Direct Air Capture: Climate Savior or Distraction?
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Direct Air Capture, or DAC, represents a significant shift in our approach to managing carbon dioxide emissions. Unlike traditional carbon capture and storage, CCS, that targets point sources of emissions like factories or power plants, DAC can be set up anywhere, it doesn’t need to be in the same place or even at the same time as emissions are occurring.
The flexibility be able to suck carbon out of the air anywhere is nice, but that flexibility comes at a big cost in terms of both money and energy use.
In this video we dive into the world of DAC: how the technology works, who’s doing it and the controversial role of DAC in our mission to combat climate change.
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Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
01:18 DAC vs. CCS
02:41 How does direct air capture work?
03:12 Liquid DAC
03:52 Solid DAC
04:33 Aura Health sponsored segment
06:01 Progress on DAC Projects
08:56 Controversial aspects of DAC
10:09 Oil and Gas using DAC to delay climate action
11:12 DAC costs a lot of money
12:26 DAC uses a lot of energy
14:14 DAC compared to other climate action
15:23 Scaling up
16:09 DAC's place in the energy transition
Related videos:
Bioenergy In All Its Complexity: The Good the Bad and the Ugly • Bioenergy In All Its C...
From Waste to Wonder: The Surprising Uses of Carbon Dioxide • From Waste to Wonder: ...
How to UNDO Climate Change: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture (BECCS) • How to UNDO Climate Ch...
Turning CO2 Into Building Materials: Mineral Carbonation International Tour • Turning CO2 Into Build...
Sources:
carbonengineering.com/our-tec...
www.globalthermostat.com/
climeworks.com/
www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/09/worlds-biggest-plant-to-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-rock-opens-in-iceland-orca
carbonherald.com/global-therm...
www.oxy.com/news/news-release....
ourworldindata.org/grapher/cu...
www.hartenergy.com/exclusives...
Journals & Reports
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.iea.org/reports/direct-ai...
3. iea.blob.core.windows.net/ass...
4. climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/th...%2[…]de,it%20was%20near%20370%20ppm
5. www.iea.org/energy-system/car...
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th-cam.com/video/go92lAvJTzE/w-d-xo.html
WASF! We are orders of magnitudes off here basically pissing into a volcano!
Aerospace engineer here - this is one of the most annoying subjects wasting out time these days.
There's no real need to go into the technologies. You can kill this entire argument just by asking how they'll process 1 Billion cubic kilometers of air to remove 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2?
Here's the explanation.
FIRST - the basic task comes from the fact we have (since the start of the Industrial Revolution) put an extra 2.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with 1.5 Trillion Tons of that being just in the last 80 years and at current rates we'll add another 1/2 a Trillion tons by the early 2030s.
Way back in 1987 as an undergraduate (in America) we had a NASA Engineer (as a guest lecturer) explain to us why terraforming Mars was utterly impractical. He'd just completed a project for NASA on what it would take. It was simply the amount of stuff needed to do the job. Before you even get to the subject of making things like water, oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles work you need to just get enough air and water.
Its a subject I now call *Planetary Mechanics* which is doing basic calculations on volumes, mass and energy. He showed us just the basics. From that its relatively easy to calculate that to give Mars a layer 1km thick of Earth standard air requires 178 Trillion (with a 'T') tons of air. Plus you need to raise its temperature from -60C to +20C and that's a lot of energy for that much air. And you'd need a lot more than just 1km to make a planet viable.
The related subject is *Planetary Dynamics* which is how you make things like the water and gas and thermodynamic cycles work which is incredibly complex. Planetary Mechanics is reasonably easy for anyone to grasp except for how big the numbers are, because its mostly just being able to calculate volumes and what mass it takes to fill that volume. That's how you get 178 Trillion tons of air.
So coming back to Earth.
Earths surface is just over 500,000,000 km² so in the first 1km above the Earths surface you have about 1/2 a Billion cubic kilometers of air. Its actually about 2% more than that. But its just easier to use 1/2 a Billion. Because if you want to consider the first 2km above the Earths surface its about 1 Billion cubic *KILOMETERS* of air and that's where most of the excess CO2 is and there's 2.5 Trillion tons of it we need to remove.
So how do any of these clowns with plants that can do 1,000 tons per year plan to remove 2.5 Trillion tons?
How much will it *COST* in BOTH money and materials to build all these plants?
How much CO2 will be produced getting all those materials and building all those plants?
How much energy with it take to just build those plants and then operate those plants?
You don't need to explain the technology, because just the scope of the task rules it out as impractical.
If you want to know why an aerospace engineer is interested in all this stuff its pretty simple. My goal in life was to build a moon base. You then start with a couple of very simple issues.
How do you build a volume of space that you can seal so that you have somewhere to live?
How do you fill that volume with air?
How do you get enough water to sustain life, because water is life?
How do you create just enough of biologic systems that they can become reasonably close to self sustaining so that you have enough air and food to survive? I think creating a 100% self sustaining system is impractical so the actual task is how close can you get for it to be practical in that it doesn't require too much effort to keep functioning.
THEN FINALLY - how do you power it all? This is where Kirk Sorenson got to when he was at NASA and re-discovered molten salt reactors.
If you want to do a video on this stuff let me know.
Just a quick addition.
I know that since 1940 we have added 1.5 Trillion tons of C02 because I have that data because its well published.
And I know that at current rates 1.5 becomes 2.0 Trillion tons in about 2033-34.
I am not as sure as the 2.5 to date which you said was 1.7 Trillion tons. I think there is some contention over the pre-1940 data and what the "normal level" is supposed to be. If you look at the historical CO2 graph that NOAA and others publish then it should be below 270ppm for a normal Milankovitch cycle, except there was that event about 200,000 years ago that had one cycle hit 300ppm.
Irrespective getting the current 415ppm back down will take a geoengineering effort of staggering scale.
The only viable way that I can see it being done is a massive worldwide re-forestation program. *We have to see trees as very cheap low maintenance solar powered carbon pumps.* The issue is the number we need. In ball park terms we need every person on the planet to physically plant themselves or have others plant for them 1,000 trees. Hoping that we get 1-2 in every 8 survive to adulthood then we'd have 1-2 Trillion trees each pulling 1-2 tons of Carbon from the air.
Every other plane like seeding the ocean with iron to promote algae growth or seeding the upper atmosphere with SO2 has major issues in that NOBODY KNOWS what the secondary effects would be. The SO2 idea is the most off the deep end thing I have heard yet. What if it doesn't work? What if it works to well? What if they get it wrong and all that SO2 falls out of the sky as sulphuric acid AND its the same sort of questions for iron seeding the ocean.
In the end it comes down to doing something we know will work and we know trees work. We just have to do it at the scale that is needed.
... OR we humans could stop carbonating drinks. 😁
I'll let myself out. 😒
DAC is the equivalent as trying to suck out water from a bathtub with a straw when the tap is still at full capacity.
If you want your tub to have less water, reducing the capacity of the tap first might be a smarter thing to do. You can always think of ways to suck out the remaining water once the tap is closed.
you may have noticed that we already trying very hard to reduce emissions but the bathtub continues to fill up
we have not, but we can still begin to try. We have "talked" about it in a "positive light". Trying very hard requires "actually doing something"@@ldm3027
Why do you think the gas of life is pollution??? It actually does far more good than harm, actually it's a theory that it does harm a theory that turned out not to be true, every prediction they have made turned out not to be true. But msm just keeps repeating this lie.
Young people commit suicide because they believe that they have no future. It's horrible, stop it. Listen to scientists like William Happer.
@@ldm3027Who made you believe that? Msm who keeps lying that's who, the amount is co2 that human activity contributes is actually miniscule compared to natural sources like volcanoes, and all their predictions has turned out not to come true.
And co2 actually does more good than harm. It helps agriculture and forestry, it makes plants more resistant to draught, it actually makes the earth greener, it's the gas of life. It's NOT pollution!!!!
Well that just sucks.
Thank you for explaining direct air capture and the relationship to Fossil fuels. How crazy is it that we use energy to extract fossil fuels, to refine and transport fossil fuels, then burn it to get a small percentage of work out of it - now propose use additional energy in direct air capture to remove those emissions from the air!
Fossil fuels not only move our transport needs right throughout the world they also grow our plants for us which gives us food to eat to denigrate fossil fuels as being something evil is dumb
My DAC system is over 100 years old. Using photons from a fusion reactor, it combines CO2 with H2O converting them into soluble hydrocarbons that are pumped underground annually as well as being converted into structures, expanding its own infrastructure supports.
Underground hydrocarbons are further converted throughout transport and assimilation networks to form a living substrate that support the DAC subsystems.
Unfortunately these DAC systems are being regularly destroyed using the end products of former, less efficient DACs
I seem to remember that bio removal system getting burnt down all over the world and releasing its embedded CO2 - not very permanent then
Trees ! Yup I get ya 😊
The only solution to be honest
Solving the right problem is critical for professional engineers.
Making money is also critical for professional engineers...
And solving that problem requires aggressive elimination of fossil fuels. Anything else will inevitably lead to human extinction. Yes, I am a professional engineer of 30 years.
Ah, so that explains the "thumbs in bums" issue of engineers doing little beyond chatting. Gotta find the "right" problem first. So simple, only an engineer could come up with it! Gotta love plausibly deniable damage per neglect being done in the meantime, because we wouldn't want to waste a little of our resources pivoting to a better solution, if it's found. So how long until we find the "right" problem to fix rather than doing something stupid like a multilayered and diversified approach that's more resistant to industrial and political bottlenecks? I can't wait to see the solution that'll take 90% of emissions out of the atmosphere in a few hours. It'll be like magic.
@@custos3249Just keep in mind that we should spend 10B to save $400k...
Which is what these system basically do.
Engineers don't make laws or policies, that's up to lobbyists
Brilliant video! Clear/logical/coherent structure. Comprehensive, well-balanced and insightful. Keep up this excellent, important work!
Excellent video. What a shame that these companies don't simply invest in renewable energy rollouts, instead this wasteful diversion...
They dont invest because it would be a monumental waste of money! They done the cost benefit work analysis blah de blah! And worked out its just cheaper to let the earth and everyone on die! We emit like 36 gigatons a year. They are talking about thousand and millions that's 1000 times to small! We are dead!
As TH-camrs who have produced videos on COP28 have pointed out, CCS puts the responsibility on the people using the energy, rather than those who produce it. So they can carry on with a buisness as usual scenario.
Renewable energy buildouts and storage buildouts are not enough. We MUST capture the CO2 in the air. See above for a link to a PNAS article about how to do this.
Aerospace engineer here - this is one of the most annoying subjects wasting out time these days.
There's no real need to go into the technologies. You can kill this entire argument just by asking how they'll process 1 Billion cubic kilometers of air to remove 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2?
Here's the explanation.
FIRST - the basic task comes from the fact we have (since the start of the Industrial Revolution) put an extra 2.5 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with 1.5 Trillion Tons of that being just in the last 80 years and at current rates we'll add another 1/2 a Trillion tons by the early 2030s.
Way back in 1987 as an undergraduate (in America) we had a NASA Engineer (as a guest lecturer) explain to us why terraforming Mars was utterly impractical. He'd just completed a project for NASA on what it would take. It was simply the amount of stuff needed to do the job. Before you even get to the subject of making things like water, oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles work you need to just get enough air and water.
Its a subject I now call *Planetary Mechanics* which is doing basic calculations on volumes, mass and energy. He showed us just the basics. From that its relatively easy to calculate that to give Mars a layer 1km thick of Earth standard air requires 178 Trillion (with a 'T') tons of air. Plus you need to raise its temperature from -60C to +20C and that's a lot of energy for that much air. And you'd need a lot more than just 1km to make a planet viable.
The related subject is *Planetary Dynamics* which is how you make things like the water and gas and thermodynamic cycles work which is incredibly complex. Planetary Mechanics is reasonably easy for anyone to grasp except for how big the numbers are, because its mostly just being able to calculate volumes and what mass it takes to fill that volume. That's how you get 178 Trillion tons of air.
So coming back to Earth.
Earths surface is just over 500,000,000 km² so in the first 1km above the Earths surface you have about 1/2 a Billion cubic kilometers of air. Its actually about 2% more than that. But its just easier to use 1/2 a Billion. Because if you want to consider the first 2km above the Earths surface its about 1 Billion cubic *KILOMETERS* of air and that's where most of the excess CO2 is and there's 2.5 Trillion tons of it we need to remove.
So how do any of these clowns with plants that can do 1,000 tons per year plan to remove 2.5 Trillion tons?
How much will it *COST* in BOTH money and materials to build all these plants?
How much CO2 will be produced getting all those materials and building all those plants?
How much energy with it take to just build those plants and then operate those plants?
You don't need to explain the technology, because just the scope of the task rules it out as impractical.
DAC consultant here. We dont need to remove 2.5tr tons of CO2 because we are never going back to the climate pre the industrial revolution - another myth. We can certainly get to the point where we add sufficient DAC plant to remove ~1bntons of CO2 /yr by the 2050s and progress to removing ~10bntons of CO2 annually in that decade. That is important to bend the curve of ever increasing temperature past net zero. The air movement issue is yet another illusion. A 1sqm area fan that moves air at 5m/s (in a current commercial DAC machine)moves 150Mcubic m of air annually, which contains ~100tons of CO2. We need 10 sqkm of those fans to move 1 bntons of CO2 annually and the energy for those machine can be supplied by just over 1 sqm of PV per tonCO2 per year, so we need just over 1000 sqkm of PV to supply the power (all non contiguous of course). To give you an idea of scale, Bloomberg NEF projects that there will be over 5TWp of installed PV globally by 2030. Each TWp produces 2000 TWh of energy in the sunbelt which is enough to remove ~ 2GtCO2 annually ( at < 1MWh/tonCO2/yr). So PV capacity for the energy is not an issue. By the time we get past net zero and remove say 10bntonsCO2/yr, we will remove 100 bntonsCO2 every decade. We expect that the cost will be under $100/tonCO2 so 10bntonCO2/yr capacity will cost under $1tr annually or well under 1% of global GDP, which is an extraordinary bargain. To get there we can use aviation to scale up with a small levy of 10% on each ticket ( global aviation revenue last year was over $700bn) Future generations can decide how much of the accumulated CO2 to remove - the current thinking is that we should get to ~350ppm from say 440ppm where we end up but nature will remove some of the excess for us so the total removed may be under 100ppm , ie well under 1tr tonsCO2. All doable @@tonywilson4713
They should have played this video at COP28. Informative and well-presented.
Those present at COP know what nonsense capture is.
Direct Air Capture is almost as ridiculous as capturing carbon from exhaust streams and directing it through a sewer and to a colossal chimney into space!
No , who told you that? Lol
We can out clean the Amazon forest in just a hand few of these. But we was able to plant and grow the entire Amazon in less than 200 yrs but it takes up to much space .
The issue is its to rational, it doesn't drive down land value or force funding into development of new energy systems though.
Our filtering technology was more than ready in 1960s but its been intentionally repressed based on milatary & economic strategies.
This is a very complex subject but we definitely can run coal without emitting things that we can't clean up ourselves.
Good idea! The sewer pipes are already there why not connect them to some kind of emissions collection system.
@@somethingsomething404 at one time it may have made sense to focus resources into new energy sources but its been weaponized to the point its lost its justice juice .
to just keep letting propaganda campaigns create more west Virginia situations is just wrong.
Unfortunately certain lines of thought and beliefs unknowingly influences many to be sensitive about nature but very ugly towards humanity . as if we are a cancer killing mother earth .
I know I'd rather die free together than to live in tyranny before id spill an ounce of blood for some pagan mother earth or cosmic sky god.lol
As much as people get on my nerves it requires a lot of rationalizing before you cast those votes.
That's not a bad idea, in the UK we have soil pipes on the side of our houses that vent sewer gasses into the air.. if every house diverted the cost of this installation into a fund it would give us approximately £22.5 billion to play with.
Climate science deniers just can't stop lying about how much carbon pollution we have emitted I see.
The only use I could see for this in a decade or two is when there's so much excess power flowing onto the grid between 11am - 4 pm weekdays in the summertime due to solar power that grid operators are desperate to get rid of it and shunt it off to massive DAC installations, who essentially convert the unwanted energy into sequestered carbon.
If you're only using it 25% of the time then it will massively raise the cost of CO2 captured. I think they will vary the usage to support the grid in certain locations, but it's more likely to be not using it in the morning and evening peaks and during any windless cloudy days.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Yeah, the cost of the plants would have to be pretty low for them to be worth building if you can only run them half or 25% of the time. Or maybe if heat is the primary running cost you could convert electricity to heat and store heat for use the rest of the day. But that would obviously make the plants even more expensive to build...
@@EngineeringwithRosie : it would be interesting to see techniques for things we can do with otherwise-curtailed renewables. Basically, it's the reverse of what is usually called demand response -- what's the things we can build that do useful work, but are cheap enough to build that we can afford to run them either intermittently or seasonally. We've got batteries of course. We have Al smelters that can turn off the heat for a couple hours, or finish up some pots and not restart them if there's a demand spike in the forecast for next week. I know NASA has some giant wind tunnels that only work once in a while, so they work with the utility to figure out when's best to turn them on. What else?
Rosie addressed a similar problem in talking about hydrogen. They say you run the electrolyzers when solar panels are producing too much power. But, that means buying expensive electrolyzer equipment and only running it a few hours per day. It is also predicated on the notion that people will continue to install solar panels in such a saturated market, just for a few hours of output at the beginning and end of the day.
I personally think that battery improvements and battery supply chain improvements are going to make the problem of solar curtailment obsolete. (I also think they will have to be, or meaningful decarbonization is going to be nearly impossible).
@@ab-tf5fl Largely agree. One other point - right now most solar installations are done to maximize the amount of energy harvested during the entire day. But as energy prices on the spot market increase in the early morning and late afternoon - relative to going negative during the middle of the day when existing solar installations maximize output - that's going to incentivize some people to install panels that only capture morning or evening sun, if their goal is to sell power back to the grid. It might also encourage those who, for example, currently only have south-facing panels on their homes in the northern hemisphere to install them on east or west facing rooftops.
It wasn't practical to only harvest weaker morning or evening sun when panel prices were higher, but now that they've fallen so much I think the math will pencil out for installs that only generate a lot of power for 2-3 hours a day *if* that's when prices on the spot market go highest.
Appreciate the engineering deep dives you do on Climate, Rosie. Thank you for the work you do. It's great to see people in the middle of the renewable energy bubble who can remain clear headed about the real challenges we face instead of being unrealistically optimistic about how straight forward all this is.
i see carbon capture in any form as like a dehumidifier. If your house is flooding they would be expensive and pointless, you're better off spending that money on mending the broken pipe spewing out water. But after you've fixed the water leak, they are good at drying your house out and stopping any further damage.
It's a good analogy because dehumidifiers need to drain somewhere and are useless when a houses drains can't carry away flooding lol
Where I live, we run humidifiers, not de-humidifiers :)
Thank you very much for this video. I've seen even my colleagues, who are scientists in the field, taken in by DAC green washing. They often aren't careful enough to write in their motivations exactly what you said in the end: it's an important technology, but only after everything that can be has been decarbonized. I'll share the video around.
The amount of carbon pollution we have emitted clearly means that we cannot wait before we start building a DAC industry. The science is crystal clear.
The US Navy actually looked into this with nuclear powered ships. It was to produce liquid fuels for the ships and aircraft out at sea. The proposal was to use a liquid solution based CO2 capture combined with hydrogen from hydrolysis of ocean water. This would supply the carbon and hydrogen needed in fuels produced and be sent through a Gas-to-Liquid reactor. This produces the liquid hydrocarbons our navy requires. The theory was having a ship like this with each carrier battle group would keep them far more independent on deployments.
Fascinating! What ever became of this?
@@astebbin
The cost and complexity killed the concept.
This is the kind of analysis that keeps you on top as my favorite Australian engineer. 😉 Seriously, this was very well done. Lots of well presented points, and excellent rebuttal to those proclaiming that they have found the answer to let us continue to burn fossil fuels. The OPEC PR machine is really in high gear on this. I hope everyone shares your videos to help counteract all that money. Thank you for all you do.
I heard somebody say that it's like telling your neighbours that they can urinate in your swimming pool because you've installed a filter.
This is a very good idea, but the reason for growing algae is that after you rupture their cell walls and get to the oils, you could use the biomass for feed and other products (cosmetics, icecream, emulsifiers, etc)
Using your method is excellent. And that would be a more direct method for getting fuel, but growing plants like bamboo, algae, and trees you get a lot of other extra bonuses and industries.
On top of that, when you’re growing those plants, you are Employing More People. I can see this as a way to get more out in addition to growing bamboo, algae, and other industrially important organisms, but you also have to think about the social impact of what you are doing, and sometimes that is More Valuable in the long run (Larger Impact)
Restoring native grasslands (and the large herds of herbivores that used to live there) would have a HUGE effect in capturing carbon, and it could be MUCH quicker than any other method. Take a look at Tony Lovell's TEDx talk on this.
One way to capture carbon in a solid form is the pyrolysis of wood. Obviously the trees capture the carbon dioxide and the pyrolysis process reduces the wood to charcoal which then can be used of something useful or stored in an old mine. About 40% of the carbon from the original wood remains as charcoal.
@ndrewclark3236 Trees and plants NEED and ABSORB carbon dioxide, and by photo-synthesis, release OXYGEN. Carbon dioxide is the gas of life FGS !!!!
Do fish live off Carbon Dioxide?@@roydavis5613
An oversight in the logic: Power plants as point sources will run an ever lower number of hours a year. This means the point source CCS amortization will become ever more challenging, reducing that cost gap to a DAC facility that doesn't face this issue.
> 250x sequestration
So.... basically, industry trying to get taxpayers to pay for dealing with their a problem they could be solving at the source for several orders of magnitude less, _and_ buying the entire industry that'll be getting paid to do it.
Yeah. No. That's a racket.
My startup has also developed a brilliant solution for all our pollution problems: we named it Hyper-Occlusive Layer Entrapment, or HOLE technology. It's a very cost effective and versatile process whereby problematic substances of any kind, be it single use plastics, chemicals, industrial waste, or even burned out nuclear fuel rods are inserted into one of our excavated HOLE facilities 10 feet in the ground, where it is covered with any kind of soil or local material until the disposal site is indistinguishable from the surrounding environment. In our tests our system has proven to be 100% successful in storing anything we could think of!
And we are already working on expanding our operations massively with our new Submerged Invisible Natural Capture system, or SINC, which is the same technology but water based, which opens an additional 75% of the global market!
Brilliant Rosie: IMHO the only way to decarbonize is to ensure that the lowest cost energy solution is Solar/Wind/Battery-Storage (SWB).
I do not believe in IRA-type incentives but would rather have the polluting energy creators pay fines for their products' CO2 and health costs.
Replace all Peaker plants. with SWB, encouraged by associating fines for pollution costs.
If the fossil fuel can use catchy shortcuts like CCS we should also use SWB.
Thank you Rosie. A very measured and thorough professional engineering lambasting of DAC. Bravo!
DAC puts a tangible price on carbon. Currently, carbon tax is set based on what governments think they can get away with, I mean, what constituents can afford. If the air is a common good, which it is, that needs to have a consistent range of carbon content, which it does, then it follows that polluters should pay the going rate to emit carbon directly into the air and to extract it back out again. Back of the envelope calculations show that current carbon offset plans, planting trees etc., have a carry capacity of less than a fraction of 1% of the total carbon emitted. DAC internalises the externality of carbon emissions, thus making it possible for the polluter paying. So, sure, if the price for DAC is $1,400 per tonne and the max carrying capacity is 2% of global emissions, then the set carbon tax that ought to be levied would be (ca-ching) $700,000 per tonne. (Take that to Exxon and tell them that will be the new business-as-usual.) It's a hard sell, but over the years I have seen politicians from both sides of the floor that could have pulled it off. There are of course two choices to lower the carbon tax (another false dichotomy?) lower the cost of DAC or lower global emissions. It really is that simple.
Many thanks for calling carbon capture out for what it currently really is, and yes perhaps it’s time will come we may need every tool we can use in the future but as you highlighted there are better more effective way’s available now. Unfortunately just like hydrogen it’s being used as a Trojan horse to continue to prop up fossil fuels. Have a great holiday season and many thanks for your excellent work this year.😁👍
You aren't even considering the CO cost of making all that steel and other components, the fact that things like fan motors wear out and need to be replaced, probably by a internal combustion vehicle and so on. Those high costs hide even more resource use and carbon production.
A important way of dealing with reducing carbon is mass transit, especially trains and trolleys powered by electricity from rails and such.
Rosie, very thought provoking video as always.
Reducing emissions is obviously the most cost affective way to avoid net emissions. However, carbon removal is essential for all net emissions accumulated over the years. Subsidies should be based only on net emissions, including all the emissions to achieve. You mentioned farming with a group of industries that is hared to decarbonize. However, a biological approach to farming can and should be a primary method of removing and managing carbon into organic content in the soil. There are known methods for doing this today. Photosynthesis of leaves remains the most potent and scalable method for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Again, net emissions is critical. Current industrial agriculture is indeed highly net emissions with both the equipment, processing, transportation and high emissions that comes from excessive tillage. Beyond removing CO2 by leaves, we need to manage the resulting carbon to reduce to a minimum, not zero, the eventual emission from that sequestration. I follow to work of your fellow Australian, Walter Jehne who identifies to cooling and water retention benefits of high organic soil content that add to the cooling beyond the reduced insulation from the CO2 removal. Cultural recognition of this potential is the main barrier to achieve on the scale needed.
Thank you! I'll be sharing this to anyone who brings it up over the holidays
Capturing CO2 out of the air at 400 ppm, is kind of insane when you could capture it from a concentrated source like a power or cement plant.
Gets even worse when you think about the power needed to do it , and the power is probably generating more CO2 than we’re capturing in the process…
An informative and well laid out video. I respectfully disagree that there is no place for DAC (and for that matter CCS) in our route to Net Zero. But I wholeheartedly agree these technologies shouldnt be used by O&G as a free license to continue unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels. IMO the amount of steel, cement, rare earth metals, etc. needed to build such renewable energy infrastructure basically necessitates some degree of CCS (or cost permitting, DAC). We need strong policies/legislation to ensure such technologies can prevent unavoidable CO2 from being emitted, rather than as a an excuse for O&G to keep running business as usual
Thanks for another simple and informative video. Can’t help but think the real vacuum is the lack strategies to stop these companies from taking the p*#$$.
Or how do we redirect them towards new revenue streams?
They clearly value their money more than life on the planet, and they’re pretty much obliged to by corporations law and the prime directive of profits to share holders before all else.
So how do we change them? Fighting them simply gives them a license to fight us. How do we make our collective interests, their interests?
A carbon market.
The EU ETS is currently about €80/tonne which shows how far DAC is from competing.
You don't repair the death machine, you smash it. ✊
You don't fight them. You take them at their word, institute broad scale CCS, and force their product to be sold diluted with synthetic fuels created with CCS.
This way you both substitute additional carbon pollution, induce demand reduction for carbon based fuels, and take away the fig leaf for fossil fuel consumption.
As an additional bonus you have greater national security as your nation can't be fuel starved when it is creating fuel out of thin air.
I've read elsewhere that it's 4 times easier with water than it is with air.
But glad they are doing it instead of denying there is a massive problem.
Thanks Rosie, your enthusiasm, facts and the numbers are a breath of fresh air. :)
Great video - CCS is way too expensive and DAC is at least 10 times more expensive. As you suggest we need lots more solar & wind + storage which will reduce CO2 emissions and the need for CCS and DAC.
try looking at the latest IPCC AR6 report about that - carbon dioxide removal needed in every scenario
What a clear explanation of the hype associated with DAC. Thank you, Rosie. 👏👏
I watch all the climate channels. Fullycharged, Just Have a Think, Simon Clark, Climate Town, Rosie, many more... Read all my local climate concerned reporting. There is a very high chance we are not going to make it. Like species ending not going make it. Pro climate entities need to step up, other environmental concerns can wait. Greenpeace is a weak organisation and is easily distracted by minor concerns. We need a strategically focused organisation.
I think it depends on what counts as "making it". I don't think we're going to get this mess sorted in time to avoid a lot of really sad outcomes, species loss, displaced humans. But I don't think it is a mainstream view that we are tracking towards species ending levels of warming.
@@EngineeringwithRosie It's too late here now to offer a counter point. But know I have a really good one. 😁 that's a smilie face if your tech isn't Samsung.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Terribly unfortunate.
Fabulous work summarizing with nuance! This is why I love your channel. Thank you!
You said it well at about minute 13 when you revealed that the effort is carbon NEGATIVE if powered by traditional power electrical sources. so unless we have excess renewable electricity, it is a waste of energy and resources. Who funds these projects, which can be proven ineffective on the back of a napkin?
I believe my high school chemistry teacher's simple breakdown of thermodynamics. You can't undo a reaction without at least as much as you initially got out of it. The complexity of the machine, the concentrating of chemical agents and sequestration/storage will surpass the energy we received from burning the hydrocarbon in the first place.
Yes, but everybody hopes that this energy will come forr free from the Sun
Thanks for these engineering videos Rosie.
what is the difference in removal between trees vs mechanical removal adding in the carbon to mfg of the equipment and operational power required per square foot of land space used.?
Since trees don’t need a power source, I think that’s pretty obvious. Yes, you’d need a lot more trees and land space, but they live without maintenance for hundreds of years and provide other benefits such as flood control, air purification, prevention of soil erosion, homes for insects, birds and reptiles, and generally being nice to look at!
Carbon capture of bio-CO2 is an already exisisting technique used today at biogasplats all over the world. All we have to do is compress that CO2 and store it at a suitable place underground. The more biogas we produce, the more bio-CO2 we get for long term storage.
Another great video Rosie. Thank You
One small nit: that Iceland DAC plant is a special case. Iceland is overrun with geothermal power generation, which is a reason why Alcoa put an aluminum plant there (heavy power user). Thus they have a lot of cheap, carbon free power with which to run the DAC.
I agree - we should do research projects now so we’re ready for when it’s actually useful - decarbonizing the atmosphere after we reach net zero. And honestly, I’m good with government investment in the research. The greenwashing is an annoying distraction, but it also means we can get oil companies to help pay for the pilot projects…
On the sequestration front, I am a lot more hopeful. I used to think sequestration was the actual hard part, because we produce about 3kg of CO2 for every kg of fossil fuel burned, and it’s gaseous in any reasonable large-scale storage state - you can’t just put it back where it came from. But Carbfix in Iceland (Rosie mentioned them briefly in the video) have a solution that can scale and be done cheaply. They dissolve the CO2 in water, then inject it into basalt rock. It takes about two years for the CO2 to react with the basalt, forming carboniferous rock, and the water is just released back into the water table. Much of the Earth’s surface is covered in basalt (about 1/7 of the land and most of the ocean floor), and over 99% of Earth’s carbon is already locked up in carboniferous rock, so scale isn’t a problem. The technology is very simple and well understood, too. They’ve been at it since 2014 and believe they can do sequestration at scale for $20/ton. I believe them.
Hi Rosie, Would it be good to use DAC to soak up the midday glut of solar power
Using batteries to soak it up would be far more useful - then we can use that power to supplement peak consumption hours.
Imagine a carbon capture technology, which only requires manual labor and common tools, can be done on almost any patch of unused land, helps you stay fit, and its byproduct are either forests, or food.
Crazy, huh?
While we must research different options, this is a classic example of Okham's razor.
Good on you Rosie, and Thanks
Perfect summary at the end. Loved it!
I have a different controversy:
- DAC Direct Air Capture
- CCS Carbon Capture and Storing.
Taking carbon is common to both. BUT there is a difference in what to do with the CO2.
The second term directly tells to store away that CO2 - the first term is completely free of anything what to do with the CO2. Perhaps it is used in some industrial processes.
Ideas like DAC and CCS are prime examples of trying to reverse the entropy created by burning the fossil fuels in the first place.
I really want to see the deep thermodynamic analysis of DAC and CCS since this will tell us what is theoretically possible. If the physicists wag their fingers then we can send the engineers off to do something more useful with their time.
2:20 That's not the reason for energy use. Indeed, you could put the DAC devices in the path of strong prevailing winds. The energy need is for liberating the CO2 from the capture medium. I'm a bit confused on why this statement is made, as the rest of the video makes it obvious that Rosie understand this aspect of DAC, in fact in great detail.
GREAT presentation Rosie!
Thanks Rosie - a very clear and understandable video.
There's a very easy way to figure out whether direct air capture is worth it:
Force all extractors and imports of fossil fuels to capture equivalent carbon to the amount they import/extract into some kind of solid/liquid form.
Thermodynamics say that you can't profitably burn fossils to capture the equivalent carbon, but it would force fossils to pay for their externalities!
(And for cases like airplanes where batteries are impractical, it would still allow transportable fuels.)
Brilliant video content. Another thing to factor in against the DAC methods you presented is the need of minerals to start with. Where will they get the calcium from? More digging? Electro-capture/separation? So again more energy needed. It’s just insane. Let’s plant more trees, restore peatlands, sea grass and corals and just use a bit of CCS here and there for things that are too hard to decarbonise.
More bullshit about carbon capture and as an Engineer she knows sfa about so called renewables
This 'technology' should be renamed Direct Gullibles Capture
Cruel statement :)
“we’re really still in the easy part of the energy transition” is a very scary sentence
Nice video. I completely agree we need to spend the real money on low hanging fruit first, stuff that is ready for prime time now. But from an engineering standpoint, there are some places with really strong winds, like Wyoming. I can't help but wonder if we couldn't create a system that doesn't need fans.
I can pour my sour milk down the drain or I can pour it on the floor and then mop it up and pour the mop bucket down the drain and rinse the mop... except, in my scenario using the mop doesn't actually make the new milk in the fridge go bad faster.
Thanks, Rosie. Great video.
Great video thanks. However, are we missing life cycle analysis on the consumable materials needed for DAC? eg KOH or adsorbents. Without this data the whole concept cannot be validated. Thoughts @Rosie?
Once upon a time, I was a DAC proponent. Well, not quite. You see, in Carbon Engineering's early days, they touted DAC *and* air-to-fuels, or A2F. Their pitch then was: Suck carbon out of the air, anywhere, then convert the byproduct to drop-in replacements for things like jet fuel...all while being carbon neutral.
Predictably, with Occidental's purchase of CE, A2F has disappeared, leaving behind a "solution" that's actually carbon-positive due to high energy inputs on fossil-fuel-powered grids.
This situation is directly analogous to that faced by The Ocean Cleanup. They devised a brilliant solution to scrape plastic out of the world's oceans. Then they came to the realization that cleaning the oceans is a futile pursuit as long as plastic emissions continued flowing. Here, they changed tack by augmenting ocean _cleanup_ with emissions barriers along the world's 1,000 worst emitting rivers; thereby shutting the tap while mopping up the flood. Now we're getting somewhere.
DAC isn't the solution. Today I believe that all DAC projects should be shuttered, instead diverting all related invest into CCS. Identify the worst offending point-source emitters that aren't energy generating facilities. As is pointed out in this video, the answer for power plants is increasing renewables capacity while expanding the grid to allow for faster connection.
For the worst offending point-source emitters, do everything possible to first minimize GHG emissions, then install CCS facilities; capturing CO2 for subterranean sequestration (like Climeworks is doing).
I'm fond of saying that there's no silver bullet when it comes to addressing climate change. There's only silver buckshot. CCS should be an important tool at our disposal while every other avenue is discovered, developed and deployed.
A2F makes sense if you force fossil fuels to be blended with it.
Suddenly fossil fuels cost much more, which immediately reduces their use, and of what is used, some of that is from recycled carbon. Gradually increase the percentage of A2F until you have 100% fossil fuel replacement.
Of course direct electrification is more efficient and likely to be more cost effective so the scale of A2F is going to be smaller than fossil fuel consumption.
Finally you scale up carbon extraction which is needed to pull the billions of tons of carbon already released back out of the atmosphere.
Well said, this is no way to deal with our carbon drilling and burning. We just need to stop burning things.
That puts you as definitely not in the Emirati Sheik's camp. Bravo! I am going to say this because I heard some of it going around when I was in Brisbane a few years ago. The climate argument had been on for a bit, and some of the engineers sponsored for a training syllabus in emerging oil technologies were asking what would become of their field; let me assure you that an engineering ticket in many disciplines can be converted faster than most teachers can change to a different subject matter. Most of the principles stay the same and the equations often echo each other. Anyway, it is both a trying time and an exciting time; "what comes next" is about to land.
Great overview, thank you.
I love your videos, well done. I think it would be less money and more practical to plant more trees. Young forests consume much more carbon than a mature forest.
They release it back when they rot. You need to hide all this wood somewhere (or forever be increasing the forest area, which is not feasible)
Very useful summary.
Thanks Rosie.
Great breakdown. Do you use single pieces of toilet paper to mop up your overflowing toilet (a pillar of water bouncing off the ceiling)? Or do you turn the water off and repair the toilet first?
Lining the empty bit in the hyways the middle full of dirt and weeds fill it with native plant seeds from flowers bushes succulents trees and more to reduce co2 and speeding and reduce being blinded by other drivers on other side of road.
The direct air capture system I'm most optimistic about is a newer company started at MIT called Verdox. Their sorbent is cycled electrically instead of thermally and doesn't lose nearly as much efficiency at low concentrations because it consumes energy per cycle, not per hour. They claim, I think believably, 70% less energy consumption than thermally driven DAC.
The other electrochemical system I've heard of that sounds interesting and promising is from a company called Captura out of CalTech using the ocean as a sorbent and releasing the CO2 by changing the PH with some electrochemistry.
Basically, there are a few really promising electrochemical DAC systems that were invented in the last few years that solve a lot of the issues with thermal systems and reduce energy consumption.
I think it's also worth thinking about unconventional markets for direct air capture. The most interesting one I've heard of is attaching DAC to a building's HVAC system to reduce the CO2 concentration of conditioned air and reduce the cost of DAC. the pretty sound theory is that buildings generally have higher CO2 concentrations than outdoors and people don't work as effectively when CO2 concentration gets higher, so if you put DAC in the HVAC system you can make the office more productive, and that pays for the CO2 capture.
Great video.. Thanks very much.
Direct air carbon capture is so frustrating to me. It consumes more energy than ocean-based carbon capture. Oceans hold 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere. According to a study from UCLA, "Saline Water-Based Mineralization Pathway for Gigatonne-Scale CO2 Management", it's estimated that the world would need 20 petawatt hours of power to remove 10 gigatonnes of CO2 from ocean water.
That's slightly less than what the entire world consumes globally per year, but at least that's something we can wrap our heads around.
The study also mentions that CO2 is absorbed into cold water more than warm water. I'd like to see large hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, and wind farms built in places like Norway, the US, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Japan, Argentina, and others meant to satisfy the 20 PWh of energy needed just to remove 10 gigatonnes. I say 'just' as if that's a small amount. It's not.
Are there any measures to capture methane?
8:49 Even 750 mt Co2 are way too little when we are emitting round 40 bt CO2 per year. It is negible.
(DAC as a large scale solution, is a non-starter.) Future video topic suggestion. Let's say we get to 80% renewables. We still need some dis-patchable sources in the portfolio. Fission is usually suggested to fill this role. But SMR's are turning out to be more expensive than expected. With the added cost, would a gas plant + point source CCS, be competitive with nuclear? Can someone crunch the numbers (in terms of emissions and cost).
New Engine Type (NET) is free for CO2 capture... The capture occurs in the secondary cycle of NET's combined cycle. The secondary moves the efficiency from 55-60% to 75%, and therefore actually SAVES money by capturing CO2.
The CO2 is also used in the engine to create a COP 4 combustion heat pump. This would make using Natural Gas drop by 75%. The heat/power from NET would replace the boiler.
NET also runs on thermal hot water to make RE electricity, with which you can them make fuels. Ethanol is the idea fuel as it is safe to store and low fire and spill risk.
This CO2 can be used to make fuel for around $1/gallon gasoline, which is 1/2 to 1/3rd Oil.
The only use for this industrial CO2 capture system is with nuclear power, but their costs preclude their use. NET is basically free...
Thank you 👍🏻🙂
I agree with your points! I don't understand your point in the ending though. You're saying that these pilot projects are part of the puzzle in order to have projects in the far future that tackle the persistent CO2 and potentially reverse the emissions that are already in the atmosphere... but just not in the hands of the present oil and gas companies... that part doesn't make any sense to me because in the end it doesn't matter who is doing the pilot projects. If start up X is doing the pilot project, then it seems like oil company Y benefit anyway.
Really good quick summary.
What a thorough video!!
How much energy do you need to invest into DAC to offset the CO2 footprint of 1kWh? If it takes anywhere near 1kWh of all-inclusive power to remove 1kWh worth of carbon from the air, then the most eco-friendly thing for a DAC plant to do is to not get built in the first place and use all of the renewable energy it would have consumed to reduce fossil fuel power generation by a similar amount and not generate the CO2 in the first place.
If what geologists said about atmospheric methane resembling ice age termination events early this year is correct, methane is about to run away with climate change and nothing we can do about CO2 will change that.
Spending* your way out of massive debt (or even spending your way to net zero) is an *_incredible_* concept that i wish i knew how to implement. 🤣
Any kind of force air movement for DAC basically renders it too costly and energy intensive. Passive air movement via wind really looks to be the only affordable method. Likewise the need for the geologic repository to be directly under the site means both things need to coincide and that's going to be rare so it will only be done at a few locations on Earth.
Thanks!
Thanks for this clear explanation. New subscriber.
Very enlightening
Tx for your insightful assessment of this tech vs CCS. It would be great to compare anthropogenic (ie engineered) DAC vs nature-bssed solutions. For example, cost of restoring a mangrove forest that also provides multiple additional benefits than "merely" capturing CO2 vs a single- purpose DAC project (great at vacuuming up public funds via gov subsidies).
One thing not covered in your excellent analysis is the environmental cost of building these humongous white elephants (diverting land use, deforestation, natural resource use such as water, pollution, building & construction materials, operations & maintenance activities, impacts on the local ecology & wildlife, impacts on local indigenous populations etc etc).
The only DAC I would excited about is perhaps clothing (or other personal equipment) that could absorb CO2 passively while we went about our everyday activities - it's projected that human pops could grow to about 10 to 11 billion people - imagine every one of us capturing carbon every day of our lives... could you imagine the exciting reality TV shows of the future (combo survivor & the great race?!)
I am fascinated by the fact that most people talk about ^fighting" climate change like it has an intent. Climate change is physics & chemistry, ie cause & effect. We are the cause, climate change is the effect. The understanding of climate change is a product of the physical / natural sciences, but the real solutions lies is the socio-cultural, economic & political sciences... with tech being one component to help us live in harmony with mature rather than against nature. Unless our attitude towards nature changes, no amount of tech can save us.
It must also be remembered that CO2 is not the only GHG of concern... there are other important GHGs that also needs to be considered. The only ^real^ solution to climate restoration is ecological restoration (people also need clean air & water, a non-polluted world & access to natural resources etc for quality of life) eg solar panel is good for clean energy, but you can't eat or drink or wear a solar panel! We need to approach the climate crisis in terms of a broader ecological crisis if we want to give our kids a future they can thrive in.
Thank-you so much Rosie. I've wanted a video like this for a few years to understand the complexity of DAC. Having looked quite deep into this topic I agree with what you've said and is why I've struggled, in case I missed anything, with my support of Climeworks which you've helped me understand, is at present expensive and maybe the money could currently be better spent elsewhere. However in their favour they are geosequestrating the CO2 in the local basalt using 100% geothermal energy. I send a few Euros their way to offset some of what carbon I can't avoid, not so much to change the word, but to help, in my small way, for them to eventually develop a large scale, cheap system to remove the historical emissions. Long after I'm gone I would love the planet to return from the current 420ppm to maybe something like the 316ppm when I was born.
I remember when they were saying that 300 ppm was the tipping point, 350 ppm would be really, really bad, and 400 ppm was unfathomable.
@@philipyoung7034the expensive weather-related events around the world are proof that the existing and future levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are untenable.
What about combining DAC with compressed air energy storage?
While the air is compressed, the carbon can be captured and sequestered
Since DAC will always be significantly more expensive than point-source Carbon Dioxide Removal, won't it be a better choice to invest in CCS for Biomass energy plants? In other words, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)? DAC could be practical once fusion energy is cheaper than solar farms (and fusion will take up less land area). In the meantime, the price point for widespread deployment of DAC should be that it is cheaper than BECCS. Is there any projection when if ever this could happen?
Because DAC could someday be more scalable than building new BECCS where there is already cheap green energy, it might possibly become worth deploying on a small to medium scale in selected regions even before fusion is commercially competitive. That would be some decades after iron and steel production is already completely green, since you need steel to make the pipes and fans heavily used in DAC.
Our grandchildren's generation might want to use it to bring carbon dioxide levels down to 1980 levels, a level such that snow landing in Antarctica might start to be bigger than ice loss from warm sea water eating at the West Antarctic ice shelf. Recent scientific studies suggest the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is already on track to contribute something like 2-3 meters to sea level rise by 2500 or so, and whether the carbon transition stabilizes at 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees will not affect that outcome much. If affordable Carbon Dioxide Removal technologies, including some cheap scalable form of DAC, could get average global temperatures back down to 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, our g'g'g'great grandchildren might be able to stretch out the collapse of the WAIS so it will take 1000 or 2000 years, instead for 300 or 500 years. If in that timeframe, snow build up in East Antarctica might start to go faster than WAIS ice loss, and sea level rise might start to reverse.
In the meantime, the world's coastal communities will have to do a lot of adaptation, and a lot of our urban cultural heritage will be irretrievably lost to encroaching tides and storm surges. A sizable chunk of the world's wealth will have to pay for relocating 30% to 100% of the population in world's coastal cities to new districts. Civilization will look very different after the carbon transition and related adaptation, let us just hope it looks a lot better than what we have today.
My takeaway: DAC when its cheaper than BECCS and a couple of decades after completely green steel.
DAC is a brilliant solution. Plants are the answer to how to do that.
Certainly making fuel from air is interesting and it would be great to be able to do it on mars or the moon but it will never be desirable to do it with fans and pumps. That is just making the problem worse, not better
Forget planting more trees for a minute. Coral. A bonus is the coral is a good source of limestone
So why are corals do not strive and self propagating ? What do you need to "plant" them ?
When you said one of the existing DAC schemes can’t find enough customers for their CO2, so they release it back into the atmosphere - I loudly gasped, like if someone dropped a crate of expensive wine! That’s even more ridiculous than I expected. It will be up to our descendants to pick up the pieces.
Yep. It's a total waste.
But, it's great for the fossil fuel company's profits if the DAC schemes end up buying lots of fossil-powered energy to run themselves. Even if they end up emitting more carbon than they remove, it doesn't matter, so long as the fossil fuel CEOs make out with more money for yacht payments.
What do you want to do with CO2? Sure it’s used as dry ice for certain industrial processes, but they don’t need that much.
@@Mike-oz4cv Pump it into an underground geological storage.
@@Mike-oz4cv AndI bet dry ice releases is back to atmosphere
thank you
Do any of these solutions post a net gain as compared to using the energy in place of fossil fuels?
Nor even close.
How about the indirect air capture of Dale Vince / Ecotricity's Gas from Grass? Or ecofuels made from the air itself which can be green if renewable energy is used to power the process?
Sounds like DAC needs a economic solution to justify its energy use.. Perhaps instead of storing the captured carbon, up-cycle it into a highly desirable product? Would it be possible to say concentrate the the carbon into carbon nanotubes or carbon fibre for use in the construction industry? wouldn't it be cool if you could catch carbon at one end and churn out carbon Ibeams at the other?
With the state of the construction industry at the moment, at least in Australia, buildings are left unfinished because the materials they quote go up by 10 - 20% completely cancelling out the profit margin the builder had factored in. If this could make abundant strong and durable building material virtually anywhere and flood the market with them, this could solve the housing crisis as well!