Submitted 1 day ago by Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/761e4fd7-a210-4495-a98e-61276396d3d8.jpeg
I can’t wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
Only if there was a small pipe or “smoke stack” that could emit these in super high concentrations of CO2 where we could just pipe it straight to the ground instead. Maybe we find all of those we could even stop them producing in the first place and leaving all the carbon in the ground. 🤔
/s
carbon capture is always a bad idea because the energy it uses cancels out the co2 it pulls from the atmosphere
If you put it right on the exhaust of a power plant it should be good no? Or not good as in good good, but better than nothing.
Unless it uses hydro, nuclear, wind, solar
And the amount of CO2 it captures is miniscule in comparison.
Which Trump has canceled many projects of those.
Current state of the art DAC plants are incredibly inefficient. Also, even if they would come with efficiency that is comparable to trees, they would still lack other positive ecological functions of trees.
It was always going to be inefficient trying to capture something that’s 400ppm.
Currently running an algae farm. First step is water, which holds 8x the gasous CO2 as the air it is exposed to.
People will do anything other than planting more trees and looking after the worlds ocean ecosystem health. Most air is cleaned by algae in oceans and then trees in land, in that order. But people will just make machines for things which were taken care of by mother earth for millennia.
Way to reinvent the tree I guess?
Fun fact, most of the O2 we breathe is processed from CO2 by algae, not trees.
I mean, trees help, but the planet is mostly covered in water, so algae has a bit of an advantage.
The problem is that the ocean has historically been one part that environmental activism has struggled with, because how do you hold someone accountable for ecological damage done on international waters?
Any damage there tends to then affect bays, natural marinas, shore lines, and other areas where algae like living.
Trees are good, but they can probably do more good by replacing these carbon capture systems with algae ponds. They’re powered by the sun too.
I can’t believe the ghouls in the Texas government let anyone past their ideological minefield to even get the permits signed, much less build the thing.
You would be very surprised by the hypocrisy in Texas.
While they are saying all this ridiculous anti green stuff:
“Texas ranks first in the nation for wind power generation, second for solar power generation, second in the nation for battery storage, and third in the nation for the number of electric vehicle registrations through 2023, according to the online Renewables on the Rise 2024 dashboard released on Wednesday by Environment Texas Research & Policy Center.”
Shhh, don’t draw too much attention to it or the fucktard republicans will try to kill it.
“The Mechanical Forest” sounds like a Ray Bradbury story.
Is this the next gen Nvidia card?
My first thought was “bitcoin farm”.
CO2in
Direct air capture is a scam. It requires energy that comes from somewhere else. Capturing CO2 requires energy, it’s basic physics/chemistry.
Nothing about it makes sense excpet as an expensive boondoggle and a distraction for correcting the root causes of climate change.
This will only ever make sense when we have carbon neutral energy that is “too cheap to meter.” So, like, nuclear fusion, or solar panels become cheaper than tar roofs. In other words, these systems will make sense after climate change is solved. lol.
Exactly.
We need a study to determine how much energy is released from burning billionaires. That’s the only way these things might be carbon-neutral!
Finally, someone who gets it!
That energy can come from somewhere that doesn’t produce more carbon than this sequesters. Solar, wind, nuclear. Obviously we need to stop burning fossil fuels, but also we need to turn the carbon we’ve already produced back into a form that won’t find its way back into the air.
It can, but it isn’t and it won’t. DAC is a scam and a distraction until fossil fuels are out of the equation. It is a false hope, a glamour, to keep us from addressing the root causes.
Cmon bro
They’re building nuclear plants for AI, you think they’re gonna build what, wind farms to run a DAC plant? They just basically made it unaffordable to put solar on your own home, do you think they won’t be like “lol build a natural gas power plant to run it”
Nothing gets done if the Saudis don’t win.
That article’s only real point is that we shouldn’t pin our hopes entirely on sequestration. Nothing about it being invalid or “a scam.”
Basically summed up in these two paragraphs:
On the one hand, putting more money into carbon removal will help scale up—and drive down the cost of—technologies that will be needed in the future.
On the other hand, the growing excitement around these technologies could feed unrealistic expectations about how much we can rely on carbon removal, and thus how much nations and corporations can carry on emitting over the crucial coming decades. Market demands are also likely to steer attention toward cheaper solutions that are not as reliable or long-lasting.
Carbon sequestration is likely to play a part in becoming carbon negative, and deserves to be explored.
Until fossil fuels are not a part of the energy equation, DAC is a band-aid where a tourniquet is required. Sure do research, but DAC will never work while we are burning fossil fuels for energy. It doesn’t even make economic sense.
So what if it required 1 watt?
You have to do actual math to determine if it’s worth it, not just write it off because it requires energy.
The more you spend, the more you save!
The math has been done to death. CO2 capture requires energy input and doesn’t yield any. This is basic stuff.
Only if we should have natural solution to this problem… Let’s fuck up the planet even more by producing more shit. How about planting trees and stopping the deforestation.
Planting trees doesn’t produce revenue for billionaires and shareholders. This does. Ergo we must produce expensive, over engineered machines to replace trees. Bees are next.
Trees are inefficient too but we actually already know what we need to do to ramp up the efficiency of the photosynthesis process in trees with genetic tinkering.
The bigger problem is that we have reached a point where trees aren’t enough anymore. The oceans have acidified. There’s just too much co2 to capture at this point.
Neither trees nor these can help much if fossil fuels continue to be burned at increasing rates.
That’s for sure. But as I don’t see people going away from fossil fuels anytime soon, we have to at least make it less terrible. EVs aren’t an answer, as making the batteries fucks up the nature a lot, wind power takes more energy to build than it will return in it’s lifetime and the machines will haunt us after they are decommissioned. I live in northern Sweden and because people in south aren’t too keen to look at those ugly things, they place it around their colony, the north. So we have new roads in forests, trees are being cut fo huge wind farms screwing up our ecosystem and being transported up here mostly from Denmark. Everyone trying to minimize their impact is currently at least a dim path forward. People are against nuclear, but if properly executed, it is currently the cleanest energy we have. Let’s hope cold fusion comes quick.
Also this plant are (with the latest technology) really less efficient than trees, like 60-70% less efficient IIRC.
Yeah, and the Wright Flyer could only travel like 30 yards. A 10 megabyte hard drive used to fill an entire room. You can’t build a better machine without building the worse ones first
Planting trees is only a temporary carbon hold. Also, it takes like 200 trees to offset the carbon for a years worth of driving from a single car.
I do have strong doubts about the usefulness of these fans, though.
Looks like your get the post title
The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.
Too late.
The thing about oceans is they have massive amounts of inertia.
We’re still surviving on the inertia from before we fucked them up, but we’ve already fucked them up, and some of the consequences of that won’t be apparent until 50 or 100 years from now.
Same with fixing them. We won’t see the effects (or the unintended side effects) of anything we do to fix them for decades, and even then they’ll probably be unnoticeable under the effects of how much we fucked them up before trying to fix them.
Stopping is probably indeed the best option, hopefully we haven’t damaged them enough that they won’t fix themselves eventually… but that’ll take hundreds or more probably thousands of years.
I’ll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective…
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that “refine” the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
Don’t count solar out, the growth trajectory is looking like it’ll supply most of the world’s electricity in a couple of decades. Solar will be the MVP that makes all these inefficient energy uses more viable.
(There’s no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
Only because it’s not being built, so really very very very misleading.
In sunny places like the southern parts of the USA, if you took the land footprint of a typical nuclear power station and covered it with solar panels with regular sized walkways in between, you generate pretty much the same power output, but with none of the toxic nuclear waste.
If you put a used EV battery under every 40-80 of them now you have 24 hour instantly responsive power.
Onshore wind power is the cheapest way of generating electricity, by some margin.
Guess why we’re not doing all this. Is it the cost? Of course not! It’s far more expensive to build a nuclear power plant. Is it the output? Of course not! Is it the environmental impact? Of course not! Is it the political lobbying and online FUD from vested interests in the power industry? Bingo bingo bingo! Of course it is!
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You’d also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you’ll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we’ve generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we’ll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world’s power on CO2 scrubbing, we’d end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won’t do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora’s box and it’ll cost us centuries to close it
You’re right about most of this, but the carbon doesn’t return to the atmosphere “as soon as they die”.
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
But planting trees doesn’t provide transportation or electricity, it does pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere though. In this case you can compare the capture technology to trees planted on the same area of land and see which one is better land use for the same purpose.
planting trees also only works for carbon capture if you don’t cut them down until they have lived their entire natural lives, which is not the way it’s done anywhere.
Explain that one to me. The tree is made of carbon, storing the tree somewhere outside the carbon cycle would reduce the amount of carbon. Why would they need to be fully mature?
Even if you let them fully mature they will eventually breakdown because that’s what trees do and then all that stored carbon will return to the atmosphere. This carbon capture is mostly fruitless as the amount of carbon they store is negligible compared to how much we are adding to the atmosphere but if they are turning it into “rock” which is likely just graphite that would take carbon out of the carbon cycle and actually sequester it. which we desperately need to do to offset the ridiculous amount sequestered carbon we are adding to the atmosphere
Entirely different use cases. Planting trees makes a deeper reservoir to store carbon, but it doesn’t take that carbon out of the carbon cycle. There is still more carbon than the carbon cycle evolved to handle. We need to do both, and also stop bringing more carbon from outside the carbon cycle into it.
This feels like Big Oil PR.
Like, ‘nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.’ Which is a total lie.
I mean, this may get downvoted, but trees are just trying to live, not fix the climate. They are a very real part of the solution, but I’m fine with considering ‘supplements’.
Sometimes the enemy of the good is the perfect.
My question is, wouldn’t the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?
This is also ignoring the gross notion that these can make money so they’re more worthy than trees when considering solutions.
In AZ and likely Texas, they could be powered by clean energy. They’re not, but they could. AZ can produce an insane amount of solar, and sun farms are continuing to grow. Texas can produce a hell of a lot of wind power if they could quit arguing against themselves. AZ also has some hydro from Hoover, and a nuclear plant.
There’s just a hell of a lot more effective steps we could be doing before trying to get to these capture systems. And even if the capture works and completely offsets the carbon used to build the systems and the power used to run them and 100x more, it’ll just be used as further excuse to continue to do nothing.
Reading your comment makes this concept even stranger because you can sustainably farm trees to get the same carbon removal benefits and then also make money selling the lumber which will keep the carbon locked up just fine if you make sure to sell it for long term use applications like carpentry.
In theory, hardware like this is designed to function as a solar sink, utilising surplus production during peak hours when storage devices (batteries, dams, etc.) are fully charged.
If the construction of these can provide a more efficient means of carbon capture than growing trees then turning those trees into building materials over and over …. It’s a good thing.
If not … it’s performative tbh.
It’s performative, the biggest ‘carbon capture’ facility made so far, didn’t even come close to offsetting its own carbon footprint.
Totally agree.
if it’s powered by renewables, sure. if not… uh… seems like we’d be much, much better off reducing output.
It’s not entirely powered by renewables day 1, but a small solar array that they plan to build upon over time.
Power for Direct Air Capture will be sourced from new renewable or low-emission power sources. Power generation will be additional to what is available from the grid today, ensuring DAC is not removing an existing supply of renewable power from the grid.
And the look much better than trees too /s
Don’t they sell the CO2 to fracking companies?
Why does this look like someone threw it together in Minecraft
I thought it was just a picture of a new graphics card that was coming out. I almost didn’t read it because I said to myself I couldn’t afford a new graphics card in the next few years.
I thought someone did the math because co2 scrubbing and the facility would be size of Georgia and have to draw in hurricane winds
Yep, it is, in part, a scam diversion by the fossil fuel industry
Leave it to those ghouls to greenwash in a way that is actually a net negative, rather than just ineffectual
I wouldn’t doubt it. Personally I’d rather they put down a field of mirrors to reflect the sunlight. I’d be curious how effective that would be
I’m a little fuzzy on the part where it “turns to rock.”
Carbon is an amazingly flexible element that gets bound up with lots of other elements. Oxygen is also incredibly reactive and makes up almost half the mass of the Earth’s crust. Add in all the heat down there for activation energy, and it starts to make sense. I’m no expert though.
You know, in a few hundred thousand years.
For the machines? They’re getting at how carbon can easily turn into CaCo3 it’s stable provided pH is neutral
In short, these machines make hot CaCo3. Now if we can figure how to inject marshmallows, we will have the most-wonderful volcanoes.
Happy to see that nobody in the comment section seems to fall for this. I’m sure that’s representative for the global human race
Only need half a million of them to keep up with current emissions.
For comparison, there are far fewer power plants that release co2. Based on some rough estimates I foind, there are fewer than 10,000 in total plants, most have more than one generator.
And those turn a profit, no one is going to fund half a million capture plants. Building out more solar and wind is insanely more financially prudent. N.
Over building with nuclear power with its massive capital costs makes far more sense than these things.
These solutions always remind of this scene from Futurma. Image
Trees do not permenantly sequester carbon, they act as a reservoir. If we cover the entire land area of the earth in amazon rainforest, it’ll sequester like 150 years worth of our carbon emissions. After that, there would be no more land left to plant trees on, and we would be back to where we are now. The only solution is to simultaneously stop bringing carbon from outside the carbon cycle into the carbon cycle, and also remove the carbon that we’ve already brought in.
Total waste of fuckin resources
It would probably take decades to offset its own carbon footprint, let alone making it negative. And then it would need to actually be significant.
Just plant trees and restore carbon sinks you fucking techno fascists.
Nice, now the techbros can finally achieve their lifelong dream of paving all the forests and selling tickets for the tree museums.
After that they can plant trees on Mars.
I’m not a huge fan of this approach.
If they can make like the size of 100-floor building, maybe there will be some differences rather than using trees that only occupied horizontal plane.
Forests: are we a joke to you?
Now reunite Mythbusters and stack like 30 seconds of freeway traffic worth of cars facing it. Go.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 36 minutes ago
I remember seeing something about fitting ACs for carbon capture. What ever happened with that?
zbyte64@awful.systems 28 minutes ago
Nowhere because it makes no sense. ACs aren’t directly burning fuel, nor would capturing carbon help in their operation. It’s like selling an extra unrelated device on top of an already expensive appliance. Sounds like a marketing scheme to shift responsibility to individual consumers.