[tiffanyg]

Ok, I was all ready to attack this as simply another dodge in the unceasing dodges every industry (& corporation, especially) has ever used to "externalize 'costs'".* But, this involves funding development and use of an actual technology to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Not familiar w/ the company or details in that space at the moment, but I am aware of the basic principles** apparently being used here. So, this seems somewhat more than the usual lip service, which is good to see.

* Along the lines of wonderous marketing phrases like "responsible corporate citizens" (or "stewardship") ... to replace actual concern for your community, one of the "efficiencies" brought to us by 'professionalizing' business management in the form of "MBAs" / burying real lives and consequences in Microsoft(R) Excel(TM) "spreadsheets"

** Punintentional ... bit oblique, but, some might enjoy

[candiddevmike]

In 2021, the US emitted more than 5 billion tons of CO2 [1]. I don't see how technology like this could ever scale to capture even a tiny fraction of that. A ton of dirt is roughly 20 cubic feet (just for perspective/I don't know what these things output), and we emit more than 13 million of those every day. The kind of scale here is insane, and that's even assuming the technology can be truly carbon negative from cradle to grave. And this is just for the US...

It's all green washing. Everyone, the rich especially, must dramatically reduce consumption and put our money towards regrowing/healing the green space.

1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-...

[gersh]

There are about 37 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. If you could get the price down to $100/ton, you can get the world net zero for $3.7t/year. US GDP is 25 trillion/year. World GPD is about 96.5 trillion. So, it would cost about 3.8% of world GDP per year. World global military is about $2.2t/year, so it would be higher than global military expenditure, but somewhat theoretically possible. If you substantially reduced emissions, it might be feasible to use carbon capture for the rest.

[alexey-salmin]

> If you could get the price down to $100/ton

That is the price of a ton of coal. Buy it from China BEFORE it gets burned and you have a sensible strategy.

Sucking it back from the atmosphere AFTER burning takes 10x more energy which is complete insanity. "Getting price down" and "when it scales" is an utter misunderstanding of the situation. Scale doesn't defeat the laws of physics.

[gersh]

So long as they have coal power plants, and need the electricity unless it get prohibitively expensive, they will just mine more coal. The way to reduce emissions is to replace high-emission infrastructure.

[rayiner]

The political and logistical problems are a far bigger challenge than energy production. Just think of all the concrete that China and India will need to pour in the coming decades and the CO2 emissions of that.

[alexey-salmin]

No. If cheap energy production wasn't a huge challenge we wouldn't have the CO2 challenge either. It is the same challenge essentially. You can say it's "96% the same challenge" if you want to take concrete into equation.

No politics or logistics can change laws of physics. Burning coal with hand and capturing it with the other at 10x the cost just doesn't make sense, neither from the engineering perspective nor from the economical.

[yurishimo]

I saw a graph of that the other day and supposedly concrete was only about 3% of emissions globally.

Even if India and China triple that, we’re still coming out ahead by focusing on the reduction of fossil fuels for power generation, international transport, and heating buildings.

[pietro72ohboy]

Why should anyone stop China and India from making lives better for their people? Seems like the classic American mindset where they get to pour as much concrete as they’d like but when other countries try to do it, they start talking of the environment.

[Dylan16807]

> That is the price of a ton of coal. Buy it from China BEFORE it gets burned

And then that money funds more mines to get coal out of the ground faster.

> Sucking it back from the atmosphere AFTER burning takes 10x more energy which is complete insanity.

Part of the plan needs to be capture at power plants. Another part of the plan needs to be heavy taxes for releasing CO2. If someone needs the convenience for some use case, let them pay the capture price.

[alexey-salmin]

> Part of the plan needs to be capture at power plants.

You realize that this makes power plants energy-negative?

[Dylan16807]

No it doesn't. You're not turning it back into fuel. You need to bottle it up or react it into a non-gas, both of which use much less energy than you get from combustion.

[AnthonyMouse]

I'm consistently hearing two claims here. One is that we'll have energy to do carbon capture because we may need to overbuild renewables by 3-5x to account for intermittency and then most of the time we'll have a lot of surplus power, and the other is that the only solution is for people to drastically reduce energy consumption.

Clearly at least one of these is wrong, because we can't simultaneously have a big surplus and have to reduce consumption, so which one is it?

[strken]

Why can't we have an energy surplus and also need to reduce consumption of carbon-intensive goods? It's not clear to me why they'd be mutually exclusive.

If e.g. smelters still need to use coal, then an energy surplus doesn't help them. If carbon capture is expensive even with virtually free power due to wages and infrastructure, the capture cost was reflected in the price of steel, and demand for steel is elastic, then we'd both capture more carbon and reduce steel consumption.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why can't we have an energy surplus and also need to reduce consumption of carbon-intensive goods? It's not clear to me why they'd be mutually exclusive.

The vast majority of carbon-intensive goods are related to energy production. Even when people talk about things like transportation and agriculture and construction, a major proportion of their CO2 emissions are from burning fuel.

> If e.g. smelters still need to use coal, then an energy surplus doesn't help them.

Smelters are using coal for heat. Burning it directly on site is more efficient than burning it in a power plant, losing most of the heat to conversion inefficiency, losing some of the electricity to distribution and then turning what's left back into heat.

If you had cheap electricity that didn't come from burning coal they could just use electric heat. At which point there would be no need to reduce steel consumption.

[hakfoo]

Part of it is the time dimension.

Electricity infrastructure used to be defined by the factories that run from (say) 9AM to 5PM. The grid has to be sized mostly for their needs, and baseload power (fossil, atomic, hydro) are sized for it, This is slow and costly to spin up and down. You see this reflected in things like utility "time of use" plans, where they offer you dirt-cheap energy at 2AM if you're willing to pay a penalty at 3PM. They'd love for you to sop up the glut by running a Bitcoin miner or chilling your house to 15C overnight.

Renewables move on a dime by comparison. If we need n GW of power at the peak time of 5PM, depending on the yield factors of local solar/wind/tidal/etc, we may end up with an infrastructure that generates 3n or 5n at other times of day. A lot of thinking has gone to batteries/molten salt/pumped hydro as ways we can store that surplus for later needs, but we can also direct the glut into processes that are energy-intensive and only economically viable in a power-too-cheap-to-meter scenario.

The CO2 scrubbers could be a viable sink for that excess power once we've got enough grid-scale storage.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're just making the "we're going to have an energy surplus" case.

We already have storage technologies that could compete with present-day energy prices if charging them was near-free. They're currently not competitive because it isn't, but in your scenario during off-peak it would be. So why would anybody have to reduce consumption then? Buy a battery, charge it when power is dirt cheap and use as much as you do now for no more than you pay now.

[AnthonyMouse]

Isn't the cost of that plus the cost of operating the fossil fuel emitting infrastructure significantly higher than the cost of other known alternative power generation methods?

[brian-armstrong]

Cynically, a "market forces" carbon reduction strategy does have the advantage that it doesn't require anyone to stop any particular behavior, which collectively is easier said than done. If there's even a small chance it could work, shouldn't we try?

[chii]

to make market forces work, you will need to regulate the release of carbon, just like the release of other pollutants - have a penalty, or some sort of cost that is higher than the actual capture cost.

[hedora]

One ton = 100 gallons of gasoline’s CO2 emissions. Many technologies would be in the $100-200 per ton range if they were scaled.

So, if any of those technologies were operating at scale, we could add a $2 / gallon tax to gasoline (or a similar upfront tax on new ICE engines, based on expected emissions), and then the transportation part of our economy would be carbon negative.

We could add similar taxes to things like concrete, and other greenhouse gas emitters.

This is all eminently doable, but it would hurt oil profits, so politicians and propagandists keep making sure it doesn’t happen. Private entities voluntarily funding actual carbon capture is the only feasible way to break the deadlock at this point (short of overthrowing ~ 100 governments at once).

[space_fountain]

It would also hurt normal people as driving, heating, electric all basically doubled. Not saying it’s not worth doing, but climate isn’t hard because of a bunch of greedy oil execs (though they obviously don’t make things easier)

[mullingitover]

I have some bad news about how future normal people are going to be hurt by drought, rising sea levels, and all the other effects of climate change.

[asynchronous]

Yeah but normal people tend to refuse to be the ones to suffer when we have private jets producing more than our cars emit in a year in a single flight. We’ll destroy the upper class before we let them use climate change to destroy the lower classes.

[space_fountain]

Note this is for a single car. Overall cars produced way more CO2. General aviation in general which I think includes private planes only admits maybe a 5th as much as passenger vehicles. That’s actually way higher than I expected, but again points to the fact that it isn’t a rich other causing global warming it’s more or less us. Though of course the rich have a vastly expanded impact and the truly poor do the least, but there are way less rich people

https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P10153PC.pdf

[space_fountain]

Sure but all those problems come later and feel less certain than literally doubling every energy bill. Thus why it’s politically hard

[jahewson]

At first glance I thought you were off by a factor of 4x, as 100gal of gas weighs around 1/4 ton but then I realised that the oxygen in the CO2 is coming from the atmosphere.

[alexey-salmin]

> Many technologies would be in the $100-200 per ton range if they were scaled.

No

[vinay_ys]

Current US price is $1.09/litre. $0.52/litre ($2/gallon) more is 48% more.

[MattRix]

many (most?) other countries already pay that much, it’s very doable, and would encourage people to switch to more sustainable forms of transportation

[tristan957]

How do I switch to a more sustainable form of transportation when the nearest bus route is over 2 miles away with no sidewalks or bike lanes? I live in a major tech city by the way.

[MattRix]

switch to an electric car? the design of cities would adapt over time as well

[asynchronous]

Man you’d be a popular politician

[harpooniker]

"It's all green washing. Everyone, the rich especially, must dramatically reduce consumption and put our money towards regrowing/healing the green space."

Microsoft can fund this development it's much more difficult to make other people change their ways

[vinay_ys]

What blows my mind is the dilution capacity of the air in our atmosphere. How much more of this can air hold and still keep it acceptable from breathable and visibility aspects?

[mr_toad]

Currently CO2 concentration in the air is about 0.04 percent. Levels above 0.5 percent may be harmful in the long-term. Levels above 7 percent can cause suffocation.

[peyton]

They heat rocks. What’s the barrier to scale other than cash?

[bboygravity]

Is there anything better than trees though?

I mean when you look at amount of CO2 emitted for planting/maintenance/harvest v.s. absorbed over the course of 10+ years?

[input_sh]

It works the same for all plants: they consume CO2 to grow and release it back when they die. The reason most of the effort is focused on trees is precisely because they store CO2 the longest and can be grown pretty much anywhere.

If speed is what you're after, bamboo grows very quickly, consuming high levels of CO2, but also doesn't live that long, undoing that. Wetlands filled with peat are the absolute kings of storing CO2 (~3% of Earth's surface stores ~1/3 of CO2), but you can't artificially make them anywhere, and it would take hundreds of years before it becomes effective. Seaweed like kelp are also very effective at storing a lot of CO2, but organisms that feed on them cancel out the benefits. So, a properly designed[0] forest still wins.

What works better than planting is conserving, as in not draining swamplands, cutting down forests, and so on. Not because it's something we can't recreate, but because the sheer amount of time it took for such ecosystems to develop makes it much more effective than anything we'd plant today.

Which brings me to the best solution: not building anything on an empty patch of land, but to build around the existing ecosystems, essentially extending them. The ends of a forest aren't anywhere near as productive as their middle, so by extending the space around them you're extending that most productive middle. Another very effective method is re-connecting forests via corridors (tunneling roads or building wildlife crossings), allowing animals to roam between the two parts, which makes both parts healthier.

In summary, building trees is absolutely the best, but it's not just about planting them, it's about picking the best spots to do so.

[0] Not planting all the trees at once, the diversity of the trees planted, proper spacing, re-introducing animals so that the space below the trees thrives with vegetation, etc.

[murrayb]

Trees are good. Everything I have read suggests soil (hummus) is better. Requires change to farming practices though which is traditionally difficult to do and has rich lobby groups arrayed against it.

[stupendousyappi]

Bamboo grows faster in compatible climates.

[Gigachad]

Active removal seems like the only legitimate scheme. All the carbon credits stuff is absolute crap.

[BariumBlue]

Quick math, it takes 10+ times more energy to scrub and then store carbon from the air, then you get by burning natgas for the same amount of CO2. (1 ton of LNG produces 100 KWh and 2.76 tons CO2, and the thermodynamic minimum energy required to extract CO2 from ambient air is about 250 kWh/ton CO2, but apparently realistically closer to 1,200 kWh / ton.)

It'd make way more sense to first focus on decarbonizing our energy grid, before starting to spend 10+x more energy to recapture and push it back underground.

[hedora]

We’ve already emitted so much CO2 that we have to capture a lot of what is currently in the atmosphere. Also, decarbonizing the grid with solar, wind, tides, nuclear, and even geothermal is going to involve generating massive amounts of waste electricity.

On top of that, some energy generation technologies (like solar) are ramping faster than Moore’s law used to. That means that non-peak energy production will no longer be scarce, so thermodynamic efficiency is a second-order effect.

In all likelihood, the most economic path forward probably involves simultaneously drawing down CO2 and also generating 5-10% of the energy we use from fossil fuels, 90-95% from renewables, and an additional 10-100% on carbon capture.

[notatoad]

obviously not putting the carbon in the air in the first place is the best solution, and carbon removal has the real potential to take away electricity that could be used for other productive purposes.

but clean energy isn't entirely fungible, and if you've got a context where it's abundant then it can make sense to use it for carbon removal. we just need to be careful that the carbon removal projects are only getting built in places where the energy would otherwise be wasted.

[cperciva]

While I agree about the thermodynamic argument -- you can't extract CO2 from the atmosphere without using significantly more energy than you released by burning fossil fuels -- there's an argument to be made that not all kWh are equal. If you can extract CO2 from the atmosphere close to the equator at noon on a sunny day, you're going to be able to do that pretty cheaply.

[Thorrez]

>thermodynamic minimum energy required to extract CO2 from ambient air is about 250 kWh/ton CO2

How is Heirloom doing it? Are they spending 250 kWh/ton for the extraction? They're reacting it with limestone, and it doesn't sound like that's taking a lot of energy.

[jgilias]

They need to initially (and then repeatedly) heat the limestone in order to release and capture the CO2 in it. This way they get some really CO2 hungry sand that binds it from the air.

I’d expect it’s the rock baking part that takes the most energy.

[harpooniker]

Wasn't Tesla funded mostly by carbon credits for a good portion of their existence?

They've made electric cars mainstream

[jpalomaki]

Carbon credit system helps by putting a price tag for the emissions and creating a market mechanisms.

[KennyBlanken]

> But, this involves funding development and use of an actual technology to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

And how is that better than putting the money toward solar panels or other renewable energy sources?

[rcxdude]

The first thing to understand is that money at this stage is mostly investment: the goal is to develop the technology and try to scale it up, not to just offset the carbon in the short term (in much the same way as investment in solar was not just to generate electricity but to enable economies of scale to actually get it to be a serious contender for replacing fossil fuels).

Why is such technology important to invest in? Two main reasons: firstly it could very well be the most economical means to make certain carbon-emitting processes carbon neutral, for cases where there is not currently a good means to eliminate the carbon emissions. Think aircraft emissions, for example. Secondly, even if we completely eliminate net carbon emissions, global warming will still continue for a fair few decades, as the climate takes a long time to actually reach equilibrium. If we want to avoid that equilibrium being too hot, we will need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And while planting trees is generally a good thing, it's not really a feasible way to actually remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to make much of a dent (only growing new forests generally removes much carbon: mature forests are mostly carbon neutral, and the carbon capture process is slow). Technology like this, if it can be scaled and use renewable energy, has a chance of being able to make this difference (though the biggest question, apart from whether the technology can actually work, is who will pay for such removal, if it's not for carbon credits).

[satvikpendem]

We must both remove existing carbon from the air as well as not emit more carbon. They are different goals, one does not replace the other.

[Retric]

Not really, as long as we hit net zero fast enough that’s sufficient. People working on carbon capture are really trying to sell the idea of carbon capture but it’s optional.

Earth slowly returns to equilibrium point well below current CO2 levels without our intervention and current levels aren’t so high as to be unlivable. So the only question we need to ask is if it’s easier to cut emissions or sequester them.

[hedora]

We had to hit net zero 10-20 years ago. We’re already hitting climate tipping points, so we’re already committed to some form of climate engineering. The lowest risk approach to that is carbon capture.

[Dylan16807]

> So the only question we need to ask is if it’s easier to cut emissions or sequester them.

At the start, cutting is much easier. But each percent is harder to cut than the last. There is a point where cutting costs more than sequestering.

[AnthonyMouse]

> At the start, cutting is much easier. But each percent is harder to cut than the last.

That isn't necessarily true. Solar panels are less than 5% of the price they were in 1990. Economies of scale reduce costs. There is a clear path to fully decarbonizing the power grid without raising energy costs using some combination of renewables and nuclear -- France has already done this. Nearly all of transportation and heating could be electrified.

You don't get into significantly higher costs until you get near the end. Biofuels would function for aviation but would raise the price if no one can come up with anything better. Cement emits CO2 and it's not currently obvious what to do about it. But if you would e.g. institute a carbon tax, it's not implausible that the market would find a more efficient alternative that isn't currently known.

It doesn't make sense to spend resources on capture until it costs less than the alternatives, and it's not implausible that it never will.

[Dylan16807]

I'm not just talking about the grid. Consider airplanes. Figuring out either biofuel or carbon capture that 90% of flights need is a lot more difficult than making a car electric.

[rapind]

> So the only question we need to ask is if it’s easier to cut emissions or sequester them.

I can think of another. How do we get everyone to do the answer to your question?

I think it’s fine to identify what’s most efficient in a political vacuum, so long as we then address how we actually convince people to do it (lower consumption & emissions).

[_aavaa_]

I don’t believe that it is.

My sibling comment even argues for needing to invest in technologies for removing carbon from the air because we need a way to remove the CO2 that’s already up there.

I believe that putting this same money into building more renewables is better use for the money. We can worry about removing CO2 from the atmosphere once we stop dumping immense quantities of it.

That being said, this problem is as much economical as technical. Microsoft, want to help reduce CO2 levels? Spend this money on lobbing to introduce carbon prices, e.g. see Canada’s carbon tax or the EU carbon tax WITH a border adjustment.

[slothtrop]

Not mutually exclusive, and the plummeting cost of solar makes it increasingly competitive anyway.