How Thermodynamics Holds Back Negative Carbon Tech
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- čas přidán 18. 05. 2024
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Direct Air Capture (DAC) has been getting more and more attention over the last few years. Could we avert climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? Could we not just stop, but actually reverse the damage done? Unfortunately, most don't fully appreciate just quite how much CO2 we've emitted and the outrageous scale of the problem facing us. Today, we apply the fundamental principles of thermodynamics to question whether this is even feasible.
Written & presented by Prof. David Kipping. Edited by Jorge Casas. Fact checking by Alexandra Masegian.
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REFERENCES
► House, K. Z. et al. 2011, "Economic and energetic analysis of capturing CO2 from ambient air", Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 108(51), 20428-33: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22143...
► Lackner, K. S. 2013, "The thermodynamics of direct air capture of carbon dioxide", Energy, 50, 38: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
► Long-Innes, R. & Struchtrup, H. 2022, "Thermodynamic loss analysis of a liquid- sorbent direct air carbon capture plant", Cell Reports Physical Science, 3, 100791: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
► Ozkan, M. et al., 2022, "Current status and pillars of direct air capture technologies", iScience, 25, 103990: www.sciencedirect.com/science...
► Sanz-Perez E. S. et al., 2016, "Direct Capture of CO2 from Ambient Air", Chem. Rev., 116, 11840: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs....
MUSIC
Licensed by SoundStripe.com (SS) [shorturl.at/ptBHI], Artlist.io, via CC Attribution License (creativecommons.org/licenses/...) or with permission from the artist.
► Hill - A Slowly Lifting Fog [0:00]
► Falls - Life in Binary [3:24]
► Hill - Northern Boards [8:03]
► Hill - To Quiet the Drumming Inside My Head [11:13]
► Hill - Chasing out the Chaos [15:29]
► Chris Zabriskie - Cylinder Seven [19:23]
► Joachim Heinrich - Y [22:53]
CHAPTERS
0:00 Climate Change
2:44 Removal Requirements
3:38 Possible Solutions
5:03 Introducing DAC
5:43 Climate Anxiety
7:12 DAC Principles
8:14 Scalability
9:29 Thermodynamics
12:08 Progressive DAC
13:32 RCPs
15:09 Simulations
17:03 Energy Requirements
19:34 Efficiency
21:21 Conclusions
24:35 Outro and credits
#DirectAirCapture #ClimateChange #NetZero - Věda a technologie
There is also research into capturing co2 bound in sea water, where it's concentration is much higher (sCS^2 process). Which would in turn reduce the co2 in our atmosphere, because they can use their giant surface area to bind more. Additionally, the co2 would be bound in limestone instead of gaseous form.
It would also turn the ocean into fizzy soda pop water, giving it a high enough level of carbonic acid that many animals like clams and corals would have a much harder time.
@@thelaughinghyenas8465i think you misunderstood he is talking about removing co2 from the ocean because it is easier than from the air. The co2 levels in the ocean itself would stay the same because the co2 in the air would get dissolved in the sea
@@thelaughinghyenas8465 Quite the opposite, that is what is what is being removed. Unfizzling the ocean and binding it in limestone, to put it in your words.
@@Mr_Stone1 , While scrubbing the ocean has the advantage of lower ambient temperatures much of the time, what will the disruption of all the ocean DAC plants and the servicing of them be to fish?
@@thelaughinghyenas8465 first of all it would be a local effect, like increased salinity around desalination plants. Second to scale it up enough to have an effect on ocean plant life would take centuries of constant effort. So to your point, the answer is none.
I’m fortunate to have a lot of smart viewers out there and some of you picked up on an error: forests capture 10 tCO2 *per year*, whereas the video implied this was total. Although this doesn’t really affect the main point of this video (which is calculating DAC thermodynamics limits), I wanted to address this regardless! So how does this affect things? Well the 10 tCO2/yr number isn’t trivially scalable because forests eventually mature. Bastin et al. (2019) investigated this (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax0848) and found that there’s about 0.9 billion hectares of arable land that could be potentially forested which would capture 205 GtC = 752 GtCO2. For comparison, in RCP8.5, by 2050 we’d need to remove 540(1310) GtCO2 to reach 450(350) ppm levels. By 2300 this becomes 11946(12717) GtCO2. So in RCP8.5 this is definitely not a long term solution. For RCP4.5 these numbers are better, we’re looking at 385(1156) GtCO2 long term to reach 450(350) ppm. So a hot 450ppm level with aggressive carbon cuts plus a billion new hectares of forests is a viable outcome. But of course with only 0.9 Gha sequestering ~9Gt/yr, its just not fast enough to offset our current emissions and thus CO2 levels would rise for decades still, and of course that’s where DAC comes in, with mechanical trees being 1000x more efficient at sequestration (eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2022/04/22/asu-researcher-builds-mechanical-tree-capture-carbon-dioxide/7398671001/ ) than trees (hence no need for a billion hectares of land, but instead a lot of power). Either way, it’s going to require a huge change to our planet. No silver bullets. Thanks everyone!
"According to a Cambridge University researcher, a hectare of hemp can absorb between 8 - 15 tonnes of CO2. In comparison, forests capture 2 - 6 tonnes only depending on the type of trees, region, etc."
We're not even talking about some of the most efficient ways to remove CO2 regarding plants. There is also a particular tree that does twice what even hemp can do, then you have to factor in the fact that you can increase that by adding ivy which also protects the tree.
Additionally none of this is taking into account selective breeding to increase these plants ability to serve this particular purpose. Also hemp is a great alternative to many plants we already use for textiles and other materials.
Edit: A combination of many methods is so much more powerful than people realize, reducing oil usage(whether we like it or not this is going to be forced upon us by limited supply and increased prices), forests, popular hemp and marijuana farms(new cash crop), DACs, ect.
Capturing co2 while we're still burning fossil fuels is like mopping the floor with a tissue while the bath is overflowing.
More like mopping the floor of the overflowing bathtub with a rag that was already dripping wet before you started.
Renewables + nuclear - the way to go
Just go all in on nuclear until we’ve eliminated the need for all forms of carbon based electricity generation. Then we can start to switch over to renewables. I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper per unit of energy generated to favor heavy use of nuclear power although I haven’t checked the most recent numbers.
Renewables? Really?
@@JenniferA886 Nothing wrong with renewables, it's just that we cannot scale them as fast as our energy needs are to ween off the fossil train before it's too late... Nuclear now, we'll think later on how to make that a bit more sustainable when we do not have as much pressure from global warming...
@@zwerko Renewables energy yield is dogshit.
its not going to be one solution. as an optimization problem, we need to evaluate all these energy sources. clean energy profiles will differ per region. look at the LCOE per geographic location and you will understand why
Did my PhD on CCUS and have been working in the area in various capacities for last 15 years. DAC is the absolute hardest way to do CO2 removal, but likely needs to be done. The good thing is that regeneration of the sorbent or solvents can be done with low grade heat, in places like TX it might even be done via solar heat not needing electric at all. Unfortunately, compressing the CO2 for storage is also quite consuming. The other major issue is moving the air through the device. The chemistry is fairly easy to understand, but the engineering for reduction of energy is quite hard.
It would be great if we could transform the residue in something useful, like carbon fiber or something else.
Please explain to me how it would sense to use energy from renewables to power fans with an efficiency of around 8% to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere when this same energy could be fed directly into the grid displacing the same amount of energy generated by fossil fuels and thus preventing more CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels being pumped into the atmosphere?
@@zaar2604As dr. Kipping mentioned in the beginning of the video, we have no option. There's no enough land to plant all the trees necessary for the job.
In other words, there's ALREADY too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
Should have done a year in economics first so you could have then focused on something else that would also have been useless because you didn't do a year in sociology.
You may as well have worked on free wireless electricity for muggers.
@@MCsCreations maybe you try to address my question please?
Advanced nuclear, nuclear, nuclear!! Even though you didn’t mention the word once or show a picture of one, your entire video is actually an advertisement for advanced molten salt nuclear reactors. You successfully argued we need way more energy than we currently generate in order to terraform our own planet (whatever direction it needs to go) and that must be clean, safe, and simple-ergo molten salt nuclear reactors that first burn our current stockpiles of nuclear waste and then burn thorium.
This. The key to all our problems is massive energy production. Nuclear energy, even if we are just stuck with fission processes, provides the scale of energy production possible for these more fantastic solutions like DAC and mass scale water desalination. It also allows us to produce all hydrocarbons synthetically without the drilling and such. I don't understand why we are wasting time with things like EVs while we continue burning fossil fuels for power plants. The first nation to go all in on nuclear power is going to be tomorrow's superpower. Sure it's expensive, but part of that is because economies of scale cannot take hold when we build so few plants. More over the next gen plants are cheaper to build, maintain, and are safer if only we would fund and build them.
Ergo solar. You just lay out silicon in the sun. No moving parts. Tech is on a rapid exponential cost curve. The sun produces far more energy than we need to do all this terraforming. If we could capture all the sunlight hitting earth, and use it all to capture CO2, we would need 37 minutes of the suns light.
@@donaldhobson8873 If it was that simple, sure but its not. Solar panels rapidly degrade and a very good lifetime for a solar plant is 10 years before all the panels need replaced. This is 1/5 the life time of even old school nuclear plants. Solar also has huge non-conditionary environmental impacts needing an order of magnitude more real estate to produce the equivalent energy of a nuclear plant. This is land that will need roads maintained for access, critters killed in traps/poisons to avoid damage via wire gnawing and nesting in components . The land will need an army of landscapers to keep the grass/plants at bay and even in a desert to keep the sand dunes from burying panels. Run off from these huge swaths will likely effect watersheds negatively. Then there is the much more intense equipment maintenance needed just due to all the travel and individual components involved in rectification and energy management and transport. Then there are the megatons of mined copper needed for all the individual solar panel interconnects. Solar can also not scale with demand which is critical for any power generation and lithium ion battery storage cannot scale to the levels needed for global grid scale storage. Even if it did by some magic, the mining/disposal of cells is a environment nightmare and the storage plants would need an army of techs replacing cells daily.
All that is not to say I think solar is useless. It has a part to play and I think it is much better than wind. That said, it will never be 100% of our power generation and will likely never top 30% of it. Nuclear (augmented by solar) is really the only alternative if we want to stop burning fossil fuels.
Video was released 8 minutes ago*. Within those 8 minutes, 10 climate-change-denial comments were posted, the earliest being posted within 3 minutes of the video's release. Video is 25 minutes long.
Tells me everything I need to know about climate-change deniers.
*: not counting the time it took for me to read the comments and post this one
There aren't any climate change deniers...
There was apparently a reply to your post, but when one goes to read it, it is not there?
@@nicolasolton Yeah no idea. Whatever the reply was, I never saw it. Might have been a spambot.
@@ADINSX3 - it's mostly people reporting comments they don't like as criminal - it takes a couple of days for youtube to check - but for the duration? nobody else can see the comment.
@@JohnnyWednesday I doubt that's what happened in this case, as I've been on youtube the entire time since I posted my comment, and I get notifications whenever I get a reply. I saw yours within a minute of it being posted, for example. So the invisible comment would have had to have racked up multiple reports within a minute or so of being posted. And it would have had to have become such a target despite being a sub-comment to a comment on a video that only has 2.7k views so far. Seems highly unlikely.
It seems absurd to argue that we can double our energy production and devote all of that extra production to carbon capture. But what if we didn't dismiss it, and asked, "can we actually do this, and how could we do so cheaply?"
There is one conceivable way we could solve this, that I don't see discussed much. There is a method firmly grounded in thermodynamics that we could use to generate absurd amounts of energy for relatively low costs - extremely large nuclear reactors.
Fission plants are interesting in that the fuel costs are a rounding error in their overall budget. All the cost is in building the plant. But fission reactors, like any heat engine, tend to be more efficient the larger you make them. And in particular, they tend to be cheaper the larger you make them. There's a reason the nuclear industry has tended towards large GW-scale reactors. These are the economies of scale needed to make fission practical.
But what if we went larger? A lot larger. Orders of magnitude larger. Imagine if we built terawatt-scale fission reactors. Think of how cheap we could make large amounts of energy if we were able to build such massive reactors.
Why hasn't anyone done this before? Because for most cases, it's not practical. A TW-scale reactor is largely useless for the electricity market. Even if it can make electricity for a very low unit cost, there simply won't be a TW's worth of electricity demand within a reasonable distance. You would have to ship that energy hundreds or even thousands of kilometers, and line losses would eat you alive. Even though monster reactors might be able to produce huge amounts of energy cheaply, we don't use them because the market within a practical transmission distance can't soak up a TW's worth of production.
But CCS is one of the few cases where such monster reactors might actually make sense. You avoid crippling line losses by building your monster reactor right next door to your big CCS plant. And you can put your CCS equipment almost anywhere (or anywhere suitable geology exists.) So in principle we could construct some monster reactor and CCS plant right next door to a uranium or thorium mine, power all the mining and processing equipment with said reactor, and make the whole process as efficient as possible by minimizing transportation needs.
We have access to the energy needed to do this. The US has alone has enough depleted uranium sitting in warehouses that we could probably cover the whole process with this. And beyond that, reactors can be built to work off thorium, natural uranium, etc.
Ideally, you would design such a reactor to specifically meet the needs of large-scale CCS. For example, you might design them to operate with unenriched uranium and thorium, large breeder reactors. Also, you might be able to skip the electricity production process entirely. As you note, often for CCS most of the energy budget goes into heating whatever compound your plant uses to absorb CO2. So you could have a plant that has a primary cooling loop going through the reactor core, passes through a heat exchanger, and gives the water to a second fluid loop that provides the heat needed for the CCS equipment. You could design the reactor to primarily serve as just a heat source directly, and thus avoid the large thermodynamic losses necessary in thermal electricity production.
And you can go further. When you start really thinking on this scale, a lot of things become possible. For example, it's likely there isn't a foundry in the world that can build reactor vessels large enough to make such monster TW reactors. But when you're thinking on this scale, simply building the necessary foundry, right on site, to produce such vessels becomes a practical option. You avoid the transportation nightmare of transporting a TW reactor vessel long distance by building your reactor vessel foundry right on site. If we want to seriously talk about atmospheric CCS, we're talking on a scale that involves dedicating a few percentage of total global GDP to the project. And when you start thinking on that scale, all sorts of options open up. If the technology to do what you need hasn't ever been scaled to the necessary level, you have the funds to scale it. If a foundry that can build a reactor vessel large enough doesn't exist, you can build that foundry. If enough nuclear engineers and technicians to run such a complex don't exist, you can pay the entire education cost of an entire cohort of students to get the training they need.
It's a bit like the original Manhattan Project. Building a nuclear weapon in 1940 seemed impossible, the logistics were insurmountable. But when you start throwing around a budget big enough to construct entire cities from scratch, a lot of things that were once impossible suddenly become possible.
Very interesting thoughts, I worry though about cooling such a monster, and the potential impact of such a steam column. Though surely it can't be much worse than a rain forest springing up where there wasn't one.
@@72APTU72E Yeah just turning such a beast on could significantly alter local weather patterns wherever you built it. This is definitely a "lesser of two evils' idea. Creating a new artificial microclimate somewhere isn't something I would generally endorse. But when weighing against the dire nature of our situation, it may be a cost worth paying.
However, it might not actually require an ocean's worth of cooling water though. The CCS equipment seems to work on much lower temperatures than most reactors run at, so a lot of that thermal energy will go right into the absorption process.
But moreover, you might be able to just rely on air cooling for such a thing. Air cooling a TW reactor? Seems absurd right? But in this one context, it might not be. After all, you're already building utterly gigantic fan setups to move the huge volumes of air needed. Once you pull the CO2 out of your air stream, you could then use that air stream as the final cold sink for your reactor.
Normally, air-cooling a nuclear reactor is pretty absurd. Generally using a big body of water as your cold sink is a much more practical option. But since you're already going to have to be moving huge quantities of air anyway, using that massive air stream as your cold sink would probably be viable.
This is fascinating. Do you do videos on the topic? Would love to learn more from you on this idea of enormous economies of scale for fission and CCS.
I haven't yet, but I have considered it in the past. @@SAPANNow
@@TanyaLairdCivil well I'm subscribing to you in case you decide to in the future. You sound like a good science communicator.
Outstanding and thoughtful analysis, as always from Cool World 🙏
Cheers, yes quite a bit of research went into this one!
The amount of time, effort, research and content your pour into your videos is outstanding. Thank you, David, for your passion on this extremely important topic. You have a way with words; your writing and your delivery show exactly just how passionate you are. And of course, thanks for keeping that beautiful "Life in Binary' song going in your background music! I will be showing this video to my science students!
Thanks so much!
And yet he missed the biggest part of the equation which pretty much kills "carbon capture" is storing that stuff. Now onto what is not included in those 7% effi numbers is storing the co2 from gaseous form into something that we can "move" easily and then push under ground into oil wells. You can go 2 ways either freeze it or compress it. Now add transportation and then pumping everything underground. Oh and for comparison we will need about 2x the "space" to store the stuff we burned as 1 liter of oil after burning becomes 2 liters of co2. Carbon capture is bullshit in the long run.The planet will be fine, life will survive and people will do the same we are smart and tech will allow us to survive, but not at the billion count. Bakc when megafauna was around aka dinosaurs the co2 levels where 2-4k range. back then estimated temperature was 25-30c.
Are you kidding? He's just making stuff up. He doesn't know the first thing about the climate.
As an automation engineer I wish that I would see work opertunity to work on these issues... Thanks for harsh reality and a good video.
Profound video. Thoughtful, compassionate, scientifically/technically on point, and well spoken. Beautifully done.
Exactly this! Thx for putting my thoughts into words 🙏
Wasn't expecting a new Cool Worlds video, on this rainy Tuesday evening! ☺
Hope its a welcome surprise!
Liquid Air storage for grid scale energy storage has a neat side effect. You will get frozen co2 as a side effect, that you can then capture or use in some innovative Cement or steel processing that need a carbon source.
I've been thinking about this a lot since I've been taking a course on it in college this semester, excited to hear what this is all about
I am happy I don't watch news or talk politics, I never have to think about climate change. I just go about my life, trying to join the middle-class homeowners and not die in poverty.
And yet here you are feeling the need to leave a comment. Ignorance is bliss.
Pasture naturally absorbs a lot of CO2 and doesn’t decay. Hadrian’s wall looks so short today because the earth around it has risen, that stored carbon right there. Pasture is a quicker carbon sink than forests are, but the Kyoto protocol doesn’t measure carbon absorption by plants that are too small, so everyone focuses on trees instead. Creative accounting has permeated the world with the wrong incentives.
Bill Gates & the tech-bros will never give up their jets and orbital selfies.
Think King “Terra Carta” Charles will give away his collection of racing motorcycles, or empty his garages full of sports cars? Malthusian blue-bloods want their colonies back and believe they’ve worked-out Sustainable Slavery via the WEF pushing ESG protection rackets, “Gee mister ‘xec that’s a nice corporate bond-rating you have there - be a shame if something Bud Light happened to it.” Net Zero = Poverty.
These mother-WEFers are not even touching the infrastructure required - no mention of Base Load, lithium, cobalt, on and on, there is no logistics. Your on your own, kid. There was never a plan, just scams: everyone on Gore’s Hockey-Schtick team are now OG multi-multi-millionaires, including Micheal-the-pious-Mann. Greens don’t appear on media to argue, never Oxford-style debate, or talk about this except as one-way sermons and long-format movies, speeches, friend-of-show talks, because people rightly refuse this nonsense.
A quick google search tells me its 2,6T from trees and 1T from pasture both per acre
Not a expert but rather interested
Are my numbers wrong?
Thank for this video, Dr. Kipping, I don’t know much about the ins and outs of DAC but I figured the outcomes would look pretty bleak and I wasn’t surprised about that. It definitely would be nice to just stop emitting altogether, but I highly doubt that’s going to happen any time soon, especially with no other completely economically accessible alternatives. Hopefully a combination of these technologies and a different way of viewing society may help in solving this crisis. 🙏
Great video! My initial scepticism was proved wrong.
And it's nice that I happen to TA thermodynamics this term. I'll try to use this as an example in class.
Always a fantastic day when David and the team release a new video 😊
The frustrating thing to me is that we've had a major piece of the solution available to us for generations now, yet haven't used it. Further to that, the loudest opponents of its use have generally called themselves environmentalists. Nuclear energy is our best tool to take fossil fuel use offline.
At this point nobody who expresses anti nuclear energy views has any credibility to call themselves an environmentalist.
Even if nuclear is the lesser of two evils. It’s still quite potentially bad for the environment.
+100
To be fair, environmentalist =/= expert
100%. There will be a day of fusion someday. But before fusion, nuclear power is the most reasonable choice for CO2 and almost all environmental problems we have. Next generation nuclear power generation will be much efficient and much safer. Nuclear power itself has very low carbon footprints and can support DCC power requirement without putting more carbon.
Yes, we know renewable energies are becoming cheaper, but they have their own carbon footprints, and it is difficult to go massive scale. Nuclear power has already mature technology, can go massive scale, and zero carbon emission. Mining uranium can bring carbon footprint? Next gen nuclear fission plant using thorium can resolve that 100%.
More and more think about this, we need to go nuclear power 100%, like right now. More usage of conventional fossil fuel power plant, more CO2. Really simple.
@@MrSupasonics Nuclear has a significant unavoidable carbon footprint in the same way renewables do, but has a much, much worse spin up time. It has a role but it isn't in any way a panacea
Great video as always. But you really need to balance the audio levels better. The background music is too loud.
Sorry my fault. In an early draft I couldn’t hear the music to increase volume but didn’t check the entire video music levels after. Will make sure to check next time 👍
great Video again Prof Kipping , quite enjoy the calm and collected manner in the way you approach and present the topic , will you do perhaps a Video on the recent finds of K2 -18 b aswell , perhaps a Video on that subject is stil in the pipeline
I posted a YT short on it, I don’t chase news as it’s just feels too low bar, anyone can do that, but doing original calculations and provide new insights like this video seem like something more suited to what we can offer
thanks much for this, I was wondering the exact same thing about these devices, whether they are physically feasible. Indeed, you just gave the greatest argument for nuclear fission I could ever imagine - you can create these machines, standalone, almost completely automated and in remote locations, without needing to create all the infrastructure necessary to hook it up to the grid. They could run off primarily thermal power generated from the fission reaction and run without C02 emissions. In addition, you could use that thermal energy TO produce things like concrete and steel without needing to create electricity from it.
I'd love it if you made a follow-up video describing that, where nuclear is used for direct substitution of industrial process heat and in heating for residences and buildings, as well as driving these processes.remotely and in scruibbing flue gases. and see how the math shapes up here.
Maybe installing DAC on or around factories where the concentrations are highest and using some of the waste heat from productions to reach that 100C temp. But in the end I think DAC is going to be a bandaid and buy us time for better technologies to be developed.
LOL, so you do not want to captrue the CO2 directly at the exhaust, but some hundred meters away? Loosing a lot of efficiency? Please explain that to me
DAC is a way of fixing past damage if we figure out some source of super abundant cheap energy.
@@donaldhobson8873Nuclear?
Children’s anxiety comes from the adults. There is more to this story than we know. And I’m sure that the truth has been inflated.
Let’s just start at nuclear.
Not often I say this...I loved this video and I hated it...Your thought process is wonderful and even the final conclusion is palatable but I will admit that it is most troubling, especially if we keep doing nothing about the problem, the scenario that worries me the most.
I teach competitive robotics at the high school and University level. The bright and inspiring students I get to work with give me hope. 20 years ago I used to joke that one day they need to be as smart and creative as possible so they could be the "real" super heros and build technologies that would save lifes...turns out I may have been more on the mark than I intended, and literally they may have to save the world...but the students I work with give me hope...
Thank you for the thoughtful video.
It’s still within our power… just
Nothing is beyond our power. Have faith in those kids. 😉
Great vid as usual! Does someone know what's the plant in the background? I've been seeing it for months and I really need to know what it is 😢
a sunshade sounds more realistic now.
I think in reality we will not only rely on 1 solution for this problem, but many different ones all contributing something, so we will probably not scale 1 solution up to this amount.
anyway I'll be in my O'Neil Cylinder.
What about using less energy and decentralizing supply chains/power/human populations. Can those be in the list of solutions?
@@gekkobear1650 "What about using less energy" Sure, but not when that asks other people to focus less on growth, whereas other people still do. It's about who uses less power and how they manage to do that whilst still producing the same amount of wealth. "Decentralizing supply chains" indeed can be part of the solution for locally produced goods. Yet many goods rely on a global entwined supply system that will not be broken down, so those must reduce emissions and pollution on their own. Decentralizing power makes a lot of sense as this also improves the wealth of the populace (no more monthly heating bill - after you paid for the panels and heat pump). Decentralizing populations is to be determined at an individual level mostly. For example, think of having to move for the 3 gorges dam.. Not very sustainable from your point of view. People can decide for themselves to live away from city centers when that becomes economically viable for them (through proper public and private transit options for example - stuff we should do anyway even without a particularly friendly outlook).
"Feet" are what you walk with. "Metres" (or meters) are what sciency people measure with. 😊
Speaking of "BetterHelp," and more specifically, Prof. Kipping's videos, I have come to realize he accomplishes what he ascribed to therapy in anxious times: he and his lab, through the topics they choose to research and explicate, help us become better versions of ourselves. That won't be a new idea to longterm fans of this amazing channel. But to anyone new to Cool Worlds, please continue, whether you love astronomy, physics, the geologic history of the Earth, or the contingencies of finding exoplanets and exomoons. Because listening to the interests of Dr. Kipping, his logic in explaining new and complex ideas, and the deep, obvious humanity devoted to every issue he examines, we are inarguably given opportunities to nurture better versions of ourselves.
And that is the only way to a better incarnation of this carbon-burdened planet. My own interest in Cool Worlds is a somewhat tangential interest in celestial mechanics. And supporting Cool Worlds' research lab, by sharing it with links or with a modest, monthly amount of money, is a sure trajectory and steady compass to the distant shores of a sustainable world.
Thanks so much for your kind words and support 🙏
@@CoolWorldsLab I'm happy & embarrassed to say "Cool Worlds" has so restored my world that my support is self-serving!
There are more energy efficient ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than this.
One of the interesting ones is one kind of CO2 battery, useful for grid scale storage - which can provide both energy storage and CO2 capture.
Taking in atmospheric CO2 during charging, and emitting pure CO2 during discharge - making it much easier to capture the concentrated CO2
Another interesting one, is extracting CO2 from seawater, which also ends up removing it from the atmosphere.
This can be done using just a fraction of the energy compared to removing it from air.
I did a small essay on Direct Air Capture for my engineering degree and it costs 2x to 10x more than planting trees to capture the same amount of CO2. Plus trees provide shelter for animals and prevent soil erosion.
Direct Air Capture is not cost efficient at all for large scales
I hear that the ocean captures more CO2 than trees. There's too much neglect of the ocean!
The problem with trees is that they burn. Or they die and decompose back into CO2. A forest like the Amazon is in a state of equilibrium. The rate at which young trees are sequestering CO2 equals the rate at which dead trees are decomposing. The circle of life.
Oceans are much more interesting, since phytoplankton sinks to the bottom when it dies. So the new generation of plankton is always sucking fresh CO2 out of the atmosphere. The stuff on the bottom slowly turns into sedimentary rock, so it is a true carbon sink on human timescales. In terms of scaling, the oceans are one of the few things on the planet that are big enough to make a difference.
Right the problem is scale. As discussed in the video there isn’t enough space on Earth for the amount of trees it would take.
What about simpler solutions? In particular, promoting healthy soils? Due to their degradation, they often exhibit a sizeable carbon deficit relative to historical levels and so there is a significant potential for them to re-store large amounts of carbon by simply improving their quality
Planting trees costs 2x to 10x less and captures the same amount of CO2.
It is also way simpler
Yes, even something as simple as spreading crushed rock (serpentine) onto agricultural land will sequester CO2 over time.
@@Haskellerz not sure if you mean soil or DAC
@glynnec2008 but use of serpentine would not work on global scale
According to OECD, "net soil carbon sequestration on agricultural lands could offset 4% of annual global human-induced GHG emissions over the rest of the century" so I guess it is one of more important solutions
Just for comparison: increasing current carbon content in arable lands by 1% would mean additional 1.26B t of C being stored (it is 12% of yearly global emissions of CO2 converted into pure C). Assuming that a single tree sequesters 45 t of C over its lifetime it is comparable to 28M trees
If anyone wants to learn more I highly recommend watching this video: "What is Carbon Sequestration, Why is it Important, & How does it Work? | GEO GIRL "
Yes, trees are the simple and obvious solution. But the agenda is the advancement of SST; subsidy sequestration technology. So please be quiet, dont interrupt the Grift.
Wonderful analysis, thank you SO much. One thing crossing my mind is the "start date" (onset of the Industrial Revolution) may mark a step change in our ability to foul our own nest, though scarcely "Start Point", for which we need to consider slash/burn dating from the initial agricultural revolution.
This assertion is evidenced by samples taken from those ice sheets currently melting at an alarming rate.
In case folk feel that's doing no more than increasing the height of the cliff at which we're collectively teetering, whilst true, it likely also adds to the number of potential components of any solutions ... if everyone isn't panicking too much to play any useful part in some ultimate solution (which isn't the Anthropocene Extinction, at any rate).
Excellent, excellent video!!
I appreciate anyone that covers this and can be objective in a way that doesn’t trigger everyone and gives them time to actually think!
Mutually exclusive from this in the video, every single one of us needs to not fall for greenwashing…. I keep thinking of the carbon capture training, but I won’t get into something like that on here..
But this topic is very massive and very complex, and at the end of the day, I wish people would realize that a lot of solutions that would help substantially, get overlooked, delivered in a tiny little package with a bow on top of it, overlooking serious details, and/or things like nuclear, which intentionally end up having a horrific stigma attached to them…
I’m really glad you talked about DAC the way you did, though, as it is definitely one of those complex in an efficient way to do it..
I also feel that we need to focus more on other greenhouse gases, other than just CO2
It's interesting, because of the high energy requirements it seems like deploying DAC on industrial scales in locations at distance from major power generation facilities might very well work hand in hand with the recent advances in Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. Because of their smaller size and modularity these reactors can be more easily scaled up and power generation could take place right at the sight where the DAC is located without needing to worry about transmission loss or building an expensive coal power plant or an environmentally destructive dam (looking at you Site C).
You are speaking of Thorium MOLTEN Salt reactors are you not ???
@@lawrenceiverson1924 I was actually talking about the reactors currently being developed and produced by the company Last Energy in the US, as discussed in the video "Is Small, Fast & Cheap the Future of Nuclear Energy?" by: 'Undecided With Matt Ferell'. He explains the concepts and such it way better than I can without leaving a huge comment.
That's a really elegant solution: reduce the power transmission loss with already existing tech instead of having to make the CC more efficient with future tech.
One of the thing about using trees to capture CO2 (I think it has to be one of the method in our portfolio of CO2 capture) is that we have to cut trees once they have reach maturity so that their carbon do not get transformed into CO2 by rotting and store them so that we can restart a new batch of trees.
Actually moss is far better, since it automatically sinks into water and gets stored in oxygen free environment. It can capture 3x as much CO2 as trees, but we don't get a humanly usable product/profit from it, so noone will do it.
After Listening to Thunderfoot, it makes me think that that method might be too slow.
We should definitely use trees as a tool in our arsenal, has many other benefits, but looks very tricky to solve climate change with trees alone
@@CoolWorldsLab why do you need focus on trees ? Trees are not dominant in carbon capturing.
You should research how long that actually takes. In a well managed forest, the long living trees will be capturing more carbon every year for up to 300 years, before going into a steady state for perhaps another 300 and taking 300 more to die. "fast growing" trees are only part of the solution and timber plantations are no solution at all. Also, if you keep extracting woody biomass from a forest, you will eventually strip the soil of the nutrients the forest needs. Tree decomposition is a natural process that must be allowed to happen. It is our extractive and polluting activities that must be limited, not the healthy cycle of life in forest communities.
Great job as usual, thank you! I think RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway for radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m^2) was slightly misdescribed as a "business as usual, total pedal to the metal future". It's a pure physics model based on just heat balance. For policy implications, we need to look at the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which model policies. Each starts with current progress as a baseline. No SSP follows RCP8.5 because it's considered too unlikely, given the progress we've made. We have made progress! But at the same time, extinction is still possible, so "pedal to the metal" could actually be *much* worse than RCP8.5, especially if we back away from Paris etc.
> extinction is still possible, so "pedal to the metal" could actually be much worse than RCP8.5, especially if we back away from Paris etc.
Extinction of what? Not humans.
So good, important topic & presentation! Order of magnitude is the magic key to understand this "mother of all problems"... Thank you so much.
A great video! Thank you for making this. People need to understand the situation we are in. We need to come together and tackle this problem.
Lets be honest, certain companies put profit over the planet and governments let them.
In terms of money causing actions to be taken - they're one and the same thing.
Good.
Governments are elected by people. Our friends and family. If we can't convince them to elect better governments, what's happening is just part of evolution. And don't worry about earth. It's been just fine for 5 billion years. It'll survive us.
Governments interfere and make things worse. Trying to force electric vehicle les on everyone is completely idiotic and will back fire spectacularly.
They're legally required by the government to maximize if it's a public company.
I loved this. I read the Ipcc as well and ran my own numbers. Even if these dacs worked… we still have a monumental roll out problem. We need to be building them yesterday at speed to meet the Ipcc targets (which of course are fantasy)
@@Rubicola174 DAC is a potentially useful tool. "Hitler was vegan" is not an argument against veganism. Association with bad people doesn't stop a technology working.
Good video. One thing it doesn't seem to mention is what to do with the CO2 once you pull it out of the atmosphere. Is underground storage proven/stable enough ?
My understanding is that the storage itself is probably the most proven aspect of CCS. The Sleipner project in the North Sea has been doing it since the 90s.
Soil and how we treat it seems like one of the better solutions. Right now much of our agriculture removes carbon from soil through herbicides, tilling and grazing but if we change our practices it can store a lot of carbon (three times more than trees without losing arable land. It's not a one solution fix thing, obviously we will need others, but it can turn an emission practice into a sequestration one.
Getting farmers to change their practices to less profitable ones? To save the planet?
You do know that they are Monsantoing the earth right now, it is really unrealistic they would vare about the planet as a whole. Unfortunately.
So....what happens to the CO2 that gets separated by DAC?
Great question, one for another video perhaps, I didn’t want to go over 30 mins. But in short likely where it came from, underground
@@CoolWorldsLab pumping it in is gonna be at least as energy expensive as pumping it out. That should be added to the graphs
CO2 separated from air by the exothermic and entropy-increasing reaction
Mg2SiO4 + 2 CO2 ---> 2 MgCO3 + SiO2
is captured, in the sense that it cannot easily return to the atmosphere, if it is just laid on the ground.@@CoolWorldsLab
Pre-industrial emissions were 280 ppm CO2, not 350.
There is an interesting study of farming and sinking seaweed like kelp out in the middle of the ocean and since it wont break down it will just sequester at the bottom of the ocean as a carbon sink. some can double their biomass in a day and the energy would mostly come from the sun. Maintaining the farming ship and the sinker tech would be the most expensive energy which could also be powered by the sun and batteries for travel. Its one of the most promising methods I've heard about and most energy efficient.
I like how your analysis laid bare the complications with this mode of carbon capture. It really needs a multipronged approach on a global scale to solve it.
Exactly, no silver bullets here sadly
It took us hundreds of years to get here. These ideas to get out in a few decades are simply not realistic. However the damage done by not hastening our back pedal is unfortunate
How do we mine as much copper for this green-transition as mankind has Ever Dug Up All Over Again - and that’s just for the next two decades transitioning. Meanwhile, all the easy pickings are gone with ore concentrations down 1/3 from our grandpa’s time : which means 7x-10x more dross, sludge, trailings piled up around all those self-awarded Green Trophies.
There is nothing Renewable about this tech, it’s Repairable - with more petroleum needed for replacement steel and concrete parts: you cannot make more panels with solar, nor more turbines with wind. I don’t understand how these windmills are classified a turbine.
@@jonathanedwardgibson with more petroleum needed for replacement steel and concrete parts
Concrete production just needs lots of heat, no petroleum. And people are working on purely electric steel refining.
> you cannot make more panels with solar, nor more turbines with wind.
Basically, yes you can. currently most of our energy infrastructure is fossil fuel, so we are using that.
20:32
That scenario sounds like it'd make an amazing setting for a post-apocalyptic book/show.
Good video. It is now clear that we need an all-hands-to-the-pumps effort, as big as the WWII effort on both sides summed up. No one application will do the whole job; everybody must do all they can; nobody gets a free ride. The big question is how bad does it have to get before we can build this team?
I love the videos, but sometimes the background music makes them hard to finish. Any chance you could lower the volume a bit:) cheers!
Sorry will double check this next time
Another problem I see is the simple and direct waste heat generated by DAC (not to mention the Urban Heat Island effect of such facilities). Maybe that was already worked into the efficiency equations, but if so, it was not made clear.
It’s not just the trees, it’s the biome that goes around the trees and the forest, the whole infrastructure needs to be protected as it can’t be replaced once it’s gone. These are ancient infrastructures that support nature, animals and ourselves. Biodiversity is what we need to have to survive, there needs to another solution to feed our population.
Great Video, I was wondering if there was any video's, podcast's, essay's or papers combining multiple options at CO2 capture like DAC, re-forestation, ect? How about extracting CO2 from the ocean? would it be easier? higher volume extraction compared to air?
Extracting CO2 from the ocean would make things a lot worse! I don’t think anyone has studied that since it would somewhat strange to seek it…
Thank you for the response. Seems counter-intuitive that c02 and carbon extraction from the oceans wouldn't help. I learned something new! Thanks again and keep these videos coming! @@CoolWorldsLab
Interesting map. There seems to be a distinct lack of DAC plants in the two biggest polluting countries on Earth. Meanwhile, the nations who are making the attempt are being continuously battered about the head and shoulders.
CO2 for the most part is well distributed, so you're not going to get much more production in any random location vs one that is convenient.
@@CorvetteAustin24 I was referring to his "We all have to work together" statement. I understand how DAC works. It's just that ignoring the underlying problem feels like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.
David thank you for jumping into this topic. I first started understand the problem after listening to Bob Wells talk about it on his channel and I'm just blown away how it can be ignored. I've been to the Philippines six times now and everytime I visit there I get sick after I spend a lot of time in downtown Manila the smog is terrible... I don't think we should leave our children a Legacy of pollution and climate change
Smog is pollution. That PM2.5 and PM10 are bad news for your lungs. So are ozone, NOx and SOx. The big lie perpetrated by climate activists is to put CO2 into the same category as air pollution. The CO2 concentration in your own breath is something like 50000 ppm. You wouldn't want to inhale that, but its toxicity pales in comparison to the constituent of smog. If you're like most people, you drink *concentrated* CO2 in the form of cola, beer, and seltzers. If CO2 were actually toxic, that would be a fatal habit.
My pleasure, thanks for tuning in
I've been a solar superintendent now for 24 years. We need to go big on the solar Farms and to continue requiring every new house do have a base system on it. We need a lot more incentives for people to get solar I think it might help the whole deal if every house can manage its own loads... maybe I'm dreaming but it would be wonderful to see
How did you get yourself to the Philippines 'six times'? What mode of transportation?
@@dmsoundcollective6746 How much oil does it take to produce solar panels? Get down to the nitty-gritty, from mining equipment and infrastructure, to moving and feeding the people involved in the manufacturer/distribution/installation process. Then take oil out of the equation (simulating the FACT that earth will be out of oil in a couple/few human generations), and see how the whole 'renewables' paradigm shift holds up.
Thanks so much for fully explicating the energy requirements of DAC. I've never seen or heard this done with such precision before and it utterly illuminates why so many people have decided it is not a runner in the fight to mitigate climate breakdown. What I'd be very interested to know is, how do the equations work for photosynthesis, and for the reverse, the nocturnal respiration of plants when carbon dioxide is released? There's a puzzle there, isn't there, ie, the petajoules necessary, collectively, to remove carbon from the filters of DAC plants, and yet actual plants releasing co2 at night without solar energy? I'm sure there must be a simple explanation, but it would be good to see a video making the comparison. My other question would be, if the energy problem lies principally with cleaning the substrates/filters so that they can be reused, why do this at all? Couldn't DAC operate with a one-way substrate, ie, that create a dust like substance that contained the carbon and could then be used as a building material for example? A process akin to the way basalt rock can fix atmospheric carbon? I'm posing this on the basis of my understanding, from your video, that it is not so much the capturing of the CO2 that is energy intensive, but the releasing of the CO2 from that substrate so that the substrate can be reused. Thanks for any responses on this, I am researching the feasibility of large-scale DAC in the face of a natural world that is increasingly less able to sequester carbon as seasons are disrupted with floods, heat and drought.
Even if we capture the CO2, there is still methane and SO6 remaining?
Indeed! They don’t contribute nearly as much but still a problem
Indeed! They don’t contribute nearly as much but still a problem
Open discussions about mitigation strategies and technologies, such as Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC), are crucial in raising public awareness of what could very well be humanity's last 'controllable' stand against irreversible damage to our biosphere.
While these technologies offer potential solutions, they also highlight the immense energy demands and politically divisive challenges we must overcome as a global community.
Climate destabilization is a threat that transcends borders, requiring united efforts on a global scale. It's truly encouraging to see the quality of scientific, data-backed conversations like this that underscore the significance of addressing climate instability as a collective endeavor.
Just surrender your house, bro. 😂😂😂
This stupid lofty dreams will not materialize when we are ruled by literal snakes. They will never practice what they preach to the peasants.
This seems like it's a problem that we can't simply avoid. It may be time to spend 1% less on weapons.
Or more and use it to bomb all coal power plants and oil refineries worldwide.
Sorry, Johnny. No can do. We need more weapons to make the world safe for democracy.
This sounds like an excellent carbon capture plan for selling co two credits if wind farms that are down due to no demand for their power could be processing co two as a side gig , But maintenance time would have to be calculated in. And also, downtime is also needed for maintenance. So I'm sure scheduling would have to be recalculated.
That alarm type sounded thing at the end of the video is really freaking out my cat lol
22:46 “ it could actually unify us” - that’s when I started to suspect it😂😂😂
Thanks for watching! Check out our sponsor betterhelp.com/coolworlds for 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp and get matched with a therapist who will listen and help. Let me know down below your thoughts on DAC - do you think efficiency will increase far above 8%? Do you think we'll use fission/fusion power to meet power demands in time? Or do you think DAC won't work and we'll need another solution.
Nice 👍
BetterHelp is a horrific company that has a well documented track record of hiring unqualified or underqualified therapists, paying them peanuts, thus providing substandard care despite being similarly priced to real therapists, and has also had a massive breach of confidential customer data. They are a terrible option for proper mental health care and it's profoundly disappointing to see this channel promoting such a terrible operation that many other CZcamsrs have sworn off of.
Scam ad!
Ots already clear that CCT will and can not save us.
However, did you really got the math right, regarding natural land and ocean sink capazities?
Your numbers seem very high up to 2050
Why would we need such linearly increasing carbon capture capacities?
Because of assumed continued world wide growth of economy and increasing carbon emissions?
Nowadays human CO2 emissions are estimated to be 40 Gt, half of which might be already "captured" or stored in land and ocean sinks
You are so passionate about this topic you're even using it to peddle therapy bullshit for an extra buck or two. This is why humanity deserves it's fate.
I wonder is it possible to include methane capture/oxidation too since levels of methane seem to be spiking in the last few years.
I'm right there with you David, I data mined a temperature history website and I did find an upward trend in temperatures in the past 50 years. The data speaks for itself.
How would the Earth fare with 750-800 ppm? To my knowledge anything about 1000 ppm would start having direct health impacts. I'm asking those questions because we're on our way there, and most solutions are just feel good vaporware, such as this carbon capture scheme.
The Cambrian period had CO2 ppm of 1400 and that resulted in the greatest growth in life in Earth's history.
Occupational limits for 8hr exposure in Minnesota set by the Dept of Labor is 10,000 ppm. For 15min it is 30,000. In many homes CO2 levels reach 1000 ppm.
@@immortalsofar7977 you forget that the Sun was quite a bit weaker back then, by about 7-8%. I fact I've seen many conservative "experts" totally ignore the increase in solar radiance during that period. I'm not saying that it will be necessarily bad for the planet, but for people, and human civilization, that was created during a period with remarkably stable climate.
@@lukeearthcrawler896 yes but between 1000-2000 ppm some people may feel sleepy and even dizzy. If the whole planet is like that *on average* imagine how much worse it will be in areas where concentration is already high now.
@@lukeearthcrawler896: Negative effects for human are known to occur at 1000ppm. In Europe, there is recommended limit of 1000ppm for indoor air quality. The air starts to feel stuffy at about 1000ppm and people are effected cognitively. No long term studies of people in a 1000oppm CO2 environment have been performed. We don't know what we are getting into at this point in time. Its scary.
unfortunately the co2 lowering oceans and also plants are not mentioned anywhere. Especially the oceans are with 10 Gt/yr a stable sink.
He literally addresses plants in the video and the tonnage of carbon they can sequester? And if the oceans are indeed a stable sink, why have they not been absorbing the measurable increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last century? Your head is in the sand.
Yup, they don't mention carbon capture by oceans. All agenda based propaganda.
So you think he is stupid? Or maybe you should do more research?
In addition, I'd love to get your reaction and/or take on the OTHER main geoengineering possibility for saving our skins - namely spraying aerosols into the troposphere. Thunderfoot did a video on this recently and I would like to know whether or not you think his math checks out from a physics perspective.
I haven’t seen their videos but I might do a future video on this. I always prefer to do an independent take then pull apart someone else’s work.
@@CoolWorldsLab ok that's fair enough - he also has a take on CCS that IMO would be worth checking out, although if you haven't seen any of thunderfoot's videos I agree with your approach. ie: doing both videos first and only then analyzing both videos.
@@gregmattson2238 I think they are kind of saying the same thing. THunderf00t is just....a bit harsh on the criticism of others but he makes good points.
Both agree it consumes a massive amount of energy, one that would be a big sacrifice of humanity to stop emitting too.
Thunderfoot recently made a few newer videos just on the scale of climate change too, pretty good.
Ideas like this have a chance at broad support specifically because they are practical and reasonable. For example, most people I know simultaneously want to combat climate change, but simply cant afford EV, solar panels etc and as you stated, that really won't solve the problem. Very interesting video, good news is the planet is full of smart people and I believe we can figure something out.
Do more of these environmental videos please
I want to keep living on a Cool World
How many feet did sea levels rise in the last 20,000 years? If you don't know already, the answer may surprise you. We need to be able to adapt as a species, not sacrifice ourselves to the altar of an immutable world.
Humans are real good at adapting.
I've seen a lot of talk about the tech itself but never about where it should go. Wouldn't these things be more effective around large population densities vs somewhere remote?
Wondering why you didn't mention the option of distributing pulverized rock to leverage the weathering effect? That entails energy expense to pulverize & distribute, but none to "operate" the rock dust thereafter :)
It took us hundreds of years to get here. These ideas to get out in a few decades are simply not realistic. However the damage done by not hastening our back pedal is unfortunate
@@kingsavage2272 Yes, and it will take humanity hundreds of years to fix it, or adapt to the new climate equilibrium. Meanwhile, the next asteroid or supervolcano or ice age might finish us off before then. Why are we even worried about computer models spewing out questionable forecasts about what MIGHT happen a hundred years hence? Life's too short.
6:12 Forget the "trigger warnings", Doc, and let's look at how such blowback as this occurred in the first place. After we do this we should have a better idea of what to avoid. This way, moving forward, we don't oversell an idea (or its proposed solutions) to the point where large percentages of our children are seeking mental health therapy as a result of the situation.
🤔👍🙂
Absolutely wild hom many of y'all subscribe to a science channel and get pissy when it presents you with science.
They are not actual subscribers
Absolutely wild that you think there's only one "The Science". Science cannot tell you what your values are. Ecological science says a lot of things about resource extraction you "science people" would be quite pissy to hear because you are in fact more into empire engineering then you are science.
How much energy, roughly, is required on an industrial scale to capture 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere?
I get 0.3 kWh.
That’s based on crushing peridotite rocks that are half forsterite (Mg 2 SiO 4 ) and half fayalite (Fe 2 SiO 4 ).
The reaction of the crushed rock with atmospheric CO 2 releases a little energy (and so the CO 2 definitely won’t be returning aloft). If any of that can be used, it might reduce the 0.3 kWh figure a little.
If not, it’s still less than one-eighth of the energy that was originally yielded in putting the kilogram CO 2 into the air. Less than a 16th, if the fuel was methane
Very interesting, and sobering. What are the numbers on splitting CO2 into C + O2, vs. separating it and storing it?
This is what plants do. The energy required to convert a mole of CO2 to glucose is about 100KCal or about 400KJ. Plants don't do this very efficiently but those would be the theoretical raw numbers.
@@8584zender Aren't plants also splitting water along the way? I know it takes scads of energy to decompose water, so if you're not doing that part too, maybe the numbers come out better? IDK. Am not a chemist...
@@TheBookDoctor Better. But fairly similar. We can get less energy use by storing something with lots of oxygen in, like formaldihyde or methanol. (hope those don't leak)
We lost already! We are done for 😆
We are technically in the beginning of the ice age 1. if we did not have Co2, we will cease to exist. 2. I used to buy liquid Co2 for my greenhouses for most plants cannot survive on less that 250 ppm, after increasing my Co2 to 650 ppm, my growth increased to 37%... Note, consider ourself lucky in a global worming condition for an Ice age would be a disaster for all mankind.
Funny how the climate evangelists seem to forget that basic fact that plant life needs CO2 and lots of it. Nurses used to removed plants from hospital wards years ago because of CO2 emissions at night.
Just to get a better feelings of the cost:
44g of CO² equals a minimum of 19505 J or 5.42 Wh per mol of CO2
so we could suck 8.1kg per Kwh of electricity at room temperature. This is 124 kWh per ton CO2. This sounds ridiculously low to me, since if solar electricity at a price of 2 cents per kWh would be used for this, the electricity cost would be only $2.48 per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. Or am i wrong somehere?
I asked basically the same questions in one of the comments here, nobody could could give an answer. Sucking CO2 from the atmosphere is a brain dead idea if you could use renewable energy to displace fossil fuel energy, the reduction in overall CO2 would be greater by orders of magnitude.
@@zaar2604 Sure. Also the 8% efficiency of the process would lead to a more realistic figure of $31/ton. Still, climateworks says that they can achieve $600 per ton to date. Anyway, reducing emissions alone wont help, we need CO2 removal as there is too much CO2 in the air and ocean already, so we have to remove it somehow
@@zaar2604 I found another source that give a number of 250 kWh/ton on page 50 www.sapea.info/wp-content/uploads/CCU-report-proof3-for-23-May.pdf
@@zaar2604 Sucking Co2 from the air can make sense with fossil fuel energy. The energy needed to suck up CO2 is ~3% what was released when the fossil fuel was burned. But inefficiencies.
Thanks for the video, always look forward to them.
EV car? You mean coal fueled.
What? I don't know where your misinformation comes from, but it could be the liar Bjorn Lomborg.
@@patricklincoln5942 And here comes the nonsense attempts at smears.
@@freedomoperator6502: If you want me to prove that Bjorn Lomborg is a liar I can do it for you (it is not meant as a nonsense smear). I just suspected he was your source because that is something I saw Bjorn Lomborg say in a looney Prager U video. If you want the proof I will give it to you. Just ask. In the meantime you should be aware that your comment does not make sense. It is not based in our current reality. There are no doublt places on the globe where your comment makes some sense just like it would make sense to say that French EV's are nuclear fueled.
His EV car that he has parked right next to his solar panels? Maybe he knows where his electricity comes from.
@@asharak84 copium much?
What if there was a solution that actively emitted fresh air. Like the water powered car which burns hydrogen and emits oxygen. Wouldn't adopting a technology that actively benefits the air, rather than being neutral to the air just not emitting further carbon like current EVs, be the ideal solution? I can't see why anyone would build one of these DAC plants without the research funding that surely funded the first ones. Do they generate any income? Building a water powered car would generate income while fixing the air. So it seems on the surface anyway. I'd like to see a video on this topic. It's a lithium free solution as well.
If you burn Hydrogen it combines with Oxygen and creates water. It also would not reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere unfortunately.
So far it has taken us more energy to split water than we'd get from burning the resultant oxygen and hydrogen - and even if we could do it perfectly? it would take exactly the same amount of energy to split the molecule as it would to reform it into water via combustion. It's the same bonds being broken and formed - no extra energy to be gained.
As a physicist, you'd be better off making a car powered by earwax, in the sense that it's at least physically possible. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen (hence H2O), put them together (burn them) and they release energy, and water. To split water into hydrogen and oxygen, it requires energy (the same amount of energy that is released when they're burned together again). The main problem with the atmosphere that causes climate change is how much CO2 is in it, trapping heat and causing the atmosphere to warm. Adding more oxygen would do nothing to counter this, and has nothing to do with the issue at hand, the atmosphere isn't a slider that just goes between good and bad. To suggest just creating more oxygen to counter CO2 emissions is a bit like trying to stop yourself when you trip down the stairs by peeing your pants, they're unrelated and now when you hit the ground not only are you hurt but you're covered in piss too.
It doesn't clean the air in any meaningful way in terms of greenhouse gasses, while using a ton more energy (which, as this video covered, we really don't have limitless amounts of).
What if there never was human made climate change and it's all a hoax to ruin you. By the way an EV runs on coal most of the time, you don't see smoke coming out of the tail pipe because the pipe is at the coal power plant.
thank you. this is kind of analysis we need on grander scale
You ever read about the stuff that happens at Lamont? Also, what do you think about sulfur and the area above Anarctica?
The glaciers and Ice caps grow and shrink in cycles over 100s, 1000s of years. They arent going to shrink and completely disappear and the human affect on any of this process is quite frankly, a drop in the bucket compared to the natural cycle. If anything we should be worried about sliding into a deeper ice age, global cooling is more dangerous to humanity than CO2 and global warming.
You're referring to 'Milankovitch cycles', the natural cycle of the cooling and warming of the planet for over 900k years now.
You've obviously got a basic understanding of them, but it is clear that you know little more than the mere fact that they exist.
What your argument is missing is that this cycle should currently be in the cooling phase. Cooling. Not warming; let alone at an unprecedented pace.
If you had researched this in any legitimate way prior to making your comment, you wouldn't have made your claim.
The impact of human activity is having a clear, significant, and undeniable impact on the warming of the planet. A planet which should be cooling.
To claim otherwise only lets everyone know that you haven't done your homework.
The impact of human activity on our planet is by no means a mere drop in the bucket.
Tell that to the scientists that actually work and live on the poles and look at core samples and do this for their living and arent being paid off by someone who funds their work. We are in an ice age period now and may be slipping back out of it. Again, im not arguing we have 0 affect but to say its drastic is not true. And the only data that points to that is over extrapolated computer models that are just that, models, not fact.
What a disingenuous pictograph of those balloons in NYC being stacked above the empire state building. Considering CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere, and humans produce a mere fraction of that percent, it should really be a miniscule dot in a vast void of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapor, etc.
Not to mention the NOx and SOx generated from combustion.
The atmosphere is real big. So a small proportion of the atmosphere is still a lot of co2 to take out and put somewhere.
Let's not forget that this is terraforming so i'm actually positively surprised by the numbers :D
I think the best approach would be the solar one if we keep going we'll have a massive surplus of energy during summer months might as well put that to good use.
This is extremely well done! I hope most people know that there are certain things that you’re leaving out because it’s such a massive, massive massive (compression, construction technique heck methane from natural/artificial sources) - you definitely did this justice, because my goodness the amount of greenwashing nonsense that people are starting to believe and the people that are profiting off of it and so on, is out of control so..
THANK YOU!!
Climate change exists and this channel has unequivocally stated as much several times
I've often thought how futile net zero for the UK was. We are a small percentage of the world's CO2 omissions, and the results of net zero seems to be a terrible example to others. we must innovate to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in amounts that mean we are a net remover of CO2 by a massive margin.
Why you want to remove it, it is essencial gas for plant life, and concentration of CO2 in the atmosfere is miniscule.
How do you differ the amount of CO2 humans produce and how do you differ it from amount of CO2 plants produce ?@@Rubicola174
@@miloddvoranak8900 not surprised you'd want to increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere considering you clearly have the IQ of a plant.
Yes, every country needs to remove what it historically emitted. UK has a long way cleaning up their shit, since they are one of the worst countries.
@@allocater2 Nice one - by worst do you mean best? Or perhaps you live in a 'better' country?
I think meddling with the atmosphere to the point going back to pre industrial levels is a really bad idea. Reminder that there is a supposed ice age coming, and trust me you would rather the Earth get hotter than getting another snowball earth
Treat it like any other thermostat. Someone complains it's too cold and slams the dial way up. Then someone else complains it's too hot and slams the dial down again.
@@donaldhobson8873 That might be true for humans, but I was thinking more about plants and crops
Hello, Professor.
I am in the industry of RE development, working in one of the world's biggest global developers. Even though what you are saying is 1000% correct from a scientific and engineering point of view, the most simple fact that with today's global economic system and how it's driven, add to that the worse fact of being unable to commercialize then Carbon capture systems and by that I mean that you can't get an income out of it, it is almost impossible to have the world's eye turning towards these types of projects. It will have to be either coming from a governmental initiative or a non-profit org. working on collecting donations for this to be picked up by a willing developer. It is a sad fact that everything is driven by money and every good action can be halted by global economic short-comings.
I have been calling for my superiors to act according to our mission statement and lobby governments to create a fund aiming to have said "experiments" as they call it, materialized, continually researched, developed further and maintained for a better future for our children.
Exactly. I think we can't pretend that technology will save our bacon on this one. We need fundamental societal restructuring to solve the problem of climate change. These massive global corporations ruthlessly pursuing increased profits and shareholder dividends is not compatible with ecology. Our economic system, the global economic system, is built on this idea of endless growth. Economic growth, industrial growth, profit growth, population growth, every kind of growth. Our economic system worked when profit incentives for private entities lined up with what was best for our species. Now the two are entirely separate. That means humanity has to make a choice, and it's honestly an incredibly easy one.
@@Erikaaaaaaaaaaaaa Thank you. That's a perfect statement!!
I was looking into a SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cell) power source for an automobile.
Not sure about the citing of the climate anxieties of the younger generation. These anxieties are completely manufactured by the media and are not necessarily the reflection of the real state of affairs. The younger generations are not all climatologists and their opinions on the subject matter are at best second hand. Not to mention that the younger generations are generally more anxious for a number of reasons.
Here's a plan sir. If you want to sequester CO2... Plant large fields of crops.
I think in 3rd or 4th grade I learned that Plants inhale CO2 and exhale O2. And as a side benefit maybe you could harvest the crops and feed them to human beings or animals.
Hope this Helps.
If you had actually watched any of this video you would (maybe) have caught on to why this can't solve the problem.
@@hahtos It's not a problem. It's a scare project for people that are easily misled.
@@Thunderbird-2 - The irony of you accusing others of being easily misled is as delicious as your crops.
@@Thunderbird-2 anybody who can do simple arithmetic can tell you that that simply won't work. If you want to try yourself, consider the tonnage of carbon that a field produces at maximum rates in a year, vs. how much carbon is emitted into the atmosphere by human activities.
@@asdfasdf-dd9lk LOL
This would be great to pair with solar energy, since solar cant fluctuate its output to keep up with the daily swings in power consumption. When the grid has lower demand, divert the power to a DAC system. Also, the energy capture becomes slightly more efficient with a lower T when the grid demand is lowest. The hottest time of the day also correlates to the most power consumption. that 3-5pm window were people are getting home work/school, but a lot of businesses are still open creates a massive spike in demand. Ideally they would draw the most power during a 10 hour window from 9pm-7am. This also gives plenty of down time for maintenance on the DAC.
This is a great and very timely video, one I will be watching a few more times. Can I suggest a collaboration with Casey Handmer, PhD, who has grand plans for DAC?