Most good ideas have a serious downside. At scale, I can only imagine how many birds these things would suck up. Kill em via climate change, or suck them to their deaths. Poor things.
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I will view this investment by oil companies as non nefarious when investment in future oil reserves is $0.
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I heard an Exxon-Mobil advertisement yesterday as they touted their work in carbon removal. You don't get to not only destroy the environment for a century, but knowingly fund a campaign over decades to undermine efforts to address global warming, and then pat yourself on the back by advertising about your paying a few poor schmoes to develop carbon removal strategies. Sorry, we ain't buying it.
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Please, we love puppies and clean-energy startups and women in technology and every other thing that might inspire you to believe that we are good people. Just let us continue pumping fossil fuels out of the earth with reckless abandon. It is insanely profitable for us to do so. Thanks and lots of love. -Every oil company in this list
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How much fossil fuel is burned to run the fans? The article doesn't talk about that.
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@bcb Plants run on renewable energy. Otherwise they don't make sense.
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Yeah no. They're "investing" in the outfit so they can snuff anything it patents before it ever hits factory and thus make clean energy tech as wildly expensive as any other US drug.
It's Reason #239457639 to End The Patent entirely, along with others like "software patents are inherently evil", "1-Click was, SOMEHOW, EVER a patentable thing", and "does the inventor REALLY have enough leverage over their wealthy employer to demand reasonable terms of use?". Then there's no "intellectual property" submarine-patent threats to look over both shoulders in worry about. Just kill it!
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Let’s have $100 / ton carbon (refundable) tax and press China and others who do trade with us to do similarly, and become leaders in innovation, nurturing startups like this one, and creating a market for carbon innovation.
Most economists might suggest that $100 is a little high, but even players like Exxon and Shell are suggesting $40-60. $100 is a conservative approach that values the risk associated with catastrophic climate change.
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Okay, clean air would be nice. Now what about clean water? What about clean seas and the creatures that are contaminated by leaks that STILL have not been stopped?
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I wonder why the article did not mention ExxonMobil's operating test facility that recovers CO2 from power plant exhaust using fuel cell technology that not only recovers carbon but generates byproduct energy to contribute to reduced fossil fuel consumption. The article appeared to be a public relations release for energy majors that are behind the curve.
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Whenever I see something like this, I ask what powers the whole process, starting with constructing the building, the fans, and all the other steps. Until we are powering with wind, solar, or nuclear, we are way behind pulling CO2--fully oxidized carbon--out of the atmosphere. "Burning CO2" ain't gonna happen. Bury it, if at all possible, or let something like a whole lot of chlorophyll do the converting. Glad I'm old.
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(Intended Audience: The wives and daughters of the carbon barons & the carbon-sponsored politicians)
I truly fear for the future safety of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the owners, board members and executives of the oil, natural gas, coal and pipeline companies and their sponsored political “leaders.”
As living conditions on our planet become unbearable due to the severe, relentless impacts of Climate Change, generations of devastated citizens around the world will ask: “Who is most directly responsible for this existential catastrophe?”
When these citizens look around, they will find many of the culpable carbon barons and carbon-sponsored politicians have already passed on to whatever afterlife awaits them. But the direct descendants of the carbon barons and the carbon-sponsored politicians will still be here. And there will be no escape – not even behind their gated communities – from the wrath of billions of incensed citizens on every continent.
For the carbon barons, it all comes down to one essential choice to be made RIGHT NOW: harvest their carbon assets and sacrifice their descendants – or – strand their carbon assets and save their descendants?
For the carbon-sponsored politicians, it also comes down to one essential choice to be made RIGHT NOW: continue to dither on Climate Change legislation and sacrifice their descendants – or – pass sweeping and meaningful Climate Change mitigation legislation and save their descendants?
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Just like the drug companies profiting off of opiate addiction remedies. Lie about your product not causing any harm, and then when it does, profit off the fix as well.
Oxymoron of the nth order
sounds very promising but no-one ever talks about planting more trees. This would be as efficient as removing carbon dioxide from the air. Trees also provide shade, homes for birds and animals and prevent soil erosion.
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@valerie
There is a great awareness of the value of trees, and of not clear-cutting rain forests for example. But everything has to be tried, it will take everyone and every tactic and strategy to counter-act the greenhouse gases already in and being steadily added to the atmosphere, isn't that right?
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@valerie
Lots of people talk about planting more trees. Try googling "Iceland reforestation", for example. We have to try multiple approaches to this very complex problem, and it's good to see that money is being put into this effort.
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The National Academies of Science did an excellent report on this subject which may interest your readers http://nap.edu/25259. It can be downloaded for free as a pdf.
This is a good investment by the oil industry. There are plenty of others that I would like to interest their boards in that will help preserve the value of their capital, monetary and human, as the World shifts from fossil fuels for energy to new replacement energy technologies which are imperative if humanity is to possibly avoid the certain catastrophic consequences of global warming should we continue to use all of the remaining fossil fuels until they are depleted from the Earth.
With my scientist colleagues I have been thinking through this problem for decades as an energy R&D program director and public policy researcher and believe that we can avoid a "6th Extinction" and continue improving our standard of living by an all-out international effort to capture solar energy in space with Maglev launched satellites in geosynchrounous orbit that can convert and beam solar energy to antennae fields for distribution on urban electric grids for the projected World population of 10 Billion by the end of the Century. Electricity created in this manner can be created very cheaply (about 2 cents per kwhr) and could use market forces to drive the shift.
This system is discussed in Dr. James Powell's books, "Spaceship Earth, How Long Before We Crash?" and "Silent Earth, Will Humans Give Up Fossil Fuels?"
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@james jordan too slow.....by 2100
@Peter Puffin
Thanks for reading my comment. I am not the greatest writer. You are correct that 2100 is too slow but I was trying to convey that we can improve the standard of living of the world which will number about 10 Billion by 2100.
Starting soon, the system could be completed by 2050 and once this cheap power is available I would anticipate rapid electrification of industry, homes, and factories, and surface transportation logistics. There could be thousands of CO2 scrubbers in place and thousands of desal units. The goal is too use this new energy source to continue to improve the quality of life of all humankind.
I think that synthetic jet fuel made from air and water and cheap electricity will be made because I don't think we will find a energy weight to energy output will replace jet engines and people will want to travel.
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Large-scale Space Solar Power is a very complex integrated system of systems that requires numerous significant advances in current technology and capabilities. - John Mankins, NASA
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"In another kind of facility, captured carbon dioxide would be combined with hydrogen extracted from water to make synthetic fuel that can be processed into gasoline, diesel or jet fuel."
So, the process takes carbon out of the atmosphere, then they make fuel out of it, which involves using EXTRA energy to first make hydrogen. Then this fuel they make is burned. The burning of the fuel puts carbon right back into the atmosphere, doesn't it?
Why use not solar or wind generated electricity to simply recharge an EV? Instead they want to use the solar or wind to make hydrogen to make fuel to burn that releases the carbon back into the atmosphere that they used a lot of energy to take out of the atmosphere.
How does this make sense?
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We recently commemorated a century's success in extracting another important element from the atmosphere -nitrogen.
Everyone will remember the pioneering work of the WW I German scientists who developed the process which enabled their country to overcome the nitrate shortage which was depleting the fertility of German farmland due to an Allied blockade. There has always been a darker side to this innovation, of course, as the nitrates produced, -being an essential element in munitions production- led to a prolongation to the horrors of trench warfare.
A century of industrial Nitrogen extraction from the atmosphere has not , I believe, led to any serious denting in the planets' stock of this valuable element. I tdoes however require methane as a feedstock and expensive electricity. Has this extraction provided us with any "ballpark figure" which would be useful in deciding if CO2 removal is an economic proposition?
@Edward Hogan: These two efforts are quite different. The German discovery, which I recount in my book "The Alchemy of Air," is based on the use of atmospheric nitrogen (which makes up about 80% of the air around you) to make the fertilizers that are feeding billions of people. The attempt described in this article to pull out carbon dioxide (which comprises about 0.04% of the air around you) is much more difficult to do in terms of cost and energy at any level that might significantly offset emissions. This appears to me to be a bit of greenwashing by the oil companies.
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This article is a fake headline designed to fool the casual observer who doesn't make it past the headline or have a basic understanding of the laws of thermodynamics.
Read through the details, and you'll find that the CO2 is intended sold for uses which will readily return it to the atmosphere, *thus accomplishing nothing* -- and using a whole lot of energy in the process. They do mention that the CO2 gas could be pumped underground, but they do not mention that the gas is not likely to remain there, nor that there are limited locations (often oil fields) where this is possible. This is strongly reminiscent of the mainstream media's articles from a few years back which implied (but did not state) that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. A majority of Americans actually believed that to be true, and now we're being lead to believe more tripe!
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Yea I'm old enough to remember oil companies setting up wind turbines all along the highway at San Gorgonio in Southern CA on a similar promise. They sat motionless for decades, all promises and no action. They were just PR props.
With their long and sullied history certainly no one actually trusts anything fossil fuel companies have to say.
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I thought calcium carbonate or bicarbonate was a stable carbon compound. If the goal is carbon reduction and sequestration why not stop at the carbonate process step and bury the pellets?
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The bottle in the picture should have had the label "Snake Oil".
All these virtuous efforts are trying to take a low-energy material, CO2, and process it somehow, usually into a higher energy material (e.g. carbonate) or into a compressed form of CO2 pumped into storage. Whatever the method, there's an energy input involved. Unless you can prove that the energy used would otherwise go to waste, say from the exhaust of a power plant, you need an energy input.
Now comes the argument "the energy will come from renewable resources". May I remind people that renewables are not yet over 100% of our current needs. By all means replace fossil fuel burning plants with renewable energy generators, but do this first rather than signing up to these thermodynamically suspect technologies. And once the fossil fuel plants are gone, how much renewable energy will have to be supplied to make a serious dent in CO2 levels? How long will it take? Maybe the natural sinks for CO2 will do the job?
These schemes sound more like jobs programs, or backdoor research done for other reasons. Maybe even cargo cult projects - if we build it, money will come!
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I can state definitively that these processes can do very little to mitigate climate change so long as fossil fuels continue to be used as we do now. Once released to the atmosphere by combusting fossil fuels, carbon dioxide is mixed with other gases and becomes very dilute. Much effort, and energy, must be expended to operate processes to extract carbon dioxide in this dilute condition. Renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power would be much better utilized if they prevent use of fossil fuels in the first place. The carbon reduction in the atmosphere would be immediate and absolute. The carbon removal technologies of this article have value only if they are implemented with a rapid and complete phase out of fossil fuel use.
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@Dave I have no problem with the argument that solar and wind power would be better used to replace fossil-fuel power, but I fail to see how preventing the use of fossil fuels would reduce the carbon in the atmosphere. It would clearly reduce the rate at which CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, perhaps even to zero, but how would it take carbon out of the atmosphere?
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Help me with the second law of thermodynamics. Seems to me that you have to use more energy than you get to make fuel out of CO2. So the idea is to use solar energy to turn the CO2 into fuel, then burn the fuel to re-release the CO2. This ends up with less usable energy than if you simply use the solar directly, unless you figure out how to avoid the second law of thermodynamics. So it becomes an energy storage system with no particular carbon benefit. There are better energy storage systems available.
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@David Yes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is working against us here. Burning fossil fuels results in a entropy generation, or equivalently, a more disordered condition. However, if renewable energy sources such as solar energy or wind energy are used, the processes described here can still be beneficial, even if only marginally. This is because energy from these sources would otherwise become converted to heat after doing no useful work for us. Humans can intervene and extract something useful from sunlight or wind before these degenerate to simply heat the environment.
@David use nature to suck it out....plant trees green deserts, provide food , take the heat locus out etc etc....you are on the first principle. Yo.
But if they do this we will need to blame those who burn fossil fuels for climate change.
Quiz:
Which is more disgusting ?
Opiate manufacturers expanding into addiction treatment . or :
Oil companies pursuing profits for carbon removal from our atmosphere ?
Send your answers in to the appropriate CEO.
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Only obliquely mentioned was the energy cost of this process, and where the energy for large scale carbon capture would come from. Locating a facility in the Pacific Northwest, where there is hydroelectric power, is advantageous only if that power is not compensated for by the burning of fossil fuel elsewhere.
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@Paul Ephraim -- and from a carbon sequestration perspective, it's not advantageous at all!
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Properly managed grasslands with deep root systems sequester carbon as efficiently as forests.
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@Kim Allsup -- absolutely! A redirection (or simple cessation) of corn/soy/ethanol subsidies (which I receive as a farmer, even though I grown none of these things) towards pasture-based farming would sequester large amounts of carbon and greatly improve american's health as we return to grass based instead of grain-based agriculture. It would likely reduce the dead zones near major river outlets, algae outbreaks, and virtually eliminate soil erosion. It would also greatly reduce pesticide contamination of our drinking water, and stop the killing of bees, butterflies, birds, and other important species.
But alas, it would significantly cut into Bayer/Monsanto/Dupont-Pioneer's stock prices, and is thus completely untenable in a corrupt and corporately dominated society.
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@David Veale better still we cut out meat...and grow trees at least in some mosaic form ? Compost systems also. But essentially return from atmosphere to soil ?
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Too little, too late.
When the history books are written—if, really—oil companies will be the poster child of that specific type of greed exemplified in western civilization.
Deservedly so.
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As the article alludes to, we already have a great direct air capture system, they are called forests. Industrially managed forests in the U.S. Southeast and Pacific Northwest are currently storing less than 1/3 of their ecological potential due mostly to short harvesting rotations. These forest are among some of the most naturally carbon dense ecosystems in the world. Amending state level forest practice laws to minimize clear-cutting and extend rotation periods could result in hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon being removed from the atmosphere. Industrialists would love to find a technocratic solution to climate change before it threatens the very social and economic structures that led to it and the host of other environmental issues we face. Climate change presents an opportunity for society to re-think its relationship to the non-human world. It would be a mistake to trade this opportunity for a quick fix.
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@Josh -- all true (and I'm a former commercial forester who worked in these very forests). However, these forests are already failing as carbon sinks. Look at the massive increase in fires over the last few years, and it's quite questionable as to whether these areas can support forests long term. Many of California's forests simply died from extended drought conditions, even without the action of fire. The flip side of reducing timber production is that we'd be likely to start using more carbon intensive building materials such as steel and/or concrete, which isn't good either.
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@David Veale - Good points (I'm also a forester). The fact that some forests (Southern Cal, SW) are in danger of becoming carbon sources, as opposed to sinks, highlights the importance of maximizing carbon storage in the PNW (coastal) and the SE (not in immediate danger of becoming sources). As you know, these area are less drought and wildfire prone (in part due to mgmt). Extending rotation age has been demonstrated to increase fiber supply in the long-term as well as quality and strength of wood. This could open new (old) markets for large timbers that could be used in substitution for concrete and steel.
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@Josh then take on the deserts ? Surely we have to irrigate and create new forests ? If necessary de salinate water and irrigate ? If we re afforest deserts we create whole new worlds; we can surely do this ? Take the heat source down ?
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