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World’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning CO2 into stone

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DBT85

Member
Now use the stone to make the tidal lagoons that generate power all the time we have a moon.

smisk said:
Where do we put all that stone though?
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Bottom of the ocean. It's rising anyway so there's more water to hide it all. What could go wrong?
 
B

Beartruck

Member
Ok it converts one household worth of emissions every year. How big is it? If you need a full factory for one household of emissions we're still fucked. Fingers crossed they can scale it down or crank the efficiency up.
 
B

BoogieWoogie

Banned
tumblr_m9cb6qcsak1r398e1o1_500.gif
 
C

Cosmo Clock 21

Banned
A few more choice quotes that answered questions I had:
And all boast that their tech is modular, meaning they can build a direct air capture plant as small or large as somebody is ready to pay for. Even at $50 per metric ton of capturing emissions, if we have to capture as much as 10 billion metric tons by 2050, we are looking at spending $500 billion each year capturing carbon dioxide from the air.
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In a 2016 study, scientists found that the carbon dioxide in these water mixtures was reacting with Iceland’s vast basaltic rock—dark igneous rock usually found under ocean floors—to form minerals. This process usually takes hundreds or thousands of years, but what was surprising in Iceland was that the mineralization occurred in less than two years. The speed probably has something to do with the unique local geology. Sandstone aquifers—which have been the most well-studied type of rock system when it comes to carbon dioxide-injection systems—react very slowly with CO2. Basalt rock, on the other hand, seems to react much more quickly, likely because of the presence of metals like iron and aluminum.
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T

Tuorom

Neo Member
Stumpokapow said:
I know people have been talking about carbon recapture for a long time. Is this the first feasible execution? It seems pretty early days and it's difficult for me to disentangle the marketing style boasts from the actual execution report.

Can someone walk me through how we solve the storage problem. The CO2 is captured into a water stream which is injected deep underground, which causes the rock in the underground to mineralize quickly. Okay. But does this change the structural stability of the ground we're injecting into? Does it affect soil quality? Does the volume of the rock increase? Will we eventually, in places where this is occurring at scale, have mountains of mineralized rock we need to store?
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Hahaha, that's a problem for the people who will grow up 100+ years from now. /s

This is pretty cool though. It would also be great if you could break up the rocks into aggregate like gravel, because I seem to recall that we are running out of it.
 
R

Regulus Tera

Romanes Eunt Domus
My only question is, what happens to all the oxygen in CO2? Is it compressed into the stone or does it roam free into the air?
 
B

Brashnir

Member
PdotMichael said:
I would claim that planting some trees is the more effective way .
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There are some pretty major issues with planting trees. First of all, they aren't enough. If you covered the entire planet in trees, it would take millions of years for them to deal with the next ten years of emissions. Second, as soon as a forest fire comes through, most of the carbon that the tree had been storing is released right back into the atmosphere.

You need to get a way to store the carbon in a place where is can't simply be released right back into the atmosphere. This happened back in the pre-cambrian period when millions upon millions of years of plants died and were buried in the ground, creating our current coal and oil reserves. We need to do it again in a way that doesn't just create more burnable material.
 
L

LumpOfCole

Member
Imagine investing in the blue collar labor to build these as a New Deal program for the 21st Century. In a sane world, it would be an incredible political opportunity.
 
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Famassu

Member
Fuchsdh said:
I mean, technology is going to save us. The question is how bad do we make it before tech saves us, and how much tech can compensate.

university-of-manchester.jpeg


By that projection we're still getting into midcentury at best before we hit negative emissions, so by 2100 we're still going to be facing greater challenges then we are now in regards to sea level rise, more unpredictable weather, greater heat stress across much of the globe, etc.

The only question I have is whether off-gassing of carbon is an issue long-term, and whether you can make that stone into something for actual use besides just filling in old mines or landfill. I'm guessing most capture tech is going to do what the plant does and just inject it underground.
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Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
 
N

nelsonroyale

Member
That is cool.

Of course, that is not how a tree works...it uses CO2 and converts it to oxygen.

Anyway, this is an interesting solution, and part of a suit of different paths to take.

Also, as someone involved in the field of ecological design, tech alone 'won't save us'...that is a reducto ad absurdum position. I mean for optimal adaptation the right technology and techniques will help us enhance the current condition of the biosphere, but there isn't enough global coherence at the moment.
 
Rentahamster

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Famassu said:
Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
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What happens if we develop lab grown meats that are not only cheaper and more delicious, but healthier for you too? Key word is cheaper. Not just technology, but technology and economics have the potential to save us.
 
Y

yanipheonu

Member
Famassu said:
Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
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I, uh, appreciate the fervour, but that escalated quickly.
 
F

Famassu

Member
Rentahamster said:
What happens if we develop lab grown meats that are not only cheaper and more delicious, but healthier for you too? Key word is cheaper. Not just technology, but technology and economics have the potential to save us.
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We already have alternatives that are healthier (at least some) and not as destructive to the planet (not necessarily cheaper yet because their consumption isn't at mass market levels & investments need to be recouped). People are too pathetic to give them a try or leave meat out from their diet for them.

It's basically to meat eaters what vaccinations are to anti-vaxxers. Unless society forces it on them, they ain't gonna eat no lab made shit.
 
Rentahamster

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
nelsonroyale said:
That is cool.

Of course, that is not how a tree works...it uses CO2 and converts it to oxygen.

Anyway, this is an interesting solution, and part of a suit of different paths to take.

Also, as someone involved in the field of ecological design, tech alone 'won't save us'...that is a reducto ad absurdum position. I mean for optimal adaptation the right technology and techniques will help us enhance the current condition of the biosphere, but there isn't enough global coherence at the moment.
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Photosynthesis involves the capture of light energy and CO2 to create O2 and sugar. The sugars are both used for energy and also processed into more complex carbohydrates and cellulose to build the structure of the plant, effectively sequestering that carbon until the plant decomposes or burns.

That is how a tree works.
 
T

TheLostBigBoss

Banned
Famassu said:
Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
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Those arguments are wrong and land use accounts for at most 15%/20% of global emissions.

Stop saying that tech won't save us when low/zero carbon energy is the only actual solution that is working to slow down emissions.

Yes, people should eat less meat or no meat. Don't lie and exaggerate your cause when you're already factually correct that land use is an issue that needs to be addressed.
 
Rentahamster

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Famassu said:
We already have alternatives that are healthier (at least some) and not as destructive to the planet (not necessarily cheaper yet because their consumption isn't at mass market levels & investments need to be recouped). People are too pathetic to give them a try or leave meat out from their diet for them.

It's basically to meat eaters what vaccinations are to anti-vaxxers. Unless society forces it on them, they ain't gonna eat no lab made shit.
Click to expand...

The alternatives are not yet a perfect and cheaper substitute for meat. When the lab grown stuff is indistinguishable from the real thing, then you can tell me about people's fickleness.

Famassu said:
It's basically to meat eaters what vaccinations are to anti-vaxxers. Unless society forces it on them, they ain't gonna eat no lab made shit.
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GMO's have that "lab grown shit" stigma attached to them, but fortunately, only a small hardcore percentage of the population have a problem with it. I'm optimistic for lab grown shit in the realm of public opinion.
 
G

Geist-

Member
smisk said:
Where do we put all that stone though?
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In May this year, Climeworks set up its first commercial unit near Zurich, Switzerland, capturing about 1,000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year (equivalent to 20 US households’ annual emissions). The captured CO2 is supplied to a nearby greenhouse, where a high concentration of the gas boosts crop yield by 20%.
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.
 
S

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Famassu said:
Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
Click to expand...

This doesn't really make any sense. If meat is destructive because it generates CO2, then making it so that you can sop up the CO2 in the air reduces the destruction, right? And if you sop up more CO2 than the total amount of CO2 produced by meat, then that's even more negative CO2.

Like, you can say meat is also bad because of other things that this doesn't solve, but if the problem is just CO2 then carbon recapture is a solution (if it scales). I'm not saying it will scale, I don't know enough. I don't even know enough about this very small example. It seems from the article that this basically only applies to power plants and can't be a standalone recapture unit, but I might be misunderstanding.

Regardless, I do know basic math. If B > A, then A - B < 0. Meat math might be different though.
 
V

v3numb

Member
Stumpokapow said:
This doesn't really make any sense. If meat is destructive because it generates CO2, then making it so that you can sop up the CO2 in the air reduces the destruction, right? And if you sop up more CO2 than the total amount of CO2 produced by meat, then that's even more negative CO2.

Like, you can say meat is also bad because of other things that this doesn't solve, but if the problem is just CO2 then carbon recapture is a solution (if it scales). I'm not saying it will scale, I don't know enough. I don't even know enough about this very small example. It seems from the article that this basically only applies to power plants and can't be a standalone recapture unit, but I might be misunderstanding.

Regardless, I do know basic math. If B > A, then A - B < 0. Meat math might be different though.
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Isn't the issue with meat and dairy farms more about methane than CO2 though? And isn't methane actually worse than CO2 as far as greenhouse gases go?
 
D

Deleted member 80556

Unconfirmed Member
Nice, but I can't help but to shake the skepticism there has been on the tech for so many years. I hope they prove the skeptics wrong.

smisk said:
Where do we put all that stone though?
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The land that will not be buried under water due to the melting of the ice-caps, maybe?
 
A

Amirai

Member
Guevara said:
I kind of hate this because it just means we'll never learn to conserve and protect our planet, we'll just keep thinking technology will save us.
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No need to hate it. Solar is already the cheapest form of energy and it’s just getting cheaper along with wind. Plans for coal plants are being cancelled around the world. No one wants coal anymore or cause the green stuff is cheaper, and that is why it will win against greed, because the greedy don’t really care about coal, they care about money and green energy will get them more of that than coal will.

Famassu said:
Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
Click to expand...

That’s just not true. In addition to lab grown meats (which are steadily improving, have the benefits of being better for the environment, are healthier, can be designed to taste in unique ways, don’t require antibiotics for any reason, are cruelty free, won’t taste worse than meat does like many of the meat alternatives (which is a big part of why the alternatives haven’t been as accepted as they could be) and, most importantly for consumer acceptance, will be significantly cheaper), it’s been discovered that adding 2% of a specific kind of seaweed reduces cow methane emissions by a whopping 99% and even makes the cows healthier. Between those, air scrubbers and clean energy beginning domination of the direction of the energy industry because it’s just the most profitable, it’s technology to the rescue! :) We don’t have answers for everything yet like the garbage patches in the ocean, but we are an inventive species and I think it’s just a matter of time before we come up with a way to improve, if not entirely solve, problems like that too.

Saucycarpdog said:
Let's just plant a couple million of these:

https://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-06/installing-plastic-trees-help-environment
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Wtf? This sounds amazing. The article’s from 2009 though, I wonder why it didn’t go anywhere.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
Famassu said:
Technology won't save us from one of the top 3 destructive forces on this planet that is meat & dairy production (there are arguments to be made it's the most destructive but I won't get into that). All of these CO2 reducing innovations are pointless when people will jack off to anything with bacon and meat & dairy consumption & production keeps increasing
Click to expand...

By all indicators, like with the population, meat consumption is going to plateau in the near future as well, and that's before we get into stuff like the possibility of making meat in the lab cost-effective for mass consumption.

And the biggest contributor to greenhouse gasses in the world is air conditioning. You fix that problem and you knock out a lot more troublesome stuff than CO2 and methane emissions from cows.

All this stuff would happen a lot quicker with a combination of incentives and taxation to fund these sorts of mitigation strategies. But it's gonna' happen.
 
C

cpp_is_king

Member
I couldn't help but get fixated on the difference between US households and indian households. Why do US households emit 10x more carbon than Indian households? And what's special about India, as opposed to say Russia or Lithuania or South Africa or Venezuela, or any other country in the world? This sentence & comparison just seem oddly out of place
 
P

PdotMichael

Banned
Brashnir said:
There are some pretty major issues with planting trees. First of all, they aren't enough. If you covered the entire planet in trees, it would take millions of years for them to deal with the next ten years of emissions. Second, as soon as a forest fire comes through, most of the carbon that the tree had been storing is released right back into the atmosphere.

You need to get a way to store the carbon in a place where is can't simply be released right back into the atmosphere. This happened back in the pre-cambrian period when millions upon millions of years of plants died and were buried in the ground, creating our current coal and oil reserves. We need to do it again in a way that doesn't just create more burnable material.
Click to expand...

A single somehow tree is easibly able to convert more than one tonne of co2 to o2, while the wood itself is an effective co2 sink.
It's simple, low tech and does have other desirable effects on nature and it works everywhere and don't need Island's unique underground to work in the first place.


DBT85 said:
Based on your years of experience?
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of climate experts, yes.

cpp_is_king said:
I couldn't help but get fixated on the difference between US households and indian households. Why do US households emit 10x more carbon than Indian households? And what's special about India, as opposed to say Russia or Lithuania or South Africa or Venezuela, or any other country in the world? This sentence & comparison just seem oddly out of place
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Because Americans are wasteful. You could do that comparison with every country and the US would look bad. There is no excuse why an American has a twice so large co2 footprint as an European either.
 
S

sturmdogg

Member
My basic science is very rusty but dont plants take co2 and convert it to oxygen? Wouldnt it be easier to just plant more....plants? Or trees?
 
T

tebunker

Banned
fill in all the holes left by strip mining and rock quarries.

Or hand it off to another group of scientists and see if they can convert that shit in to precious gem stones that we can then turn in to lasers that we can put on sharks heads. Because that should be our end goal. We can stop funding our Army if we had sharks with lasers on their heads made with reclaimed CO2 rocks...


I love that this tech exists, I can only hope they can scale fast enough and actually help the world.

I've seen companies make pure water from fetid water only to lose funding because purifying the world's water wasn't/isn't profitable enough yet. I hope that this is.
 
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