"Will carbon capture technologies deliver on their promises?" No. Carbon Capture is like saying "If we improve our ability to treat lung cancer we can keep on smoking." of "If we improve vehicle safety standards we can do away with speed limits and traffic lights.." It is lunacy to think that we can solve this problem by creating another.
Most economic sense is to capture at the source (flue gases, cement kiln etc) where the concentration of CO2 is highest. Once captured, turn CO2 into hard durable material like polycarbonate, polyurethane foam etc. for human use. When out of service, use those material for land fill (much better CO2 sequestration than compressed CO2 in underground caverns).
In order to meet our climate goals, we can't rely upon carbon capture alone. We will need renewable energy sources and carbon capture. Our waste treatment facilities also produce greenhouse gasses, so we also need to pay attention to them.
@@balamus Unfortunately. Many of those material can made cheaper using oil directly. And, funny enough, that is one of the direction the the oil industry is pivoting toward.
Exactly. Here in Saskatchewan the Conservative (of course) government of the day was going on and on about how CCS would save us and would ONLY cost the taxpayers $1B! 😂 That's a huge amount of cash in a province of 1 million people. Of course, the taxpayers are paying for it, and it just quietly went away. Haven't heard a peep about it since 2007. It was really just to stroke their oil company buddies. Alas, we're the idiots that keep voting these crooks in.
Not sure how it is in the EU, but in the US there's tiny govt funding for basic research; oil companies have made most of the investments, but it's a tiny, tiny write off for them compared to core drilling and refining. The long and short is that oil companies invest just enough to dangle it as a solution, so we can all get off the hook and not have to change. But, it's wildly too expensive to be feasible. There's no value for CO2, and it's not high enough concentration for DAC. Far more efficient for at least the next 20 years to reduce consumption, build soils, and plant trees.
@guru47pi 🤣😅 That's hilarious. The US is by far the worst offender for subsidizing corporations, especially oil companies. They shouldnt even be allowed in the G20 with the huge amount of legalized bribery that is inherent in the whole system there. It's usually in the form of zero regulations and huge tax breaks, which is the same thing as a handout. Get your head out of the sand. Now watch YT delete my anti-oil comment again...what a joke.🙄
I remember very clearly the right wing (Redneck) parties in Australia promising CCS technology back in 2006, all the while ridiculing the Green Party for saying that wind and solar will be cheaper in the future. Of course, the right wing parties are basically beholden to the coal industry in Australia, so it was obvious back then which way this was going.
Why? Carbon capture means they can continue to sell fossil fuels and say they are green. Fossil fuel industry LOVES carbon capture because it distracts from competitive renewable resources.
The cost of carbon capture is clear from the beginning: it will always be more expensive to release CO2, then store it, than to not release CO2 at all. You see, the point of fossil fuels is pollution. It’s intrinsic to extracting work from it.
@jjoesmith331 no, he clearly meant this from a purely physical/chemical perspective. I think the argument is, that the energy generated by releasing a certain amount of emissions is less than the energy needed to collect and store the same amount of emissions.
@jjoesmith331 look, it's not that hard to grasp, let me make up an example with completely fake numbers to illustrate the point: let's say you burn 1kg of coal to produce 1kg of co2 and 1 mil joules of energy. then you actively sequester the 1kg of co2 which takes 1.5 mil joules of energy. so you end up down 0.5 mil joules of energy.
@jjoesmith331The issue with carbon capture is that it requires a lot of energy, and that energy will very likely come from burning more fossil fuels instead of cleaner sources like renewables and nuclear, thereby releasing more CO2 and repeating the cycle Your analogy isn’t correct because you don’t generate more trash as you drive to the landfill
@jjoesmith331 That’s the ideal scenario and what carbon capture should be used for Unfortunately it seems to be shown off as a way to make fossil fuels cleaner instead of cleaning up what they have caused
Meanwhile energy density of batteries is doubling every few years. Wasting money on carbon capture and storage for fossil fuel electricity generation instead of hastening the arrival of our ability to power cities at night via solar is essentially corruption.
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The cost is not the main concern, but the engergy consumption. How much engery is used to capture one ton of CO2 vs. how much CO2 is produced in the process.
The densest form of for carbon is... oil. CCS is just a fancy way to describe a perpetual motion machine. It is thermodynamically impossible for CCS to be anything but a stop gap for steel/cement manufacturing, to slow down the emission at best (which it is clearly is not even close).
True, by looking at it from an exergy perspective the sheer waste of useful work is on full display. Why set up renewable (hopefully) power plants to power carbon capture projects when you can just instead use that electricity?
while carbon capture tech isn't very feasible logistically and cost wise it is definitely thermodynamically possible I don't know what you are on about. fossil fuels (like propane for example) are not in their lowest energy configuration molecularly. burning this propane produces co2 and water. the burning process is what releases the energy. what happens to the co2 afterwards has no bearing on it's energy potential. you could stick a cartoonishly large bag on the end of smoke stacks to literally capture the carbon and they would work just fine.
@@reinhardtscheepers2349Direct-air capture might make sense as an energy sink if we somehow have a surplus of zero-emission energy in the future and storage is full. Otherwise, there are far better uses of energy we could put renewables towards.
@@nilnailscrew4784When hydrocarbons exchange their lightweight hydrogen atoms for oxygen from the air, the resulting CO2 ends up being a lot heavier -- about 3x as heavy as the original fuel. And since CO2 is a gas, the result is truly massive. Burning 1 liter of gasoline/petrol results in over 1,000 liters of CO2. Carbon dioxide is highly compressible, but it's still very hard to bring its volume down close to that of the original fuel -- it'll nearly always be a bigger size than what was burned. I've felt for a long time that we basically need to run the petroleum production process backwards and inject liquid hydrocarbons back into the ground. When nuclear power was new, some proponents hoped it would be able to produce energy necessary to essentially do direct air capture to generate fuels, rather than extracting more oil from the ground, though nuclear never became cheap enough for that, and they glossed over the complexity of the actual DAC process. Basically we need to figure out if we can create anything that's more effective than planting massive numbers of trees and ensuring their carbon stays locked away rather than going back into the atmosphere
Yes, but the idea would be to use (too much) _renewable_ energy to recover the carbon generated by use cases that can't use renewable directly. That's the expensive theory. In practice it's just a scam.
@@M69392 this is entirely pointless as long as renewables don't make up almost the entirety of energy production already. before then it's always better to use renewable power to replace fossil power. we're far away from the point where actively sequestering co2 is more efficient than reducing how much is emitted in the first place. the only thing this technology achieves is diverting attention and investment from measures that actually help. (nuclear falls in a similar vein)
thermodynamics suggests nothing of the sort. The champion DAC tech uses under 1MWh per ton of CO2 captured. Burning natural gas produces around 5 MWh per ton of CO2 created
@@ldm3027 👍 I hope you are right. I ain't ever tried to unmix the kool-aid, but I guess with enough time you could. The complexity of the mechanism, filters and subduction of the spare carbon would need to be created without releasing more CO2 as well.
Paradoxically CCS doesn't work but we need to keep doing it. It's a smokescreen for heavy industries but they need to be forced to keep doing it as an aside to other carbon reduction measures, not their principle effort. They need to keep investing it in the hope they can make it work in the near future but not be ale to free ride on decarbonisation efforts by investing in it.
@@cmyk8964 You're right. "Renewable" is a problematic concept. I used to advocate using "sustainable" instead but that term has problems, too. Both terms imply an infinite supply. Nuclear comes close to being renewable in a couple ways. The Uranium in the ocean is resupplied by erosion of crustal material and by precipitates going back into solution. The other way is breeding more fuel than is consumed in some special types of reactors. Thorium and 238U can be bred into fissile isotopes. Reprocessing "spent" nuclear fuels is another way to extend the supply of fissile materials. The Sun is not really a renewable source of energy, either. The Sun radiates thermal energy at a fairly constant rate. The amount available is a function of the collection area - which limits the amount of energy available. The biological world depends on that energy. Using it to charge the battery in your EV may not be the best use of that energy. Entropy will have its due. All energy that we might use was previously stored, somehow. Most of it can be traced back to the big bang.
The thing most people dont understand, is that it's not either/or. We are already past the "safe" zones(and we have a track record of underestimating the effects), and we need to do ALL: - All new investments should be in renewables + storage (shoutout to Tony Seba and the U-curve) - Any remaining facility should have ccs - Transition transportation to electric - Plant more trees - Stop overfishing and deep sea mining - Restore natural habitats (i.e coral reefs, mangroves etc) that have many other benefits too, as well as the sea - Improve efficiency across the whole world(Tesla's Master Plan 3 details greatly how we could do so) Etc, the list goes on... Each of these are important, so we shouldn't be complacent, and specially greedy like all these corporations
Yes we need everything in theory. But in reality, money and taxes are finite, so they should not be spent on much less efficient solutions right now. Unfortunately, this won't change until we see a lot more climate catastrophes. Then maybe people will accept to spend more taxes or pay the "real" price for fossil fuel.
no, we should specifically avoid ccs. the damn things require more energy than they have the capacity to offset the emissions from. moreover every dollar invested into ccs is a dollar not invested into actually decreasing the share of fossiles in the energy mix. dac doesn't fare much better btw
A lot of people don’t even understand that not stopping the trade with a fossil-fuel-driven country which frequently starts genocidal wars against their neighbours, bombing the shit out of their lands and dams, committing the straight-up ecocide is not good for the environment and still trade with the russian federation 🤷 And some people do understand, but do the same as they don’t give any care and they value maximising the low-term profit above anything else. At least until they are regulated or their reputation go so low they can’t make any profit anymore.
Clean coal facilities mostly failed before they began. The “success” case can arguably prevent the emission of (or “store”, rather) up to 8%. It’s a pathetic failure of an idea. But I’m yet to be convinced that carbon capture and storage for cement and steel production is a bad idea. Those processes things were never meant to produce more energy than they consume.
How would you even conceptualize a controlling regime for carbon capturing & carbon emissions? What about fabricated data and methodological errors, such as wrong estimations? It’s already immensely difficult to just get an income tax right (and we’re talking about simple accounting, no physical realm involved)
@@xXMatManeraXxFrequent Audits by companies that get paid performance fees by how may CO2 emissions they can verify and defend. Steep fines can also be levied to cover the cost of the audits.
With 8.2 billion humans driving tire-pulverizing electric cars while running AC and asking AI how to make more money, what could go wrong? Let’s get more energy so we can have 12 billion monkeys wearing plastic outfits and being entrepreneurial.
nah, its way better to use the energy spent on capturing the co2 on substituing the energy made from fosil fuels. Untill they make carbon capture more efficient at lower cost its pretty much useless on large scale.
sinse electricity from oil and gas is already on par or more expensive than renewables, and coal is significantly more expensive, anything that adds to the cost is already a non starter. And wind and solar are still getting cheaper every year. So it's only going to get less efficient to divert money from renewables to carbon capture. This was always just an excuse to keep the power plants running and the money flowing into the hands of fossil fuel companies
Anyone know a good source of a discussion about these two idealogied: - "we should do these things to help our planet" - "the planet doesn't care about us, we're just doing this to help 'us' who are on the planet, not 'for' this hunk of rock"
I’m so tired of every climate change video lately having a question mark in the title. Like why are we validating the debate? It’s that othersiderism that’s slowing down progress. Speak the truth stop acting like there’s multiple sides, since these thumbnails are just an act to get clicks anyway. So dumb to me and it’s so old I hate even clicking anymore because I’m tired of the b.s questions in the titles that aren’t questions anymore, they’re red herrings
Indeed, question marks, catchy titles and other clickbait tricks are overused. YET... there are effectively multiple sides (bone fide ones!) and they are worthy of investigation. The truth you are calling for can be hard to establish, although in the particular case of DAC, and to a lesser degree in the case of CSS, I'd venture to say that the truth might be easier to come by. There is growing evidence that these "solutions" are impractical. There is an incentive to genuinely understand the potential and the limitation of various "solutions" as such knowledge can help avoid continued investment, financial and otherwise, in unlikely solutions and directing time and resources to more promising activities. Maybe the most negative effect of these bad "solutions" is to keep the illusion alive that technology will usher a painless, rapid and inexpensive transition if only we just don't validate any debate to the contrary ;-) And yes, it is frustrating to gather such understanding through various videos, many of dubious quality, but amid of all this noise, there are, online and elsewhere, resources that can allow one to get a keener grasp on the truths that matter. Seeking such knowledge is a journey!
Hi Armando! Take a look at our video "Is Germany's nuclear exit a mistake?" that might interest you 👉th-cam.com/video/eWuGP_aBoYg/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared Subscribe to our channel! We post new videos every Friday ✨
Just one year after closing the nuclear power stations they postet a record low number of coal used for electricity and a record high number of renewable energy and on top the electicity prices went down.
@@toniober4416 german carbon intensity increased from 453 to 489 g/kwh from 2021 to 2022 after closing half the nuclear powerplants, in 2023 it did drop to 425 g/kwh but total electricity produced also drop drastically from 491 to 446 Twh, this drop was not a result of a drop in demand but in supply and that energy was imported from mostly france who has a carbon intensity of 45 g/kwh ( 10 times lower than germany thanks to nuclear). Your argument is so wrong that if you compare 2020 with 2023 germany produced more energy at 491 twh at a lower carbon intensity of 399 g/kwh. So yes they missed big time, renewables are the future but germany acted like a child
Now RWE is GREEN because they’ll kill the native Colorado wildlife for a 9 square mile solar plant. Sell electricity to stupid Americans reliant on AC.
We're going need DAC regardless of whether oil companies are going to invest in it or not; it's beyond that point now. They are historically untrustworthy to do so because it does not serve their business interests. We need to remove them as a factor, and make DAC profitable as a standalone industry, without feeding it back into oil and gas. The CO2 itself needs to become a commodity in order for the incentives to be there, and that cannot mean going straight back into oil. The best possible way I can see this happening is by finding a use for it within manufacturing:- trapping it within another material to improve its properties, or potentially breaking it down and tapping into the raw carbon. And yes, that is what trees do, but it does not scale. We have to solve this problem whether the oil companies will back it or not.
Carbon capture technologies should be part of the solution, but not the only solution. But if we combine it with other solutions like strategic agricultural programs and other evolving tech, it might work. For example, vertical farming requires elevated CO2 to help plants grow. So why not get CO2 concentrators, latch them onto vertical farms? Encourage people to do small scale farming/gardening? Strategic gardening and farming at the municipal level? I've been to many city malls... Consider multi-level parking lots where the upper deck are half solar, but also half garden? A place to go and sit that is safe and calming? Mall roofs could be redesigned to have small scale farming with the produce sold by the companies in the food court? Mixed in with the solar could be shade-preferring crops. For dedicated public transit routes, consider planting things like grass between the tracks. There is no either or for us to save the planet. We just need to get to carbon neutral naturally and use CCS tech to top things up.
Carbon capture is great and using renewable energy to do so is great!!.... EXCEPT we should use that renewable energy in place of fossil fuels to prevent producing carbon in the first place
@@oldones59 mainly because there are already plenty of such systems designed already and secondly because it takes lot of money to design and develop such systems
2% of US agriculture is organic. The rest of it uses chemical fertilizers to feed plants instead of using the soil to become a storage area for Carbon to increase production with microorganisms.
Chemical fertilizer was developed to feed the planet. Hence you hear very little about millions of people dying from hunger. Yet, it has run its course. And can be made from water electrolysis. As opposed to from natural gas. Or coal.
@@user-pt1ow8hx5l Regenerative is broader title to organic, but both use organic methods. "We found 77 multi-year experimental results measuring changes to no-till with an average carbon sequestration benefit of 0.77 metric tons of CO2e per acre per year. We found 189 experimental results for planting cover crops, with an average sequestration benefit of 0.76 metric tons per acre per year. "As of 2023, the United States had 879 million acres of farmland, which is 39% of the country's total land. This is a decrease of over 66 million acres since 2000, when the total farmland area was 2.17 million acres. The number of farms in the U.S. has also decreased, from 2.04 million in 2017 to 1.89 million in 2023. The average farm size in 2023 was 464 acres, which is slightly larger than the 440 acres recorded in the early 1970s.
farmers sold us out for profits over the last 50 years, destroyed our food and land to feed the supermarkets. now many want praise for adding a few hedgerows :)
Oil industry finally managed to actually create recycling ! Sadly, we're still not recycling plastics (there is no cycles in today's plastic "recycling"), but they managed to make brand new CO2 emissions from old CO2 emissions. So great ! I have a proposal, let's listen to all the big oil company and accept all their plans as life ending strategies.
The problem with DAC is that it requires renewable energy to actually operate CO2-negative, otherwise you will emit more CO2 by operating the facilities than what would be captured. As DAC has a energy efficiency of maximum 0,05% (400ppm CO2 in the athmosphere), the renewable energy is used better by feeding it in the grid to reduce the dependency on fossile electricity production. There is just no scenario in which DAC makes sense from an environmental or economical perspective.
@@ldm3027 You do understand that there is not more than 400 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere thus the yield can't be higher compared to carbon capture from industrial point sources where you sometimes have more than 25% CO2.
@@silvesterbecker1015 again you are wrong as you dont understand efficiency. the "yield" of CO2 from DAC is near 100%, whereas CCS is much lower. And the 1pointfive DAC machine being built in the Permian uses natural gas as its main source of energy. There is no requirement to use renewables so long as emissions are captured
In the netherlands we have a negative price for energy in the summer. The negative price could even cut the costs. You could program the dac to only operate when the price breaks even.
I do not mind pumping down gas to extract more oil. We need oil. If you have dug a hole might aswell extract as much of it as you can. I am in Sweden. Electricity is doeble without oil, building house aswell witha lot of added cost, simple thing as plumbing without plastics. The third essential ingredient to survive is food and without oil I doubt we would manage to have enough food for everyone in the country. No oil means no plastics and probably not any fresh vegetables atleast 4 months of the year. No oil no tractor a lot les food overall etc. Personally I want oil price to atleast not skyrocket because if it did my food would cost more which already is ~33% of my income as a student. Making oil cheaper I believe will make peoples life easier. Making the pollution side more expensive I can get behind. When someone is sceptic to oil in a black and white manner it is hard to take them seriously.
Great overview. Please look into ground basalt as well next time. This is something that scales well. It is essentially the rock weathering process speeded up by a factor of millions. Rock weathering is a thermostat that keeps the planet within a limited range of temperatures - on very long time scales, but it can't keep up with the pace of human-juiced climate forcing. It operates by - wait for it - removing CO2 from the air, and more quickly when it's warmer. Ground basalt accelerates this process. It's a way to get the carbon out of the air and back into rocks.
Agreed. Carbon can be captured. And recycled as concrete, too! Possibly making the proces 'bankable',....... So many better options than capturing carbon from big emitters, especiall big emitters of little value.
Ultimately, based on what's been said here, CCS is several times cheaper than DAC and less complicated....but no-one is using it at anywhere near the level that has been promised or advertised. So, why should we expect DAC to go anywhere at all? Sure, we may eventually need it...but in the mean time, it's just serving as a fig leaf for Oil Companies to do yet more polluting.
Building walkable cities seems like a losing battle unless you start making new ones. Too many people have their investments tied up in real estate for that to happen. Unless you plan on forcing people out of their homes.
@@neetfreek9921 "Unless you plan on forcing people out of their homes." - well, the government, states, and municipalities already did (and still do!) that for highways and roads, so why shouldn't we do the same for something much, much, more efficient (and cleaner, if electrified) public transport systems? [To answer my own question: because there is no "public transit industry" which will bribe, er, sorry, I of course meant "lobby", enough politicians, like the car industry did and still does...]
@@IgorRockt Destroying peoples homes to build roads is never popular. Even getting the die hard trumpers to give up their land (just the land) to build the border wall they wanted so much was challenging. They could force it, but they also need to get re-elected. You need a large shift in public opinion for this to be accomplished.
Now there are countries who have over production of renewable energy, causing big issues for grid stability. Hence sometime consumers are being paid for using energy (negative energy prices) I believe we’ll see this scenario more often as solar and wind power gets cheaper. Mass scale energy storage is one solution but it is expensive and requires significant amount of lithium mining (which is detrimental for earth and co2 emissions) Then why don’t we approach this problem by using excess renewable energy to capture co2? What if these plants only operate at the periods where there is excess renewable power? In this case it could start making sense. We need fast response co2 capture facilities, not only capturing carbon but also helps to stabilize grid. Yes their operation time will be lower (capex/co2 captured will be higher) but this way we can start justifying their role beyond carbon capture.
Since electricity from oil and gas is already on par or more expensive than renewables, and coal is significantly more expensive, anything that adds to the cost is already a non starter. And wind and solar are still getting cheaper every year. So it's only going to get less efficient to divert money from renewables to carbon capture on energy generation going forward. This was always just an excuse to keep the power plants running and the money flowing into the hands of fossil fuel companies instead of being given to green energy. on none energy generating c02 sources like cement direct capture is a good idea, but still only adds cost. So without something like a functional carbon tax it's never going to be economically viable. Direct air capture is not even worth thinking about until we've eliminated all the easily replaceable emissions sources. Until then every bit of renewable electricity used to power air capture would reduce emissions more if just added to the grid to replace high carbon energy, or used to generate green hydrogen. And every dollar spent building the air capture machines would reduce more carbon emissions if spent on solar panels or wind farms or home insulation or heat pumps or pumped hydro or basically any other existing technology. Once weve picked all the low hanging fruit then we can start thinking about stuff like this. But right now we are spending a lot of money and time trying to build a cherry picker while there is fruit laying on the ground going to waste, to stretch the metaphor.
Paid commercial for one company claiming that 800eur/tone of CO2 will change the world. Great journalistic work from country that gave up on 23gw of carbon free power in last 20ish years…
Hernandez said it well. Greenwashing. And with the president of COP28 making deals instead of reductions, the oil companies will continue producing for 60, 70 or even 80 years.
The range of 15-120 $/tCO2 is quite imprecise, but considering the fact that the social cost of carbon has just been estimated at 1000+ $/tCO2, we should be investing in this (as well as other methods) like crazy!
every dollar invested into this is a dollar not invested into actually decreasing emissions. in fact we'd be increasing emissions due to the additional energy required and the high percentage of fossils in the energy mix.
6:57 You're absolutely right in pointing out that, given current technologies, CCS remains one of the viable pathways for industries like cement to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The cement industry is a significant emitter of CO₂, and while there are ongoing advancements in energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and the use of supplementary cementitious materials, these alone are not sufficient to fully decarbonize the sector.
I feel the story is missing a a major topic. What happens after we reach net-zero. At that point we need to restore the damage we have done to the atmosphere. The carbon that should no be their should be removed. I like Adam Dorrs analogy in his book brighter(tip, it is fun to read): The current climate is like a burning house, the flames are our Co2 emissions. Reducing emissions does not put out the fire, we need to completely stop with Co2 emissions, After the fire is out we need to repair the fire damage before we can live in the house again. We need DAC and reforestation to do this.
What makes you think civilisation will reach net zero? The increase in the use of fossil fuels is still accelerating, subsidies are in the trillions. No political will anywhere to do anything at all, if done, they will lose the next election, so instead they do nothing (and here in Sweden even enable polluters to increase their emissions). With tipping points activated, there is little hope.
Something I don't think anyone is thinking about when it comes to scaling up DAC use is how will it affect the surrounding plant life and how big can you go before it starts killing off plant life.
I am unfamiliar with the economics of it but I always wondered if it's more cost effective if we could grow trees en mass, chop/replant them, treat them, and either use the timber for construction or store the wood underground as a sort of "reverse coal".
Fighting big oil is good, but we also plan to use CC for our cogeneration plants and WtE plants in EU as additional business opportunity rather simply to say that this is somehow single-handedly solve the climate crisis. I think this part was lacking in this video. The opportunity comes from the fact that Co2 is very useful resource, either for production of food, jefuel of whatever, and it competes with carbon storage, which sort of fights the issue you mentioned with pumping oil. I think this piece was more of a hit piece rather than real report on what the CC is actual good for. Hope that wasn't the intention, otherwise, what's the point of journalism if its not better than influencers.
Two things can be true at once: DAC & CCS are woefully insufficient at present to live up to their promise as represented by the fossil fuel industry, BUT ALSO we will almost certainly need to develop and deploy at least DAC in the years, decades and perhaps even centuries to come in order to undo the damage we have already done.
If "the tub is the atmosphere" (at 1.14) 430ppm CO2 in the atmosphere is going to be a wet skim on the floor of the dry model bathtub. You'd need 2500 more of these wet patches to fill the tub. The video shows the model bathtub about 20% filled with water, and that would be equivalent to 200,000 ppm. Consider the difference between 200,000ppm and 430ppm in the real atmosphere. It's a misleading exaggeration and should be cut.
Your misunderstanding the point. A full bathtub doesn't mean 100% co2. The full bathtub represents the tipping points in climate change. As CO2 rises it reaches tipping points that cause more environmental damage to ecosystems. It also reaches points where positive feedback loops kick in. Melting permafrost releases methane or the ocean releases more co2 at warmer temperatures. These tipping points are the full bathtub. You can present arguments of where the tipping points are and what damage is caused at various points, but they aren't at 100% as you suggest.
Another fascinating example of the rebound effect ( as in cars and planes)… even if CCS was economically viable, it would just fuel the fossil energy business. Would DW care to make a video about that?
One thing a lot of people get wrong about climate solutions is, that not every idea, that sounds like it solves the problem actually solves the problem. Just because you can in principle do a certain thing, neither means, that you can scale it up to 100% market penetration, or to solving 100% of the problem, not that you can do so economically. There are many ways to reduce our climate impact, that don't actually cause net costs, but are actually a good investment even without climate change. Then there are ways, where financial benefit and costs come out around zero, ways where you end up with a net cost, but it's small per ton co2. And then there are things like carbon capture, that are in the priciest and least scalable category. Doesn't mean, that there is no use case for it, but it will continue to be very limited and will only make sense, where there just aren't any better alternatives.
I guess someone already thought of this, but I am curious, why this is not considered a valid option: 1) plant something that absorbs lots of CO₂ fast. First plant that comes to my mind is bamboo. But I am not going to argue. Might vary depending on climate, soil. Maybe go offshore and farm seaweed. 2) harvest plant from point 1. 3) put it in a location where it will not decompose. In swamps, in deep sea where there is no oxygen, bury it in a desert.
The reason that planting something to grow, harvest, and bury is not considered a valid option is that the resources used for that could have been used to grow food. The sunlight, soil, and water are too valuable. And, of course, it is too little and too late.
@@virgilfenn2364 IIRC, we are producing more than enough food to feed all the population - it's the distribution that is problematic. And if I remembered that incorrectly, there still are the inedible parts. Or the seaweed I proposed in the original post ;)
This video makes it so glaringly obvious that what's needed to curb carbon isn't a new technology, it's a new economic model. Yet, we assume economic regimes are immutable so we must come up with new innovations to prevent catastrophe. That's 100% backwards. Nationalize the oil companies and the 100 largest corporate emitters; dismantle the US military-industrial complex (the world's largest emitter); de-subsidize the meat and dairy industry; and tax elite 1% consumption into oblivion (the largest individual polluters in the world).
@jjoesmith331 They are almost all U.S. based companies, and many of them were at one time (during WWII and the US Civil War) under the conservatorship of the U.S. government. This includes U.S. financial services firms and insurance companies.
Innovations produce enough economic destabilization to overturn old models and regime from the “throne” ICE manufactures are investing heavily into hydrogen and electric cars for example. The players may stay the same but their moves do not.
@@Neoprenesiren Yes, and those innovations have been around for decades. That's my point. We don't need MORE/NEW innovations like giant carbon Hoover machines to save ourselves. But you're wrong about EVs--they will do little to help, and introduce new problems...car-centric infrastructure is the problem.
I think DAC should be installed near carbon emitting sources,to extract gases without the need of any sucking mechanism. Secondly, the sucked up gases needs to be stored in such a way that nature can slowly breakdown toxic gases into carbon,nitogen, sulphur, oxygen etc as a result we can re-use them in future.
DAC or CCS are both sound nice as a technological means to achieve net zero or net negative CO2 emissions. However, they only make sense in a framework that includes emission taxing or effective emission trading schemes. And it is also exactly this framework that determines whether xxx € per ton removal should be considered 'expensive' or 'cost-effective'. Then, the price of DAC/CCS decides on the fate of certain industries that cannot avoid CO2 as leaving group in a redox reaction for the production of materials, or as a product of burning fuels with high energy density.
Landscaping practices often cite 'carbon capture,' claiming that forestry stores 'carbon' in the soil, or wood, of constructed, or wild forests. These are often exotic forests, existing in part due to an ecological imbalance, like the removal of beaver. The claim ignores, respiration, transpiration, and decomposition of forests - emissions of CO2, water-vapor, or methane, are all greenhouse gasses. Claims of shade for climate-cooling doesn't address infrared-radiation, present both day and night, which is the agent responsible for the greenhouse effect. Photosynthesis itself is energy-capturing, not reflection / albedo. The decomposition of organic matter releases heat in the forest mulch-layer, compost, or landfill. Yard-waste is the single biggest contribution to the landfill, and landfill-generated methane is insufficiently captured, in many cases. It also ignores the equipment used in pruning, tree-removal, and chipping. Sidewalk and street repairs from roots heaving pavement generates expense and is dependent on fossil fuel consumption. Forestry for 'carbon' sequestration ignores the chemical-weathering of the soil or rock due to rhizospheric-activity, converting carbonates into CO2 as plants extract essential nutrients, like calcium and magnesium, from the soil. 'Carbon credits' are much like carbon capture, somewhat, or even outright, fraudulent. What 'carbon' are we talking about, CO2, methane, or CFCs - they are all carbon-containing greenhouse gasses? Carbon, itself, isn't a gas, it exists as graphite, diamond, or the black material found on the walls of the anoxic-side of a plumbing drain-pipe trap. We have become so fixated on 'carbon' that we forgot about the greenhouse effect.
emissions of water vapourare negligible when talking about climate change as atmsphere can hold only so much water vapour at any given time therefore the halflife of water vapour is very short and it quickly condense and drop out as rain, snow etc. Meaning water vapour is not primary driver but positive feedback agent amplifing the climate change
@@Taudlitz Yes, but here in the desert, we transpire or evaporate more water than we receive as precipitation. Our habits have to change, or we will have to reduce our population. A depleted aquifer leads to land subsidence. What about record floods, record hail, and the greater intensity of storms/ tornadoes, isn't water-vapor a contributor to those events? Our municipality allows a residential property to use 10,000-gallons of tap-water a month. You can easily put 6 or 7,000-gallons on the trees and greenery. At 8.33lbs/gallon, that is more than a ton of water-vapor contributed to the atmosphere every three days in June or July, not including natural and 'harvested' precipitation.
yeah ofc. Adaptation and change of lifestyle in response to more and more severe impacts of climate change will be mandatory in years to come. Great inspiration for water management is Israel for example, they managed amazing things in Negev desert. Sadly I think there will be places hit so hard with the changing climate that it will not be feasible to hold onto them anymore leading to increasing migration
@@Taudlitz Our contribution of water-vapor is incredible. Our municipality allows the use of 10,000-gallons of tap water a month, per residence, without fine. Consider if 7,000-gallons of water is used for irrigation of exotic 'greenery' during the summer. 8.33lbs/gallon of tap-water means that over a ton of water-vapor is emitted in the atmosphere every three days, which includes the contribution of rainwater, or rainwater harvest from the roof or pavement, by evaporation and transpiration. Water-vapor is a greenhouse gas. Record-size-hail, record flood, and the greater intensity of storms, like tornadoes should call into question our contribution of water-vapor emissions. There are areas in the US where evaporation and transpiration exceeds precipitation received, indicating a depleting aquifer. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jawr.12010. Our water-consuming habits need to change, or the resource will disappear. A depleted aquifer includes other issues such as land-subsidence, and the need for desalination technologies, as water-quality depreciates with the depth of extraction.
You need to plug the holes in the boat before you start bailing. All funds and manpower should be allocated towards eliminating fossil fuels completely.
No, No. That is not the way to keep the boat afloat. You need to drill more holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water out. -- Ridiculous, of course, but that is the effect of all CCS schemes. They require expending even more energy than was released by burning the fossil fuels in the first place. I agree, "All funds and manpower should be allocated towards eliminating fossil fuels completely."
It should be fairly obvious, that spending money on something that requires close to a 100% share of renewables in the energy mix to actually achieve its goals while not spending said money on actually increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix, won't achieve the desired results
Enhanced chemical weathering (grinding up volcanic rocks so the metal ions can dissolve out of them in water more easily and bind to carbonates, drawing down co2 levels) seems like the most viable form of carbon sequestration, but it is slow and would likely need to be done on a large scale for hundreds of years to draw down all of the co2 needed to get to preindustrial levels, even if we stopped carbon emissions now. in combination with making biochar and mixing it into soil and/or burying it maybe it would take less time. If we excavate volcanic rocks for that anyway, we may as well do it where we can get geological hydrogen. Geological hydrogen seems like an interesting potential source of hydrogen for things like green steel, but will likely be opposed by fossil fuel companies because methane is currently used to make the hydrogen in some "green energy" projects with the argument that it can later be produced by electrolysis from green energy instead. The estimates of hydrogen available are rather large, but they are found in places with a lot of volcanic rocks so were not found often historically as oil forms in different geological conditions (more sedimentary). If we were to drill for hydrogen it would likely have some of the same environmental problems associated with things like fracking, so the politics of this are likely to be complex in similar ways to how nuclear is, with environmentalists with different focuses on different sides of the issue.
And more... I forgot to mention that there are more simple technologies to sequester carbon (i.e. nature-based solutions). These also have the benefit of providing local cooling. Something that we also need.
Completely failed to mention LN2 energy storage, a by product being accumulated Dry Ice that can be pumped into the ground, often after its thawing spins a turbine releasing much of its stored energy. There is also the concept of growing and sinking kelp to the bottom of the ocean where it will stay there and store for up to millions of years.
I am very skeptical that the technologies will provide solutions on the necessary scale. CCS is at the heart of many strategies for meeting climate goals (e.g. EU). We are betting on our future and drastic cuts in emissions worldwide need to be made.
What's the power usage of DAC and what's the carbon cost of that power usage? Even if DAC uses green power if means that that green power cannot then be used in the grid to reduce the coal or gas produced power?
You're right in that there can be an opportunity cost. DAC can still play a crucial role especially where there is too much renewable energy or where emissions from other sectors are difficult to eliminate. Here's couple of studies that look into the life-cycle emissions: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03263; www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-44709-z
Direct air capture makes absolutely zero sense. It takes far too much energy to suck up enough air to capture a meaningful amount of CO2 and put it somewhere else. Burying that CO2 underground is a gamble on how long CO2 will stay there as a pressurized gas before finding its way out. Imagine billions of tons of CO2 blowing out of underground storage all at once 30 years down the road when someone accidentally bores a hole into it or an earthquake fractures a storage area. Also, if you have already weakened the ground with fracking to get more oil/gas out of a well, that area probably shouldn't be trusted with long-term CO2 storage. There already are tens if not hundreds of thousands of leaking retired gas wells all over the world, not going to be any better off with making a million leaky CO2 wells. If all we do with CO2 is pump it back under ground, it is likely only a matter of time before leakage back out of underground storage exceeds the practical limits of pumping CO2 underground.
most cost effective option is tree plantations, where tree absorb carbon. why spent more energy is being spent on carbon capture projects, which can be used to replace the fossil fuel energy.
Best bet in my estimate. Run the CCS solely on nuclear if possible. It’s the only way I can reckon to get around the thermodynamics of this issue. You can’t use FF to run these systems. It’s pointless.
I just finished my thesis in ccs and all I wanted was to relax.... and then this video shows up 😂😂😂 In my opinion EOR is the best way to get things started but regulations have to be put in place to force the oil industry to capture a significant amount of carbon extracted as oil.
Having more tools is only better if using one tool does not take away from using another tool. Investment into CCS is investment removed from other options (renewable energy generation, environmental protection, etc...).
If they were really so worried, why would they allow hugely populated countries like China, India and Russia to just carry on regardless? China has over 1100 coal-fired power stations. Here in the UK we are being penalised when in fact the UK is responsible for less than 1% of World carbon emissions. So, if they are so concerned about it, target China, India and Russia. So the next time someone talks about net zero, say: "By the way, did you know that the biggest polluters are China, India and Russia, NOT the UK! The UK accounts for less than 1% of Carbon emissions".
This technology never made sense to as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student. Leads me to ask who do investors consult before wasting funds on unscientific and unviable endeavors.
These kind of wasteful technologies are dumb, to put it mildly. The cheapest way of creating carbon sinks are planting trees which can actually use the CO2 present in the air. And the next best method would be artificial photosynthesis. And the best way is ofcourse to decarbonise at the source itself, ie to stop burning fossil fuels to the maximum extent possible. For the industries that still need to use fossil fuels for whatever reason, they should be taxed at atleast double their current operating cost so that they have a strong incentive to move away from fossil fuels. It's just policy paralysis, nothing else.
....because CCS and DAC cost money, what are the possibilities of converting that CO2 into carbon-fiber products for sale (some company isolates the carbon and oxygen...sells the carbon for carbon-fiber manufacture and the oxygen to hospitals {or welders})? just a random thought while doing laundry :)
We need to find ways to utilize the carbon captured in a manner that is economically viable as well as environmentally friendly. That way, we can have ways to CCS and DAC better for the environment and also have huge amount of investment into these technologies due to economical viability.
i feel like when it comes to carbon capture, we’re missing out on a hidden mvp: macroalgae aka seaweed. they grow much faster and are up to twenty times more efficient in sucking up co2 than trees, nevermind ccs and dac. cost will definitely be fractional to what carbon capture tech requires. not only absorbs co2, but also raises the oxygen content in the water-which in tandem also mitigates marine death due to suffocation and climate change’s more dire counterpart, ocean acidification. when the seaweed have reached maturity, they can be harvested for human and animal consumption (feeding red seaweed to cows can cut their methane emissions by 12%!), natural fertilizer for enhanced soil quality, and who knows what else. can be mass produced and a source of profit, provides jobs for the common people, stimulates the coastal economy. it’s a win-win all around, so why are we as a global community not putting more focus into macroalgae?
If you like algae, go ahead and watch this piece we did previously! 👇🌞 "Why the world needs more algae, not less." 📺 th-cam.com/video/bcyIbq3NhI0/w-d-xo.html
What about the good old direct before the chimney CO2 carbon capture like modern power plants filter their smoke already? Capturing after blowing out of chimney seems like feeding all plants with CO2 from the chimney - sometime more than than plants require to grow better.
You can’t store CO2 anywhere and everywhere. You need the the geology that makes for a large and high quality container, especially for the large volumes hard-to-abate industries need. This means CCS needs lots of pipelines-yet another economic and political hurdle.
Carbon capture is based on the same technology as the cigarette filter: positive thinking and markeing. Today, every cigarette comes with a filter, unless you roll your own.
Planting trees is not enough. Remember that carbon nowadays come from mining underground fossils. I even think that when all the lands on earth are full of trees, it's still not enough to store carbon unless we found a technology to return the carbon underground
CCS over promises, just like solar, wind and nuclear does. But we cannot exclude any of them. We need it all! Perhaps in a 100 years we can ditch some. Not now. We cannot effort to.
What was presented here were mechanical and chemical methods. Not presented are biological methods called "Bio-sequestration". There are many methods and many are probably less costly. Of particular note are: micro organisms that sequester carbon. It's kind of like brewing beer but backwards.
We know the scale of the fossil fuel industry and it produces energy and therefore money. In order to be effective we'd have to create a capture industry of proportional scale except, that it'd be an energy and therefore money sink. On top of that we'd have to cease all CO2 emissions now because it's more efficient to do that than continue to emit and then recapture it.
The vast majority of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) released to the air is in our pursuit of generating energy because we do not have a surplus of it. DAC requires a ton of energy to do so it actually makes things worse, on average, and cannot be the solution. Yes, there are places where we currently have surplus of energy generation but it's better to invest into transmitting that energy, or making it portable in a different way, and then reduce CO2 released in 'generating' energy elsewhere, than just wasting it in the futile attempt of CO2 capture from the air.
Considering the amount of carbon already in the air its just not enough to be carbon neutral by a time, we need to be carbon negative to remove the already existing excess carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is a bandaid solution for a massive problem without widespread societal change. We are so fucked.
Cpmbustion based plants , such as coal fired powerhouses could be built around oxygen concentrators. A coal plant burning with pure oxygen would have an exhaust stream of fairly pure CO2, much easier to compress and store than the nitrogen heavy exhaust of an air breathing coal burner.
Question: Does the CCS direct from air account for the Co2 it produces itself by needing energy to do the job? Or is it supposed to run on "clean energy" 🙂 And also; there is already "technology" available for this for free. They are called trees and plants including algae in the sea. There are a lot more interesting project that captures Co2 this way. They can either be left alone whee they are or cut down and burned to produce energy for people and at the same time make room for more trees to grow. The Co2 can be captured from these plants in parallell with CCS from oil burning plants.
Even in Copenhagen it would be 1.000 more efficient to isolate houses further. And expand on ultralocal power sources; small wind turbines, heat pumps and the like. As opposed to spending billions on co2capture. As is the plan. (Have noticed the DW team in Copenhagen.) Hence the hint.
"Will carbon capture technologies deliver on their promises?" - I think they have to, if we wish to avoid barreling into, and past, a long line of climate tippingpoints. How we can make this happen? I can only guess; it needs to start with more openness and transparency in how the state of affairs are now from the owners and operators of CSS. It has to do with actually putting a price on CO2(e) so people will pay for having the carbon captured. It has to do with governments realizing that they need to step up, take responsibility and collaborate to fix this. I cannot see it happening otherwise. There should be an incentive to do the right thing, and it should not be in the form of marketing or a ESG report for stock-trading
What do you think? Will carbon capture technologies deliver on their promises?
"Will carbon capture technologies deliver on their promises?"
No.
Carbon Capture is like saying "If we improve our ability to treat lung cancer we can keep on smoking." of "If we improve vehicle safety standards we can do away with speed limits and traffic lights.."
It is lunacy to think that we can solve this problem by creating another.
One of those when 20-year old ask me 60-years old "remember 30 years ago?" hahaha. )))))
Most economic sense is to capture at the source (flue gases, cement kiln etc) where the concentration of CO2 is highest. Once captured, turn CO2 into hard durable material like polycarbonate, polyurethane foam etc. for human use. When out of service, use those material for land fill (much better CO2 sequestration than compressed CO2 in underground caverns).
In order to meet our climate goals, we can't rely upon carbon capture alone. We will need renewable energy sources and carbon capture. Our waste treatment facilities also produce greenhouse gasses, so we also need to pay attention to them.
@@balamus Unfortunately. Many of those material can made cheaper using oil directly. And, funny enough, that is one of the direction the the oil industry is pivoting toward.
Oil companies aren't investing in this. It is government subsidised, meaning tax payers are paying for it.
Exactly. Here in Saskatchewan the Conservative (of course) government of the day was going on and on about how CCS would save us and would ONLY cost the taxpayers $1B! 😂 That's a huge amount of cash in a province of 1 million people. Of course, the taxpayers are paying for it, and it just quietly went away. Haven't heard a peep about it since 2007. It was really just to stroke their oil company buddies. Alas, we're the idiots that keep voting these crooks in.
Figures. No company will invest in something where they won't earn a thing.
NASA's video on "global CO2 behaviour" 🤔🤔
Not sure how it is in the EU, but in the US there's tiny govt funding for basic research; oil companies have made most of the investments, but it's a tiny, tiny write off for them compared to core drilling and refining.
The long and short is that oil companies invest just enough to dangle it as a solution, so we can all get off the hook and not have to change. But, it's wildly too expensive to be feasible. There's no value for CO2, and it's not high enough concentration for DAC.
Far more efficient for at least the next 20 years to reduce consumption, build soils, and plant trees.
@guru47pi 🤣😅 That's hilarious. The US is by far the worst offender for subsidizing corporations, especially oil companies. They shouldnt even be allowed in the G20 with the huge amount of legalized bribery that is inherent in the whole system there. It's usually in the form of zero regulations and huge tax breaks, which is the same thing as a handout. Get your head out of the sand. Now watch YT delete my anti-oil comment again...what a joke.🙄
Any technology on carbon capture that has been 'embraced by fossil fuel companies' has to be deeply suspect. 3:45
I remember very clearly the right wing (Redneck) parties in Australia promising CCS technology back in 2006, all the while ridiculing the Green Party for saying that wind and solar will be cheaper in the future. Of course, the right wing parties are basically beholden to the coal industry in Australia, so it was obvious back then which way this was going.
in southern saskatchewan, they were using it to pump co2 down old oil wells to make sure and squeeze that last little bit of oil out
Any sufficiently advanced technology is hyped on TH-cam..
Why? Carbon capture means they can continue to sell fossil fuels and say they are green. Fossil fuel industry LOVES carbon capture because it distracts from competitive renewable resources.
Eventually the industry will go through a transformation
The cost of carbon capture is clear from the beginning: it will always be more expensive to release CO2, then store it, than to not release CO2 at all. You see, the point of fossil fuels is pollution. It’s intrinsic to extracting work from it.
@jjoesmith331 no, he clearly meant this from a purely physical/chemical perspective. I think the argument is, that the energy generated by releasing a certain amount of emissions is less than the energy needed to collect and store the same amount of emissions.
@jjoesmith331 look, it's not that hard to grasp, let me make up an example with completely fake numbers to illustrate the point:
let's say you burn 1kg of coal to produce 1kg of co2 and 1 mil joules of energy. then you actively sequester the 1kg of co2 which takes 1.5 mil joules of energy. so you end up down 0.5 mil joules of energy.
@jjoesmith331The issue with carbon capture is that it requires a lot of energy, and that energy will very likely come from burning more fossil fuels instead of cleaner sources like renewables and nuclear, thereby releasing more CO2 and repeating the cycle
Your analogy isn’t correct because you don’t generate more trash as you drive to the landfill
@jjoesmith331 That’s the ideal scenario and what carbon capture should be used for
Unfortunately it seems to be shown off as a way to make fossil fuels cleaner instead of cleaning up what they have caused
Meanwhile energy density of batteries is doubling every few years.
Wasting money on carbon capture and storage for fossil fuel electricity generation instead of hastening the arrival of our ability to power cities at night via solar is essentially corruption.
The cost is not the main concern, but the engergy consumption. How much engery is used to capture one ton of CO2 vs. how much CO2 is produced in the process.
The densest form of for carbon is... oil. CCS is just a fancy way to describe a perpetual motion machine. It is thermodynamically impossible for CCS to be anything but a stop gap for steel/cement manufacturing, to slow down the emission at best (which it is clearly is not even close).
True, by looking at it from an exergy perspective the sheer waste of useful work is on full display. Why set up renewable (hopefully) power plants to power carbon capture projects when you can just instead use that electricity?
while carbon capture tech isn't very feasible logistically and cost wise it is definitely thermodynamically possible I don't know what you are on about. fossil fuels (like propane for example) are not in their lowest energy configuration molecularly. burning this propane produces co2 and water. the burning process is what releases the energy. what happens to the co2 afterwards has no bearing on it's energy potential. you could stick a cartoonishly large bag on the end of smoke stacks to literally capture the carbon and they would work just fine.
@@nilnailscrew4784 essentially what our catalytic convertor's do
@@reinhardtscheepers2349Direct-air capture might make sense as an energy sink if we somehow have a surplus of zero-emission energy in the future and storage is full. Otherwise, there are far better uses of energy we could put renewables towards.
@@nilnailscrew4784When hydrocarbons exchange their lightweight hydrogen atoms for oxygen from the air, the resulting CO2 ends up being a lot heavier -- about 3x as heavy as the original fuel. And since CO2 is a gas, the result is truly massive. Burning 1 liter of gasoline/petrol results in over 1,000 liters of CO2.
Carbon dioxide is highly compressible, but it's still very hard to bring its volume down close to that of the original fuel -- it'll nearly always be a bigger size than what was burned.
I've felt for a long time that we basically need to run the petroleum production process backwards and inject liquid hydrocarbons back into the ground. When nuclear power was new, some proponents hoped it would be able to produce energy necessary to essentially do direct air capture to generate fuels, rather than extracting more oil from the ground, though nuclear never became cheap enough for that, and they glossed over the complexity of the actual DAC process.
Basically we need to figure out if we can create anything that's more effective than planting massive numbers of trees and ensuring their carbon stays locked away rather than going back into the atmosphere
Thermodynamics suggest that sequestering carbon dioxide after using the energy by ignition would use all or more energy than received initially.
Yes, but the idea would be to use (too much) _renewable_ energy to recover the carbon generated by use cases that can't use renewable directly. That's the expensive theory. In practice it's just a scam.
@@M69392 Yep, "renewable" items are made and transported via fossil energy and have to be replaced eventually.
@@M69392 this is entirely pointless as long as renewables don't make up almost the entirety of energy production already. before then it's always better to use renewable power to replace fossil power. we're far away from the point where actively sequestering co2 is more efficient than reducing how much is emitted in the first place. the only thing this technology achieves is diverting attention and investment from measures that actually help. (nuclear falls in a similar vein)
thermodynamics suggests nothing of the sort. The champion DAC tech uses under 1MWh per ton of CO2 captured. Burning natural gas produces around 5 MWh per ton of CO2 created
@@ldm3027 👍 I hope you are right. I ain't ever tried to unmix the kool-aid, but I guess with enough time you could.
The complexity of the mechanism, filters and subduction of the spare carbon would need to be created without releasing more CO2 as well.
It's just more greenwashing, I'm more worried about the methane released "accidentally" and unrestricted/regulated leakage.
Paradoxically CCS doesn't work but we need to keep doing it. It's a smokescreen for heavy industries but they need to be forced to keep doing it as an aside to other carbon reduction measures, not their principle effort. They need to keep investing it in the hope they can make it work in the near future but not be ale to free ride on decarbonisation efforts by investing in it.
No. It is a waste of energy. It's not like you could get clean energy from nuclear.
@@virgilfenn2364Nuclear is clean. It’s just not (really) renewable.
@@cmyk8964 You're right. "Renewable" is a problematic concept. I used to advocate using "sustainable" instead but that term has problems, too. Both terms imply an infinite supply.
Nuclear comes close to being renewable in a couple ways. The Uranium in the ocean is resupplied by erosion of crustal material and by precipitates going back into solution. The other way is breeding more fuel than is consumed in some special types of reactors. Thorium and 238U can be bred into fissile isotopes.
Reprocessing "spent" nuclear fuels is another way to extend the supply of fissile materials.
The Sun is not really a renewable source of energy, either. The Sun radiates thermal energy at a fairly constant rate. The amount available is a function of the collection area - which limits the amount of energy available. The biological world depends on that energy. Using it to charge the battery in your EV may not be the best use of that energy.
Entropy will have its due. All energy that we might use was previously stored, somehow. Most of it can be traced back to the big bang.
8:45 I think the term Ponzi Scheme is way more accurate to describe what’s happening there.
The thing most people dont understand, is that it's not either/or. We are already past the "safe" zones(and we have a track record of underestimating the effects), and we need to do ALL:
- All new investments should be in renewables + storage (shoutout to Tony Seba and the U-curve)
- Any remaining facility should have ccs
- Transition transportation to electric
- Plant more trees
- Stop overfishing and deep sea mining
- Restore natural habitats (i.e coral reefs, mangroves etc) that have many other benefits too, as well as the sea
- Improve efficiency across the whole world(Tesla's Master Plan 3 details greatly how we could do so)
Etc, the list goes on... Each of these are important, so we shouldn't be complacent, and specially greedy like all these corporations
Hear hear! 🙌
Yes we need everything in theory. But in reality, money and taxes are finite, so they should not be spent on much less efficient solutions right now. Unfortunately, this won't change until we see a lot more climate catastrophes. Then maybe people will accept to spend more taxes or pay the "real" price for fossil fuel.
no, we should specifically avoid ccs. the damn things require more energy than they have the capacity to offset the emissions from. moreover every dollar invested into ccs is a dollar not invested into actually decreasing the share of fossiles in the energy mix.
dac doesn't fare much better btw
True
A lot of people don’t even understand that not stopping the trade with a fossil-fuel-driven country which frequently starts genocidal wars against their neighbours, bombing the shit out of their lands and dams, committing the straight-up ecocide is not good for the environment and still trade with the russian federation 🤷
And some people do understand, but do the same as they don’t give any care and they value maximising the low-term profit above anything else. At least until they are regulated or their reputation go so low they can’t make any profit anymore.
How much CO2 do you produce in storing CO2? that is the only question..
Yup. If CCS has only captured 0.1% of CO2, it stands to reason that the CCS plants are carbon positive.
Clean coal facilities mostly failed before they began. The “success” case can arguably prevent the emission of (or “store”, rather) up to 8%.
It’s a pathetic failure of an idea.
But I’m yet to be convinced that carbon capture and storage for cement and steel production is a bad idea. Those processes things were never meant to produce more energy than they consume.
This is why you put a $150 tax per ton of carbon, and let the market work to remove the carbon from the atmosphere to make money.
How would you even conceptualize a controlling regime for carbon capturing & carbon emissions? What about fabricated data and methodological errors, such as wrong estimations? It’s already immensely difficult to just get an income tax right (and we’re talking about simple accounting, no physical realm involved)
@@xXMatManeraXx CO2 can be Measured. Monitoring is necessary.
@@xXMatManeraXxFrequent Audits by companies that get paid performance fees by how may CO2 emissions they can verify and defend. Steep fines can also be levied to cover the cost of the audits.
Markets caused the problem that is climate change. Why do you think it will solve it.
Who is gonna impose the tax? Al governments ar on a leash held by the oil companies (and other companies)
36,000 ton capture compared to 37 billion tons of emissions, was a scary comparison
With 8.2 billion humans driving tire-pulverizing electric cars while running AC and asking AI how to make more money, what could go wrong? Let’s get more energy so we can have 12 billion monkeys wearing plastic outfits and being entrepreneurial.
the better simple solution is probably NOT emitting emissions
sure did, but fossil dudes and gals will lobying this harder than ever
And the economy will collapse, ur family lose their job
@@mizan-mq3me Who cares about losing jobs, the Holocene is not present anymore, the biosphere is dying. Money is useless when society is destroyed.
or stop human existence.
You first
People that buy into it need one.
The politicians and lobbyists just need jail time, they know they are scamming.
There are ways for this to work. It just needs to be looked at in a different way.
nah, its way better to use the energy spent on capturing the co2 on substituing the energy made from fosil fuels. Untill they make carbon capture more efficient at lower cost its pretty much useless on large scale.
sinse electricity from oil and gas is already on par or more expensive than renewables, and coal is significantly more expensive, anything that adds to the cost is already a non starter. And wind and solar are still getting cheaper every year. So it's only going to get less efficient to divert money from renewables to carbon capture. This was always just an excuse to keep the power plants running and the money flowing into the hands of fossil fuel companies
Anyone know a good source of a discussion about these two idealogied:
- "we should do these things to help our planet"
- "the planet doesn't care about us, we're just doing this to help 'us' who are on the planet, not 'for' this hunk of rock"
I’m so tired of every climate change video lately having a question mark in the title. Like why are we validating the debate? It’s that othersiderism that’s slowing down progress. Speak the truth stop acting like there’s multiple sides, since these thumbnails are just an act to get clicks anyway. So dumb to me and it’s so old I hate even clicking anymore because I’m tired of the b.s questions in the titles that aren’t questions anymore, they’re red herrings
Well said.
Indeed, question marks, catchy titles and other clickbait tricks are overused. YET... there are effectively multiple sides (bone fide ones!) and they are worthy of investigation. The truth you are calling for can be hard to establish, although in the particular case of DAC, and to a lesser degree in the case of CSS, I'd venture to say that the truth might be easier to come by. There is growing evidence that these "solutions" are impractical. There is an incentive to genuinely understand the potential and the limitation of various "solutions" as such knowledge can help avoid continued investment, financial and otherwise, in unlikely solutions and directing time and resources to more promising activities.
Maybe the most negative effect of these bad "solutions" is to keep the illusion alive that technology will usher a painless, rapid and inexpensive transition if only we just don't validate any debate to the contrary ;-)
And yes, it is frustrating to gather such understanding through various videos, many of dubious quality, but amid of all this noise, there are, online and elsewhere, resources that can allow one to get a keener grasp on the truths that matter. Seeking such knowledge is a journey!
Remember when Germany closed all of their nuclear power stations?? That could've prevented so much CO2 in the air!
Hi Armando! Take a look at our video "Is Germany's nuclear exit a mistake?" that might interest you 👉th-cam.com/video/eWuGP_aBoYg/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared Subscribe to our channel! We post new videos every Friday ✨
Just one year after closing the nuclear power stations they postet a record low number of coal used for electricity and a record high number of renewable energy and on top the electicity prices went down.
@@toniober4416 german carbon intensity increased from 453 to 489 g/kwh from 2021 to 2022 after closing half the nuclear powerplants, in 2023 it did drop to 425 g/kwh but total electricity produced also drop drastically from 491 to 446 Twh, this drop was not a result of a drop in demand but in supply and that energy was imported from mostly france who has a carbon intensity of 45 g/kwh ( 10 times lower than germany thanks to nuclear). Your argument is so wrong that if you compare 2020 with 2023 germany produced more energy at 491 twh at a lower carbon intensity of 399 g/kwh. So yes they missed big time, renewables are the future but germany acted like a child
@@toniober4416 yes, and charge high tax on cheaper renewable energy cars, lol, typical german.
Now RWE is GREEN because they’ll kill the native Colorado wildlife for a 9 square mile solar plant. Sell electricity to stupid Americans reliant on AC.
We're going need DAC regardless of whether oil companies are going to invest in it or not; it's beyond that point now. They are historically untrustworthy to do so because it does not serve their business interests. We need to remove them as a factor, and make DAC profitable as a standalone industry, without feeding it back into oil and gas. The CO2 itself needs to become a commodity in order for the incentives to be there, and that cannot mean going straight back into oil.
The best possible way I can see this happening is by finding a use for it within manufacturing:- trapping it within another material to improve its properties, or potentially breaking it down and tapping into the raw carbon. And yes, that is what trees do, but it does not scale. We have to solve this problem whether the oil companies will back it or not.
Carbon capture technologies should be part of the solution, but not the only solution. But if we combine it with other solutions like strategic agricultural programs and other evolving tech, it might work. For example, vertical farming requires elevated CO2 to help plants grow. So why not get CO2 concentrators, latch them onto vertical farms? Encourage people to do small scale farming/gardening? Strategic gardening and farming at the municipal level? I've been to many city malls... Consider multi-level parking lots where the upper deck are half solar, but also half garden? A place to go and sit that is safe and calming? Mall roofs could be redesigned to have small scale farming with the produce sold by the companies in the food court? Mixed in with the solar could be shade-preferring crops. For dedicated public transit routes, consider planting things like grass between the tracks. There is no either or for us to save the planet. We just need to get to carbon neutral naturally and use CCS tech to top things up.
cos everybody wants to own the world
Carbon capture is great and using renewable energy to do so is great!!.... EXCEPT we should use that renewable energy in place of fossil fuels to prevent producing carbon in the first place
Why don't you design a system for that?
@@oldones59 We have plenty of renewable energy technologies already in place, ready to replace oil, natural gas and coal on a large scale.
@@oldones59 mainly because there are already plenty of such systems designed already and secondly because it takes lot of money to design and develop such systems
Thin profit margin when comes to renewables, unless you have an abundance of hydro dams.
Yet it still doesn't happen
Because it doesn't make enough money
2% of US agriculture is organic. The rest of it uses chemical fertilizers to feed plants instead of using the soil to become a storage area for Carbon to increase production with microorganisms.
Chemical fertilizer was developed to feed the planet. Hence you hear very little about millions of people dying from hunger. Yet, it has run its course. And can be made from water electrolysis. As opposed to from natural gas. Or coal.
p.s. Briefly. Have looked into socalled 'regenerative agriculture'. May I ask what your take is. On how much carbon can be stored in the soil?
@@user-pt1ow8hx5l Regenerative is broader title to organic, but both use organic methods.
"We found 77 multi-year experimental results measuring changes to no-till with an average carbon sequestration benefit of 0.77 metric tons of CO2e per acre per year. We found 189 experimental results for planting cover crops, with an average sequestration benefit of 0.76 metric tons per acre per year.
"As of 2023, the United States had 879 million acres of farmland, which is 39% of the country's total land. This is a decrease of over 66 million acres since 2000, when the total farmland area was 2.17 million acres. The number of farms in the U.S. has also decreased, from 2.04 million in 2017 to 1.89 million in 2023. The average farm size in 2023 was 464 acres, which is slightly larger than the 440 acres recorded in the early 1970s.
farmers sold us out for profits over the last 50 years, destroyed our food and land to feed the supermarkets. now many want praise for adding a few hedgerows :)
[citation needed]
Oil industry finally managed to actually create recycling ! Sadly, we're still not recycling plastics (there is no cycles in today's plastic "recycling"), but they managed to make brand new CO2 emissions from old CO2 emissions. So great ! I have a proposal, let's listen to all the big oil company and accept all their plans as life ending strategies.
The problem with DAC is that it requires renewable energy to actually operate CO2-negative, otherwise you will emit more CO2 by operating the facilities than what would be captured. As DAC has a energy efficiency of maximum 0,05% (400ppm CO2 in the athmosphere), the renewable energy is used better by feeding it in the grid to reduce the dependency on fossile electricity production. There is just no scenario in which DAC makes sense from an environmental or economical perspective.
on the contrary, the current champion DAC tech has a second law efficiency of around 25% and uses under 1MWh per ton of CO2 captured
@@ldm3027 You do understand that there is not more than 400 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere thus the yield can't be higher compared to carbon capture from industrial point sources where you sometimes have more than 25% CO2.
@@silvesterbecker1015 again you are wrong as you dont understand efficiency. the "yield" of CO2 from DAC is near 100%, whereas CCS is much lower. And the 1pointfive DAC machine being built in the Permian uses natural gas as its main source of energy. There is no requirement to use renewables so long as emissions are captured
It might be easier to invest in bamboo plantations to capture carbon
In the netherlands we have a negative price for energy in the summer. The negative price could even cut the costs. You could program the dac to only operate when the price breaks even.
there is a very innovative way to capture CO2 : plant TREES
Not true trees sequester very little carbon compared to plants like grasses which sequester a lot.
I do not mind pumping down gas to extract more oil. We need oil. If you have dug a hole might aswell extract as much of it as you can. I am in Sweden. Electricity is doeble without oil, building house aswell witha lot of added cost, simple thing as plumbing without plastics. The third essential ingredient to survive is food and without oil I doubt we would manage to have enough food for everyone in the country. No oil means no plastics and probably not any fresh vegetables atleast 4 months of the year. No oil no tractor a lot les food overall etc. Personally I want oil price to atleast not skyrocket because if it did my food would cost more which already is ~33% of my income as a student. Making oil cheaper I believe will make peoples life easier. Making the pollution side more expensive I can get behind.
When someone is sceptic to oil in a black and white manner it is hard to take them seriously.
Great overview. Please look into ground basalt as well next time. This is something that scales well. It is essentially the rock weathering process speeded up by a factor of millions. Rock weathering is a thermostat that keeps the planet within a limited range of temperatures - on very long time scales, but it can't keep up with the pace of human-juiced climate forcing. It operates by - wait for it - removing CO2 from the air, and more quickly when it's warmer. Ground basalt accelerates this process. It's a way to get the carbon out of the air and back into rocks.
Agreed. Carbon can be captured. And recycled as concrete, too! Possibly making the proces 'bankable',....... So many better options than capturing carbon from big emitters, especiall big emitters of little value.
Ultimately, based on what's been said here, CCS is several times cheaper than DAC and less complicated....but no-one is using it at anywhere near the level that has been promised or advertised. So, why should we expect DAC to go anywhere at all? Sure, we may eventually need it...but in the mean time, it's just serving as a fig leaf for Oil Companies to do yet more polluting.
Walkable cities + Public Mass Transit + Remote Work + BEV transportation + Solar + Wind + C02 Capture
Each has a role.
i like the countryside ty :)
Building walkable cities seems like a losing battle unless you start making new ones.
Too many people have their investments tied up in real estate for that to happen. Unless you plan on forcing people out of their homes.
@@neetfreek9921 "Unless you plan on forcing people out of their homes." - well, the government, states, and municipalities already did (and still do!) that for highways and roads, so why shouldn't we do the same for something much, much, more efficient (and cleaner, if electrified) public transport systems?
[To answer my own question: because there is no "public transit industry" which will bribe, er, sorry, I of course meant "lobby", enough politicians, like the car industry did and still does...]
@@IgorRockt Destroying peoples homes to build roads is never popular. Even getting the die hard trumpers to give up their land (just the land) to build the border wall they wanted so much was challenging.
They could force it, but they also need to get re-elected. You need a large shift in public opinion for this to be accomplished.
Nuclear. You forgot the only technology that actualy matters. Also Wind Energy has no place in any rational society.
Now there are countries who have over production of renewable energy, causing big issues for grid stability. Hence sometime consumers are being paid for using energy (negative energy prices)
I believe we’ll see this scenario more often as solar and wind power gets cheaper. Mass scale energy storage is one solution but it is expensive and requires significant amount of lithium mining (which is detrimental for earth and co2 emissions)
Then why don’t we approach this problem by using excess renewable energy to capture co2? What if these plants only operate at the periods where there is excess renewable power? In this case it could start making sense.
We need fast response co2 capture facilities, not only capturing carbon but also helps to stabilize grid. Yes their operation time will be lower (capex/co2 captured will be higher) but this way we can start justifying their role beyond carbon capture.
Since electricity from oil and gas is already on par or more expensive than renewables, and coal is significantly more expensive, anything that adds to the cost is already a non starter. And wind and solar are still getting cheaper every year. So it's only going to get less efficient to divert money from renewables to carbon capture on energy generation going forward. This was always just an excuse to keep the power plants running and the money flowing into the hands of fossil fuel companies instead of being given to green energy.
on none energy generating c02 sources like cement direct capture is a good idea, but still only adds cost. So without something like a functional carbon tax it's never going to be economically viable.
Direct air capture is not even worth thinking about until we've eliminated all the easily replaceable emissions sources. Until then every bit of renewable electricity used to power air capture would reduce emissions more if just added to the grid to replace high carbon energy, or used to generate green hydrogen. And every dollar spent building the air capture machines would reduce more carbon emissions if spent on solar panels or wind farms or home insulation or heat pumps or pumped hydro or basically any other existing technology.
Once weve picked all the low hanging fruit then we can start thinking about stuff like this. But right now we are spending a lot of money and time trying to build a cherry picker while there is fruit laying on the ground going to waste, to stretch the metaphor.
Paid commercial for one company claiming that 800eur/tone of CO2 will change the world. Great journalistic work from country that gave up on 23gw of carbon free power in last 20ish years…
Hernandez said it well. Greenwashing. And with the president of COP28 making deals instead of reductions, the oil companies will continue producing for 60, 70 or even 80 years.
Scale, efficiency and cost
Agreed and there is a way to make it profitable, my latest video explains this.
The range of 15-120 $/tCO2 is quite imprecise, but considering the fact that the social cost of carbon has just been estimated at 1000+ $/tCO2, we should be investing in this (as well as other methods) like crazy!
every dollar invested into this is a dollar not invested into actually decreasing emissions. in fact we'd be increasing emissions due to the additional energy required and the high percentage of fossils in the energy mix.
@@Jonas-Seiler
Not entirely true, as it can be targeted to the hard to decarbon industries. But yes,the risk is there.
6:57
You're absolutely right in pointing out that, given current technologies, CCS remains one of the viable pathways for industries like cement to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The cement industry is a significant emitter of CO₂, and while there are ongoing advancements in energy efficiency, alternative fuels, and the use of supplementary cementitious materials, these alone are not sufficient to fully decarbonize the sector.
CCS doesn't work that is the problem.
I feel the story is missing a a major topic. What happens after we reach net-zero. At that point we need to restore the damage we have done to the atmosphere. The carbon that should no be their should be removed. I like Adam Dorrs analogy in his book brighter(tip, it is fun to read): The current climate is like a burning house, the flames are our Co2 emissions. Reducing emissions does not put out the fire, we need to completely stop with Co2 emissions, After the fire is out we need to repair the fire damage before we can live in the house again. We need DAC and reforestation to do this.
What makes you think civilisation will reach net zero? The increase in the use of fossil fuels is still accelerating, subsidies are in the trillions. No political will anywhere to do anything at all, if done, they will lose the next election, so instead they do nothing (and here in Sweden even enable polluters to increase their emissions). With tipping points activated, there is little hope.
…and Enhanced Rock Weathering. Yes that is a good book. And I agree that net zero is just the first step.
Something I don't think anyone is thinking about when it comes to scaling up DAC use is how will it affect the surrounding plant life and how big can you go before it starts killing off plant life.
I am unfamiliar with the economics of it but I always wondered if it's more cost effective if we could grow trees en mass, chop/replant them, treat them, and either use the timber for construction or store the wood underground as a sort of "reverse coal".
Fighting big oil is good, but we also plan to use CC for our cogeneration plants and WtE plants in EU as additional business opportunity rather simply to say that this is somehow single-handedly solve the climate crisis. I think this part was lacking in this video. The opportunity comes from the fact that Co2 is very useful resource, either for production of food, jefuel of whatever, and it competes with carbon storage, which sort of fights the issue you mentioned with pumping oil. I think this piece was more of a hit piece rather than real report on what the CC is actual good for. Hope that wasn't the intention, otherwise, what's the point of journalism if its not better than influencers.
Two things can be true at once: DAC & CCS are woefully insufficient at present to live up to their promise as represented by the fossil fuel industry, BUT ALSO we will almost certainly need to develop and deploy at least DAC in the years, decades and perhaps even centuries to come in order to undo the damage we have already done.
If "the tub is the atmosphere" (at 1.14) 430ppm CO2 in the atmosphere is going to be a wet skim on the floor of the dry model bathtub. You'd need 2500 more of these wet patches to fill the tub. The video shows the model bathtub about 20% filled with water, and that would be equivalent to 200,000 ppm. Consider the difference between 200,000ppm and 430ppm in the real atmosphere. It's a misleading exaggeration and should be cut.
Looks like you missed the metaphor. The amount of water has nothing to do with it
Your misunderstanding the point. A full bathtub doesn't mean 100% co2. The full bathtub represents the tipping points in climate change. As CO2 rises it reaches tipping points that cause more environmental damage to ecosystems. It also reaches points where positive feedback loops kick in. Melting permafrost releases methane or the ocean releases more co2 at warmer temperatures. These tipping points are the full bathtub. You can present arguments of where the tipping points are and what damage is caused at various points, but they aren't at 100% as you suggest.
@@BM1982.V2 Tipping points are bunkum. The model is either misleading or (by extension) bunkum.
Another fascinating example of the rebound effect ( as in cars and planes)… even if CCS was economically viable, it would just fuel the fossil energy business.
Would DW care to make a video about that?
very well designed overview
One thing a lot of people get wrong about climate solutions is, that not every idea, that sounds like it solves the problem actually solves the problem. Just because you can in principle do a certain thing, neither means, that you can scale it up to 100% market penetration, or to solving 100% of the problem, not that you can do so economically. There are many ways to reduce our climate impact, that don't actually cause net costs, but are actually a good investment even without climate change. Then there are ways, where financial benefit and costs come out around zero, ways where you end up with a net cost, but it's small per ton co2. And then there are things like carbon capture, that are in the priciest and least scalable category. Doesn't mean, that there is no use case for it, but it will continue to be very limited and will only make sense, where there just aren't any better alternatives.
I guess someone already thought of this, but I am curious, why this is not considered a valid option:
1) plant something that absorbs lots of CO₂ fast. First plant that comes to my mind is bamboo. But I am not going to argue. Might vary depending on climate, soil. Maybe go offshore and farm seaweed.
2) harvest plant from point 1.
3) put it in a location where it will not decompose. In swamps, in deep sea where there is no oxygen, bury it in a desert.
The reason that planting something to grow, harvest, and bury is not considered a valid option is that the resources used for that could have been used to grow food. The sunlight, soil, and water are too valuable. And, of course, it is too little and too late.
@@virgilfenn2364 IIRC, we are producing more than enough food to feed all the population - it's the distribution that is problematic.
And if I remembered that incorrectly, there still are the inedible parts. Or the seaweed I proposed in the original post ;)
And how much does it cost to sequester carbon by planting trees? ;)
This video makes it so glaringly obvious that what's needed to curb carbon isn't a new technology, it's a new economic model. Yet, we assume economic regimes are immutable so we must come up with new innovations to prevent catastrophe. That's 100% backwards.
Nationalize the oil companies and the 100 largest corporate emitters; dismantle the US military-industrial complex (the world's largest emitter); de-subsidize the meat and dairy industry; and tax elite 1% consumption into oblivion (the largest individual polluters in the world).
@jjoesmith331 They are almost all U.S. based companies, and many of them were at one time (during WWII and the US Civil War) under the conservatorship of the U.S. government. This includes U.S. financial services firms and insurance companies.
Innovations produce enough economic destabilization to overturn old models and regime from the “throne” ICE manufactures are investing heavily into hydrogen and electric cars for example. The players may stay the same but their moves do not.
@@Neoprenesiren Yes, and those innovations have been around for decades. That's my point. We don't need MORE/NEW innovations like giant carbon Hoover machines to save ourselves. But you're wrong about EVs--they will do little to help, and introduce new problems...car-centric infrastructure is the problem.
I think DAC should be installed near carbon emitting sources,to extract gases without the need of any sucking mechanism.
Secondly, the sucked up gases needs to be stored in such a way that nature can slowly breakdown toxic gases into carbon,nitogen, sulphur, oxygen etc as a result we can re-use them in future.
DAC or CCS are both sound nice as a technological means to achieve net zero or net negative CO2 emissions. However, they only make sense in a framework that includes emission taxing or effective emission trading schemes. And it is also exactly this framework that determines whether xxx € per ton removal should be considered 'expensive' or 'cost-effective'.
Then, the price of DAC/CCS decides on the fate of certain industries that cannot avoid CO2 as leaving group in a redox reaction for the production of materials, or as a product of burning fuels with high energy density.
Landscaping practices often cite 'carbon capture,' claiming that forestry stores 'carbon' in the soil, or wood, of constructed, or wild forests. These are often exotic forests, existing in part due to an ecological imbalance, like the removal of beaver. The claim ignores, respiration, transpiration, and decomposition of forests - emissions of CO2, water-vapor, or methane, are all greenhouse gasses. Claims of shade for climate-cooling doesn't address infrared-radiation, present both day and night, which is the agent responsible for the greenhouse effect. Photosynthesis itself is energy-capturing, not reflection / albedo. The decomposition of organic matter releases heat in the forest mulch-layer, compost, or landfill. Yard-waste is the single biggest contribution to the landfill, and landfill-generated methane is insufficiently captured, in many cases. It also ignores the equipment used in pruning, tree-removal, and chipping. Sidewalk and street repairs from roots heaving pavement generates expense and is dependent on fossil fuel consumption. Forestry for 'carbon' sequestration ignores the chemical-weathering of the soil or rock due to rhizospheric-activity, converting carbonates into CO2 as plants extract essential nutrients, like calcium and magnesium, from the soil. 'Carbon credits' are much like carbon capture, somewhat, or even outright, fraudulent. What 'carbon' are we talking about, CO2, methane, or CFCs - they are all carbon-containing greenhouse gasses? Carbon, itself, isn't a gas, it exists as graphite, diamond, or the black material found on the walls of the anoxic-side of a plumbing drain-pipe trap. We have become so fixated on 'carbon' that we forgot about the greenhouse effect.
emissions of water vapourare negligible when talking about climate change as atmsphere can hold only so much water vapour at any given time therefore the halflife of water vapour is very short and it quickly condense and drop out as rain, snow etc. Meaning water vapour is not primary driver but positive feedback agent amplifing the climate change
@@Taudlitz Yes, but here in the desert, we transpire or evaporate more water than we receive as precipitation. Our habits have to change, or we will have to reduce our population. A depleted aquifer leads to land subsidence. What about record floods, record hail, and the greater intensity of storms/ tornadoes, isn't water-vapor a contributor to those events? Our municipality allows a residential property to use 10,000-gallons of tap-water a month. You can easily put 6 or 7,000-gallons on the trees and greenery. At 8.33lbs/gallon, that is more than a ton of water-vapor contributed to the atmosphere every three days in June or July, not including natural and 'harvested' precipitation.
Proof and sources from independent sites, or is this just your opinion?
yeah ofc. Adaptation and change of lifestyle in response to more and more severe impacts of climate change will be mandatory in years to come. Great inspiration for water management is Israel for example, they managed amazing things in Negev desert. Sadly I think there will be places hit so hard with the changing climate that it will not be feasible to hold onto them anymore leading to increasing migration
@@Taudlitz Our contribution of water-vapor is incredible. Our municipality allows the use of 10,000-gallons of tap water a month, per residence, without fine. Consider if 7,000-gallons of water is used for irrigation of exotic 'greenery' during the summer. 8.33lbs/gallon of tap-water means that over a ton of water-vapor is emitted in the atmosphere every three days, which includes the contribution of rainwater, or rainwater harvest from the roof or pavement, by evaporation and transpiration. Water-vapor is a greenhouse gas. Record-size-hail, record flood, and the greater intensity of storms, like tornadoes should call into question our contribution of water-vapor emissions. There are areas in the US where evaporation and transpiration exceeds precipitation received, indicating a depleting aquifer. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jawr.12010. Our water-consuming habits need to change, or the resource will disappear. A depleted aquifer includes other issues such as land-subsidence, and the need for desalination technologies, as water-quality depreciates with the depth of extraction.
What if we just... plant more trees. All they do is capture CO2
then how politican and businesman will earn
You need to plug the holes in the boat before you start bailing. All funds and manpower should be allocated towards eliminating fossil fuels completely.
No, No. That is not the way to keep the boat afloat. You need to drill more holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water out. -- Ridiculous, of course, but that is the effect of all CCS schemes. They require expending even more energy than was released by burning the fossil fuels in the first place. I agree, "All funds and manpower should be allocated towards eliminating fossil fuels completely."
It should be fairly obvious, that spending money on something that requires close to a 100% share of renewables in the energy mix to actually achieve its goals while not spending said money on actually increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix, won't achieve the desired results
Enhanced chemical weathering (grinding up volcanic rocks so the metal ions can dissolve out of them in water more easily and bind to carbonates, drawing down co2 levels) seems like the most viable form of carbon sequestration, but it is slow and would likely need to be done on a large scale for hundreds of years to draw down all of the co2 needed to get to preindustrial levels, even if we stopped carbon emissions now. in combination with making biochar and mixing it into soil and/or burying it maybe it would take less time.
If we excavate volcanic rocks for that anyway, we may as well do it where we can get geological hydrogen.
Geological hydrogen seems like an interesting potential source of hydrogen for things like green steel, but will likely be opposed by fossil fuel companies because methane is currently used to make the hydrogen in some "green energy" projects with the argument that it can later be produced by electrolysis from green energy instead. The estimates of hydrogen available are rather large, but they are found in places with a lot of volcanic rocks so were not found often historically as oil forms in different geological conditions (more sedimentary). If we were to drill for hydrogen it would likely have some of the same environmental problems associated with things like fracking, so the politics of this are likely to be complex in similar ways to how nuclear is, with environmentalists with different focuses on different sides of the issue.
Thank you, now I understand why there was not more of these plants.
And more... I forgot to mention that there are more simple technologies to sequester carbon (i.e. nature-based solutions). These also have the benefit of providing local cooling. Something that we also need.
Completely failed to mention LN2 energy storage, a by product being accumulated Dry Ice that can be pumped into the ground, often after its thawing spins a turbine releasing much of its stored energy. There is also the concept of growing and sinking kelp to the bottom of the ocean where it will stay there and store for up to millions of years.
I am very skeptical that the technologies will provide solutions on the necessary scale. CCS is at the heart of many strategies for meeting climate goals (e.g. EU). We are betting on our future and drastic cuts in emissions worldwide need to be made.
What's the power usage of DAC and what's the carbon cost of that power usage? Even if DAC uses green power if means that that green power cannot then be used in the grid to reduce the coal or gas produced power?
You're right in that there can be an opportunity cost. DAC can still play a crucial role especially where there is too much renewable energy or where emissions from other sectors are difficult to eliminate. Here's couple of studies that look into the life-cycle emissions: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c03263; www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-44709-z
Direct air capture makes absolutely zero sense. It takes far too much energy to suck up enough air to capture a meaningful amount of CO2 and put it somewhere else. Burying that CO2 underground is a gamble on how long CO2 will stay there as a pressurized gas before finding its way out.
Imagine billions of tons of CO2 blowing out of underground storage all at once 30 years down the road when someone accidentally bores a hole into it or an earthquake fractures a storage area. Also, if you have already weakened the ground with fracking to get more oil/gas out of a well, that area probably shouldn't be trusted with long-term CO2 storage. There already are tens if not hundreds of thousands of leaking retired gas wells all over the world, not going to be any better off with making a million leaky CO2 wells.
If all we do with CO2 is pump it back under ground, it is likely only a matter of time before leakage back out of underground storage exceeds the practical limits of pumping CO2 underground.
most cost effective option is tree plantations, where tree absorb carbon.
why spent more energy is being spent on carbon capture projects, which can be used to replace the fossil fuel energy.
Best bet in my estimate. Run the CCS solely on nuclear if possible. It’s the only way I can reckon to get around the thermodynamics of this issue. You can’t use FF to run these systems. It’s pointless.
It was hard to think of an industry more evil than the tobacco industry - that is until the actions of the oil and gas industry became apparent.
I just finished my thesis in ccs and all I wanted was to relax.... and then this video shows up 😂😂😂 In my opinion EOR is the best way to get things started but regulations have to be put in place to force the oil industry to capture a significant amount of carbon extracted as oil.
Having more tools is only better if using one tool does not take away from using another tool. Investment into CCS is investment removed from other options (renewable energy generation, environmental protection, etc...).
Why not just capture it directly from the smoke stack via a pipe linked to a container with porous rock to store the carbon and then reused as needed?
Yep. Algie, especially, connected to the smokestack via a few pipes spreading out is a viable route, it seems. As one of many other solutions.
It’s strange to say CCS and DAC are expensive at 15-500USD/t. Electric cars cost USD1000-2000/t of co2 avoided
If they were really so worried, why would they allow hugely populated countries like China, India and Russia to just carry on regardless? China has over 1100 coal-fired power stations. Here in the UK we are being penalised when in fact the UK is responsible for less than 1% of World carbon emissions. So, if they are so concerned about it, target China, India and Russia. So the next time someone talks about net zero, say: "By the way, did you know that the biggest polluters are China, India and Russia, NOT the UK! The UK accounts for less than 1% of Carbon emissions".
This technology never made sense to as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student. Leads me to ask who do investors consult before wasting funds on unscientific and unviable endeavors.
Good content
These kind of wasteful technologies are dumb, to put it mildly. The cheapest way of creating carbon sinks are planting trees which can actually use the CO2 present in the air. And the next best method would be artificial photosynthesis. And the best way is ofcourse to decarbonise at the source itself, ie to stop burning fossil fuels to the maximum extent possible. For the industries that still need to use fossil fuels for whatever reason, they should be taxed at atleast double their current operating cost so that they have a strong incentive to move away from fossil fuels. It's just policy paralysis, nothing else.
CO2 CO2 CO2.... yet almost nobody is talking about NOx and the hydrocarbons in the air
Let's compare our emissions on those gases you mention. And let's determine our priority.
....because CCS and DAC cost money, what are the possibilities of converting that CO2 into carbon-fiber products for sale (some company isolates the carbon and oxygen...sells the carbon for carbon-fiber manufacture and the oxygen to hospitals {or welders})?
just a random thought while doing laundry :)
they won't share information that says they spent alot or captured less that directly reflect share holders stocks
1.7 Million is quite good for EROI Cehvron is doing great stuff
We need to find ways to utilize the carbon captured in a manner that is economically viable as well as environmentally friendly. That way, we can have ways to CCS and DAC better for the environment and also have huge amount of investment into these technologies due to economical viability.
i feel like when it comes to carbon capture, we’re missing out on a hidden mvp: macroalgae aka seaweed. they grow much faster and are up to twenty times more efficient in sucking up co2 than trees, nevermind ccs and dac. cost will definitely be fractional to what carbon capture tech requires. not only absorbs co2, but also raises the oxygen content in the water-which in tandem also mitigates marine death due to suffocation and climate change’s more dire counterpart, ocean acidification. when the seaweed have reached maturity, they can be harvested for human and animal consumption (feeding red seaweed to cows can cut their methane emissions by 12%!), natural fertilizer for enhanced soil quality, and who knows what else. can be mass produced and a source of profit, provides jobs for the common people, stimulates the coastal economy. it’s a win-win all around, so why are we as a global community not putting more focus into macroalgae?
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What about the good old direct before the chimney CO2 carbon capture like modern power plants filter their smoke already? Capturing after blowing out of chimney seems like feeding all plants with CO2 from the chimney - sometime more than than plants require to grow better.
Corporate will continue to promise anything what so ever to keep profits high and temperatures higher.
No matter the cost!
You can’t store CO2 anywhere and everywhere. You need the the geology that makes for a large and high quality container, especially for the large volumes hard-to-abate industries need. This means CCS needs lots of pipelines-yet another economic and political hurdle.
Carbon capture is based on the same technology as the cigarette filter: positive thinking and markeing. Today, every cigarette comes with a filter, unless you roll your own.
Planting trees is not enough. Remember that carbon nowadays come from mining underground fossils. I even think that when all the lands on earth are full of trees, it's still not enough to store carbon unless we found a technology to return the carbon underground
CCS over promises, just like solar, wind and nuclear does. But we cannot exclude any of them. We need it all! Perhaps in a 100 years we can ditch some. Not now. We cannot effort to.
Why not plant extensive bamboo forests?
The production can be treated to be used in housing and other aplications.
What was presented here were mechanical and chemical methods. Not presented are biological methods called "Bio-sequestration". There are many methods and many are probably less costly. Of particular note are: micro organisms that sequester carbon. It's kind of like brewing beer but backwards.
"Do you remember the early 2000s?"
stop making me feel old
We know the scale of the fossil fuel industry and it produces energy and therefore money. In order to be effective we'd have to create a capture industry of proportional scale except, that it'd be an energy and therefore money sink. On top of that we'd have to cease all CO2 emissions now because it's more efficient to do that than continue to emit and then recapture it.
The vast majority of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) released to the air is in our pursuit of generating energy because we do not have a surplus of it. DAC requires a ton of energy to do so it actually makes things worse, on average, and cannot be the solution. Yes, there are places where we currently have surplus of energy generation but it's better to invest into transmitting that energy, or making it portable in a different way, and then reduce CO2 released in 'generating' energy elsewhere, than just wasting it in the futile attempt of CO2 capture from the air.
Considering the amount of carbon already in the air its just not enough to be carbon neutral by a time, we need to be carbon negative to remove the already existing excess carbon in the atmosphere.
Carbon capture is a bandaid solution for a massive problem without widespread societal change. We are so fucked.
Cpmbustion based plants , such as coal fired powerhouses could be built around oxygen concentrators. A coal plant burning with pure oxygen would have an exhaust stream of fairly pure CO2, much easier to compress and store than the nitrogen heavy exhaust of an air breathing coal burner.
Question: Does the CCS direct from air account for the Co2 it produces itself by needing energy to do the job? Or is it supposed to run on "clean energy" 🙂
And also; there is already "technology" available for this for free. They are called trees and plants including algae in the sea. There are a lot more interesting project that captures Co2 this way. They can either be left alone whee they are or cut down and burned to produce energy for people and at the same time make room for more trees to grow. The Co2 can be captured from these plants in parallell with CCS from oil burning plants.
Yeah remember Dell computers shipped in plastic captured from thin air ? turned out they sneaked in plastic pellets from the backdoor.
Even in Copenhagen it would be 1.000 more efficient to isolate houses further. And expand on ultralocal power sources; small wind turbines, heat pumps and the like. As opposed to spending billions on co2capture. As is the plan. (Have noticed the DW team in Copenhagen.) Hence the hint.
"Will carbon capture technologies deliver on their promises?" - I think they have to, if we wish to avoid barreling into, and past, a long line of climate tippingpoints.
How we can make this happen? I can only guess; it needs to start with more openness and transparency in how the state of affairs are now from the owners and operators of CSS. It has to do with actually putting a price on CO2(e) so people will pay for having the carbon captured. It has to do with governments realizing that they need to step up, take responsibility and collaborate to fix this. I cannot see it happening otherwise.
There should be an incentive to do the right thing, and it should not be in the form of marketing or a ESG report for stock-trading
Carbon capture need development, not a "reality check"
No, we need a reality check that carbon capture is a scam.