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posted by martyb on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-do-not-capture-the-inactive-carbon dept.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/

Discusses the scientific and economic feasibility of using methods to actively capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also the article discusses the possibility that carbon dioxide harvested from the atmosphere can be sold on the market competitively, and thus engage the private economy in countering man-made climate change.

I wonder if a consequence of profitable harvesting of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might be that it could lead us into an ice-age.

Related Stories

Lab-Made Magnesite could be Used for CO2 Capture 43 comments

This Lab-Made Mineral Just Became a Key Candidate For Reducing CO2 in The Atmosphere

Scientists just worked out a way of rapidly producing a mineral capable of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) - giving us a potentially exciting option for dealing with our increasingly overcooked planet. Magnesite, which is a type of magnesium carbonate, forms when magnesium combines with carbonic acid - CO2 dissolved in water. If we can produce this mineral at a massive scale, it could safely store large amounts of carbon dioxide we simply don't need in our planet's atmosphere.

[...] Being able to make the mineral in the lab could be a major step forward in terms of how effective carbon sequestration might eventually be. "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude," says [Ian] Power. "This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient."

[...] With a tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite able to capture around half a tonne of CO2, we're going to need a lot of magnesite, and somewhere to put it all as well. As with other carbon capture processes, it's not yet clear whether this will successfully scale up as much as it needs to. That said, these new discoveries mean lab-made magnesite could one day be helpful – it puts the mineral on the table as an option for further investigation.

Abstract.

Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability


Original Submission

Y Combinator Requests Startups for Atmospheric CO2 Removal 31 comments

Silicon Valley's largest accelerator is looking for carbon-sucking technologies — including one that could become 'the largest infrastructure project ever'

Earlier this week, Y Combinator, which has backed companies like Airbnb and Reddit, put out a request for startups working on technology that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem — including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work," Y Combinator's website says.

Y Combinator is looking for startups working on four approaches that they acknowledge "straddle the border between very difficult to science fiction" — genetically engineering phytoplankton to turn CO2 into a storage-ready form of carbon, speeding up a natural process in which rocks react with CO2, creating cell-free enzymes that can process carbon, and flooding Earth's deserts to create oases.

Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, acknowledged that these ideas are "moonshots," but said that he wants to take an expansive approach to the issue.

Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Storing Carbon Dioxide Underground by Turning It Into Rock
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability
Y Combinator Spreads to China
Lab-Made Magnesite could be Used for CO2 Capture
NASA Announces CO2 Conversion Challenge, With Up to $750k Awards


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1) by Gravis on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:58AM

    by Gravis (4596) on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:58AM (#103985)

    But carbon dioxide still represents only one in 2,500 molecules in the air. That means an effective air-capture machine would need to push vast amounts of air past amines to get enough carbon dioxide to stick to them and then regenerate the amines to capture more. That would require a lot of energy and thus be very expensive, the 2011 report said. That’s why it concluded that air capture “is not currently an economically viable approach to mitigating climate change.”

    why not just go right to the source of the CO2, energy generation plants? grabbing it out of the air would be time and resource consuming, so it seems like something that would be part of a cleanup effort when we move on to other energy sources.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:06PM (#103989)

      The main source of carbon dioxide isn't power generation plants. It's actually the rectums and anuses of cows and other livestock. Are you proposing that some device be developed that's inserted into the anuses of these animals, which allows the feces to pass through while collecting the carbon dioxide gas? How is it going to separate out the carbon dioxide from the methane, sulfur and other gases present in these emissions?

      • (Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:20PM

        by Sir Garlon (1264) on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:20PM (#103999)

        The main source of carbon dioxide isn't power generation plants. It's actually the rectums and anuses of cows and other livestock.

        And they taught me in school that carbon dioxide comes out of animals' *lungs*. It's a cover-up!

        And if you RTFA, it says the main source of carbon dioxide (by a narrow margin) is "distributed sources" like automobiles and home heating and cooking fuel. So it's true that scrubbing CO2 from 100% of power plants would only address slightly less than half of emissions.

        --
        [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:26PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:26PM (#104001)

          It depends on the animal. Animals considered ruminants pass the bulk of their carbon dioxide back into the digestion process. This causes it to be emitted from their anuses instead of through their respiration system, so they do differ from humans, which are probably what you were taught about in school. These livestock are typically quite large, with even a relatively small sheep, comparable in size to a human, producing seven to ten times as much carbon dioxide. The impact is even greater when it comes to cows, obviously.

          Livestock are "distributed sources". They're actually much more distributed than vehicles and other similar sources. Humans and human-made creations that emit carbon dioxide are generally far more centralized and condensed than livestock and related animals.

          • (Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:50PM

            by Sir Garlon (1264) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:50PM (#104058)

            Also, methane is a greenhouse gas. My nitpicking about what gas comes out which end of the animal is less important than the quantity of the respective gases produced.

            --
            [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
            • (Score: 1) by kryptonianjorel on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:21PM

              by kryptonianjorel (4640) on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:21PM (#104198)

              methane is something like 1000x more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It typically breaks down in 4 years or so, but breaks down into CO2, so it is a big problem itself

        • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:32PM

          by Thexalon (636) on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:32PM (#104026)

          So it's true that scrubbing CO2 from 100% of power plants would only address slightly less than half of emissions.

          Which would, of course, be a massive reduction in the scale of the problem. I'm not saying that the other stuff doesn't matter, but let's not use "It doesn't solve 100% of the problem" as an excuse to do nothing.

          Although really, the current excuse for the primary offenders not doing anything substantial about the problem is that even if the US does something, China and India won't, and vice versa. Each of those countries has been putting enormous time and effort into trying to make everybody else solve the problem for them. Europe, by contrast, is actually doing stuff, which means that Iceland runs mostly on geothermal, Germany is up to 25% renewable, and so forth, but the response from the US and China and India is basically "Great, that's less we have to do!" In the US at least, there's also the important fact that oil, gas, and coal company's assets are mostly deposits they haven't taken out of the ground yet, and so they will adamantly refuse not to drill / mine the stuff because any other policy would tank their stock price.

          They are getting more sophisticated about it, though: They know that ordinary people want to solve global warming, even if the powers-that-be don't care about it really, so they now are getting really good at PR campaigns that make it appear like they are taking substantial steps while in fact doing nothing.

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:37PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:37PM (#104030)

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree [wikipedia.org]

            All powerplants should be surrounded by huge forests of trees. Trees genetically modified to pull in more CO2.

            As a plus in 20-30 years we get a nice source of lumber to build tings then replant.

      • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:12PM

        by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:12PM (#104046) Journal

        It's actually the rectums and anuses of cows and other livestock

        Listen dammit, I've been playing my part to wipe these fucker out by eating burgers and steaks but they just keep coming.

        • (Score: 1) by arulatas on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:39PM

          by arulatas (3600) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:39PM (#104052)

          Eating burgers filled with the offending cow parts?

          --
          ----- 10 turns around
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @01:00AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @01:00AM (#104274)

            Cows don't have penises. Bulls do.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:06PM (#103990)

    Oh wait, what about the pile of cell phones we are swimming in.
    Not to mention, tires.

    Anyone care to calculate the height of a 10 square kilometer of cell phones or just tires?
    And for extra points, the height of cell phone adapters or the history of the plastic our cell phones distribute in.

    How high do we have to climb?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:13PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:13PM (#103995)

      Well, blame Mozilla for that, I guess. That's what happens when a memory- and CPU-hungry mobile operating system based around a bloated web browser and JavaScript is forced onto cheap phones. People in India buy them because of the price, then realize they can't actually be used for anything useful, and then throw them out. When phones are treated as cheap, disposable devices instead of as real computers, nobody should be surprised when they're, well, disposed of without much consideration!

    • (Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:53PM

      by morgauxo (2082) on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:53PM (#104010)

      Easy. Zero! Now had you said 10 qubic kilometers rather than square I would have guessed the cube root of 10. Of course that assumes an actual cube, all sides the same.

      How high do you want to climb? Personally I don't think climbing piles of cellphones or tires is a very good idea but I'm not your dad. Do take a picture if you reach the top though!

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:57PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:57PM (#104148) Journal

      Anyone care to calculate the height of a 10 square kilometer of cell phones or just tires?

      No problem. But I kinda need to know the height of the pile in order to make the calculation.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:06PM (#103991)

    I told that to the guy's face in the meeting, and he just smiled and said, "Thank you. We certainly hope so."

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:05PM (#104013)

    now the price of salat and carrots is gonna go up too.
    on the other hand i think we'll get the salat for free if you take the glowy typ that sequestered iodine 131, cesium, strontium and whatnot from your friendly eco-green nuclear power ... errr ... plant.

  • (Score: 2) by geb on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:10PM

    by geb (529) on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:10PM (#104016)

    Accidental ice age from shortage of CO2? No. Pure nonsense FUD.

    Even if we perfect the methods of drawing vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and find some productive, profitable use for it, it's never going to be difficult to make more CO2 as required. Making it is very, very simple. You just burn stuff. Burn almost anything. There's far too much carbon in existence for us ever to lock it all away in owned products.

    • (Score: 1) by BananaPhone on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:12PM

      by BananaPhone (2488) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:12PM (#104047)

      If it would become that easy and efficient we could terraform Venus.

      • (Score: 2) by geb on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:20PM

        by geb (529) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:20PM (#104049)

        Yes, but not quickly. If you put up a sun shield putting Venus into complete perpetual darkness, and then entirely removed the atmosphere so there was no insulation between rock and space at all, it would still take about 3 centuries for the surface to cool down to Earthlike temperatures. There's a lot of residual heat.

        • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:41PM

          by buswolley (848) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:41PM (#104054)

          What about adding active heat capture tech? ;)

          --
          subicular junctures
          • (Score: 2) by geb on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:12PM

            by geb (529) on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:12PM (#104094)

            If you've got the technology to move the entire atmosphere into storage during the cooldown period, you could probably cover the entire surface in perfect black body radiator panels too and pump heat up from the deep rocks. In principle there's no reason why you couldn't speed it up.

    • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:39PM

      by buswolley (848) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:39PM (#104053)

      Relax. It was a little bit of humor.

      --
      subicular junctures
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:24PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:24PM (#104050) Journal

    Suppose one uses carbon capturing plastics [scientificamerican.com] and power them with nuclear power (perhaps even LENR). How long would it take to get the carbon level from 400 ppm to 280 ppm?

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by WillR on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:59PM

    by WillR (2012) on Thursday October 09 2014, @02:59PM (#104062)
    It's called "trees".

    They're durable, with most models lasting 100 years and a few that last well over 1000. They require minimal maintenance in any outdoor environment that gets sufficient rain and sunlight. And the best thing about "trees" is that they're freely copyable through novel mechanisms I call "seeds" and "cuttings", and those copies can be redistributed royalty-free and without any burdensome license agreement!

    "Trees" are available now, look for them at a nursery or home center near you.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:26PM (#104069)

      But trees don't remove carbon from the Carbon Cycle by themselves. That would require people to cut them down and stuffing them in some hole instead. This is why belief that planting trees solves Global Warming is naive at best.

      • (Score: 2) by Covalent on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:58PM

        by Covalent (43) on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:58PM (#104086) Journal

        This is utter nonsense. Every pound of extra wood a tree produces during its lifetime is made of gaseous CO2 (plus water and a few other incidentals) that stay solid at least as long as the tree is alive.

        When the tree dies, it rots, and that CO2 goes (slowly) back into the air. But in the meantime (i.e. hundreds of years) it's out of the air.

        Hundreds of years is a lot of time for us to come up with solutions. Trees are a big help.

        --
        You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:33PM (#104182)

          unless forest fire

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:35PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:35PM (#104247)

            Forest fires are part of the life cycle of trees. They burn the outside down, which falls off, and then the inner core grows back.

      • (Score: 2) by WillR on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:07PM

        by WillR (2012) on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:07PM (#104091)
        Calm down, it was a joke. And even so, it's at least as good as TFA's approach. Carbon converted to wood stays captured as long as the tree is alive, while CO2 sold to industrial users will mostly be back in the atmosphere in a week.
      • (Score: 1) by Scruffy on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:44PM

        by Scruffy (1087) on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:44PM (#104139)
        Serious question for you: what about the roots? They're made of the same thing the rest of the tree is, right? Isn't it reasonable to assume that at least some carbon is being sequestered underground naturally?
        --
        1087 is a lucky prime.
    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:13PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday October 09 2014, @04:13PM (#104095)

      Monsanto's lawyers are drafting a restraining order to prevent you from posting about freely distributing copies of living trees.

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:30PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:30PM (#104154) Journal

      I have an active carbon capture technology too...It's called "trees".

       
      A tree absorbs a whopping 48 lbs of carbon a year. [americanforests.org]
       
      World emissions are in the multi-billions of tons.
       
      I think we need something a bit more efficient.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:31PM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:31PM (#104229) Homepage
        However, the number of trees we cut down per year also is measured in billions. Several billion alone just for paper, for example.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:42PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:42PM (#104251)

        Thanks for pointing out that just planting a single tree won't do the job. We'll have to plant two! Or hundreds!

        OR THOUSANDS!

  • (Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:00PM

    by Sir Garlon (1264) on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:00PM (#104063)

    Consider me one of the skeptics.

    Even if Eisenberger's dreams come true and he can extract 18 billion metric tons [co2now.org] of CO2 from the atmosphere per year, and find a market for all of it, and sell it at a profit, without noticeably increasing global CO2 emissions while doing it, there remains the question of what happens to those billions of tons of CO2 after he's sold it.

    Simply put, what guarantee is there that the people who buy those billions of tons of CO2 will not put it right back into the atmosphere?

    It's hard to imagine getting to negative emissions if you're selling the captured CO2 instead of putting it into long-term storage.

    --
    [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:44PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:44PM (#104233) Homepage
      Consider me one of the skeptics too.

      If he's going to be in the business of sucking CO2 out of smokestacks, he's going to be *encouraging* fossil fuel combustion.

      There *will* be unintended consequences as economic equilibria shift. Google for "Cobra effect" for how trying to get rid of something encourages its production.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday October 11 2014, @01:50AM

        by tathra (3367) on Saturday October 11 2014, @01:50AM (#104662)

        If he's going to be in the business of sucking CO2 out of smokestacks, he's going to be *encouraging* fossil fuel combustion.

        thats the same argument used to prevent schools and even Planned Parenthood from giving out free condoms (or hell, even providing the HPV vaccine); "It encourages kids to fuck!" its not true there, why would it be true here?

        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:13AM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday October 11 2014, @10:13AM (#104722) Homepage
          So you didn't google "cobra effect", then. The freakonomics podcast on this is one of their better ones.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @03:23PM (#104068)

    I wonder if a consequence of profitable harvesting of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere might be that it could lead us into an ice-age.

    No.

    Seriously. Do you really need to wander about things like that? If you haven't noticed, the problem seems to the exact opposite. This question is like asking "I wander if cleaning up our sewage and agriculture, not to dump all that crap down the rivers will result in total annihilation of aquatic plant life as essential nutrients are removed from the water".

    Think first, ask questions later.

  • (Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:21PM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:21PM (#104128) Homepage

    ...is sound, and is the long-term future of our civilization, if it is to have one.

    The problems are "only" economic.

    Given enough energy input, you can suck as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as you might want, and given more energy, you can turn that CO2 into any sort of hydrocarbon as you might imagine -- gasoline to drive your car, kerosene to fly your plane, even asphalt to pave your roads.

    The question, then, is how much energy and where you get it from and how much it costs you.

    I don't have the references at hand, but, today, right now, you can produce a barrel of crude-equivalent for under $300 using solar photovoltaics as the energy source, and industrial-scale production using today's technology would cost you under $200. That's a lot more than oil, and it might even be more than our current economy can even theoretically bear without global depression and its concomitant collapses of social order. But it at least provides an upper limit on the price of oil as well as a limit on how much oil we're going to drill.

    And, once you're manufacturing oil from solar energy rather than making energy from mined oil, you've at least stopped pumping CO2 from the ground into the air...and it's only a very small additional step further to make more synthetic oil than you need and pump that excess back underground. The excess at first serves to return atmospheric CO2 levels to wherever we decide we want them, and then provide a nice reserve / bank account / rainy day fund to help buffer any hiccoughs in production or for any monumental projects we might want to periodically undertake.

    But it won't be cheap, and might not even be affordable in any sense we currently understand....

    Cheers,

    b&

    --
    All but God can prove this sentence true.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:03PM (#104169)

    I have read that the earth will actually go extinct when all the carbon is sequestrated below the crust. As the plates shift, this moves carbon underground, many years the carbon level has already dropped to actually kind of scary levels 315 ppm is not much and over the lifetime of the planet is actually lowest every minus the last few ebbs and flows to what 400ppm whoa I say we need more carbon in the air. But you global warming freaks go ahead and wring your hands at a different point of view that isn't being funded to scare you and divert attention from really pressing matters.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:12PM (#104226)

      You clearly need better reading material if your argument is that plate tectonics moving carbon underground is a "pressing" matter.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:47PM (#104256)

        I thought he was making a really long-winded pun.