I know that there is ‘legacy carbon’ in the atmosphere that needs to get removed but why aren’t we leveraging carbon capture as part of industrial processes (e.g. at the factory’s smoke stack, for example). Or maybe we are already?
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Because it’s kind of like burning wood in a fire pit and wanting the wooden logs to be in the same condition at the end.
You’re making/using energy by creating carbon emissions and it would take the same (or more) energy to put it back.
There are some companies that do this. Although their ability to capture everything they pollute isn’t 100% yet.
One of the problems with our current carbon capture technology is that it’s mostly taking carbon out of the air and putting it back into the ground for more fertile crops. The carbon is pumped directly into the ground so it only works when you have polluting facilities near farmland…. which is actually a lot rarer than you’d think.
Other carbon capture products are available but are less useful. Like there’s companies developing fuel from carbon capture. But that fuel can only be used in some equipment and honestly would be best used for blending fuels…. but it’s also incredibly expensive so most companies just aren’t interested in that product.
Ultimately in most jurisdictions with a carbon tax it’s cheaper to pay the tax than it is to clean up the solution. This puts governments in a bad place because it means most carbon taxes are too low.
It’s expensive and non competitive. Amine absorbers on stacks is terribly inefficient due to the low concentrations of CO2 in the flue gas. Also, the additional capital cost associated with building a unit that provides no monetary value is like a boat anchor to a commercial enterprise. It’s not worth it.
There are companies trying to do it but it’s hard to do. For example, some companies are trying to put the sequestered carbon back underground but you have to have the geology to do that and it’s rarely right at the source. So then you’re stuck trying to pipe it somewhere to inject and we know how people feel about pipelines
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Before anything else, consider that carbon capture is bullshit. While it works, the energy required to capture carbon is the same amount of energy obtained from breaking carbon, so even if you had 100% efficiency, which is not even possible as far as we know, carbon capture is useless if it is powered by carbon fuel, and redundant if you are using renewable energy (Instead of using the renewable energy to capture the carbon, you just use it instead of the fossil fuel energy source).
With that in mind, understand that carbon capture is a public relations thing. The only reason anyone does it is to look good, they don’t care about actually helping. They won’t bother making the process efficient then, as long as it gives them a good image.
CO2 removal on each car would be impractical based on the following 2 issues. There are 2 major issues with carbon capture because 1) you need to extract the CO2 from and then once you have it captured you need to do something with it.
In the oil industry the legacy method is to use a chemical called amines that pull the CO2 from hydrocarbon gas. This process needs to be done on a large scale, as it is energy and capital cost expensive.
Secondly, you now have low pressure dirty CO2 and you can either just release it into the atmosphere directly (very common but doesn’t help reduce CO2 emission) or you need to store it somehow so it doesn’t leak into the atmosphere or use it (if you clean it and use it such as in fizzy drinks, the CO2 is still released into the atmosphere).
In an ideal world we could convert the CO2 by some chemical reaction to turn it into a powder or crystals, then we can bury it. This isn’t currently an option.
Now we can clean the gas. Pump it to very high pressure and then send it into a depleted hydrocarbon reservoir and close it. Hoping it can stay there for millions of years like the oil we had extracted.
The problem as always with this is you will create 50% more CO2 to “solve” the problem so you are always chasing tails with current technology and solutions.
This is mainly on the oil and gas and power generation industry. The alternate option people like to push is to use “green” technology like solar and wind. Well this goes back to the problem with the input energy to create these technologies which still comes from oil and gas and power generation so those are really just an offset of CO2 generated over time. Yes my windmill doesn’t generate CO2 today but it will need to operate for many years before it is CO2 neutral.
Note:- the stacks you see at a power plant is intact just water Vapour only as these are cooling towers. They are by far the most efficient and “green” part of the energy cycle
I didn’t look at comments but SaskPower in Canada burns coal to produce electricity. The take the co2 from the process and capture it right there. I think they use it to put in oil wells to increase their production.
Because it takes energy to do, which means you burn more fuel which releases more carbon to be sequestered, repeat forever. It does level out but it means you are burning a lot more coal to sell the same amount of electricity
Carbon capture at emission sources is still much more expensive than avoidance of carbon emissions.
Cap and trade is a market-driven mechanism to discover the cheapest ways to reduce carbon from industrial sources, but it’s critically dependent upon accurate accounting.
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