This is sadly not a surprise. Any carbon capture project that doesn’t involve trees is guaranteed to be a money sink and little else. Any process that pulls carbon out of the air is going to be an energy intensive one. Which means that many carbon capture projects are carbon positive. Often by a significant margin. Most of them are pushed by the oil companies since it’s something they can point to as helping the environment but it increases power usage and their profits. So it’s the option they want everyone to go with. And they’d prefer if we ignore the option that uses self replicating structures with built in solar panels that have spent the last billion years becoming hyper efficient at this exact task.
In this case, the carbon is being captured is a concentrated stream resulting from ethanol fermentation (point source capture). It’s more efficient than capturing carbon from the air (direct air capture) due to the much higher initial concentration.
Yeah just building solar to replace a fossil fuel plant is a way better means of preventing CO2 from entering the atmosphere in the first place, but that’s not sexy so fuck it, let’s burn a gigajoule of energy to absorb a tonne of CO2
Yep, some carbon capture tech is even used to extract more oil. They push CO2 down a well to push out more oil, then they get carbon credits for that. Does the carbon stay in the well after it runs dry? Who knows, it’s not the oil company’s problem any more.
From what I know, the co2 is pumped under immense pressure, to the point of solidifying into dry ice. At that depth where this is done once the well is sealed up, it is relatively stable.
Not exactly dry ice, it is supercritically pressured carbon dioxide so it has the density of a liquid but defuses like a gas. CO2 plumes are stable at depths where injection occurs because they are maintained in a pressure and temperature environment where the CO2 stays in a liquid stage, so it will never rise to the surface like a conventional lighter-than-air gas. In-situ mineral carbonation can also occur where the CO2 is injected into silicate rock formations to promote carbonate mineral formation, locking the CO2 for thousands (millions maybe) years.
Planting more trees and making more solar panels won’t fix the issue of rapidly increasing CO2 emissions around the world. Making solar panels is not a green industry and the ability to build them locally is not really an option for a lot of countries, which will need petroleum fuel to ship panels and mine the materials. CCS is the only technology we have available that can actually prevent CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere from sites that are CO2-heavy, with direct air capture showing we can remove carbon from the air (though it is not inefficient). Yes, that CO2 is instead going into the deep subsurface (mineralized or as a supercritical plume) but it can be managed with robust regulations and scientific monitoring. Petroleum based combustion is not going away and especially in an incoming Trump administration I see any option on the table as a good one when it comes to carbon wrangling. I’m happy to debate this because as a society we need to have dialogue about how to mitigate climate change.
Regarding this Illinois project, this project began 10 years ago as a proof of concept, of course target sequestration rates will be lower than desired. DOE regularly invests huge sums of money to develop technology for industry using research scale pilots. This plant was never meant to be a proof of what large-scale CCS can do.
Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.
“Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. “It would require a massive undertaking. If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.”
(NASA)
This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.
As someone who plants a lot of trees, the main benefit in my view is the huge protective effect they’ll have on extreme heat in urban areas. They’re an essential climate adaptation strategy but not a very good preventative one.
This is sadly not a surprise. Any carbon capture project that doesn’t involve trees is guaranteed to be a money sink and little else. Any process that pulls carbon out of the air is going to be an energy intensive one. Which means that many carbon capture projects are carbon positive. Often by a significant margin. Most of them are pushed by the oil companies since it’s something they can point to as helping the environment but it increases power usage and their profits. So it’s the option they want everyone to go with. And they’d prefer if we ignore the option that uses self replicating structures with built in solar panels that have spent the last billion years becoming hyper efficient at this exact task.
In this case, the carbon is being captured is a concentrated stream resulting from ethanol fermentation (point source capture). It’s more efficient than capturing carbon from the air (direct air capture) due to the much higher initial concentration.
Yeah just building solar to replace a fossil fuel plant is a way better means of preventing CO2 from entering the atmosphere in the first place, but that’s not sexy so fuck it, let’s burn a gigajoule of energy to absorb a tonne of CO2
Yep, some carbon capture tech is even used to extract more oil. They push CO2 down a well to push out more oil, then they get carbon credits for that. Does the carbon stay in the well after it runs dry? Who knows, it’s not the oil company’s problem any more.
From what I know, the co2 is pumped under immense pressure, to the point of solidifying into dry ice. At that depth where this is done once the well is sealed up, it is relatively stable.
Not exactly dry ice, it is supercritically pressured carbon dioxide so it has the density of a liquid but defuses like a gas. CO2 plumes are stable at depths where injection occurs because they are maintained in a pressure and temperature environment where the CO2 stays in a liquid stage, so it will never rise to the surface like a conventional lighter-than-air gas. In-situ mineral carbonation can also occur where the CO2 is injected into silicate rock formations to promote carbonate mineral formation, locking the CO2 for thousands (millions maybe) years.
Planting more trees and making more solar panels won’t fix the issue of rapidly increasing CO2 emissions around the world. Making solar panels is not a green industry and the ability to build them locally is not really an option for a lot of countries, which will need petroleum fuel to ship panels and mine the materials. CCS is the only technology we have available that can actually prevent CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere from sites that are CO2-heavy, with direct air capture showing we can remove carbon from the air (though it is not inefficient). Yes, that CO2 is instead going into the deep subsurface (mineralized or as a supercritical plume) but it can be managed with robust regulations and scientific monitoring. Petroleum based combustion is not going away and especially in an incoming Trump administration I see any option on the table as a good one when it comes to carbon wrangling. I’m happy to debate this because as a society we need to have dialogue about how to mitigate climate change.
Regarding this Illinois project, this project began 10 years ago as a proof of concept, of course target sequestration rates will be lower than desired. DOE regularly invests huge sums of money to develop technology for industry using research scale pilots. This plant was never meant to be a proof of what large-scale CCS can do.
Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.
As someone who plants a lot of trees, the main benefit in my view is the huge protective effect they’ll have on extreme heat in urban areas. They’re an essential climate adaptation strategy but not a very good preventative one.