This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Everyone here is mad that we’re doing this as if this is the only thing we’re doing. This… nor any of the other things suggested here… are either/or strategies. They’re all AND strategies.
People just wanna bitch.
Celebrate everything that is done to help slow down climate change and encourage more.
The problem is, that this technology is already being used to greenwash fossil fuels. There's a gas power plant currently running that got subsidies and good press for building a CCS facility next to the power plant. Something like 1% of the emissions were actually sequestered, but millions were wasted.
If these subsidies are actually tied to reasonable requirements, I'm all in. History shows, though, that this is usually not the case.
Part of the problem with new technologies is that they’re inherently less efficient than the same technologies once they’ve been further developed. And the problem with that is that it takes millions of dollars develop and deploy new technologies.
This was once the biggest argument against solar and wind. It was expensive and markedly less efficient than coal. However, solar and wind are now pretty good and continuing to get better. All because people were willing to invest the many millions of dollars to develop those technologies.
This is almost always the argument with new technologies. But to make the argument that it’s a good reason to stop investing in a wide variety of technologies that could literally help save the world is shortsighted.
You completely missed my point.
This technology is currently used to greenwash fossil fuels. With tax payer money.
That is, you pay taxes, that are paid to big oil and gas firms to pollute the planet even further. The CCS is just window dressing. It does nothing. And that's what I'm afraid will happen again.
CCS only makes sense, if the CO2 is actually pulled out of the carbon cycle. Otherwise it's fraud.
The other thing many people miss is that the article is ONLY about these specific DoE DAC hubs but other private ones already exist. ExxonMobile is running one in Wyoming.
Tallgrass Energy is building another one in Wyoming.
Those are just the private ones I'm aware of in my own state, which has a climate commitment of being carbon negative by 2050.
Behold! The Tree.
Algae isn't it ?
Efficacy of photosynthesis in mitigation of CO2 is slowing.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-global-photosynthesis-due-carbon-dioxide.amp
Until the tree dies and all that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Trees are not the solution. The forest is the solution.
No, as said you cab use the wood for building stuff or reduce it to charcoal and store it for a long time, so taking it out permanently.
It's a technological antisolution.
Just noticed your username--did you write that post? If so, nice work
People should keep in mind that even if we stop adding more carbon into the atmosphere today it still wouldn't stop climate change because all the carbon we've put there already isn't going anywhere. To truly stop and reverse climate change requires carbon capture in one way or another. It's something we have to do.
We're sooooo far from even thinking about reversing climate change that this argument, though valid, sounds very misplaced. If can't even get my friends, who are otherwise smart and decent people, to consider not eating meat.
Try slow changes for them first. Impossible burgers are actually very tasty! And if seasoned well, taste pretty close to the real thing. Maybe convince them to do a day off meat per month at first, with these burgers to replace it.
... Which is more reason to invest in carbon capture.
Carbon capture is a fucking scam, always has been.
This just funnels more money into big oil.
Direct carbon capture is a scam. Alternatives like biochar, enhanced basalt weathering, and reforesting are definitely not.
The article says it's direct air capture. So everything I said about this being a scam is true.
I recall the biggest direct air capture facility ever made in like, Norway?, only being able to capture about a few seconds worth of our yearly carbon output lol
Why don't we just simply throw every big oil exec into life in prison. That'd solve so many issues. Fuck em, they're straight evil.
From an industry standpoint everything the article says at the end as a critique is correct. We should be playing moneyball, those fans that draw in the particles would be an additional toll on the power grid.
Instead spend the money on removing the emission sources and modernizing our grid/reducing fuel emissions. After weve exhausted low hanging fruit there we'll have to throw money at offset tech.
I suppose we'll have to get the tech made eventually but there's just so much to be reworked on our grids as is.
We're past the reducing emissions stage.
We need to BOTH cut emissions, and find a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to get to a healthy planet. Not all the CO2 traps are going to be the right way to do it, but we need to research and figure out how to sustainably pull CO2 out, stop methane emissions, switch to a carbon free grid, and.... everything else.
We are not beyond the emissions reduction stage and will not be until the grid is 100% renewable or other emissions free energy powered.
Switching to clean energy is emissions reduction. Imo should be our #1 priority because we're not reducing power demand without massive societal change.
Awesome. But we need more effort to clean up our oceans and reduce the waste and plastic pumped into them by mega corporations.
That is a completely different problem
The ocean also absorbs CO2 and produces half of our oxygen. Pollution is fucking that up.
We don't save the ocean, we don't get to breathe.
They rather should've planted a bunch of trees
I agree that planting trees is generally good, but doing so can't sequester the amount of carbon released by humans since the start of the industrial revolution. We need other avenues to do that. If we returned forests back to how they were 100,000 years ago (untouched by modern humans) the new trees that would grow wouldn't be able to soak up the CO2 released. Returning the forests to that state with the current world population isn't feasible either as we need some of that land for agriculture.
I get your sentiment, but we're beyond a 'plant trees' solution.
We've been doing that too. The US has more trees now then it did a hundred years ago.
Amen, only angle I can see someone disagreeing with is trees becoming a potential bank of carbon to be fed back into the atmosphere via fuel for wildfires.
I so wish there were better ways to control forest fires.
Forest fires do contribute to CO2 emissions, but naturally occurring forest fires are part of the carbon sequestration cycle. The ash, and charcoal leftover from forest fires trap carbon and provide for nutrients for the next forest.
It's not great to have half a continent burn at once, but regular, controlled fires are a net sink for carbon.
But even if they do die, if you always make sure to have enough trees alive, it'll be a net zero.
Also, I'm wondering that no company has started investigating to bury trees into abandoned coal mines yet. Like, take one, give back one for using a few hundred thousand years later.
~~Or moss. Moss is better~~
That's not what that article says. At all.
As mentioned in the article, moss is pretty good at pulling particulates out of the air and "cleaning" it in that sense.
But trying to get CO2 out of the air isn't the same. Trees are very effective at this because they have a lot of mass and density and are largely carbon themselves. When we talk about "carbon sequestering", we're generally talking things like trees because that carbon from the air has to go somewhere and having a huge dense chunk of carbon is basically the most efficient natural method.
Moss is good at removing other particles, but trees are generally still better at carbon sequestering and CO2 removal.
Semi related: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/187327/how-plants-carbon-affects-their-response/
TL;DR - if you want to suck up a lot of CO2, you basically want a massive plant. Moss isn't one of them.
This is honestly probably more of a transition jobs program for oil workers and something designed to get a few extra votes in Congress. One of the projects is in my state (Louisiana) and the politicians all stressed how it’s creating jobs in the oil producing Southwest part of the state. And the other project is in East Texas. The companies even pinky swore that at least 10% of their workforce would be former oil workers.
I'm fine with that. If it gets jobs, gets more political support, and gets carbon out of the air... I'm all for it.
I can't get the article to open. Is this going to worthwhile carbon capturing or is it going to be like that South American sequestration plant which just opened that will take 168,000 years to remove just the carbon we generated in 2022?
