AI will develop a reaction to turn atmospheric CO2 into electricity and oxygen and then we’ll have nothing to worry about in our future except for the constant threat of combustion.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Just checked the numbers, for those interested.
A gas power plant produces around. 200-300kWh per tonne of CO2.
Capture costs 300-900kWh per tonne captured.
So this is basically non viable using fossil fuel as the power. If you aren't, then storage of that power is likely a lot better.
It's also worth noting that it is still CO2 gas. Long term containment of a gas is far harder than a liquid or solid.
Who says you power that thing with fossil fuels? The real way to do that is via giant nuclear reactors or reactor complexes.
Fission power can be made cheaper per MW by just making the reactors bigger. Economies of scale, the square cube law and all that. The problem with doing this in the commercial power sector is that line losses kill you on distribution. There just aren't enough customers within a reasonable distance to make monster 10 GW or 100 GW reactors viable, regardless of how cheap they might make energy.
But DACC is one of the few applications this might not be a problem for. Just build your monster reactors right next door to your monster DACC plants.
But then the power generated by those reactors is better used to power things that burn fossil fuel in a less efficient way or to simply replace the fossil fuel powered electricity generators...
Quebec transports its electricity over more than a thousand kilometers, surely distance from nuclear reactors isn't an issue if you build the infrastructure around it.
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There are 3 use cases I've seen.
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Making fossil fuel power stations "clean".
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CO2 recovery for long term storage.
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CO2 for industrial use.
It's no good for the first, due to energy consumption. This is the main use I've seen it talked up for, as something that can be retrofitted to power plants.
It's poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn't do.
The last has limited requirements. We only need so much CO2.
The only large scale use case I can see for this is as part of a carbon capture system. Capture and then react to solidify the carbon. However, plants are already extremely good at this, and can do it directly from atmospheric air, using sunlight.
The only DAC variant i could see working out is if it takes the CO2 from high-concentrated sources (such as portland cement factories) and transforms it into something practical, like liquid fuel or methane.
It could be leading to cheaper methane than from biological sources, because technological processes can have higher efficiency, and therefore lower prices.
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That small red bulb counteracts the entropy argument because you bring energy (and quite a lot of I recall) into the system.
Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.
Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.
I don't think there'd be anyone left alive to be sad in that case...
That's sad
The wider issue is you have to generate that energy, and you have to be able to capture more carbon than that generation released.
As I understand it doesn't at all. This is why it's seen as analagous to a perpetual motion machine, it's an endless chain of power plants capturing each others carbon to no end.
You could use solar of course, but then why generate anything with fossil fuels just to capture the carbon with solar? Just use solar.
Because we still need to bring CO2 levels down even if we stop burning fossil fuel.
And then we'll probably need to burn fossil fuel to keep them at the right level, since we are in a capitalistic society and we're never going to be able to shutdown the CO2 collectors if they are ever built.
What I mean by entropy is that we burn fossil fuels (low entropy) and release CO2 into the atmosphere (high entropy), so it takes a lot more energy and effort to remove CO2 than simply not burning fossil fuels.
Clearly laws of physics work against us when we try to remove a relatively low concentration gas from a planet-wide system.
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There are plenty of arguments to be made against direct air capture, but entropy isn't one of them. Nobody ever claimed this is some kind of perpetuum mobile.
This is a joke.
While physically possible DAC is a waste of money and energy compared to effective measures such as constructing solar farms, batteries and power lines. Even hydrolysis may look attractive.
That’s right. We should only do one thing, and that’s to switch away from fossil fuels. It won’t be a problem that we will still have all that CO2 warming the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans, we really shouldn’t bother trying to make that tech any better, it has clearly no use.
You fucking armchair Reddit-ass commenter.
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Even if we went to zero emissions soon, we'd still want to decrease CO2 over time to reverse the effects of climate change. Capturing co2 is always going to be much more energy intensive than not emitting it in the first place, but sometimes you don't have another choice.
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The point is to use a low carbon power source to power it.
Yes that’s the point but why take the extra steps. Use the low carbon energy directly and stop using the high carbon sources.
I think the intention is that the switch is not going to be immediate, and so there will be a stretch of time where some places use renewable sources of energy and some places still use non-renewables. There's nothing you can do if your neighbor doesn't switch, other than to try to capture their carbon output
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Renewable energy has many parts. I have listed the 5 most important here.
As you can see, renewable biomass and hydropower are also part of renewable energy. That is because they have the advantage of being both power-sources and energy-storages. That means people will continue to use biomass and combust it in the long term.
The argument is that there exist some use cases where we do not have a viable low carbon energy source yet (things like heavy farming equipment or aircraft), and one can effectively counteract the emissions of these things until we do develop one. Or alternatively, by the time that we eliminate all the high carbon energy, the heating effect already present may be well beyond what we desire the climate to be like, and returning it to a prior state would require not just not emitting carbon, but removing some of what is already there.
It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.
I just literally can’t imagine a machine that is both cheaper and easier to deploy than the green goo we call life. Plant a tree. It’ll even spread itself. They look pretty.
Unfortunately, this is one area human imagination and intuition fail. Trees are great, but the math shows they simply aren't remotely viable as a means of bulk carbon sequestration.
They were for several hundred million years. What changed?
Nothing. You're just asking trees to do something they're not meant to do. Absorbing a single year of carbon emissions would require half the planet's land area of trees. And that's just while the trees are growing and absorbing a lot of carbon. Trees just aren't efficient enough on a per acre basis to make a dent in carbon emissions, let alone capturing the carbon already in the atmosphere.
Trees never evolved for the purposes of mass capturing carbon from the air as efficiently as possible. Yes, they convert CO2 to O2 as part of their life cycle, but algae and other organisms have a much bigger role in capturing CO2 and turning it into O2.
Furthermore, so much of the CO2 that we emit is CO2 that was sequestered in the past over those very same 100s of millions of years. Meaning that going the natural route will take that amount of time.
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I think you have to cut them down and bury them (or at least don’t burn them) for the carbon to “go away”.
That’s how it got underground to begin with.
Still until we actually 100% switch everything we could power off solar and wind to solar and wind, active carbon capture doesn’t make sense, sense we could use that clean energy for direct purposes instead of cleanup. I’m not sure we will ever have “excess energy” like that, we will always rather use it for something other than cleaning up our mess, like AI.
yes, you are correct, it makes more sense to focus on electrifying our big consumers first.
however, cleaning up could happen eventually. maybe some politician in the future will sell it as some "jobs program" or sth.
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Trees aren't actually that great. Algee is what is really effective. Codyslab has some great videos and some wild ideas on application for it.
I was under the impression that’s just because of the relative surface area of the ocean vs arable land
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That's essentially how many gases are made from mixtures, like notrogen or oxygen. Showing this as something new tells a lot about author's uderstanding. Carbon capture is not about making entirely new tech, it's optimization, and that's where startups suck at everything except for getting and then wasting cash.
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I really think we can capitalism our way out of a capitalism caused climate crisis who's with me and rex tillerson