US Energy Dept Pledges $100M to Buy Products Derived from Converted Carbon Emissions (energy.gov) 27
This week America's Department of Energy announced $100 million to support states, local governments, and public utilities "in purchasing products derived from converted carbon emissions."
The hope is to jumpstart the creation of a market for "environmentally sustainable alternatives in fuels, chemicals, and building products sourced from captured emissions from industrial and power generation facilities." U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says it will "help transform harmful pollutants into beneficial products." "State and local grants, made possible through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help demonstrate the economic viability of innovative technologies, resulting in huge net reductions in lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, while bringing new, good-paying jobs and cleaner air to communities nationwide." States, local governments, and public utilities purchase large quantities of products, therefore providing an incentive to purchase products made from carbon emissions is an important method to drive emissions reductions...
[T]he Carbon Utilization Procurement Grants program will help offset 50% of the costs to states, local governments, and public utilities or agencies to procure and use products developed through the conversion of captured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions. The commercial or industrial products to be procured and used under these grants must demonstrate a significant net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to incumbent products via a life cycle analysis...
Projects selected under this opportunity will be required to develop and implement strategies to ensure strong community and worker benefits, and report on such activities and outcomes.
The hope is to jumpstart the creation of a market for "environmentally sustainable alternatives in fuels, chemicals, and building products sourced from captured emissions from industrial and power generation facilities." U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says it will "help transform harmful pollutants into beneficial products." "State and local grants, made possible through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help demonstrate the economic viability of innovative technologies, resulting in huge net reductions in lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, while bringing new, good-paying jobs and cleaner air to communities nationwide." States, local governments, and public utilities purchase large quantities of products, therefore providing an incentive to purchase products made from carbon emissions is an important method to drive emissions reductions...
[T]he Carbon Utilization Procurement Grants program will help offset 50% of the costs to states, local governments, and public utilities or agencies to procure and use products developed through the conversion of captured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide emissions. The commercial or industrial products to be procured and used under these grants must demonstrate a significant net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to incumbent products via a life cycle analysis...
Projects selected under this opportunity will be required to develop and implement strategies to ensure strong community and worker benefits, and report on such activities and outcomes.
So public servants have been buy more stock! (Score:2)
insanity (Score:1, Troll)
Complete waste of money. Energy dept needs to be funding sources of energy, especially research, not pointless feelgood nonsense.
Re:insanity (Score:5, Informative)
DOE budget is $161B so this is 0.06% and pales in comparison to the money they do spend on energy generation. This absolutely is research money, imo it's actually a smart way to do it; here's a pot of money, people come and get it.
This is exactly the kindof of long shot, long term funding into research that government can do really well as it doesn't have to concern itself with quarterly returns.
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There's no need to "jumpstart" a market anyway. Either a market exists or it doesn't. Either you're making a product people want or you're not. If it's a good product then you won't have trouble finding investors to get you started and you won't have trouble finding buyers.
Total waste of tax dollars.
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especially research, not pointless feelgood nonsense.
Wait, so you're saying the energy department should invest in R&D, but only R&D in proven and ready confirmed technologies that need no more R&D? You sound like a government employee of the month.
Hint: They are investing in R&D. It's the investment that pays for science that determines if something works or is just feelgood nonsense, not some random idiot on Slashdot.
Re:insanity (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the single best way to fund this.
What we want is carbon capture. The Department of Energy is going to buy products made with captured carbon, based on the weight of the carbon. There is literally no better way to do this. This is the perfect, most market-friendly, most-textbook-economics way to accomplish that.
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>> This is the perfect
Nope. It is not.
It does not consider all the externalities of said carbon capture.
And don't forget all the released CO2 itself is a giant externality that is slowly killing us.
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I was already wondering how to make it sustainable (Score:2)
I mean, we're talking about something that can't be profitable. Hell, it can't even sequester more CO2 than it would produce if ran on fossil fuel. So how is it supposed to be sustainable?
By injecting tax money of course. Why didn't I think of that?
Lots of concrete (Score:3, Interesting)
And... just like that "negative carbon" concrete is announced (this year?):
https://carbicrete.com/ [carbicrete.com]
I would make a joke, but this seems real. Since the early Roman days, concrete has been used everywhere, and it has been leaking CO2. It is even more than our personal vehicles combined.
So, why not invest in this (seemingly real) technology with that money? If it turns out to be stable, it will save much more than trying to fix our tailgates, or banning gas stoves in San Francisco.
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Probably because they are a Canadian company and the Canadian goverment did seed them with at least $3M in grant money about 3 years ago:
https://carbicrete.com/funding... [carbicrete.com]
If it's now a real scalable process, absolutely, get some more funding their way.
We can do all of those thing at once, no reason to pick any over the other, although to be fair the gas stoves is not as much about emissions as much as the growing body of evidence of negative health effects.
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So, why not invest in this (seemingly real) technology with that money?
Since when does a government invest in products or technologies owned by companies based in other countries?
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I would make a joke, but this seems real. Since the early Roman days, concrete has been used everywhere, and it has been leaking CO2. It is even more than our personal vehicles combined.
Okay, there's a lot wrong with this.
First, curing concrete actually absorbs CO2. I remember this because of a blurb about the difficulties with the concrete in Biosphere 2 [wikipedia.org] absorbing the CO2 for the sealed environment living experiment(basically a vivarium) where they tried to live in a completely sealed air tight system for 2 years. They had lots of difficulties.
Where concrete emits lots of CO2 is actually just a spike - during the production of the cement. That emits a lot of CO2. How much CO2 is then
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The concrete was the culprit why the Biosphere II experiment failed. And that is also a lesson for the carbon storage believers. Because the CO2 was stored in the concrete and the plants made oxygen out - now much less - CO2, the problem was that the Oxygen levels got lower and lower.
Carbon storage will help exactly nothing if you don't address the creation-and-destruction equilibrium. But in reality every carbon storage plant is planned because we don't want to stop polluting our own planet.
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Early Roman concrete did not use portland cement, so I'm not sure that it had the same amount of carbon dioxide output as modern portland cement concrete. And, technically, it is the making of the portland cement that spews out carbon dioxide in such great amounts. As the concrete ages, rather than leaking CO2, it actually absorbs CO2, eventually sequestering up to 50% of the CO2 generated in the making of the ceme
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LOL. Do you like pissing away money at frivolous lawsuits?
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Uh, if he has MS, and lower temperatures prevent flareups, that's a medical reason to not consider it frivolous at all.
He'd even have the evidence needed to win, so in the end it'd cost him nothing.
Still, I get the idea that his employer is smart enough to NOT set the temperature that high, so the lawsuit isn't necessary.
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Uh, if he has MS, and lower temperatures prevent flareups, that's a medical reason to not consider it frivolous at all.
He'd even have the evidence needed to win, so in the end it'd cost him nothing.
Still, I get the idea that his employer is smart enough to NOT set the temperature that high, so the lawsuit isn't necessary.
False. Simply having a flareup does not mean he would win. The standard here is a reasonableness test, and 78degrees is not unreasonable. If that were the case everyone could sue every employer who doesn't have an AC unit installed. It's stupid and the lawsuit is frivolous, and even if you find a really dumb judge who swings the case your way you'll get slapped down on appeal.
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Actually, for the ADA, the reasonableness test is the OPPOSITE of what you say. It looks at whether or not the accommodation would be reasonable or not. Going from, say, 78 to 75, would most likely be considered "reasonable". Not that "78" is a reasonable temperature for normal people, rather than those that suffer from MS or other conditions that react badly to higher temperatures.
As for not having AC installed at all - I'd have two questions:
1. How many places of employment these days don't have AC in
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I'm sorry, can you point me to the law that enforces those thermostat settings? Or an actual enforced "rule"?
Of course you can't because it doesn't exist. This is literally just a suggestion from "No-Cost tips" that Energy Star published.
https://doee.dc.gov/service/en... [dc.gov]
How do you spell... (Score:2)
Is this the return of the true Cinder Block? (Score:2)
Human Feces is about 40–50% Carbon (Score:2)
So is this article. Like I give a hit