Trees do it much cheaper.
Yeah, I mean I think carbon capture is kinda stupid on one level. It’s like an excuse for us to not change our behavior
Yup. It’s a technological antisolution.
If you build enough solar and wind to kick fossils off the grid, they’re going to overproduce at times of peak operation. Rather than wasting that peak production, use it to process CO2.
Also, Canada’s forests burned so hard, they were a net emitter this year. I’m not sure how reliable a carbon sink trees really are as the warming gets worse…
You need nuclear, too. There isn’t enough solar and wind manufacturing and deployment capacity for the foreseeable future to eliminate fossil use. There is no solution to climate change which does not involve significant numbers of new nuclear builds.
Geothermal. It doesn’t matter where you put up those carbon capture facilities. Meaning you could put them in the desert, you could them next to some vulcanos…and so on.
And nuclear builds are a waste of carbon…all that steel and concrete is most of the time not calculated when co2/kwh gets…well, calculated
Wow.
Be more wrong.
Seriously, try; I’ll wait.
Sure is a shame there’s so many scams related to that area. In theory, planting or protecting forests is one of the best things we can do. But in practice? A lot of organizations that claim to protect some area from industrialization are actually protecting an area that was never at risk in the first place. That is, if they didn’t exist, the forest would be unchanged. Others are only protected for short periods of time. https://youtu.be/AW3gaelBypY?si=56uG8zf1iAeJM31H
To earn revenue, the company is selling carbon removal credits to companies paying a premium to offset their own emissions. Microsoft has already signed a deal with Heirloom to remove 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
And this is why direct air capture is a farce right now - any progress they make is literally counter acted by large corporations who will increase their carbon output because they have a contract with a company like this.
Carbon air capture technology paired with 100% clean energy can save the world from a lot of hardship in the near future, but not like this.
I think it’s the opposite. This paves the way to enforce companies to pay to remove the carbon they emit. If this can be profitable then there is room to invest on improvements making it more feasible at large scale.
bro im starting one of these companies
Do you think Microsoft was holding back expanding its business because if carbon output?
Form a Fortune article:
While Heirloom declined to disclose the price tag to build the California facility, the company aims to operate at a cost of $100 per ton of carbon removed by 2030
From a Techwire article:
Heirloom estimates that the current cost of the technology ranges from $600 to $1,000 per ton of CO2 removed.
I could not find any article on how much the carbon cost was to run such a facility and move the raw materials to/from it.
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Ok Joni
Unfortunately I can’t read the article. What do they do with the carbon once it’s collected? How are these powered? How much power does the collector use compared to how much it collects? If stored, where and how?
At the California plant, workers heat limestone to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit in a kiln powered by renewable electricity. Carbon dioxide is released from the limestone and pumped into a storage tank.
The leftover calcium oxide, which looks like flour, is then doused with water and spread onto large trays, which are carried by robots onto tower-high racks and exposed to open air. Over three days, the white powder absorbs carbon dioxide and turns into limestone again. Then it’s back to the kiln and the cycle repeats.
“That’s the beauty of this, it’s just rocks on trays,” Mr. Samala, who co-founded Heirloom in 2020, said. The hard part, he added, was years of tweaking variables like particle size, tray spacing and moisture to speed up absorption.
The carbon dioxide still needs to be dealt with. In California, Heirloom works with CarbonCure, a company that mixes the gas into concrete, where it mineralizes and can no longer escape into the air. In future projects, Heirloom also plans to pump carbon dioxide into underground storage wells, burying it.
So they’re using the “limestone -> quicklime -> slaked lime -> limestone” cycle. The kiln must be powered by renewables (otherwise the process is pointless), but it’s a perfectly reasonable capture method.
Storage is slightly less straightforward. Concrete naturally absorbs carbon dioxide over decades, mixing carbon dioxide in during production is just accelerating the inevitable.
Additionally, the reason concrete can absorb carbon dioxide is that cement contains quicklime, which is mainly produced by… you guessed it, heating limestone to release the carbon dioxide! The concrete won’t absorb more carbon dioxide than was released during its production, so making excess concrete is not a solution to CO2 capture. However, if the concrete was going to be produced anyway (and we produce a lot), I suppose it’s slightly better to have it absorb carbon dioxide sooner rather than later.
Pumping carbon dioxide into underground storage wells a more scalable solution, provided that the local geology (olivine?) can absorb the carbon dioxide.
An alternative not discussed in the article is to reduce the carbon dioxide into various feedstock chemicals that we currently derive from fossil fuels. Again, this would need to be powered by renewables otherwise the process is pointless.
You a wonderful. Thank you for this.
You’re welcome!
