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!
I would probably name it T.R.E. Terrestrial Regeneration Engine.
Inspiring. Innovating.
Submitted 7 months ago by Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/761e4fd7-a210-4495-a98e-61276396d3d8.jpeg
Comments
wabafee@lemmy.world 7 months ago
thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Why spend energy to make energy when you could make solar. Or capture at source tech for non energy producing carbon sources?
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 7 months ago
How much carbon dioxide was produced to build this fucking thing.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
How much environmental damage from surface disturbance and tailings?
amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And then to run it! I hate how these ideas get funding and are immediately being built without question. How much energy was put in the materials, in building it, and how much more will they need to run it to extract how much CO2 exactly? And then let’s say it works. It works so well that in that region CO2 levels fall well below and reach normal levels. What then? They leave it there? Move it?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Ssssssh. Sssssssssssssssh. Only dreams now.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
Only kisses Jenny
ColdWater@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
Fuck no I hope this fail, plant trees or die
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 7 months ago
In the middle of a desert? Planting trees is good, but its not enough to save us by itself.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Trees are better carbon capture devices, you even get lumber from them.
unphazed@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And sea algae are even better.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I believe that’s what OPs caption in the post body is getting at
Cyberflunk@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Fuck this postt, this is all fiction. There are initiatives that AMERICA IS DESTROYING.
Occidental and 1PointFive can’t secure permits, let alone funding, it’s all hand waving slop.
3 fucking minutes of research is all it takes
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Occidental’s plant was purely greenwashing. They never had any intention of fixing the damage their company contributed.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
I knew it was bullshit the moment I saw “The US is building…” and it wasn’t a concentration camp
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Hey now, we also build bigger and bigger stroads and bigger cars every year which kill more and more children every year.
I swear we won’t stop with the urban sprawl until our entire country is covered in asphalt
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 7 months ago
I remember seeing something about fitting ACs for carbon capture. What ever happened with that?
zbyte64@awful.systems 7 months 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.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 7 months ago
What we really need are ACs that utilise AI by cloud computing on the Blockchain
olafurp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
There’s actually a new kind of gas turbine thermodynamic cycle that does in fact emit super-critical CO2 in a highly concentrated form that is extremely easy to collect and sequester. netpower.com/technology/
They’re building a 300MW facility in Texas right now. I’d say this is a really solid contender for a transitionary power generation while we stand around with our heads in the sand.
olafurp@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yeah, capturing it from the source is way better than capturing from some random air. A capture rate of 90% as an addon to current coal/gas infra including cement production would buy us a ton of transition time
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Well we still need to capture the excess CO2 that we’ve pumped into the air for the last 200 years.
Sorgan71@lemmy.world 7 months ago
carbon capture is always a bad idea because the energy it uses cancels out the co2 it pulls from the atmosphere
Boo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
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.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 7 months ago
No. Direct carbon capture is essentially burning fuel in reverse, and at a bare minimum requires roughly the same amount of energy as was released when you burned the fuel. Consider you have a coal power plant operating at 45% energy conversion efficiency. That means for each 1,000 kW of power produced, you actually released 2,200 kW of thermal power total burning the coal. Guess how much energy you need to completely negate the impact of the power plant? It’s much closer to that 2,200 kW number. Let’s say that it only has a thermodynamic requirement of 2000kW due to a favorable storage reaction. However, those machines aren’t 1000% efficient. Even at something like 80% efficiency (much higher than I have ever seen) that still bumps you up to needing 2500 kW, and at 50% efficiency you get to 4000 kW. So in order to run your carbon capture scheme, even in the most optimal conditions, you need more than double (and potentially quadruple) the power output of the plant you’re putting it on. Now you might say “but you could use green energy to run the carbon capture!” But you could also just replace the plant with green energy and bypass the whole problem.
Carbon capture technology is essentially just PR from fossil fuel companies and it’s a total scam the way that it’s sold to the general public. It’s like if you saw a toddler going around dumping out containers of glitter and said “We need to invest in a better vacuum cleaner to keep the house clean of all this glitter to keep up with this toddler” instead of focusing on stopping the toddler from dumping out more glitter first and worrying about the vacuuming up later. Carbon capture cannot possibly keep up with or make a meaningful dent in total CO2 concentrations until we dramatically reduce emissions. It is a thermodynamic impossibility, and it legitimately pisses me off that there are engineers working on these scams who are either too stupid to realize this or are complacent in the scams.
nexguy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Unless it uses hydro, nuclear, wind, solar
Sorgan71@lemmy.world 7 months ago
then its a waste of money you could have spent to produce electricity
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It still uses the energy, and most of the time it just makes more sense to directly swap whatever you’re running to one of those cleaner energy sources instead of using more energy than it would take to run the machine that releases carbon to undo that.
isaaclw@lemmy.world 7 months ago
How about we start with using those sources instead of generating co2 we have to clean. Tht would be more effective.
Sirdubdee@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Can we start using heat generated by data centers yet?
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And the amount of CO2 it captures is miniscule in comparison.
Xatolos@reddthat.com 7 months ago
Which Trump has canceled many projects of those.
Etterra@discuss.online 7 months ago
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.
Fenrisulfir@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
The amount of energy, created through burning fossil fuels, required to run the things offsets the benefit. This is Texas greenwashing burning energy for no reason.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 7 months ago
Carbon capture is the preferred solution to climate change for oil and gas companies, because is the only one that doesn’t require a reduction on oil and gas extraction.
blarth@thelemmy.club 7 months ago
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.
wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Rick Perry said “Energy is energy is energy” and pushed to modernize the grid. It had some successes like lots of generation from renewables. But no new nukes and the coal plants still chugged along.
toppy@lemy.lol 7 months ago
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.
PrimeMinisterKeyes@leminal.space 7 months ago
“The Mechanical Forest” sounds like a Ray Bradbury story.
Zacryon@feddit.org 7 months ago
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.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 7 months ago
current state
No state will be efficient. Burning shit in reverse takes more energy than you got out of it in the first place. It’s a physical impossibility to make an energy efficient direct carbon capture plant.
Zacryon@feddit.org 5 months ago
Of course. But it’s the scale of inefficiency (also in terms of a financial perspective) that becomes quite significant.
icelimit@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
It was always going to be inefficient trying to capture something that’s 400ppm.
Zacryon@feddit.org 5 months ago
Yes, of course there is a physical limit. But I’m not sure we’ve leveraged all that’s possible yet. And currently the scale of inefficiency - also from a financial perspective - is quite significant. Especially when comparing to other methods like planting trees.
Inucune@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Currently running an algae farm. First step is water, which holds 8x the gasous CO2 as the air it is exposed to.
hOrni@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Don’t they sell the CO2 to fracking companies?
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Way to reinvent the tree I guess?
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
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.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
Is this the next gen Nvidia card?
hOrni@lemmy.world 7 months ago
My first thought was “bitcoin farm”.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
CO2in
hayvan@feddit.nl 7 months ago
The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
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.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 7 months ago
And the look much better than trees too /s
udon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
But if we can pretend that we might have an idea to solve it in the future we don’t have to even pretend to do anything now!
GaMEChld@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m a little fuzzy on the part where it “turns to rock.”
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
For the machines? They’re getting at how carbon can easily turn into CaCo3 it’s stable provided pH is neutral
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 7 months ago
In short, these machines make hot CaCo3. Now if we can figure how to inject marshmallows, we will have the most-wonderful volcanoes.
Tinidril@midwest.social 7 months ago
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.
Soggy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You know, in a few hundred thousand years.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Why does this look like someone threw it together in Minecraft
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 7 months ago
Non plainer slicing(3d printer) would actually make something like this feasible.
FrogmanL@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 7 months ago
if it’s powered by renewables, sure. if not… uh… seems like we’d be much, much better off reducing output.
blarth@thelemmy.club 7 months ago
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.
bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
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.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
My question is, wouldn’t the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?
The hardest part about green energy is getting it to the time and place where it can be most useful. That’s why real time solar power prices sometimes dip negative (where the producers are literally paying people to take that excess power off the grid), and sometimes in consistent and predictable ways (e.g., California’s “duck curve” in spring and autumn).
So with solar power being the cheapest form of generation, but highly dependent on weather conditions, the solution might be to build up overcapacity where production during cloudy days is enough, and then find some way to store the excess on sunny days for nighttime, and maybe using intermittent power sinks that can productively use energy only when the production is high (charging batteries, preemptively cooling or heating buildings and storing that for later, capturing carbon, performing less time-sensitive computer calculations like data analysis for science, etc.)
If we have systems that produce too much energy, then carbon capture (including through manufacture of fuel or other chemical feedstocks) can vary by time of day to address overcapacity.
zbyte64@awful.systems 7 months ago
What you’re missing is they use the carbon to push out more oil from the ground. That’s where the profit is.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 7 months ago
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.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
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.
invertedspear@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
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.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
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.
Pappabosley@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s performative, the biggest ‘carbon capture’ facility made so far, didn’t even come close to offsetting its own carbon footprint.
FrogmanL@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Totally agree.
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
What would work better… Trees? Or a machine consisting of rare earth metals which need to be mined and processed and are only partially recyclable… A tree outlives a machine. Replacing old machines with new ones is good for the economy, so yeah, let’s do that! Wait, what was our goal exactly?
OrteilGenou@lemmy.world 7 months ago
If trees did their god damned jobs, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place
rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Seriously, after we cleared out so much room for them, too
TigerAce@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Those lazy ass trees just standing thur.
Black@lemmy.today 7 months ago
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.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
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.
Cattail@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I thought someone did the math because co2 scrubbing and the facility would be size of Georgia and have to draw in hurricane winds
AlexCory21@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Who’s gonna pay for the build cost and maintenance? Just curious.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This feels like Big Oil PR.
Like, ‘nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.’ Which is a total lie.
Unlearned9545@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Greenwashing is an issue, but so is avoiding complicated nuance by simply laughing at an idea without understanding it.
The country I live in is mostly powered by renewables, they focus on reducing emissions, then capture at source, but they are currently having a healthy nuanced debate on whether to implement something like this.
The original set of these were built without reguard to their specific carbon offset as they were built to be exerpimental and to experiment with the technology. As with almost anything on engineering.
Modern ones have to go through a Life Cycle Assement (LCA) where they figure out when the break-even point will be before they are built and they are typically built where there is renewable energy sources. They must be net carbon negative for government subsidy.
Arizona and Texas are mostly desert where trees may not be a viable option but they have solar and wind farms. Deforestation is awful and reforestation can be a great option but these two climates in particular have not had forrests for thousands of years.
The largest one in Texas is owned and operated by an oil company, likely powered by oil, and the CO2 is used to frack more oil. For them it needs to be net profit rather then net carbon negative. Protest and ridicule away.
Iceland has the most successful powered by geothermal and is over 90% net carbon negative already and likely to increase the longer it runs.
Other places inject the CO2 into concrete building blocks making them stronger and a viable non destructive form of storage.
Others turn them into burnable fuels effectively “recycling” the CO2.
Others use them for industrial production of urea, methanol, fire exstinguishers, or even for drink carbonation or food preservation. Scrubbing the air for CO2 instead of the traditional method of capturing off-gases.