I’ve been mulling entering carbon sequestration space using biochar but what’s mainly stopping me is the fact that no amount of industrialization can even put a dent in how much new carbon is being introduced every year when now in terms of burning newly pumped fossil fuel.
Seems like the natural gas angle may be better due to higher efficiencies of existing equipment (power plants) that burns natural gas. Maybe the same can be done with gasoline?
And of course you can't reasonably run a plane on natural gas AFAIK.
Solar power wasn't economically viable once, nor was Wind power.
Sucking fuel out of the air anywhere you like has to be more viable than sailing out to sea and building a huge rig to drill underwater for pockets of gunk that you then have to refine. Imagine an airport that creates its own fuel instead of needing constant resupply.
> A carbon price is a cost applied to industries that emit carbon pollution. British Columbia has a carbon price of C$35 a ton, and all of Canada will have a $10 price in September that will rise to C$50 in 2022.
Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field.
If the future costs of processing and burning oil could be accurately calculated. It could be the case that synthetic fuel is already cost competitive. A tax could attempt to represent that discrepancy.
Like a sugar tax or a tobacco tax, for which there are real personal, societal, and ultimately economic costs beyond the sticker price - these costs are accumulated and deferred, so it's hard to intuitively judge for the individual. Taxes against these poor choices help make the cost more intuitive, hypothetically they could even be proportional and immediate if those funds were used to treat those issues though e.g health care spending.
> Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field.
British Columbia generally uses the Carbon Tax revenue to offset other government revenues (eg: lowering income taxes; a Conservative candidate campaigned on this federally in 2017 [1]), while the federal policy provides a flat rebate to taxpayers. They both attempt to be "neutral" in one way or another. I'm not sure which is better.
That said, the Carbon Tax is a bit of a wedge issue (federally) in Canada, as different regions are more suburban and car-dependent than others as well as other provinces historically have produced oil. Your lifestyle and outlook to climate change policy often influences your feelings on the topic.
IIRC current estimations of a carbon price accurate to the social costs of a ton of CO2 are near US$185 [1]. It is probably unrealistic to assume that such a price is politically achievable within the next 10 years (even if all the income from such a tax is redistributed). Making gas more expensive is really not popular.
Another option is emissions trading, where a fixed amount of CO2 certificates are issued over some timespan (with the amount calculated to fit some emissions goal). The price is then determined by the market.
Of course this should also lead to high CO2 prices, which will be unpopular, but with proper protections against future changes to the system in place, politicians might be able to absolve themselves of responsibility and more or less put the blame on the market. I think that might make this more politically achievable (especially since possibly the effects on consumer prices might only appear a while after the relevant political decisions are already made).
I get that this isn’t cost competitive on the energy side alone with a barrel of oil, but what about energy PLUS storage cost competitive to solar/wind?
Feels like if we didn’t have to invent new batteries but instead just turned excess solar and wind into carbon neutral gas “batteries” that would be a win.
A barrel of oil is about 1,700 kWh. If we have an optimistic cost (https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_battery_...) of $300 per kWH capacity that is $510,000. Divide by say 5000 cycles that you can get out of a battery: it costs $102 in what is capital depreciation/wear to store one barrel of oil.
Of course projections show that reducing to 1/3 of that...eventually.
I had a similar realisation recently when comparing the house building industry in the US to that from here in Europe.
Because the US builds most of its residential housing out of wood it means that the Sun does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to "creating" the building materials out of which most of the US residential houses are built. The biggest cost related to energy when it comes to the US residential market is the opportunity cost of not having those trees back in the forrest still producing oxygen, plus the loss of forrest habitat as a result of ever-expending suburbias.
Meanwhile, in Europe most of the residential houses are built using cement, concrete and even bricks, all of these activities very energy intensive, you can't rely on the Sun's goodwill as the Americans do. Granted, you don't incur the opportunity costs of having to cut down trees/forests, but I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house.
There's also a discussion to be made about costs related to house insulation and the loss of energy, where, I agree, European houses perform much better compared to the US houses made of wood.
All in all I think we need to "rediscover" economists like Georgescu-Roegen [1], people who had built almost all of their intellectual careers talking about this sort of stuff.
> I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house
You've overlooked the cost of shipping the wood from the Americas.
Wood construction isn't used as much in Europe because it's much more expensive. Apart from a few pockets of environmentally important old growth forest, centuries of industry and warfare depleted European forest.
The typical European brick & mortar home is much sturdier than your typical US wooden frame construction. Houses aged 100 or more years are no rarity. The US median age of 37 years or so is still relatively young on, e.g., the German market.
Interestingly, though, European wood-based construction companies (wooden houses are usually prefab here) distinguish themselves with their energy efficient wall construction techniques. A brick-and-mortar company can achieve the same level of efficiency by choosing the best available bricks but they will typically offer cheaper bricks with add-on insulation. It's definitely not the case that new wooden construction is less energy efficient - but of course that comes with a price.
It's worth noting here that the root system of the tree remains and also that different trees/plantation systems have different carbon uptake profiles. There are ways to tune a production forest to have a lot of carbon uptake while allowing you to remove trees for production continuously, even to the extend where managed land is takes up more carbon than unmanaged land. Deserts are technically unmanaged land but they don't store more carbon and similarly a forest will stop being a carbon sink when the trees start decaying or the big trees stop growing while still outcompeting all the smaller, still growing, trees
I say this as someone living in Northern Europe in a wooden house: there’s a fairly good reason that the building industry uses brick rather than lumber here. The combination of humidity, temperature, and often densely-packed housing created both a skills base and a supply chain that has, over time, made it needlessly costly to build with lumber. And, a lot of our historic architectural styles prioritise brick, which is a huge pull factor when people are deciding on styles for new buildings.
When it comes to leaving the trees in the forest, you have to take into account the fact that mature trees will produce less oxygen than growing trees, and if nobody cuts the old trees down, when they do fall themselves and succumb to decay, all of the captured CO2 will be consumed by aerobic organisms and thus released back into the atmosphere.
They state "It costs more than a barrel of oil right now, but in places with a price on carbon of $200 a ton, like what’s enabled through California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, we’re competitive". Today, the carbon price in the European cap-and-trade scheme is $81 per ton, and in California it's $29 per ton. So unless they've greatly improved efficiency, they don't have a profitable market.
The EU price is also only that high since about a year ago, two years ago it was about $23 per ton. Even if they were profitable at about $80 per ton, there was little time to scale up production.
Even if gasoline was free and didn't cause global warming it would still lose out to electric vehicles. Why? Because of the poisonous gases they exhaust. Almost every one alive has been habituated these gases and think "that's just the way it is." But EV's emit no poisonous gases. With EV's you could make a parking garage that's completely enclosed and heated with no problem. Downtown cores with only EV's will smell like springtime all year long. There is no going back to ICE vehicles in the cities of the world.
It's all about the cost equation - cost of producing this stuff where it's needed, when it's needed. Vs the cost of drilling, hauling, refining, shipping, storing ordinary fuels.
Trouble is, we've raised the scale on all those things to the point it's hard to compete with small local carbon-fuel plants. Small will always struggle to complete with huge.
Even in the far flung magical fusion driven mckendree cylinder spinning future, we will have gasoline. It will be expensive to make, messy, but it is some of the most shelf stable, energy dense, and human handlable energy storage in existence. The jerrycan will be a tool in the human toolbox forever and this is probably how it will get made.
Sounds funny, kind of recycling emissions - we burn gasoline, put carbon into the air, then we take carbon out and make gasoline that we burn again and the process restarts.
It's hard to see how 'sucking carbon from the air' will be cheaper than producing it from the much carbon richer renewable waste and bio materials being used elsewhere.
"Sustainable Aviation Fuel"/SAF has already dropped to just over twice as expensive as traditional fuel (or less depending on the current price of oil)
Biofuel isn't just from "waste," it's a significant percentage of our grain production. Making carbon-neutral fuels without agriculture would be a big reduction in our land usage, fertilizer runoff, and pesticide use, all of which are major environmental issues of their own.
It should be noted that this company is backed by major fossil fuel funders and companies, even with connections to some of the dirtiest fossil fuel productions on earth (tar sands): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering
While I do think there is a need to develop DAC and e-fuels technologies, everything about Carbon Engineering feels like this is an effort by fossil fuel interests to give the impression of an easy solution that doesn't require too much change.
However, relatively recently there has also been the discoveries of extraterrestrial sources of kerogen, including in meteorites, Martian samples and planetary nebulae:
It's not clear to me how much to attribute to how much terrestrial kerogen could be present during our planetary formation vs that which is continuously replenished during the carbon cycle.
Anyone know of studies of the relative contributions?
I posted this for a couple of reasons. I'd like to know, why is it still not economical? Has any progress been made? How much progress can be made (like how does this compare to plants? Maybe we're just better off going the algae route or whatever)?
In any case, maybe it's just a pipe dream but it would be really convenient if our needs for energy storage (that's how I see this) could be met with something that incentivizes cleaning up the environment. I don't see why it matters that oil companies are involved if they have the resources and power to do this. The fact that they obviously need to be reined in is as far as I can tell entirely orthogonal.
[+] [-] manigandham|3 years ago|reply
There's also Prometheus Fuels which is a YC company doing the same thing: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/
The science is sound, but whether the process is economically viable remains to be seen.
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronax|3 years ago|reply
Discussion of economics: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
Seems like the natural gas angle may be better due to higher efficiencies of existing equipment (power plants) that burns natural gas. Maybe the same can be done with gasoline?
And of course you can't reasonably run a plane on natural gas AFAIK.
[+] [-] Gwypaas|3 years ago|reply
Also works as a backup of last resort for power systems through power to gas/x.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-X
[+] [-] roryisok|3 years ago|reply
Sucking fuel out of the air anywhere you like has to be more viable than sailing out to sea and building a huge rig to drill underwater for pockets of gunk that you then have to refine. Imagine an airport that creates its own fuel instead of needing constant resupply.
[+] [-] tomxor|3 years ago|reply
Interesting, this is a seemingly proven? way of levelling the temporal playing field.
If the future costs of processing and burning oil could be accurately calculated. It could be the case that synthetic fuel is already cost competitive. A tax could attempt to represent that discrepancy.
Like a sugar tax or a tobacco tax, for which there are real personal, societal, and ultimately economic costs beyond the sticker price - these costs are accumulated and deferred, so it's hard to intuitively judge for the individual. Taxes against these poor choices help make the cost more intuitive, hypothetically they could even be proportional and immediate if those funds were used to treat those issues though e.g health care spending.
[+] [-] danbolt|3 years ago|reply
British Columbia generally uses the Carbon Tax revenue to offset other government revenues (eg: lowering income taxes; a Conservative candidate campaigned on this federally in 2017 [1]), while the federal policy provides a flat rebate to taxpayers. They both attempt to be "neutral" in one way or another. I'm not sure which is better.
That said, the Carbon Tax is a bit of a wedge issue (federally) in Canada, as different regions are more suburban and car-dependent than others as well as other provinces historically have produced oil. Your lifestyle and outlook to climate change policy often influences your feelings on the topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Conservative_Party_of_Can...
[+] [-] r0uv3n|3 years ago|reply
Another option is emissions trading, where a fixed amount of CO2 certificates are issued over some timespan (with the amount calculated to fit some emissions goal). The price is then determined by the market.
Of course this should also lead to high CO2 prices, which will be unpopular, but with proper protections against future changes to the system in place, politicians might be able to absolve themselves of responsibility and more or less put the blame on the market. I think that might make this more politically achievable (especially since possibly the effects on consumer prices might only appear a while after the relevant political decisions are already made).
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05224-9
[+] [-] drewcon|3 years ago|reply
Feels like if we didn’t have to invent new batteries but instead just turned excess solar and wind into carbon neutral gas “batteries” that would be a win.
[+] [-] aaronax|3 years ago|reply
A barrel of oil is about 1,700 kWh. If we have an optimistic cost (https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2022/utility-scale_battery_...) of $300 per kWH capacity that is $510,000. Divide by say 5000 cycles that you can get out of a battery: it costs $102 in what is capital depreciation/wear to store one barrel of oil.
Of course projections show that reducing to 1/3 of that...eventually.
[+] [-] bilsbie|3 years ago|reply
They just released an interesting white paper detailing a lot of good progress:
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...
I think it’s interesting because they’re focusing on the cheapest and easily manufactured technologies instead of efficiency.
[+] [-] paganel|3 years ago|reply
Because the US builds most of its residential housing out of wood it means that the Sun does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to "creating" the building materials out of which most of the US residential houses are built. The biggest cost related to energy when it comes to the US residential market is the opportunity cost of not having those trees back in the forrest still producing oxygen, plus the loss of forrest habitat as a result of ever-expending suburbias.
Meanwhile, in Europe most of the residential houses are built using cement, concrete and even bricks, all of these activities very energy intensive, you can't rely on the Sun's goodwill as the Americans do. Granted, you don't incur the opportunity costs of having to cut down trees/forests, but I have a gut feeling that the energy (and pollution) costs of building a house based on cement/concrete/bricks are a lot bigger than the opportunity costs you gain from not cutting down some trees in order to build the same house.
There's also a discussion to be made about costs related to house insulation and the loss of energy, where, I agree, European houses perform much better compared to the US houses made of wood.
All in all I think we need to "rediscover" economists like Georgescu-Roegen [1], people who had built almost all of their intellectual careers talking about this sort of stuff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Georgescu-Roegen
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
You've overlooked the cost of shipping the wood from the Americas.
Wood construction isn't used as much in Europe because it's much more expensive. Apart from a few pockets of environmentally important old growth forest, centuries of industry and warfare depleted European forest.
The UK set up the Forestry Commission after WW1 depleted forest cover to just 5%: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/103379
[+] [-] choeger|3 years ago|reply
The typical European brick & mortar home is much sturdier than your typical US wooden frame construction. Houses aged 100 or more years are no rarity. The US median age of 37 years or so is still relatively young on, e.g., the German market.
Interestingly, though, European wood-based construction companies (wooden houses are usually prefab here) distinguish themselves with their energy efficient wall construction techniques. A brick-and-mortar company can achieve the same level of efficiency by choosing the best available bricks but they will typically offer cheaper bricks with add-on insulation. It's definitely not the case that new wooden construction is less energy efficient - but of course that comes with a price.
[+] [-] magnuspaaske|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sosull|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eptcyka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sufficer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toto444|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorge-d|3 years ago|reply
Also, technically, all hydrocarbons are made from Carbon sucked from the air.
[+] [-] wongarsu|3 years ago|reply
The EU price is also only that high since about a year ago, two years ago it was about $23 per ton. Even if they were profitable at about $80 per ton, there was little time to scale up production.
[+] [-] alex_duf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entropicgravity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
Trouble is, we've raised the scale on all those things to the point it's hard to compete with small local carbon-fuel plants. Small will always struggle to complete with huge.
[+] [-] blamestross|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reportgunner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|3 years ago|reply
"Sustainable Aviation Fuel"/SAF has already dropped to just over twice as expensive as traditional fuel (or less depending on the current price of oil)
https://simpleflying.com/saf-cost-competitive-jet-fuel/
[+] [-] DennisP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adgjlsfhk1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebronie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roryisok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccozan|3 years ago|reply
What is the most efficient plant that can sequestrate the carbon at the same rate?
[+] [-] sobkas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hannob|3 years ago|reply
While I do think there is a need to develop DAC and e-fuels technologies, everything about Carbon Engineering feels like this is an effort by fossil fuel interests to give the impression of an easy solution that doesn't require too much change.
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
This is a red herring distracting you from the fact that oil is subsidized when it should be taxed.
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neil44|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmayrgundter|3 years ago|reply
The geologic carbon and kerogen cycle looks to be be:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuelHowever, relatively recently there has also been the discoveries of extraterrestrial sources of kerogen, including in meteorites, Martian samples and planetary nebulae:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen#Extra-terrestrial
It's not clear to me how much to attribute to how much terrestrial kerogen could be present during our planetary formation vs that which is continuously replenished during the carbon cycle.
Anyone know of studies of the relative contributions?
[+] [-] fbergen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] black_13|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] guerrilla|3 years ago|reply
In any case, maybe it's just a pipe dream but it would be really convenient if our needs for energy storage (that's how I see this) could be met with something that incentivizes cleaning up the environment. I don't see why it matters that oil companies are involved if they have the resources and power to do this. The fact that they obviously need to be reined in is as far as I can tell entirely orthogonal.
[+] [-] pif|3 years ago|reply
Entropy and energy.
- Entropy: dispersing is easy, collecting is hard.
- Energy: burning releases energy, putting it back together requires energy.