this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
173 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
67669 readers
5978 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s always seemed nonsensical to me. Now I studied the computer stuff, not physics but… it seems like you’d need a gigafuckton (SI unit right there) of energy to get the CO2 levels down in an appreciable way when the levels were talking about here are in the hundreds of parts per million.. just seems like it’d be incredibly inefficient at best
It's even simpler to see how stupid it is. It costs more energy to capture the carbon and store it than is gained by burning it in the first place. It's literally more energy efficient to just not burn it at all.
If not burning it were an option, we'd be doing that. But we aren't, so it isn't.
So we need to do something with the stuff in the air..
Not burning it is an option though.
..it's just cheaper not to. If you ignore the externalities for it. Which we do.
Yeah but when running carbon capture produces more CO2 than it can remove it is no point, its like running an air condition without exhausting the hot air.
I'm with you. Also, it seems like it would be much more efficient to do carbon capture at the source, where the fuel is being used, like a power plant, where the concentrations are relatively high, compared to atmospheric capture where CO2 is less than 0.1%.
Yeah. Carbon capture of flue gas would be much more efficient.. but we're also not really doing that so..
We would need clean energy production to cover demand and then have the capacity to produce excess energy for it to ever be anything to consider at all, we are nowhere close to that.
We'll actually HAVE to do it at one point but yeah, it will take a good 30-50% of the world's energy budget for decades to centuries to do so.
However, until we're on 100% nuclear / renewable, you're just generating 100 carbon for every 30 you capture. That's where the stupidity lies. Even if you use renewable energy to power your capture plant, it still be more efficient to just route that energy directly into the grid where it would then avoid someone else having to generate the carbon to use the energy.
Wonder what my physics teacher will say in the next exam when I calculate with it. What's the abreviation?
Hmmm… Gfucks I suppose. Gotta capitalise the G!
Problem is not energy even, it's that they are not transforming CO2, meaning that is still there, simply temporarily stored. It is not a solution. It can be part of a solution. But currently there are better and cheaper overall solutions