The roughly two-hectare facility, still under construction, is hosting what could be called a carbon removal Olympics. It will pilot eight different versions of a similar technology using various machines that will suck in air, remove the carbon dioxide and send it to a central plant where it will be compressed and liquified for storage deep underground.
The winner of this initiative wouldn’t get a medal on a podium. Instead, Deep Sky, the Montreal-based project developer behind it, plans to take the best versions of the direct air capture technology that prove most effective in Canada’s climate and deploy them on a commercial scale all over the country.
How dare they try to make a profit off the exhalations of millions of CO2 creators without fairly compensating them?
You can’t take the sky from me.
How to suck carbon right out of the air sustainably and cheaply -
Tech bros always re-invent trains but worse.
Climate bros always re-invent trees but worse.
Crypto bros always re-invent MLMs but worse.
It’s like carcinisation.
Removed by mod
The Saskatchewan government has been running this scam for at least a decade; throwing subsidies to their rich friends AND using it as an excuse to lie and say “see…there ARE alternatives to the Carbon Tax”.
It’s all bullshit. It never worked. It never will work. It’s a grift to make Scott Moe’s donors more money.
It makes no sense from a thermodynamics point of view, but it makes amazing sense to VC money and government bribes.
I’ve read a lot of skepticism over the years about how carbon capture is a gimmick that doesn’t work but helps prop up the fossil fuel industry as a greenwashing scam.
And then I see something like this:
The company is so confident this will be successful that it’s already begun initial work on two commercial projects, one in Quebec and the other in Manitoba. That’s despite not yet knowing how they will be fully financed or which technology will be put to use.
“We don’t know if it works or how we’ll pay for it.”
Plants capture 56% of fossil fuel emissions annually, and they are the most efficient way we have to capture CO2 with solar power. So we would have to grow an additional 0.4 earth’s worth of plants, every year, and then find a place to hide them where they never rot or break down forever, just to break even.
To do the capture directly with human chemistry would take up even more space just in solar panels, due to the lower efficiency.
The only way to cut down on atmospheric carbon is to stop using fossil fuels all together.
Government subsidies from politicians eager to greenwash their oil and gas industry.
Or they’re generating buzz for a private investment scam where they can take the money and run.
Can’t be done. Takes more energy to capture carbon than is released when you burn it. At best we stop burning fossil fuels and use capture mechanisms that run on renewables (like trees, provided that the wood is then stored in such a way that it never rots or breaks down).
Hemp grows fast, and captures 10 times the amount of carbon as the same acreage of trees. Stores about 85% in the roots too. Marijuana also does similar, but IIRC not quite as much as hemp. Plant them, harvest 4 times a year. Take all the roots, and put them into a compacter. Dump roots in the Marianas trench. Should keep that carbon sequestered for a few hundred million years.
Except they will rot down there and release methane and CO2. Stopping emissions is step 0 of this process, then we have to find a way to re-fossilize captured carbon.
Not going to rot that far down under the water. Perpetually cold water + pressure does weird things to land dwellers.
So far DACC is a scam. The energy costs to capture carbon have always proven near as high or higher than the energy gained from burning fossil fuels. It’s always been unviable and treating any of it as anything but research projects is 100% bs.
Fossil fuel companies have vested interests in perpetuating the myth that we can clean up our mess after the fact. Think about how insane this proposition is! How can a world that has to drastically reconfigure itself to run on a renewables eroei of roughly 3 to 1, find the surplus energy to recapture capture carbon when the 100:1 eroei of fossil fuels are no longer available? The superorganism known as human civilization won’t have the surplus energy to handle its own metabolic needs and recapture carbon.
A surface gusher of light sweet crude used to give 100:1. The last 30 years have seen eroei decline from 30-1 to 18-1 today as an average with tight oil going as low as 5-1.
This article is false hope. Sickly sweet paliative medicine given to terminal patients. There there dear. Your suffering will soon be over and everything will be beautiful again in the afterlife.
DACC is such a scam I’m legitimately upset that engineers fall for it and work on these technologies trying to help. Chemically speaking most carbon sequestration schemes are essentially burning something but in reverse. Now this should automatically set off alarm bells in terms of thermodynamics because enthalpy is a state function and if you have a net release of energy burning something, there is no possible way to do that reaction in reverse without adding that energy back in. So you have to have renewable energy to make it work. But then, I ask, why not just use the renewable energy to replace a carbon source? It’s not big enough? Then it’s not big enough to offset that carbon source either.
If you had a magical piece of technology that rapidly converted CO2 into long chain molecules using sunlight andv rain water that would be pretty cool. Oh wait? That tech already exists and it’s been in existence for millions of years? Yeah that’s right it’s a fucking tree. Carbon sequestration is a fucking scam to make you feel better about not decarbonizing
In theory you could run it on excess solar and turn it off the rest of the time, but of course if you’re running it only part of the time it’ll take you longer to capture CO2, and not every process can actually be easily turned off and on.
Direct carbon capture that runs on solar during the day and automatically shuts down at night.
Like a tree.
Yeah, planting trees (in a place where forest fires aren’t going to be a problem) is probably cheaper and less energy intensive.
It took thousands of years for plants to capture the carbon we burn every year. We are so far past ‘the trees will help us’.
That doesn’t mean that planting more trees can’t be a part of the solution.
No, not the entire solution. But a cheap, quick and easy part of it.
If you have enough solar to waste it capturing carbon you can just stop burning carbon and use solar power to begin with. Catching the sun to catch the carbon you burned to make electricity is just an expensive Rube Goldberg that kills us.
That’s just using solar power with extra steps.
The extra step of cleaning up CO2 emissions from the past is a rather useful one
I don’t disagree, but it is magnitudes of order less effective than reducing pur current spew of greenhouse gasses and only deals with one specific GHG (for example, does nothing for methane release)
Yeah, investing in batteries on the grid would definitely be a better use of capital.
I don’t think you’ve fully understood my admittedly terse post. " Excess solar" is a very loaded term. The long term eroei of solar and wind, accounting for best in class recycling of the materials for turbines and panels gives an eroei just over 3-1. This is the surplus energy that your entire civilization has to do its stuff. All resource extraction. All agriculture, all industrial and technological production. The last 250 years have seen us go from 1000-1 to below 18-1. An explosion of metabolic activity followed by contraction, atrophy and collapse as we shift to 3-1.
At 3-1 eroei, are we driving cars? Are we heating homes? Are we mining crypto? Are we feeding 8-11 billion humans? We will have to make some wildly radical decisions on where to apply limited resources. Everything is too precious to waste.
Under every conceivable option yet discovered, carbon capture makes no sense, and is dwarfed by the obvious and much easier benefits of stopping the use of fossil fuels.
Solar has an EROI of between 1/5 and 1/10 (and improving), not 1/3. Wind is between 1/10 and 1/15. By excess solar, I mean the energy that is generated during the day that otherwise isn’t used and is sometimes curtailed by the grid. It’s definitely better to charge batteries with that, but you could use it for other things as well if all the batteries are full.
And yes, carbon capture is a PR exercise by the fossil fuel industry, you’ll get way better returns doing anything else.
Edit: and gas has an EROI of 30/1, what has 1000/1?
“The EROI for discovering oil and gas in the US has decreased from more than 1000:1 in 1919 to 5:1 in the 2010s, and for production from about 25:1 in the 1970s to approximately 10:1 in 2007 (Guilford et al., 2011).”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856
Edit: from the same source.
An examination of the EROI literature on solar photovoltaic or PV energy generation shows differences in the assumptions and methodologies employed and the EROI values calculated. The values, assumptions, and parameters included are often ambiguous and differ from study to study, making comparisons between PV and other energy EROI values difficult and fraught with potential pitfalls. Nevertheless, we calculated the mean EROI value using data from 45 separate publications spanning several decades. These values resulted in a mean EROI value of roughly 10:1 (n of 79 from 45 publications) (see Lambert et al., 2012 for references) (Fig. 3). It should be noted that several recent studies that have broader boundaries give EROI values of 2 to 3:1 (Prieto and Hall, 2012, Palmer, 2013, Weissbach et al., 2013)
I agree with this. I don’t want to expand fossil fuel generation, but with renewable generation proliferating and potential breakthroughs in the long term, using excess available energy to try to reverse the emissions we had already put in the air could be beneficial.
Excess available energy. We’ve never had that before. Despite all our renewables development is has only supplemented our energy, never displacing fossil fuels.
It all depends on the province you are from. NL, BC, MB, QC have long had massive excesses in energy and nearly zero fossil fuel generation, as still the case today. Canadian provinces keep selling to neighbouring US states for a healthy profit since we have too much here. ON got rid of coal for LNG and are developing wind and solar, so they don’t have to rely on their gas peak time plants as hard going forward.
The capacity to deliver energy is one thing but the other is the time and rate at which you do. Fossil fuel is good at ramping up on demand while renewables are beholden to weather changes, and on the other side the power demand rate is relatively predictable in terms of the time of day (I’ve worked in this industry). Renewable tech including batteries and hydro storage will displace the need to use those LNG plants further.
This is a surplus of electricity while we are still using fossil fuels.
Cut out fossil fuels and power EVERYTHING with electricity and we’ll see how much “surplus” we have.
Displacing doesn’t necessarily mean cut everything out at once, it can include a gradual reduction/ramp down as the other increases by similar amounts at a time.
It can, but it doesn’t.
Hopefully a nano tech evolves where carbon connects to a material and we somehow slough it of in stage 2 of the process
We already have that nanotech, photosynthesis. A process perfected over billions of years to be as efficient as possible. It works so well that gigatons of carbon was captured and then trapped in underground.
The problem is that capturing carbon is literally un-burning it, by plant or by nanobot you have to rip the oxygen off of carbon and make sure they stay that way. That process consumes energy, it is working up hill against entropy. Burning carbon to form CO2 is downhill all the way, you give it a push and it’s self sustaining.
Unless you have a power source that exceeds all fossil fuel burning processes, by like 10x, you can never capture carbon at a meaningful rate. (And if you DO have that 10x clean energy source, you already don’t need to burn more carbon)
I don’t mean biological process, I mean actual nano science, like fuel cell membrane that strips hydrogen on its own
Evolution doesn’t necessitate something to be “as efficient as possible”.
How about we not generate carbon in the first place? I’m calling for a switch from fossil fuels to electricity generated by renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind. Fossil fuels are not only directly hurting the planet via means of greenhouse gases but also profits are being spent to buy politicians and cause democratic backsliding and they were instrumental to Trump being elected and not to mention they do lots of lobbying and political interference on a global scale including in Canada. So when you import fossil fuels from U.S. companies they are paying for your own demise.
The good news is you have the power to fight back. I urge you to contact your MPs and demand a faster transition to renewable energy, no more buying fossil fuels from the U.S. and also divest from other major Republican and Trump donors. Also consider getting solar or wind for your home if that option is right for you. No fossil fuels means less fuel for Republican’s campaigns.
Illinois just banned this practice in certain areas where the only source of water is underground. ADM in Decatur Illinois has a project which leaked under the lake and ADM lied about it for months. The funniest part is that local politicians were shocked ADM would lie like they didn’t make a whole movie about it starring Matt fucking Damon.
Here we go again…
