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.
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.
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.
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.
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.