@@Omer1996E.C "How dare you, I pay you to give me a better image whilst I don't actually care because by the time this is a big enough problem I'll be long dead but profits need to keep rolling in!"
@@kristoffer3000 CEO: "uhhh, you engineers are a failure, I'm going to buy some lawyers to help me circumvent the law anyway, you can't break natural laws, but they can break national laws"
Amine scrubbing is my PhD research. We can capture more than 99% of co2 with amine solvents. 90% was just the standard that’s been used but that’s by no means an upper limit. It just depends how you design your columns. And there are no larger scale testing of activated carbon that I’m aware that would be necessary prior to commercial use. Amine scrubbing could be installed on almost any point source emitter right now because it is a mature well tested technology.
The problem is primarily the cost and the fact that it's a fossil fuel enabler. I think it we should have more carbon capture at the source, but I don't want that to slow the transition to renewables.
Cool Worlds did a video 2 days ago, showing the absolutely ridiculous amounts of energy needed for carbon capture if we want to stay within 2 degrees c warming. It will still be needed but we need to cut our emissions to zero way faster than people think if we are to have any hope of being able to use carbon capture to make up the difference. Great video by the way.
But it's important to remember the difference between direct air capture, which he covered, and capturing it at the source, which takes significantly less money and electricity. The only problem is that it requires us to keep polluting to have something to capture, but if we're going to pollute anyway, we should be doing. As long as it doesn't become an excuse to avoid transitioning to renewables.
Of course I won't be here to find out, but I'd like to know where civilization will be on this subject a hundred years from now. I am pretty sure our grandchildren and great grandchildren will NOT be happy with how we're dealing with the climate change problem presently.
When you're using "we" I assume you're talking about us here in the west? The rest of the world where poverty is a big concern they have other priorities in life. Yes, the problem won't solve itself but there are *many* problems intertwined that needs to be solved in the near foreseeable future. Climate change, poverty, overpopulation, food, work and so on. Most of us are living in a protected little bubble but the rest of the world isn't. They can't afford to think about the climate.
This (capture at the source) is the kind of carbon capture you like to hear about, not that direct capture nonsense. It's great that people are researching direct capture, we will want a mature and effective technology eventually, but in the short/medium term, until we've all but completely eliminated *all* of our avoidable global emissions, every dollar and megawatt spent on direct capture is not spent reducing emissions. It's like using a teaspoon to try and empty a bucket before you've even turned off the tap that's filling it.
Its the economics that are the problem. Until we make it cheaper to not use fossil fuels, nothing will happen. HOW we go about making it cheaper is the problem. We can tax the crap out of it, but then that puts the cost on the average joe, and reduces their standard of living. VERY few people will accept this, and it only works in places that are willing to implement taxes. If on the other hand, governments and corporations develop tech that replaces the need fossil fuel, but making it cheaper to not use it, then the world will pick it up on its own, and improve the standard of living for everyone.
@@dave4882 Everything you said is absolutely true, but also completely irrelevant to everything I said. All I said is that direct air capture doesn't matter until we "turn off the tap" of emissions. All you said is that "turning off the tap" is hard. Complementary, but mutually exclusive claims.
@@cebo494 I'm not saying its hard, I'm saying its pretty much impossible. I don't think we should stop researching CC just because it's not going to make a big impact right now. The research we do now, might be vital to undoing the damage in the future. Even though, there are more effective ways of stopping the Co2 than CC, the public will not allow those more effective strategies to happen. I don't think CC is a silver bullet. It might be a important piece of the solution in the future, but it will never solve the complete problem.
Sadly, in Canada at least, the American oil companies that control our tarsands acquired the right to buy the carbon capture companies monitoring their exhausts. Already the reports about carbon capture are vague to the point of being useless. I can't imagine they will be investing in any upgrades.
They'll just kick in a few more $million to right wing politicians. We'll get action once there are 100 million environmental refugees in the US and Canada, and the conservatives figure out a way to spin it against the liberals. Not one minute earlier.
@TheRealSkeletor your assuming the american oil monopolies that basically control our contry wouldnt make an effort to hide carbon emissions? I mean they hide literal massive ocean oil spills and get off without oaying anything. Idk, im leaning toward trusting this jearsay.
I work with activated carbon daily, used in water treatment, usually coconut shell carbon. I understand adsorption, but never realized the surface area in terms of basketball courts! Great video
I wonder if used coffee grounds would be a good activated, charcoal medium. I am thinking about from commercial processing of freeze dried coffee , and sellers of coffee concentrate.
And this is why they can sell you on the global warming scam. ( the words climate change was invented by George Bush. Wasn't even coined by scientists, it came out of a focus group. I got the order to change the government lexicon. Because you don't even know how to look in the science and need things explained in basketball courts. This scam preys on the scientifically illiterate.
It's not a good comparison because they're measuring them at different scales, invalidating the math. It's way less than 3 courts if measured correctly. See my main reply for more.
I work on MOFs which are basically cage shaped molecules that can capture CO2 but not other gases. I work in one of the labs that discovered CALF-20. This has already been implemented in some plants and is very promising!
We would still need a way to sequester the algae once grown. Or else it would just decompose and release the CO2 back to the atmosphere. Which means burying it, or pumping it deep underground.
@@cloudpoint0 not if you bake living things' corpses without oxygen into a crisp - pure carbon will remain and you can bury it somewhere where fire and oxygen from atmosphere won't find it.
We already are under the plan of building a carbon capture fecility in my town here in Norway, to try and capture all the CO2 created by a aluminium factory. They are planning to use the carbon to create carbon nanofiber.
You know it is just a wealth transfer right? Just like those OLD pictures of those fancy solar farms are not maintained and falling apart, and broken, Like the plastic recycling scam (there is no such thing as recycling plastic, they bury it in China or dump it in the ocean) those will be abandoned to rot in a year when they pocket your money. What a scam. LOL Thermometers weren't even invented till the 1600s.
Public support and funds aren't infinite. Nuclear costs too much public support for a energy source that takes years to actually build and is also non renewable and will require more effort and investment in the future to replace with something actually sustainable. Better to just expand on renewables and energy storage now instead of having some more nuclear reactors 10 years from now.
You are spot on! I can’t believe they used a clip of a nuclear plant as an example of a carbon producing factory. They only talk about pipe dreams. Their ideas are so bad that they have to be forced on the population.
@@FNLNFNLNexactly. Nuclear is good but when accepting the realities we have to deal with political viability and accounting for changes in influence is important. Keep the nuclear plants that we have going, and finish the one’s we’re already building. But a new plant that doesn’t get finished in 10+ years cuz someone different got elected means no progress in that time, and if it gets cancelled half way through there’s no progress at all. Renewable projects are progressively productive, and if you get only 5 years into a 10 year project, you still may very well have half the intended energy production rather than none of it. Investment can also be more widely spread out by encouraging residential & commercial rooftop solar, farmers in appropriate areas doubling their land as crop farms + wind farms, etc.
Fantasy comments that don't realize or will not admit to themselves that we will need to invest in nuclear and will not be able to completely avoid fossil fuels. Regional adoption of appropriate alternatives can help, but a uniform grid completed comprising what we currently consider renewables will not sustain current levels of technology. [edited to add: And we haven't solved the energy storage problem for renewables.]
@@FNLNFNLNit's expensive because it's not being built. The more demand for the specific parts that go into a nuclear plant will cause prices to come down over time. The parts would start being mass produced driving prices down.
I had the same problem when trying to play oxygen not included. That co2 was so annoying to get rid off so what I ended up doing was building a long pipe into space and that solved the problem without me needing to process it or anything. Magic. All jokes aside, I don't see corporations or many nations changing anytime soon. We're "different" here in the west but that doesn't mean countries in the east care because at the end of the day money is everything. It's easy to sit and judge other people when you're safe at home protected but if you're living in an underdeveloped country and you're poor that's when you have other priorities. Then again with the cost of living skyrocketing across the board I'm seeing a lot of people getting poorer with time everywhere in the world. It's going to be a lovely future no matter what happens with the climate.
Much of the carbon emissions in the developing world are from corporations based in the developed countries selling cheap products to citizens in the developed countries. Many people in underdeveloped countries would actually benefit hugely from a fast transition to clean energy, think for example, large scale solar and wind electric generation in rural Africa. Wealthy countries and their corporations could subsidize this in underdeveloped countries but theyre not because their real concern is maintaining their own wealth and power first and foremost.
Thunderf00t has been covering carbon capture recently.... and he explains the actual science of it.... and how for the most part, cabon capture isnt feasible.... especially when we use fossil fuels still, and still use money.
@@emptyshirt "something for nothing" you don't get with thermodynamics. But I suppose they could use sunlight or some other readily available energy source to desorb or decouple the CO2 afterwards.
yeah no i think thats a coal plant, look at all the silos, hoppers, and conveyor belts. Not to mention its right next to a busy train yard which nuclear plants dont usually need
That was priceless. And this is supposed to be a science show. Their ideas are nothing but pipe dreams, and are so bad that they have to be forced on people.
Even if all people collectively did their best to reduce their needs it would still hardly be a dent in country wide emissions. Big industry loves to gaslight the average people to reduce their emissions when they themselves are profiting immensely blowing CO2 out of every orifice. It's a scam. Voting for environmental representation is really the most powerful tool we got.
2:52 Google Bard is saying --> Melamine porous networks (MPNs) are a new material that can grab carbon dioxide out of exhaust and hold it tightly, but still release it without putting in too much work. MPNs are cheap, hardy, and have a lot of space where reactions can happen without being big and bulky.
condensing smokestacks would reduce the loss of efficiency by cooling the gas and taking the heat out of it . A lot of those large factories needs heat anyway , might as well recapture a tonne from the smoke stacks. potentially for heating water for local commercial or industrial needs as well.
One foreign word: daisugi It literally means (if I even got the correct word) platform ceder They're just trees gown ontop of other tree The idea is we do this almost everywhere with various types of trees More trees, more food, more paper, more nature, less carbon, better mental health
... actually can't stop laughing at these images 😂 Amazing. Tho in all seriousness, planting forests with diverse trees is among the best carbon captures we got... aside form like growing cyanobacteria in massive vats maybe. Daisugi seems to be more of an art thing. Looks hecka cool. But I don't see how it would help climate wise. More tree density might actually be bad for forest fires.
Decently wet ground, or at least a system of creeks and ponds do a lot to stop forest fires. Get beavers, those weird flat tailed rodents do great things for the water cycle, even in deserts.@@Broockle
@@eric2500 People need a lot of space and trees. Flooding also causes a ton of damage. But ye, agreed. Nature has a lot of mechanisms to make use of to preserve it if we can only find a middle ground.
It's not the capturing part that we need to worry about, it's a storage/usage we need to figure out. I work on amine plants and i know we capture plenty o co2 but we don't have a economicaly viable way to store/use it.
Thunderf00t has a good video on this and ya, it's pretty poor idea unless we change our electrical network from the current dirty energies to something cleaner.
We've already put too much CO2 into the air. We need to do lots of air capture, not just to offset our future emissions in sectors like long-distance aviation where the density of hydrocarbon fuel is enough of an advantage to justify the cost, but also to offset a big chunk of our past emissions. It's too late to prevent them, and too expensive to ignore them. We also need to do the R&D on air capture in order to get a rational price for future emissions. As long as we don't know what the cost will be, we can ignore it, which effectively amounts to assuming that it will be cheap, but implicitly, so that we don't have to say the implausible parts out loud.
Question, would activated carbon with co2 make for a usable soil additive? I know plants get carbon out of the air but what if they have some in the soil as well ?
I'm gonna say no because the part of the plant that breathes in co2 is up in the leaves. The roots absorb other nutrients. Though for some plants that thrive in water, this could work. I imagine it might be effective in a seaweed farm.
Unlike the previous two respondents, I'm actually aware that it's been tested, and seems to work quite well. Look up "terra praeta", and move onwards to modern experiments with homemade charcoal from there.
Capturing CO2 out of the oceans is orders of magnitude easier than from the air since CO2 is about 140 x more dense in ocean water than air. The solar cycle environment is doing the work for you. The US Navy studied making jet synfuels using nuclear electricity on air craft carriers. There is a very neat trick in pulling the CO2 out of water using a very low frequency AC, which is like passing a DC ocean current in a battery but reversing every few seconds to keep the chemistry clean. More energy still is needed to electrolyze water so that the C and H atoms can be converted into a CH molecule. The energy used to capture the CO2 is far more than was released when the CO2 was released in combustion, this demonstrate the futility of releasing energy from fossil fuels and then chasing the CO2 later. If nuclear energy was completely free, the world would have to rebuild the entire energy model for 100% nuclear power for all primary energy use and then do so at about 3x over for 100 years to undo all the CO2 emissions for the last 200 years. The more you know the science, the more hopeless the situation looks. Thunderf00t already explained this as well. Things humans should not waste effort on, CO2 capture, fusion power, and worst of all renewable energy that uses fossil fuel to make it look cheap. If interested take a look at the Moltex MSR fission reactor, also read the book, Without The Hot Air, and look at the LLNR Energy Flow Graphs and other tables on Wikipedia for Per Capita Energy Use. There are also ways of burning nat gas not in air but in pure oxygen where the CO2 is trivial to capture and the net result is that the Carnot efficiency increases from 60% to 80%. The downside is that the oxygen production will take back 10% but at least the CO2 does not get into the air. There is also a way of breaking methane into hydrogen that does not use the steam reform method but uses heat, this hydrogen is called emerald hydrogen so the Carbon is captured directly. The captured carbon could easily be buried to improve soils.
I would love to see a carbon capture system that can be retrofitted into the exhaust system of a car. One of the challenges, of course, is that car exhaust is hot, and the entire exhaust pipe gets pretty hot if you're driving for a period of time, so unless the methods you are describing have to get really really hot to release the carbon, they wouldn't work in that application.
@@THall-vi8cp there is, but, those are not greenhouse gasses. I'd say the most important problem should be taken first, especially since replacing a vehicle, especially getting a new vehicle, is not practical for most people, and getting any new vehicle is worse for the environment than maintaining an old one, electric or gas.
@@absalomdraconis why? We actually use catalytic converters on gas cars, and whole DEF systems on diesels. What reasons do you have for saying cartoon capture filters aren't practical?
Unrelated, but does anyone have an idea for why a common human trait is to get tired of a particualr food and then you don't want to eat it anymore? Where as my pets will eat the food they like and never get bored of it.
Could you have a system of burying plants low enough so their decomposition does not release carbon, but their nutrients are accessible to new plant growth? Seems like it could work if you can figure out how to bury them effectively without breaking up the soil too much and releasing the carbon that's already there.
You need to learn about the carbon cycle. No, this is not possible. I think people are burying logs and stuff, but the nutrients will not be available until a lot of time has passed.
The energy required for carbon capture releases more carbon than that which is captured. We need to focus our time and money on not using fossil fuels, but that won't happen because using fossil fuels makes money. Carbon capture is a technology for undoing the damage we've done *after we stop causing damage*.
I’m concerned about my carbon foot print created from my weekly trash. After watching this video I now know that burying my carbon foot print in the swamp across town will save the environment! CARBON(trash)- now ya see it: now ya don’t!
Clean coal will work this time ! Just give us millions more public dollars to throw at it instead of renewables or nuclear. To be clear, I don't mind CCS in industries where it's genuinely unavoidable like say cement making, but for coal and gas plants the solution is not to use them.
Capturing CO2 from a power plant is an energy wasting machine. All the energy spent recovering your amine/activated carbon/catalyst etc. and then the energy spent pumping the co2 in the ground would probably exceed what you gain from the power plant in the first place -- making co2 is easy, removing it is hard -- thermodynamics wouldn't allow anything otherwise. Material science can help you find materials that are cheaper and more efficient at this, but at the end of the day you are still throwing away all this energy. Powering it with renewable energy is also nonsense -- you could have simply used that renewable electricity for normal usage rather than to clean up a dirty power plant.
This is wildly incorrect. You underestimate the amount of energy that is in fossil fuels. That's the reason we are still using them. Running an amine unit really is not that much of a power consumer. Remember thermodynamics only cares about closed systems, and for climate change, we generally are talking about atmospheric CO2. If it's underground, it doesn't warm our atmosphere. It's just that companies don't like spending resources on parts of their business that don't make them money. So no one carbon captures. And environmentalists don't care for it either because you are still using energy created by burning fossil fuels to sequester the emissions. Like you said, we could be using that energy to replace fossil fuels rather than decrease their polluting.
In the video the optimistic figure of 50% is given, so we'd need to increase our energy generation by half as much again. It's madness. @@AnAcceptedName
So you realized CO2 capturing it's a scam but can you admit there's no evidence of "man made climate crisis" at all? This wasteful madness need to stop, it's no longer based on data or principles of ecology, it turned into a cult.
TBH, this sounds like a desperate excuse to keep burning fossil fuels. Here's an idea for a 100% efficient method of preventing that carbon from going into the atmosphere: stop burning it. Use all that money and effort to develop clean alternatives instead. Then carbon capture can be focused on trying to reduce the carbon that's already in the atmosphere. And I'm very curious how that underground storage works. Is it being stored as CO2 gas? That will require enormous volume, and what if it leaks? Will this really work? Really feels like just compounding the error.
Actually underground storage of CO2 is a bad idea because it is a gas and it might escape and there might not be enough suitable underground storage sites. So it would be better to convert CO2 into pure carbon which can be put on the fields or polyethylen(plastic) which at least needs no underground storage. I'd try a solution based on basic chemistry instead of that half-baked underground storage thing.
A gram doesn't have the same surface area as 3 basketball courts. To arrive at that you need to take a major shortcut that invalidates your math. Just like coastline, surface area varies according to the scale at which you measure it. If you were to measure the basketball courts at the same scale as you do the activated carbon (which you should), all the bumps and crannies would significantly increase their surface area.
So isn't it true that building in alternative energy capacity requires us to rebuild the power plants anyhow? Isn't it also true that we should have done these " transition to the transition" steps decades ago?
Part A is correct. There is no free lunch. "Capturing" carbon means creating stable chemical compounds that require 1) production of raw materials for carbon to bind to, 2) chemical plants to run the process 3) transportation of the resulting compound 4) safe storage of said compound ... good luck running all of this on "renewables". Most/all "renewables" are not capable securing a base load. So we need back-up power plants. Part B not so much: as the transition is basically a non-solution to a non-issue, the shift in itself as well as supporting two parallel systems for decades in itself has a huge ecological footprint that's bigger than making the established system smarter, cleaner and more efficient. THAT would have been possible decades ago and that's what we should have requested as consumers - the current "green" tech is mostly "look here but don't look there" (like the cancer rates of 40% in the regions where they are mining rare earth elements to make the generators in wind turbines and the motors for Teslas...). But the route of "improving what's working" isn't a good match with the (young & uninformed) supporters political activism and makes it hard to justify the warm money showers a very visible and very different technology can release (the old newer-is-better-fallacy).
There are so many ways and reasons for tackling CO2 emmissions, you wouldnt believe. And honestly I dont think that one way is going to be our only route to completing the goal of carbon sequestration, we will need multiple routes.
Why not burn the fuel with pure oxygen gas in the first place? Not only you'd get a relatively pure CO2 exhaust (there might be some NOx, SOx pollutant traces, but why not pump them down along with the CO2?) but you get access to higher safe process temperatures and therefore possibly higher electrical efficiencies (granted: I've heard the turbine nowadays is often the limiting factor on process temperature). I think the company Linde is the frontrunner in oxygen separation/liquefaction with some huge implementations of the kind I've described having happened in China. Of course, these implementations had difficulties with getting profitable: generally they are not intended for sequestration but for Fischer-Tropsch-type emergency-backup-fuel purposes (like Germany needed in WWII), i.e. the pure CO2 exhaust or the pure syngas exhaust (CO+H2) is used as a feedstock to make things like methanol or alkanes (starting e.g. from an anthracite feedtstock).
Because how do you get that amount of pure oxygen? I don't think people really need carbon dioxide, so that would probably be more expensive than just burning it in normal air, and it would still release carbon dioxide.
Carbon capture is important no matter what, some industries don't have an alternative which doesn't emit carbon. I know this is the case with making concrete (which is actually a very significant percent of total greenhouse gas emissions), and I'm pretty sure there are tons of other thibgs but I don't know them off the top of my head
Thanks to your video title and the feral jukebox in my brain, Fight Carbon With Carbon, said to the chorus melody for Metallica's Fight Fire with Fire, is playing in my mind on repeat now. And probably for the rest of the day
I'm really disappointed in the writing for this episode. CCS has some critical flaws, not the least of which is that it delays the transition further, while not having a significant impact on CO2 emissions in practice. We already have a solution: stop using fossil fuels. Reduce total energy use. Support people through the transition, NOT corporations,
There is a difference between the ideal and the practical. Examining these will tell you why just cold turkey ending carbon-based fuels is not a practical solution.
But carbon capture is no better than just doing nothing. Petro companies will get all of the free CO2 they can find any use for, paid for by the government, and when sequestration ineviably fails only the corporations will have benefitted at all.
@@emptyshirt : The OP's "reduce energy use" plan has been failing since the Carter administration, and won't stop failing any time soon, so at least carbon capture is in established company.
When we as a civilization on this planet start developing some new economic and business models that are based on sustainability not on growth, is when we will start making progress in not damaging and polluting our environment.
@@rheiagreenland4714 Whether it’s Socialism, Capitalism, Fascism or Communism these political ideologies are not about a sustainable economy. Having said this, there are good and bad ideas in all of them. Personally, I think Capitalism has the best ideas and is the way forward but I think some of the ideas of Capitalism need to be amended. Presently, if the economy (the innovation, production and exchange of goods and services) is not growing, it is considered a problem and or a failure. This type of thinking cannot continue uninterrupted on a finite planet with finite resources. There needs to be flexibility in the system for the economy to be able to expand and contract and for a contraction to be considered normal and just as prosperous and productive as the expansion and not a problem or a failure. I am sure there will be some Nobel prizes awarded to the academics, economists, engineers, corporate board members, bank executives and business leaders, entrepreneurs and of course politicians and government officials along with our smartest and brightest among us that can develop some new models of how a sustainable economy can work. Whether it’s the production of food and material goods, the amount of resources extracted from the earth, the amount of toxins put into the earth they cannot continue to increase forever! Everything in moderation can be made to work similar to the balanced cycles of nature on the planet. Pollution is also part of the natural cycles. If the fish use the lake as their toilet, it is not a problem, unless you start getting too many fish. If we raise some cattle and have a few barbeques to cook some meat, it is not a problem. If we cut some trees to build some homes, it is not a problem. If we burn some coal to generate some electricity it is not a problem, if we burn some gasoline to move some vehicles around or fly some planes, it is not a problem, if we make some concrete and steel to construct some buildings and bridges, it is not a problem. When we say that we have to keep doing more and more of these things every year because if we don't we are not growing and that is bad thing then it becomes a problem!
I personally don't believe that A) This is possible on a large enough scale to mean anything B) We should count on this working if we wanna stop climate change C) That carbon capture credit purchases should be listed as companies or people being environmentally friendly And we're forgetting too that carbon isn't the worst greenhouse gas we emit. If you truly wanna stop this you have to stop emitting all of them, not just one no?
Recycling the carbon from earth's crust into the biosphere is one of the best things humans have ever done. More carbon is great, even in the atmosphere.
With how useful material carbon is I'm surprised we aren't looking for ways of directly converting it into things that we use, like growing activated carbon from the carbon that we're producing or anything like that?
air separation plants capture CO2 from the atmosphere every day, but they then release it back into the atmosphere. These are super common all across the world. Someone should look at sequestering the CO2 they separate.
Still pushing co2... We are pretty much at saturation levels, that if any more co2 is released, makes a negligible difference. On top of that, it's the increased wetlands and ch4 production that is the issue, but that would involve destroying some wetlands to maintain balance. It seems the heat and wetlands go hand in hand during a termination event.
Would be interesting if we make a type of new rebis area of issues solving of science and philosophy where issues can be seen and resolved to another branch of the same original concept like nuclear fusion, ftl travel issues
Right now, they aren't enough We need measures that can be implemented right now and achieve fast results rather than waiting for entire forests to regrow
@@VoidHuggeryea but we still need to plant millions of trees non the less. They are arguably more efficient than “carbon capture”. Even young trees take in carbon
doesn`t work, trees only really capture as much carbon as is held physically in the wood and as soon as it rots or burns in a forest fire we`ll be back at square one, so it is incredibly temporary and also not able to scale up effectively enough to make a meaningful difference, we really can`t plant enough to solve this. with that said carbon capture is also bogus, while scientifically feasible it is not economical or scalable, carbon capture exists to look like a pragmatic solution to legislators so fossil fuel companies don`t really have to do anything. better options have already existed for decades.
The world does NOT need to reduce its energy consumption. What we need to do is transition to new methods of generating power that don't rely on fossil fuels (which we are going, and at an exponential rate. In a decade it will be clear that the world is on a track to sustainable energy production. How in the world would you expect us to remove carbon from the atmosphere if we reduce out power consumption? RethinkX has a great series about this, and why people are massively underestimating how fast the transition will take.
Carbon capture and storage is all talk and no action. It has been that way for 50 years. A recent report, I think it was from the IEA, cited CCS as a non-improving technology. The world's largest CCS plant is so small you could walk around the perimeter of it in about 3 minutes. Maybe CCS could be used in the far future as part of a desperate attempt at geoengineering, but it was not relevant when it was proposed 50 years ago, and it is still not relevant.
Its sorta like colonizing Mars. Back of the envelope math makes it seem like it could actually work, as long as you ignore the time and resources. If everyone on Earth quit having fun and eating tasty food we could maybe pool the extra resources and make carbon capture work.
Interesting, I just noticed RU-vid put in a “Context” space under the description. Is that new where they add in a little snippet for any videos that mention or discuss climate change or other scientific topics?
If only we could find something that could capture CO2 and be able to trap the carbon and use it to grow and make copies of itself, while releases the oxigen to atmosphere... And oh! Of course, make it solar powered. Looks like too much to ask.
I'm confused about something, isn't rocket fuel basically just hydrogen and oxygen? With the product of the burning of rocket fuel being water. So why can't we replace gasoline with a less potent form of rocket fuel for use in cars and other vehicles as a way to reduce carbon emissions?
Because Hydrogen is far too difficult and too dangerous to work with, especially when braindead humans are using it! Of course that would be no worse than owning a Tesla knowing that the battery pack could explode into flames and destroy everything around or in it. Ah heck, it's just another form of population control and helps to remove the stupid people from the gene pool! Go for it!
Hydrogen is a pain to store since it has an incredibly low density and liquid hydrogen needs to be cooled to 20K. And the way we currently produce hydrogen in bulk isn’t actually electrolysis, it’s steam reforming where you pressurize steam and methane to get hydrogen and CO2, so we’d have to make whole new systems for producing it.
Check out Australia's utter failures testing carbon capture. Perhaps the technology has changed since then, but... TheJuiceMedia did a nice episode/psa about that.
@@Broockle there is good reason to not use carbon capture, mostly that it is technically scientifically sound, it is not economically sound or scalable and will never be even if we take it to it`s theoretical maximum , we already have technology that exists and is proven to work and be more effective than the realistic best carbon capture can theoretically achieve, carbon capture is at best a unproven band-aid that will come too little too late and while I agree to not put all your eggs in one basket, we only have so many eggs and this basket is sketchy as hell
@@mememachine5495 well yeah... that's kinda what I meant by 'we can do both'. Developing carbon capture doesn't hinder fission technology development does it? It's unlikely to even be part of the solution for climate change in the foreseeable decades but we might as well develop that tech as well. It may well play a role eventually. Prbly a much more efficient carbon capture tech is just sustainable forest practices and maybe cyanobacteria... 😅
@@Broockle it kinda does hinder it because a ridiculous amount of government funding has been going into carbon capture development for decades, and the programs are run by the fossil fuel companies themselves, it is pretty blatant that it is mostly pushed by those companies as a convenient solution. I am extremely doubtful of the viability of carbon capture tech, but if someone is paying for it, it shouldn`t be tax payers, fossil fuel companies can save themselves if it really is viable, but judging on how they literally spend more money on advertising carbon capture, instead of to the project itself, they don`t even think it will work or else they`d put their money where their mouth is and earn their free pass out of controversy and legislation.
why not bond carbon to Oganesson? with an atomic weight of 294 Oganesson would cause the carbon to sink to the bottom of the burner where it could be swept up . yes Oganesson is radio active and may require nuclear license to use. of course you could use the rare earths used in catalytic converters but at hundreds or even thousands of dollars per gram that can get very expensive. basically emulate Flocculant witch is an additive you put in swimming pools to cause fine particles to settle to the bottom so they can be vacuumed out by bonding carbon to another element that has a much higher atomic weight.
Stupid question, but, if all burning takes oxygen from the atmosphere in the first place then these carbon capture companies take that co2 and just pump it into the ground, how will that oxygen make its way back into the atmosphere ( as with photosynthesis ) ?
No... good question! Only excuse I can think of is that we have a 20% O2 atmosphere whereas CO2 has been going up, because of capitalism, in increments of 0,01% (100ppm).
if they made activated carbon from waste would it not have the potential to have all forms of carbon to therefore capture a wide variety? would it be more or less toxic than using the amine method and not using up waste? It may not be the golden goose of solutions but if it can solve one issue and mitigate another then technically it would be better than what we've got and innovation can continue without the looming threat of needing a perfect solution.
Powering the carbon capture system of a polluting power plant with green energy - this idiocy should indicate clearly how insane is to think about keeping that plant open and that the obvious solution is to replace it immediately with sustainable power generators. Still, this research might be useful in some niche situations.
"Hmm, so we could use energy to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using carbon-based precursor molecules. I bet we could even use solar energy! The process needs a lot of energy, though, so perhaps if there was some sort of enzyme to catalyze the reaction-- "--Wait. I just invented photosynthesis, didn't I?"
Can carbon capture actually work...? Maybe I'm missing something but the equation of using energy to remove the by product of making energy seems unefficent.
Wait a minute, if you've captured CO2 in the soldi, powdery "activated carbon", why bother heating it up to release gaseous CO2 in a container? Why not just take the CO2-laden activated carbon and put *that* in the ground. It's going to take up much less space than gaseous or liquid CO2 so you can fit more of it underground, *and* it won't be volatile, so there's little risk of it being released back into the environment.
@SciShow Let's crowdsource this idea: The obvious solution is the brute Force of PV solar Superpower (credit RethinkX Tony Seba) powering CO2 removal and sequestration stored in transient exhaust containment vessels that could be very large light weight structures with an inverted piston cap controlled to equalize pressure. Every day the exhaust gas is cycled in and out into the CO2 sequestration system with free electricity to power it.
? If they can capture the carbon with activated carbon sawdust... then why would they need to heat it up again if the idea is just to capture it? Couldn't they just... bury it?
Semi legit question, why dont we send captured carbon to the moon. It can be reusable space travel since space has made that possible. If it can be presurized it could be net carbon negative to bottle it and launch it into space
All of the energy required for running any compression tech can come 100% from renewable resources as the tech is already electrified (barring unusual circumstances like remote locations). So it's not free or 100% environmentally neutral but that's letting perfect get in the way of an option.
@@SueMyChin If your question is "Shouldn't we just stop burning things in the first place and go electric?" Then yes. 100% yes. It's so, SO much easier to stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere vs pulling it back out. In terms of the "fossil fuel industry" well then.. Jeez. It depends on how deep we're going. Are we talking about getting rid fossil fuels in local transportation? Yes. All that we can as fast as we can. Every dollar spent now is some absurd number saved in the long run. If we're talking about displacing the existing fossil fuel industry in the world of plastic production? I mean, it's doable. We have the technology. The main problem is the sheer amount of power required and how expensive that makes synthesizing the hydrocarbons used in making things like plastic.
I don't understand this at all. What is the point of trapping CO2, putting it through a series of expensive and hazardous materials and ending up with CO2 again? Once the CO2 is extracted from any contaminatinants such as methane or even just free hydrogen why can't it be collected then. Maybe this would not work, I'm not a chemist, but another idea that should work is to infuse pure hydrogen at high pressure into the C02 breaking the O off when it will combine with the H to form water which is easy to dissipate leaving the pure carbon behind.
