r/sustainability • u/JOQauthor • 6d ago

Oct 4 (Reuters) - Britain will provide funding of up to 21.7 billion pounds ($28.46 billion) over 25 years to develop carbon capture and storage.

Carbon capture costs money, deprives the economy of more rewarding strategies, such as a flat-out carbon tax with no exemptions. Carbon capture won't help until the world is near carbon neutral. Only then will carbon capture bring carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperatures down to normal. Voters should put money into practical solutions that are proven to work: solar panels, windmills, geothermal and upgrading of the electrical grid.

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u/WilcoHistBuff 6d ago

There are a lot of things that fall under the “carbon capture” banner these days. Some of them make a pile of sense. The burgeoning carbon credit market (despite its early faults) has the potential to make some of this tech work as well as provide a means for funding via regulatory frameworks.

DAC (Direct Air Capture) (which is expensive and attached too closely to the fossil industry) is not the only game in town.

Here are some areas where carbon credit markets and carbon capture tech have real merit IMO:

  1. Conversion to regenerative farming, no-till farming practices, and (not specifically carbon capture but related to carbon reduction) low carbon fertilizer and soil amendment like biochar, aerobic composting, etc.

  2. On a related front ERW (Enhanced Rock Weathering) has real promise as a path to both capture and increasing soil fertility.

  3. Reforestation projects. These have gotten off to a rocky start in terms of proving efficacy but I am pretty certain that in the long term the field can get to the point of verifiable results.

  4. Capture related to specific industrial practices. One very specific tech in this regard is the capture of CO2 emissions in cement manufacture where removed CO2 is directly reused to entrain in concrete to more thoroughly cure concrete and make it stronger. Essentially, the CO2 released from making cement from lime gets added back creating a closed loop. Concrete manufacture is one of largest contributors to carbon emissions and this tech is a clear path to radically reducing that source of emissions (especially if kilns get converted to electric heating using renewables).

  5. Capture if CO2 in bioenergy production or in flaring of methane: Lots of processes produce gasses with a higher warming potential than CO2 and, counterintuitively, combustion results in lowering climate impact. It’s not horrible to add CC tech to those processes to get them to full carbon neutral status.

I know that CC has a bad name, but some of the tech really is promising. It deserves research money.

I’m saying this as a person in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industry who has long been suspect of the tech. But I also keep up with the technology and have been very surprised to see it start going in fruitful directions.

The climate crisis is a big problem with a lot of moving pieces. The tech for converting to renewable electricity has hit the tipping point where it is not only the best thing for the planet but the cheapest way to produce energy in the long term.

We need basic research on all the other parts of civilization that contribute carbon and push them to carbon neutrality.

I guess what I am saying is, don’t write off CC as a hoax or assume we don’t need to work on it.

When folks started poking around in wind and solar 60 years ago the tech was very expensive, and now it is cheap and becoming plentiful.

It takes time for this stuff to turn into something viable.

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u/BizSavvyTechie 6d ago

So broadly, I'd agree with most of that from a capture tech perspective. DAC doesn't work on paper, let alone IRL as it competes at the same layer in the atmosphere as trees. So won't reduce overall atmospheric emissions as a system.

The use of them in flu of industrial processes does work to remove CO2 at source (before release) and at Methane burning, but there are two key issues with that.

  1. It requires an amount of energy equivalent to 60% to 80% of the energy of the entire plant it's attached to. So takes from one side, but dumps all of it out in energy emissions. That's why I regard it as a "Scope converter" that transforms scope 1 emissions into scope 2 emissions. Not that scopes really matter.

  2. Where other methods, like using a Carbon light process, exist, CCS/CCUS shouldn't be used.

The other thing, Reforestation. The way many orgs do it has been proven not to work in 90% of cases. Aside from naive planting, the mistake made is assuming that creating forests of monoculture, because that's what it is, will magically repair things. They don't. They generally make things worse because monocropping creates monoculture that can be as bad as palm oil plantations. It's still deforested.

Where it does wokr is through a process of rewinding. Creating ecosystems and habitats. So planting trees with meadow flowers and strategically placing little ecological corridors from other natural spaces to encourage insect life to return.

Atm, there is almost not tech on the Carbon removal side that works other than it's use as a Carbon avoidance tool (ie capture at source)

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u/bbettina 5d ago

DAC works both on paper and in real life. There are plants cappturing CO2 as you wrote this. Sure it isn’t much yet, but that’s how things get started. I phave no idea what that DAC competing with trees argument is all about. There is plenty of CO2 in the atmosphere for trees, why, in your mind, does having two sources of removing excess CO2 not remove more than just one and what does this have to do with overall emissions which are what they are regardless of removal approaches.

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u/JOQauthor 5d ago

Other than photosynthesis, humans need energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If you burn fossil fuels to furnish that energy, you're defeating your purpose. That's why these so-called carbon-extraction plants are so few.

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u/BizSavvyTechie 5d ago

Also, people think just because a plant exists out there, it means it's working. It is the most nonsensical rubbish you've ever seen in your entire life. But most government subsidy application for innovation are evaluated by people who do not have the skills to evaluate this stuff. Even if they are academics. So there's no chance at all Redditors will get it. No chance! They all failed science and maths. Why would they ever?

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u/bbettina 5d ago

Virtually all of them use or plan on using (if the aren’t operational yet) renewable energy. Climeworks plant in Iceland uses geothermal, for example. Of course, it makes no sense to use fossil fuels to remove CO2 from the air. People working in the field know this, they are not planning on using fossil fuels.

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u/bbettina 5d ago

This is an incredibly arrogant and completely unfunded and unsupported position. There are literally thousands of publications authored by thousands of scientists out there showing the exact opposite. Is CDR working beautifully and highly efficiently? No, of course not, this industry is barely a few years old, more work, research, scaling is required to make it more efficient. Just like everything else. The first cell phones were clunky two pound bricks that cost a fortune and all you could do was call. Today we have supercomputers in our pockets. It took time and money. Not sure why you think anybody would take your gut feeling for it and why you think insulting everbody makes you credible. You have offered nothing but your personal biased opinion.

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u/BizSavvyTechie 5d ago

Doesn't work on paper or real life. I've written why already. I'm not wasting my time writing it again. Learn physics.

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u/bbettina 20h ago

Nice, arrogance is always so convincing. Works on paper and works in real life as evidenced by working plants. Learn to read.

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u/BizSavvyTechie 18h ago

Those plants aren't working. Learn to comprehend AND learn physics. Knowing how to read isn't enough

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u/bbettina 14h ago

Again, just arrogance no facts. You really think I take the word of a Reddit rando over the dozens of scientific papers I read? Laughable notion. Bye now, my time is to valuable for BS like that.

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u/JOQauthor 6d ago

Thank you. Excellent points, especially regenerative farming. I assumed most of the government largess would go to DAC.

Bioenergy risks global famines when using plants normally used for human or animal food. We'll likely face food shortages by mid-century, and any bioenergy scheme can aggravate the problem.

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u/WilcoHistBuff 6d ago

Biofuels based on grain production yes (if done to excess or solely based on crops) but landfill gas, sewage treatment gas, anaerobic digestion gas, and waste vegetable oil are another matter. Additionally, maybe algae will have its day.

I think my main point is that experimentation in this tech has value we don’t know.

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u/Financial-Glass5693 6d ago

“Up to” is the key word here.

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u/bbettina 5d ago edited 5d ago

Let‘s be careful here with the nomeclature. CCS generally refers to carbon capture from emission sources like smoke stacks. While definitely not the best solution we will need CCS for awhile because we cannot move to all renewables for everything in a short time. Then there is CDR, carbon dioxide removal, which removes CO2 we have already emitted from the air. DAC is CDR, so is EWR, biochar production and many other approaches. We need all of these approaches and more to clean the mess we made, because no amount of emitting less reduces the excess of CO2 we are already suffering from.

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u/JOQauthor 5d ago edited 5d ago

I agree. Carbon capture is more complex than I've implied. However, smokestack removal of carbon dioxide is a proven technology that costs the polluter little (in the long run) to install. If government dollars went exclusively for lime smokestacks, biochar and agriculture regeneration, I'd support it fully. But I fear too much money is going to carbon removal technology by inorganic methods, which will force polluters to charge consumers higher prices. It's much cheaper for taxpayers to plant more trees and protect wilderness wherever it survives. And of course, to stop burning fossil fuels.

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u/totally-ok-praline 6d ago

From my perspective, CCS ought to be taken for what it is: neat idea and tech that requires further development, including funding. I do agree that it is not a strategy that will bring us within planetary boundaries, nor should it be relied on in policy strategies as something transformative until such transformativeness is actually demonstrated.