial processes, and there some kind of carbon capture could become really useful, and it’s better to develop it now.
But yeah, anyone who sees this and thinks it can single-handedly solve climate change is utterly divorced from reality, and in that sense, no, it won’t make a difference.
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Sure, this is fine if you make it clear it’s only an experiment. Which it is. But that’s not how it’s being presented (by… the reporters, the company…), it’s being presented as the solution in-the-making, just as soon as they scale it up (cough millions of times). Carbon capture has a… problematic history, in terms of how it’s been talked/thought about, so one must be extremely cautious. It’s been the favorite of those who would deny the seriousness of climate change: “Oh, we’ll just invent some magic machines to take all the carbon out of the air, so we won’t have to change anything that we’re doing.”
Well, yeah. Just the direct impact of the CO2 and other greenhouse gases already emitted would take a while to be felt; processes we’ve already put into motion (wildfires in the thawing Arctic, deforestation in regions hit by climate change-caused aridification) would continue producing more CO2, etc. Carbon capture of some sort (and probably quite a lot of different sorts) will be necessary once emissions have been reduced to (near) zero, but it doesn’t actually do any good until that point, and can very easily cause harm.
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Hoo boy, yes. Even worser, the figure you quote of 8 GT / y is carbon, not CO2. CO2 emissions are around 30 GT/y (1 T of CO2 is about 0.27 T carbon, 0.73 T oxygen).
Having said all that:
- global emissions are forecast to peak in the next year or three. So the size of the fleet of such devices will ramp down over the coming decade.
- In 2007, Australia had about 30 MW of total rooftop solar installation. Today it’s over 15000 MW: Australian Photovoltaic Institute • Animated installation map
Even good things can grow.
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Maybe but it is about the lowest priority, lowest payoff thing you can do. Reduce fossil fuels is #1. Direct carbon capture from the exhaust gasses of any stationary CO2 sources we can’t eliminate might be viable. Capturing CO2 from the air is incredibly inefficient and energy intensive. It doesn’t make sense until we run out of other ways to reduce CO2.
Nothing wrong with doing R&D at small scales like this right now but if you are talking about solutions to problems today a dollar spent on renewable energy or improved efficiency will be far more effective than spending it on this sort of capture.
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