Major US Oil Company Now Plans World's Largest Carbon Capture Project (reuters.com) 76
If you ranked all U.S. companies by annual revenue, Occidental Petroleum comes in at #183.
But Wednesday this massive "hydrocarbon exploration" company "outlined plans to advance its clean energy transition business," reports Reuters, "including spending between $800 million and $1 billion on a facility to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air." The proposed facility, the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) project, is set to begin construction in the second half of this year in the Permian basin, the largest U.S. oilfield, with a start in 2024. The U.S. oil and gas producer is aiming to build a profitable business from providing services and technologies that pull CO2 out of the air and burying it underground to advance government and business climate mitigation goals. This year's investments in the low carbon business will total $275 million, and the company plans to develop over time three carbon sequestration hubs that will be online by 2025 and another 69 smaller DAC facilities by 2035, it told investors....
Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year — 100 times bigger than all 19 DAC plants currently operating worldwide combined, according to the International Energy Agency.
"There's just not going to be enough other alternatives for CO2 offsets," said Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub. "So this is a sure opportunity." Executives did not say when they expect the business to turn a profit. DAC is currently not commercial on a large scale. "We expect that to play out over the next five to 10 years as we develop plants," Richard Jackson, Occidental's head of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management operations, told Reuters by phone. "The commerciality of those plants will be determined by mainly the market".
Last month Occidental announced that Airbus had already pre-purchased "400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits from [Occidental's] planned first Direct Air Capture facility," specifically, "the capture and permanent sequestration of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for four years — with an option to secure more volume in the future."
Occidental called the deal "indicative of the availability of a feasible, affordable, and scalable decarbonization solution for aviation and other hard-to-abate industries."
But Wednesday this massive "hydrocarbon exploration" company "outlined plans to advance its clean energy transition business," reports Reuters, "including spending between $800 million and $1 billion on a facility to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air." The proposed facility, the world's largest direct air capture (DAC) project, is set to begin construction in the second half of this year in the Permian basin, the largest U.S. oilfield, with a start in 2024. The U.S. oil and gas producer is aiming to build a profitable business from providing services and technologies that pull CO2 out of the air and burying it underground to advance government and business climate mitigation goals. This year's investments in the low carbon business will total $275 million, and the company plans to develop over time three carbon sequestration hubs that will be online by 2025 and another 69 smaller DAC facilities by 2035, it told investors....
Occidental's first DAC facility has a goal of removing 1 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year — 100 times bigger than all 19 DAC plants currently operating worldwide combined, according to the International Energy Agency.
"There's just not going to be enough other alternatives for CO2 offsets," said Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub. "So this is a sure opportunity." Executives did not say when they expect the business to turn a profit. DAC is currently not commercial on a large scale. "We expect that to play out over the next five to 10 years as we develop plants," Richard Jackson, Occidental's head of U.S. onshore resources and carbon management operations, told Reuters by phone. "The commerciality of those plants will be determined by mainly the market".
Last month Occidental announced that Airbus had already pre-purchased "400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits from [Occidental's] planned first Direct Air Capture facility," specifically, "the capture and permanent sequestration of 100,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year for four years — with an option to secure more volume in the future."
Occidental called the deal "indicative of the availability of a feasible, affordable, and scalable decarbonization solution for aviation and other hard-to-abate industries."
And The Scam Continues (Score:5, Insightful)
We've understood thermodynamics since the 19th century, and yet somehow we keep falling for perpetual motion machine scams. Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere requires enormous amounts of energy, and either that means using emitting fuel sources or alternative energy sources. If it's the former, then it's an automatic fail, if it's the latter, and you're producing enough to actually power a carbon capture plant, then why would you burn fossil fuels at all?
Re:And The Scam Continues (Score:5, Insightful)
You misunderstand. Occidental is not pulling CO2 out of the air to please the greenies.
They are extracting CO2 from the air, compressing it into a supercritical fluid, and pumping it "downhole" into fracking wells.
Super-critical liquid CO2 is 1.5 times the density of water-based fracking fluid, needs no expensive additional solvents, and is very effective at freeing hydrocarbons from shale and displacing it upward to be pumped to the surface.
Enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org]
Selling the carbon credits to gullible European taxpayers is just an extra benefit.
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"Net Zero" is bullshit.
"Carbon Capture" is too little, too late.
Real, meaningful reduction in emissions is what we need.
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Real, meaningful reduction in atmospheric CO2 is what Occidental is achieving. You shouldn't oppose it just because of the insufficient purity of their motives.
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But, Is it meaningful? that detail is missing, how many tens of millions of tons of fossil fuels will be extracted with this 1 million tons of CO2? 1 million tons might sound a lot but we emit 34,000 million tons of CO2 each year.
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really.
what are people going to do about it.
solar.
wind.
batteries.
it is a watch that works.
and oil would be wise to embrace the new free energy sources
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Solar, wind, and batteries are bullshit measures to solve the world's energy needs. I'll get concerned about global warming when the bullshit ends and people start looking at the real numbers. What are the real numbers? Here's an article from a few years ago that sums up some of the numbers quite succinctly: https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
Here's our three, and only three choices:
- Continued use of fossil fuels.
- Nuclear fission power.
- Energy scarcity.
This is where morons will claim that there is a fou
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You missed one, solar power satellites.
One of the more useful metrics is how fast an energy source repays the energy used to create it. Currently solar is about a year in favorable places. Wind comes in in good places at around 6 months.
Solar power satellites (if they are ever built) require a lot of energy to lift them into space. But it turns out that the energy repayment is between 2 and 3 months.
There are other solutions, but the technology is not advance enough for them yet.
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You missed one, solar power satellites.
No, I didn't miss that. That is because this is one of those mythical fourth options that we can't use today because it doesn't exist yet. You even admit it doesn't exist yet.
Solar power satellites (if they are ever built) require a lot of energy to lift them into space. But it turns out that the energy repayment is between 2 and 3 months.
I'd like to know where you get those bullshit numbers because I have heard prominent engineers like Kirk Sorensen and Elon Musk explain that they are a money and energy losing idea. There is no getting the energy back on this energy investment.
One of the more useful metrics is how fast an energy source repays the energy used to create it. Currently solar is about a year in favorable places. Wind comes in in good places at around 6 months.
That's nice. Nuclear power pays back it's energy debt in days, maybe months.
https://en.wi [wikipedia.org]
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skippy.
take a chill pill.
the day is coming when only the rich will be to afford gasoline
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You have to start somewhere.
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Start by guaranteeing loans for grid-scale storage, ending fossil fuel subsidies, subsidising home insulation and solar etc etc.
Nothing stopping fossil fuel companies becoming competitors in the renewables sector.
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So I wonder how much carbon they'll be pumping out of the ground per unit of carbon captured? Hope the answer is something hilarious.
Re:And The Scam Continues (Score:5, Interesting)
It's complicated. These are not virgin wells. They are wells that are already depleted of the "easy" oil. Then EOR is being used to get another 20% or so.
CO2 takes up a lot more space than heptane or octane, so you can't displace carbon one-for-one. But since the wells are already mostly depleted, there is plenty of space to shove CO2 in.
The world still relies on oil, which will continue to be true for decades. Since we need oil anyway, it makes sense to produce domestically and do it as carbon-neutrally as possible. So this is a net good thing. That European taxpayers are paying for it makes it even better.
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Crude is very variable in its carbon content, but turns out a kg of number six bunker oil, at nearly a kg per liter (0.98 kg actually) makes 3.1 kg of carbon dioxide. Meanwhile a liter of liquid CO2 masses 1.1 kg. So roughly speaking we're pumping in 1.1 of CO2 to perhaps make 3.1 kg of CO2 upon burning the fuel.
Yes, it's hilarious. There is green, and there is greentard. This is greentardation.
Re:And The Scam Continues (Score:4, Interesting)
You assume that every liter of fluid going downhole means a liter of oil coming up.
That is wildly incorrect.
For standard fracking fluid, about 100 liters go downhole for every liter of oil produced.
CO2 is more effective than water-based solvents, so it will do somewhat better, but there is no way it is one-to-one.
If it was one-to-one or even ten-to-one, every fracker in the world would be doing this.
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Enhanced recovery isn't fracking though, has some amount of oil coming up for fluid pushed in, not the 100 to 1
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So I wonder how much carbon they'll be pumping out of the ground per unit of carbon captured? Hope the answer is something hilarious.
It's completely irrelevant. The carbon being pulled out of the ground is not being pulled out to make space for what is being put in, it's being pulled out because it's a product that an end user demands.
Even if we pull 10000 units of carbon out and only put 1 unit back, that is still 1 unit less carbon that well would otherwise contribute, and if they didn't pour supercritical CO2 in there then it would be some other concoction of chemicals the industry already uses for end of life wells.
The fallacy here i
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Wrong and utterly ignorant, devoid of basic mathematical understanding.
The amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere is negligible and doesn't matter at all, then it's used to bring up many times that amount of carbon. It's expensive stupidity.
Plenty of sensible alternatives exist to this project, instead of capturing carbon in a stupid cycle of pumping out many times that amount of carbon, the money could be spent on clean energy that would be used instead of carbon.
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Oh... there are other things they might be looking at too:
https://cleantechnica.com/2022... [cleantechnica.com]
They are now "mining" CO2 and doing it quietly so that folks don't catch on too soon
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In fairness there aren't a lot of options that have the necessary energy density for long-range flight or cargo shipping. Batteries have been plummeting in price, but their energy density has only been improving slowly - and most of the technologies on the horizon are focused on improving cost and reliability for grid-scale systems.
We could pivot away from those technologies entirely - but wind & solar cargo ships are likely to mean slow and expensive international shipping.
And lighter-than air vehicle
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In fairness there aren't a lot of options that have the necessary energy density for long-range flight or cargo shipping.
For ships thy exist. Just replace the ballast with batteries.
Other options are hydrogen and fuel cells and/or LNG.
but wind & solar cargo ships are likely to mean slow and expensive international shipping.
But not necessarily much. Except for exotic fruits, it does not really matter if a ship from Amsterdam to New York needs 6 days or 11 days. Sure: it is less effective, the shipping c
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Ballast must be removable depending on the ship's load - that's the entire point of having it. The tanks are empty when the ship is fully loaded. And you don't want to be removing most of your batteries when you have a particularly heavy load.
Hydrogen or LNG might be options, but they're *much* more expensive than the bunker oil ships usually burn. Ammonia is another promising option that's a lot easier to handle, though an ammonia spill might be even worse than oil.
I'm also very leery of natural gas. Me
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Ballast must be removable depending on the ship's load - that's the entire point of having it.
Every ship has non moveable ballast in form of either lead or concrete.
But. An LA to London flight is likely to take many days, maybe weeks by airship,
Perhaps one week, depending how high it flies. If it can catch a jet stream: less than two days.
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>Every ship has non moveable ballast
Do they? Weighted keels, etc. are certainly common in personal vessels - but I'm not seeing it in any of the cargo ship cutaways I can find. I think they may just rely on a minimum weight of cargo.
>depending how high it flies
And how fast it flies - pushing a giant balloon through the air consumes a lot of energy, and the immense weight of batteries is a much bigger problem for an airship - you're not carrying a weeks worth of power, or even a days, at high thrust.
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Sounds like even burning fossil fuels, an Atlantic crossing typically took 5-10 days back when airships were last popular.
Yes, but they where flying very low.
That is why I mentioned Jet Streams, they are at high altitude, but around 400mph fast. Unfortunately they only go from west to east AFAIK.
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Yeah, there's a lovely "circular" surface wind current across the Atlantic that sailing ships used, but a quick search suggests it averages closer to 20mph.
I think 400mph might be overstating it for jet streams though - a lovely animation of jet streams on Wikipedia, saying the fastest polar streams can can reach speeds greater than 110mph - but judging by the animation most are much slower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also, the direction is far less east-to-west than it used to be, and continues to ge
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A jet stream is a current in the hight of about 12km (aka 36,000 feet), circling the northern and the southern polar regions with about 300mph - 400mph.
They are often that fast, and have nothing to do with ordinary polar streams like the problematic winter two years ago with the "arctic vortex" coming south.
At best, the air pressure at 9km is only about 30% sea level - which means an airship will lose 70% of its lift force. Nope, it gains lift force. As the "lighter than air" inside of the ship is expanding
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So instead of actually reducing emissions, which is what we really need, Airbus can pump out ...
How do you propose that Airbus reduce emissions?
Do you believe a trans-Pacific flight can run on batteries?
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How do you propose that Airbus reduce emissions?
Synthesized net carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels. Draw up water from the sea. Pull out the dissolved CO2. Extract hydrogen from the water and carbon from the CO2. Combine carbon and hydrogen with a century old chemical process, powered by nuclear fission. Out comes the highest quality jet fuel known on this planet.
The US Navy developed this process something like a decade ago and has been since begging Congress for funds to turn this into a practical solution to produce jet fuel from the nuclear power
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"Synthesized net carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels."
I have run the numbers on this. Turns out getting CO2 out of seawater is substantially more expensive than direct air capture, though in any case, the CO2 cost is small compared to the hydrogen. In places where PV is inexpensive (1.35 cents per kWh), the hydrogen to make a bbl of synthetic fuel is around $40.
The capital cost of an F/T plant (from the one in Qatar) is around $8/bbl. Currently, the killer is the capital cost of the electrolytic cells that
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I have run the numbers on this. Turns out getting CO2 out of seawater is substantially more expensive than direct air capture...
I'm going to tend to believe the US Navy on this that it is less expensive to get CO2 out of seawater than to extract it from the air. The US Navy has been working on processes to extract CO2 from air for a long time to keep their submarine crews from getting poisoned. If direct air capture was easier then they'd not only use that for fuel synthesis but also for keeping submarine crews safe and healthy.
I'm thinking that the US Navy not only has more experience with this but also a lot of technology they a
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The considerably smaller part of business travel, and the vacation part of travel will be much more expensive after losing the bullshit part of business travel, and that too is
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if it's the latter, and you're producing enough to actually power a carbon capture plant, then why would you burn fossil fuels at all?
Simple answer: Direct capture can be done on demand with spare capacity. Powering your home cannot. You can decide when to turn off the DCC plant, yet you'll be hung drawn and quartered if you turn off the power to a few suburbs.
Just because you haven't thought through all aspects of something doesn't make it a scam.
chemistry (Score:2)
The amount of energy in compressed CO2 is still less than the hydrocarbons that were burned to make it.
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CO2 is produced by exposing lye (sodium hydroxide) to air to form Na2CO3 (sodium carbonate). The Na2CO3 is then reacted with lime (CaO) to form CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) in an exothermic reaction that requires no energy.
CaCO3 is far less soluble in water than Na2CO3, so it precipitates and can be dried and powdered.
The next step is to heat the CaCO3 to about 950C to release the CO2 and convert the calcium back into lime. This is the major energy-consuming step but uses cheap heat rather than expensive ele
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Lye is produced on an industrial scale with electrolysis on sodium chloride. It takes energy to make the lye, more energy than you get from sodium carbonate.
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There are certain applications where the energy density of fuels are critical. The mention of Airbus in the summary might have tipped you off. There's no possibility of building a battery powered airliner in the near future, and very little possibility of building one that doesn't run on carbon emitting fuel.
Carbon sequestration is a decent way of allowing such applications to be carbon neutral, particularly if it uses excess energy provided by renewables at peak times.
The fact that carbon sequestration has
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Two things can be true.
In this case, one company is emitting CO2, while another collects and sequesters CO2. They are even doing these two things in different locations. Amazing!
As they have yet to actually do the CO2 collection and sequestration they are selling, it may turn out to be a scam... but the technology is real.
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And what has your rant actually to do with Thermodynamics as in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ??
Nothing obviously.
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Greenwashing? (Score:5, Informative)
They going to remove 0.002% of today's CO2 emissions in the year 2035?
Call me a curmudgeon if you like but that's nothing to get excited over.
In perspective: We could stop cutting down trees for 1.8 days and get that reduction right now.
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We need those trees for high end retail bags now that plastic is banned.
You seriously don't expect Louis Vuitton shoppers to actually use Louis bags do you.
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In perspective: We could stop cutting down trees for 1.8 days and get that reduction right now.
Do it. No really, if you think that's so easy do that right now. I never understand the comments like yours which basically say: "If a single project can't solve the world's problems it should not exist".
It's frankly a stupid take and would literally have resulted in the humans remaining in the dark ages if you applied it to all other developments.
Speaking of Greenwashing, since you by your own admission say it removes some emissions either you're lying or don't know the meaning of the term.
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I called it "Greenwashing" because:
a) It's being done by an oil company and widely publicised
b) It's a small plan, to be carried out a long way in the future, ie. they can do (a) for many years.
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Neither of which actually fit the definition of greenwashing. But thanks for clarifying my last point.
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Greenwashing: "a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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We could stop cutting down trees for 1.8 days and get that reduction right now.
Some of those trees get ground up into sawdust, pressed into pellets, shipped across the ocean to be burnt in former lignite coal power plants in Europe as a sustainable, carbon neutral energy source.
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Some of those trees get ground up into sawdust, pressed into pellets, shipped across the ocean to be burnt in former lignite coal power plants in Europe as a sustainable, carbon neutral energy source.
That is not a carbon neutral cycle. The only part that is carbon neutral is the release of the carbon sequestered by the tree during it's growth -and then it is still a question of timeframe: if it is released faster than it is sequestered you still have an increase in atmospheric carbon. All of the effort involved in harvesting, processing and transporting is additional carbon release.
You have provided us an excellent example of greenwashing.
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shipped across the ocean to be burnt in former lignite coal power plants in Europe as a sustainable, carbon neutral energy source.
Extremely unlikely. Would not make any sense.
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Since when has making sense had anything to do with green energy Biomass [npr.org] projects? Doesn't make much since from a Social Justice [cnn.com] point of view either.
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The article is a ly. Or your previous comment is huge misunderstanding about what Europe is doing with wood:
It is used to heat houses. It is not used in refurbished coal plants: because that makes no sense Or do you really think it is cheaper in terms of money to import chopped down wood from Canada than coal from Australia?
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If it's a lie or misunderstanding, then providing references should be trivial.
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No, it is not trivial. There are no links to things that did not happen.
So: how to find a link?
If you think a lignite plant is burning wood chips from Alaska or Canada: find it. THAT should be trivial.
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Good ol'Buffett and Dems (Score:1)
Warren Buffett makes a killing backing Goldman Sachs under Obama.
Now he'll make a killing on Occidental under Biden.
All government subsidized handouts.
"Why can't everyone invest like Buffett". Clown world.
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Such a nice AD (Score:2)
On the exponential highway to Hell! (Score:2)
CS fail (Score:2)
The existing carbon sequestration schemes already in operation in Western Australia are an abject failure at enormous cost to the tax payer thanks to a brainless government giving enormous subsidies.
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The existing carbon sequestration schemes already in operation in Western Australia are an abject failure at enormous cost to the tax payer thanks to a brainless government giving enormous subsidies.
You should have seen the first steam engine. It failed miserably, leaked all over the place and didn't produce any power. Just as well no one every tried anything again and we just realised the horse is as good as it gets for the human race.
Now here's some insider knowledge from someone who supports the process industry: companies take note of other company's failures and try and work around them. The first company, be it an oil and gas company, or a group of hippies with an engineering degree, to successfu
Carbon Takeback Obligations (Score:2)
We need Carbon Takeback Obligations.
Of course, what Occidental is doing is laughable given the scale of the problems they are causing.
I wouldn't blame them though, because the decision is a political one.
https://carbontakeback.org/ [carbontakeback.org]
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Of course, what Occidental is doing is laughable given the scale of the problems they are causing.
What problems are they causing? They dig oil out of the ground? The fact their customers demand oil and burn it has nothing to do with Occidental and if they shut down their company today there would be zero change in CO2 emissions as a result, customers will continue to demand oil and will get it from elsewhere.
Do you really think the world is worse off because they are trying to sequester CO2? Do you think the alternative is do nothing? No, the alternative is that instead of pumping CO2 into the ground th
Wood farming (Score:1)
Instead of paying money to directly seque
What is the 'half-life' of sequestration? (Score:2)
Fact: the carbon isn't taken out of the eco-system. It is taken out of part of the eco-system and stuck in another part.
Fact: diamonds are efficiently sequestered carbon. Carbon in concrete is not because concrete degrades.
Fact: the permafrost 'sequestered' CO2 and methane for a long time but with a little temperature ...
What it looks like: eventually all that sequestered carbon will return to the part of the eco-system it was extracted from. So how long will that take?
Conclusion: sequestering carbo
Major US Oil Company Now Plans World's Largest Car (Score:1)