Carbon Engineering's Tech Will Suck Carbon From the Sky (ieee.org) 115
"It's not enough to slash greenhouse gas emissions," warns a new article in IEEE Spectrum (shared by schwit1).
"Experts say we need direct-air capture of atmospheric carbon." West Texas is a hydrocarbon hot spot, with thousands of wells pumping millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Permian Basin. When burned, all that oil and gas will release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
A new facility there aims to do the opposite. Rows of giant fans spread across a flat, arid field will pull carbon dioxide from the air and then pump it deep underground. When completed, the project could capture 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, doing the air-scrubbing work of some 40 million trees.
Canadian firm Carbon Engineering is designing and building this "direct-air capture" facility with 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management. Carbon Engineering will devote much of 2021 to front-end engineering and design work in Texas, with construction slated to start the following year and operations by 2024, the partners say. The project is the biggest of its kind in the world and will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
Carbon Engineering is among a handful of companies with major direct-air capture developments underway this year. Zurich-based Climeworks is expanding across Europe, while Dublin's Silicon Kingdom Holdings plans to install its first CO2-breathing "mechanical tree" in Arizona. Global Thermostat, headquartered in New York City, has three new projects in the works. All the companies say they intend to curb the high cost of capturing carbon by optimizing technology, reducing energy use, and scaling up operations.
"Experts say we need direct-air capture of atmospheric carbon." West Texas is a hydrocarbon hot spot, with thousands of wells pumping millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Permian Basin. When burned, all that oil and gas will release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
A new facility there aims to do the opposite. Rows of giant fans spread across a flat, arid field will pull carbon dioxide from the air and then pump it deep underground. When completed, the project could capture 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, doing the air-scrubbing work of some 40 million trees.
Canadian firm Carbon Engineering is designing and building this "direct-air capture" facility with 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management. Carbon Engineering will devote much of 2021 to front-end engineering and design work in Texas, with construction slated to start the following year and operations by 2024, the partners say. The project is the biggest of its kind in the world and will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop.
Carbon Engineering is among a handful of companies with major direct-air capture developments underway this year. Zurich-based Climeworks is expanding across Europe, while Dublin's Silicon Kingdom Holdings plans to install its first CO2-breathing "mechanical tree" in Arizona. Global Thermostat, headquartered in New York City, has three new projects in the works. All the companies say they intend to curb the high cost of capturing carbon by optimizing technology, reducing energy use, and scaling up operations.
Holding our breath (Score:1)
Until the sky turns blue?
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Why not do something productive with the carbon. Compress it into diamonds, carbon nanotubes, plastics, whatever.
Personally I'm interested in seeing some kind of diamond concrete.
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An obvious and cost-effective use for the captured CO2 is enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org].
Inject the CO2 into oilfields where it dissolves and displaces the oil. CO2 is denser than oil, so the oil is pushed upward, then pumped out. The CO2 is left sequestered in the ground.
Since this facility is located in the Permian Basin, the oilfields are right there. That is unlikely to be a coincidence. The location was probably selected because of the ready market for the CO2. They just didn't put it in TFA because it wou
Re:Holding our breath (Score:4, Informative)
There are fields that naturally produce oil and gas including high percentages of CO2 and experiments to pump this CO2 back have been going on for some 20 years.
One of the problems is that although CO2 by itself is not very problematic it is unavoidable that it get mixed with water thus making a strong acid.
This acid is so nasty it eats away at the stainless tubing and completions of the injection well, especially near the reservoir where the geothermal heat is exacerbating the extreme corrosive effects of the acid.
(Yes I've been involved in such projects)
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CO2 is denser than oil, so the oil is pushed upward, then pumped out..
Where did you get the idea that CO2 (a gas) is denser than oil (a liquid)?
If they are just pumping the gas down into old wells to try to get the remaining oil to migrate to other wells it might help some. Otherwise, it makes about as much sense as trying to speed up pumping water out of a swimming pool by blowing bubbles in the water.
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Re:Holding our breath (Score:4, Informative)
You might have at least looked at what he linked. That said, I don't get his CO2 density comment.
Gas injection, which uses gases such as natural gas, nitrogen, or carbon dioxide (CO2), accounts for nearly 60 percent of EOR production in the United States.
Gas injection or miscible flooding is presently the most-commonly used approach in enhanced oil recovery. Miscible flooding is a general term for injection processes that introduce miscible gases into the reservoir. A miscible displacement process maintains reservoir pressure and improves oil displacement because the interfacial tension between oil and water is reduced. This refers to removing the interface between the two interacting fluids. This allows for total displacement efficiency.[9] Gases used include CO2, natural gas or nitrogen. The fluid most commonly used for miscible displacement is carbon dioxide because it reduces the oil viscosity and is less expensive than liquefied petroleum gas.[9] Oil displacement by carbon dioxide injection relies on the phase behavior of the mixtures of that gas and the crude, which are strongly dependent on reservoir temperature, pressure and crude oil composition.
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Where did you get the idea that CO2 (a gas) is denser than oil (a liquid)?
CO2 liquefies under pressure. When it is pumped into the ground, it is not a gas. It is a supercritical fluid.
The critical point for CO2 is at about 1000 psi. A typical injection pressure for hydraulic fracturing is ten times that.
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Maybe it'd be less of the ticking time bomb that putting it underground in high pressure sounds like. Anything that can be inserted by humans can be released. Nice geo-suicidal target for the likes of North Korean bombs or hackers.
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Manufacturing with sequestered carbon is maybe less expensive than you think:
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
I haven't seen the dollars-and-cents analysis yet, but if it can make $4.00/gallon gasoline then the market will bear it, albeit relunctently. It could be used for materials synthesis as well.
Re: Holding our breath (Score:4, Insightful)
These devices are co-located with renewable energy sources - their first plant is hydro powered - so the only overhead is operational and maintenance cost.
The advantage of direct-air capture is that the facility does not need to be connected to the power grid and there is no resources that need to be shipped in or out so no energy usage. Even if the renewable source is not 24/7 that does not matter as the whole facility could spin up and down with power availability. In theory operations could even be fully automated further saving cost.
Re: Holding our breath (Score:4, Informative)
If we have such spare renewable energy why aren't we using it to offset not burning fossil fuels?
That's the fundamental problem in the economics of clean energy. For every "green hydrogen plant" currently in the works by some company through electrolysis powered by greenness what they are actually saying is "please power your house from coal a little longer".
CO2 is only one part of a problem in burning fossil fuels. Rather than using green energy to capture CO2, instead invest money in storage for green energy to make it compete with baseload and then shutdown an actual fossil fuels burner. Not only do you eliminate CO2 but you also eliminate SOx, NOx, particulates, and reduce the environment impact from mining resources in the process.
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The capacity factor for wind and solar are not terribly high. My local power mob put the factors at 33% for wind and 27% for solar [agl.com.au] (although that was 2 years ago, so they may have improved). Given how cheap it now is, it makes sense to over-provision so that a suitable amount of electrons flow even in mediocre conditions.
However, when conditions are just right, it's possible that the excess of renewable power sends the wholesale price negative [energyaction.com.au]. In this case, spare renewable is not offsetting more fossil
Re: Holding our breath (Score:4, Informative)
We already have processes that can do that, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere is simply not economically feasible (you spend more energy than you remove)
Waving your hands while you say it does not make it true.
otherwise people wouldâ(TM)ve been doing that whenever they need a tank of CO/CO2.
You literally don't comprehend what "new technology" means.
Or that the near future will contain machines that the near past did not contain.
Or that the various prices will have changed.
Somebody told you, at some time in the distant past, that this technology wasn't available, and you though they meant it would also never be available in the future.
You're pretty stupid. Just sayin.
"sequestering the CO2 and forcing up the oil" (Score:4, Informative)
Clever.
They will get their fracking funded by the government.
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Missing a punctuation (Score:2)
it should read: "Carbon Engineering's Tech Will Suck. Carbon From the Sky "
good idea, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying this technology isn't worth it. Technology is often demonstrated using small pilot plant setups. Just that, one way or another, it needs to be scalable by a factor of a thousand if it's going to be useful. While some people will say "every little bit helps" that's actually faulty logic. If your house is on fire, you don't run down to the local stream and grab a cup of water because "every little bit will help". You call the fire department, because they are the people with enough water and equipment to actually deal with the fire. Running to the river is actually a damaging distraction that will simply allow your house to burn down faster.
We need GIGATON-PER-YEAR solutions.
Re:good idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why biology is the only way to sequester really large amounts of carbon. On land, plant fast-growing woody species in fallow areas, make charcoal out of it, and then bury it in the same soil. It will then grow better crops besides taking carbon out of circulation for generations. At sea, stimulate the growth of large areas of algae over abyssal depths. When the stuff dies and sinks to the bottom, it could take gigatons of carbon with it. Make it a surface-matting species in an ocean gyre, and it could at the same time pull down substantial amounts of floating plastic.
Re:good idea, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why biology is the only way to sequester really large amounts of carbon. On land, plant fast-growing woody species in fallow areas, make charcoal out of it, and then bury it in the same soil. It will then grow better crops besides taking carbon out of circulation for generations. At sea, stimulate the growth of large areas of algae over abyssal depths. When the stuff dies and sinks to the bottom, it could take gigatons of carbon with it. Make it a surface-matting species in an ocean gyre, and it could at the same time pull down substantial amounts of floating plastic.
I wonder about the feasibility of greening the Sahara Desert. Forests do create their own climate, and if you could establish an appropriate forest on the Sahara tomorrow it might be self sustaining, but I'm not sure how to kickstart that process nor how long it would take.
Still, the Sahara is a BIG dessert, there's room for a lot of trees and while you lose some ecosystems in the process it's pretty minor compared to other regions.
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The problem is getting trees to take root in sand, which they usually don't do. There's a whole process by which plants "invade" barren wastelands and it can take a couple of hundred years before any actual trees grow.
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The problem is getting trees to take root in sand, which they usually don't do. There's a whole process by which plants "invade" barren wastelands and it can take a couple of hundred years before any actual trees grow.
It is grasses that take root in sand. Then after some mega-fauna help the grasses spread for a few decades, then maybe enough soil has accumulated for a more deeply rooted grass. Then after a few more decades you get trees. Forests take at least a century (and a huge amount of rainfall). Its not just the plants. A soil generation process has to take root as well. Plus the animals that go with those packages of plants to help them reproduce. You can't just plant trees unless there is already soil and
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Over in Jordan they're experimenting with permaculture. https://www.permaculturenews.o... [permaculturenews.org]
Are the northern African nations investing in desalination? A pipeline would perhaps be required to supplement the Sahara's meagre precipitation.
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The Sahara desert, like many other deserts, exists due to global atmospheric patterns. The dry climate with high temperatures is not a matter of lacking vegetation. If you could "green" the Sahara, it would mean there's something seriously wrong with the global climate.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
All it takes is a return to an ice age. Or fusion power to run the desalination plants.
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> I wonder about the feasibility of greening the Sahara Desert.
Roll out wind and solar, and it might happen all by itself;
https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]
=Smidge=
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Cheesecake? Apple pie? Strawberry tarts?
Or did you mean "desert"?
Name for a new dessert (Score:2)
Sahara is a good name for a new dessert.
A yellow, crumbly top crust. A dusting of green around the edges. A brown chocolate underlayer (oil). And a blue stripe down one end representing the Nile. (Or is it denial? No one knows. Enjoy!)
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Re:good idea, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
All you need is a large source of renewable energy to power the process. Solar, wind, or nuclear would do it. I read an analysis that the price can be as low as 10-30 dollars per ton, which means trillions of dollars. It's a big number, but the GDP of the US is like 20 trillion at this point, and the US is only one country. If a third of the planet agreed to write some checks, it could be done at the cost of a mild global recession.
Not gonna happen until we're driven to do it, though. Half of American citizens aren't even willing to pay enough taxes to feed starving children, let alone cough up money for something as esoteric as global warming. When we start to see entire cities destroyed by climate issues, or major farming regions converted to desert right before our eyes, that's when we'll take action. Probably not before.
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When we start to see entire cities destroyed by climate issues, or major farming regions converted to desert right before our eyes, that's when we'll take action.
Yes, and that action will likely consist of violent mobs killing any member of the reality-based community.
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If you grow crops over shallowly buried charcoal, the micro-flora wiill use the carbon and eventually it gets expelled as a gas. And the half-life of that charcoal is far shorter than a generation.
You'd need to grow a bunch of trees. Cut them down and bury them in an airtight salt mine. Then when the mine is full, you leave a standing forest that is indefinitely protected and maintained. Repeat until you put away more than the amount of carbon we drill each year. It's hard to do it. And probably impossible
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If you grow crops over shallowly buried charcoal, the micro-flora wiill use the carbon and eventually it gets expelled as a gas. And the half-life of that charcoal is far shorter than a generation.
What I have in mind is Brazilian Terra preta. It has long been known that tropical rainforest laterite soil is notoriously depleted of nutrients by jungle growth, turning to concrete as soon as the forest is cleared. Yet tracts of cleared land farmed in antiquity showed tremendous fertility, which turned out to be indigenous use of charcoal as a soil amendment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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but it's not a carbon sink if you have to keep adding carbon to it when it gets depleted.
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It comes down to the energy efficiency of carbon reduction. Biology does this almost always through RuBisCO and has an efficiency generally less than 2%, existing industrial systems do this at about 10% (and have done so for a long time now).
The Earth gets about 6 kWh per square meter in sunlight. It will require that we cover an extra 2600 square kilometers with plantlife for each gigaton of CO2 we want to remove from the atmosphere per year.
If we use solar panels and industrial conversion, we need 520 squ
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We need GIGATON-PER-YEAR solutions.
How much are you willing to invest in my as yet unproven technology? No one has in the history of the human race developed a "giga-anything" solution. We have also developed small, proven concepts, and then scaled in a controlled fashion.
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Op stated that pilot-scale work is necessary. However, there needs to be a credible scale-up case made.
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Actually, the world produces about 5 billion tons of concrete per year.
You missed my point. The first concrete ever produced was hand mixed and even if every slave in the kingdom were working on it we didn't produce 5 billion tons of concrete a year.
We built up scale. We started small. With concrete as with everything else.
Technology (Score:1)
What cost area, and how much power (Score:4, Insightful)
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For one it can operate continuously. Forests aren't endless carbon sinks. Quite the opposite. Plant a million trees and they consume carbon while they grow. They will also leave and build a decaying floor, which eventually releases carbon. After the tree has grown it's efficacy has reduced. Over its life the question is will a forest fire undo all it's good work, or will people burn it for biomass and at least get usable energy from it? In the end what is certain is that trees are in the long run carbon neu
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But planting trees is an incredibly worthwhile short term investment in many ways beyond just carbon.
Which starts by first not clearing forests like they do in Brazil or Romania. Yet, the international community just looks on helplessly and soft power as well as military power of eg. the US, Europe and Russia aren't mobilized to prevent the incredible, ongoing loss of rain forests.
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Energy ROI (Score:1)
Re: Energy ROI (Score:1)
Unless powered with nuclear or intermittently running on its own solar/wind plant it will not be carbon neutral. Iâ(TM)m guessing the construction alone of the steel and the boring of the holes will introduce more carbon than this system can ever reduce in its useable lifespan.
Thus to avoid breaking the laws of thermodynamics, it must introduce at least slightly more carbon than it reduces in the system.
To crack carbon from the oxygen in the atmosphere they have to add a lot more energy.
I have this solved already... (Score:2)
And best of all, no patents, license fees or other IP nonsense. In fact, all you need to do in order to get the benefit of my solution is to stop cutting down forests in the first place...
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Yes. The best you could do is have a sort of logging police force to shut down all the illegal logging. And pass laws to make even more logging illegal. And replant old and plant new forests. It will be a far more effcient use of funds than any carbon capture technology can ever be.
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And best of all, no patents, license fees or other IP nonsense.
At least until one of your plants gets too close to something from Monsanto.
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At least until one of your plants gets too close to something from Monsanto.
1. Monsanto no longer exists.
2. Most of Monsanto's GMO patents expired years ago.
3. Monsanto never sued anyone for unintentional pollination, so being "too close" was never an issue.
The myth of Monsanto suing farmers comes from the "documentary" David vs Monsanto [amazon.com] which made it up.
Please try to keep up with your conspiracy theories. This one was debunked a decade ago.
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He didn't say Monsanto would sue, he said cross pollination with GMO introduces IP nonsense.
Except it doesn't and it never did.
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The IP nonsense is certainly there
The IP has never applied to inadvertent cross-pollination.
Whether Monsanto, or whatever they're called now, would enforce it is a separate matter.
The patents expired years ago. So there is nothing to enforce.
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The IP has never applied to inadvertent cross-pollination.
No, it's never been enforced against inadvertent cross-pollination.
The patents expired years ago. So there is nothing to enforce.
Then the GMO is no longer "something from Monsanto". I see that Bayer bought them, so make that "something from Bayer". Either way, if some patented GMO cross-pollinates with your plants, IP nonsense clearly ensues. Your argument is nonsense.
Note: I realize there have been conspiracy theories related to Monsanto that have included paying off judges/juries, poisoning crops, introducing "Terminator" genes to crop seeds (which they actually h
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Your solution is similar to those who keep house plants for air filtration. They don’t realize that for the plants to actually do anything you would have to have your house so densely covered in them it would resemble a forest. Same applies to the earth.
And even if you managed to cover the earth’s surface with plants and then cover the oceans in algae, then no one knows what type of ecological effects this would have. There would certainly be unintended consequences, such as many large mammals g
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Because plants have a metabolism that is so many times lower than that of animals, it takes a considerable area of plants to cancel out one (person/farm animal/vehicle/aircraft/etc.)
Yet it remains the simplest, cheapest and most effe
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I call my solution... plants. .
Agreed, we must kill all vegetarians and vegans to save the planet!
Trees, They Work (Score:2)
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When trees die, the carbon they've captured is released back into the atmosphere. So once a forest has grown, it stops capturing carbon and just occupies space. If you want to keep capturing more carbon with trees, you have to keep allocating more land to forests.
Now growing more trees and forests is a good idea for many reasons, so we should do that, but we've burned a huge amount of fossil fuel, too much for trees to be the whole solution. I'm also skeptical about how permanent the storage of CO2 pumpe
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When trees die, the carbon they've captured is released back into the atmosphere.
Trees live a long time, and wood takes a long time to decay. If trees can sink carbon for a century, it gives us time to work on a more permanent solution.
I'm also skeptical about how permanent the storage of CO2 pumped underground will be.
CO2 is usually pumped into exhausted gas fields. The shale formations held the methane for millions of years, and methane is way more geologically mobile than CO2.
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It was held for millions of years, yet they found their way out within our lifetime. One of the risks with pumping into exhausted gas fields is that humans can release it with more ease as it took to release the gas in the first place. Known locations; established holes; maybe, hackable or otherwise unreliable machinery, or corrupt officials, plus a rogue state or organization.
Meaningless (Score:1, Troll)
Who the hell cares, now that the entire population of Earth is being treated like one giant open-aired prison.
Greenwashing by Occidental Petroleum (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot more efficient and effective to just plant the 40 million trees. At least that would actually reduce carbon in the atmosphere and not just enhance oil production. Don't oil companies get enough tax dodges already?
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A lot more efficient and effective to just plant the 40 million trees.
Then plant them.
Or did you want someone else to plant them at their own expense?
Why would they do that?
At least that would actually reduce carbon in the atmosphere and not just enhance oil production.
This also reduces carbon in the atmosphere.
Pumping CO2 into the oilfield means that oil that would otherwise be carbon positive is at least carbon negative. That is a net win. And unlike "planting trees," it is also an economic win.
This isn't causing more oil to be consumed. It just means less oil will be produced elsewhere to meet demand.
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A lot more efficient and effective to just plant the 40 million trees.
Then plant them.
Or did you want someone else to plant them at their own expense?
Why would they do that?
I was merely pointing out the PR bullshit. This is nothing to do with reducing emissions, just adding to their bottom line. They create a nice green veneer for the company (I note they omitted the Petroleum half of Occidental's name in the Carbon Neutral press release), they increase the lifetime of the oil field, possibly/probably reduce the cost of pumping and gain tax credits that would be better spent planting trees.
At least that would actually reduce carbon in the atmosphere and not just enhance oil production.
This also reduces carbon in the atmosphere.
Pumping CO2 into the oilfield means that oil that would otherwise be carbon positive is at least carbon negative. That is a net win. And unlike "planting trees," it is also an economic win.
This isn't causing more oil to be consumed. It just means less oil will be produced elsewhere to meet demand.
I'll concede the point of there being less carbon in the atmosphere - not carbon negativ
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This is nothing to do with reducing emissions, just adding to their bottom line.
Actually, it does both.
CO2 reductions that also create profits are the best kind because there is a big incentive to do even more.
the best approach would be to cease giving these companies incentives
That would just shift the production to the lowest cost producer, which is Saudi Arabia.
Saudia Arabia does no sequestration and is a repressive theocracy.
Why say planting trees is not economically beneficial?
Because it isn't profitable. If you think it is, then go do it. Come back and post a photo of your yacht.
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The US props up Saudi Arabia. They couldn't even support the Yemen government to retain the capital, even with the billions of dollars worth of annual military procurement.
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CO2 reductions that also create profits are the best kind
Profits coming at least partially from public money - not earned profit. Oil companies, who have so largely contributed to the ruin of the planet's climate, should not be helped in any way.
Why say planting trees is not economically beneficial?
Because it isn't profitable. If you think it is, then go do it. Come back and post a photo of your yacht.
That is your measure of success - profits and yachts? Let's leave it at that, peace, bro.
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A lot more efficient and effective to just plant the 40 million trees. At least that would actually reduce carbon in the atmosphere and not just enhance oil production.
You could instead look for a net win. You don't "enhance production" by continuing to use half empty fields. You enhance production by developing new ones. There are several net wins here:
a) oil companies will attempt to extract fields regardless. You may as well sequester carbon rather than pumping toxic chemicals into nearly empty fields.
b) people will continue to demand oil for the foreseeable future. You may as well continue to use existing wells better than develop even more newer oil fields which over
And how about that methane issue? (Score:1)
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Methane has an estimated lifespan of 7 years in the atmosphere. CO2 is measured in thousands.
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During which time its effect on global warning is approximately 30 times that of CO2, then it is converted into CO2.
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/mo... [fau.edu]
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I didn't realize that. I wasn't worried about Methane because it seemed static - 7 years ( according to other responder closer to a few decades) and then it was gone . Well, that seems to me like a rotating buffer of 7 years of methane. If it turns into CO2 at the end of that...
Thanks for showing me something new!
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Methane has an estimated lifespan of 7 years in the atmosphere. CO2 is measured in thousands.
20 years for Methane and 200 for CO2. Those are both half-lives. Where are you getting those crazy numbers? Natural Gas Frackers of America or something?
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I couldn't recall if I tried where I got the number from. As the other responder pointed out the main issue with Methane is it devolves into CO2. Otherwise, the total methane we're outputting now hasn't gone up since 2000, so we'd just be at replacement levels.
If you must sequester carbon (Score:2)
If you must sequester carbon, I can think of no quicker, more scalable way than cyanobacteria bioreactors. They can work with minimal water loss and nutrient runoff, and once they have fixed carbon and nitrogen in their biomass, you can use them in soil amendments, which in turn would ease a lot of our dependency on petroleum-based fertilizer.
A healthy spirulina culture under the right conditions can double its mass in days. Trees are great, but for the application this article is talking about, algae bea
fecking idiots (Score:2)
Fecking idiots
Why not just plant 40 million trees ?
and then a few billion more trees,
because that exercise was so successful
Aren't you the guys... (Score:3)
...selling that special fodder that makes the carbon stay in the cows so the meat grills itself?
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Bovine emissions reduction involves feeding cows a dietary supplement made from red algae.
I wonder if it works on humans too. The species of algae is related to Nori, so perhaps one can lower one's emissions by eating sushi rolls and saving a cow!
Fix it properly. (Score:3)
I expect to be voted down for this but screw it, here goes.
International, planet wide policies, all humans, all countries.
1, 1 child policy, until our numbers do not exceed 500 milllion
2, ALL power plants required (if any, see first policy) to be sustainable (wind / solar / water etc)
2a, Slowly replace all existing power plants and vehicles with sustainable alternatives, generally with heavy taxes or subsidies when applicable.
3, "A tree, per person, per week, 50 years" (Note, this doesn't mean each person has to do this, it just needs to be done, by the numbers, be it by the govt of that nation or even some nations doing it on behalf of others where tress arent' suitable, either way, we need the incredible carbon sink, that is trees and an immense amount of them)
My wildly uneducated belief is those few things, will /probably/ significantly help with the problem. I would still expect severe extinctions for many trees and animals but it may not result in the earth 'dying' or at least, becoming entirely un-inhabitable by humans.
In perhaps 2 or 300 years (?) the planet might be kinda normal again, maybe?
However, the reality is, we're proper, proper stuffed.
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My, what a...flawed...understanding you have of economics.
Yes, economics. It's central to your entire plan, although you don't mention it once. Go look at what happens to societies when their death rate outstrips their birth rate. That, alone, is enough to condemn your plan. Plus you don't even mention nuclear?
Your plan would accomplish the opposite of what you hope; even if you could implement any of it, there'd be such a monumental pushback that we'd end up worse than we started.
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I didn't mention economics, I am talking about humanity surviving. I didn't say it would be simple.
Economics is entirely meaningless if we're to survive.
To bring up economics, with the issues we're facing, is frankly laughable.
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You missed the GP's point. Economics is fundamentally essential if we as a species are to survive. Pretending you can ignore it is your problem.
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This is why your plan is unfeasible.
Economics is central to everything groups of humans do. Stop thinking of it in terms of money, and start thinking of it in terms of how we mediate our interactions with each other. Money is an emergent property of that, yes, but it's not the cause.
If we're to "survive" ( by which I take to mean society and not the species as the species is more than capable of surviving anything related to global warming ), then it'll have to be done in a way that's economically sound.
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In perhaps 2 or 300 years (?) the planet might be kinda normal again, maybe? However, the reality is, we're proper, proper stuffed.
Or you could just build a few nuclear power plants and use them to generate hydrocarbon fuels. I'll believe you actually care about the environment when histrionic posts like yours explain why we can't do nuclear (and you actually know what you are talking about). The tech has been solved for some time now, its about the regulation and lawsuits ATM.
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Where did I say I was anti-nuclear? I missed that part.
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I see, you're one of the delusional people that thinks we can carry on the we were were with a few simple changes.
My intention is to NOT make people suffer, long term, yours seemlingly is to have humanity die out completely.
We could have a better quality of life, for every single human on the planet, if there was simply, 1/10'th the humans here and some decent policy.
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Already unworkable. The entire world, which is its 100% of its trading partners, is currently not preventing Brazil from the horrendous act of getting out of the business of having rain forests. They clear football field size forest plots every second (or something) while the Earth's politicians go to conferences to express their disappointment, if that, while all countries continue to import their banana and beef like nothing is happening.
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Step 1: Make it someone else's problem.
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Headline is four words too long (Score:2)
It will suck. That I agree with.
No, no, no, that's not what we wanted! (Score:2)
We want to kill off use of hydrocarbons in every facet of society! How the hell are we supposed to do that if you remove CO2 from the atmosphere?!
Stupid, selfish and short sighted (Score:2)
While I am happy with all attempts to save the planet do some attempts strike me as plain crude and stupid. It's those kind of ideas that got us into trouble in the first place. Instead of just sucking carbon out of the air and pumping it under ground should we try to revitalise lost soil. We have plenty of deserts and deforested a lot of land that it only makes sense to start there. We should try to make the planet greener. It would not only capture carbon, but save many species in the process and not only
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Why not plant trees? (Score:2)
If it costs hundreds of millions, and does the equivalent of 40 million trees, why not just plant 40 million trees? That would cost less, look prettier, and do the same thing.
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Came her to say the above. Complicated, expensive, energy intensive, unproven industrial plan? Or just plant and retain more trees for one time cost, numerous beneficial side effects. Off of the top of my head I would think these would be ok ideas:
1.) Stop and start reversing Amazon deforestation by purchasing 99 year leases of broad swaths of at -risk Amazon forest. Either owned by US or UN if that is more palatable. For some small amount if US dollars (including requisite pay-off to Bolsonaro ) we
Greenwash / Climate BandAid (Score:2)
When theres too much water in the bath you turn off the tap, not keep bailing out and emptying buckets from the overflow.
Like wise with the CO2 problem the first thing we need to do is turn off the emissions sources.
The fact that this is a joint venture with a petroleum company tells you everything you need to know
about the motives behind this project. The main one being a desire to continue with crude oil extraction.
The truth is that we have now passed the point of no return, CO2 emissions are still increa
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Like wise with the CO2 problem the first thing we need to do is turn off the emissions sources.
I totally agree with you. But it's not enough. We've passed the point where just stopping emissions will solve the problems. Every credible plan for avoiding 2C warming (and they're getting less credible all the time) assumes we'll go carbon negative around 2050 and start pulling lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year. Not just a little bit. Really a lot. To do it, we'll need every tool possible. Reforestation can help, but on its own it won't be enough. A lot of the land that used to be fore
What do you have against... (Score:2)
...green plants??