HN

Comments (132)

• Menu

  condiment
  At current rates of emissions, we’re only about 20 years away from people needing to install CO2 scrubbers in their homes.Soda lime, or calcium hydroxide, is the current state of the art. We use that in an anesthesia and in saltwater aquariums and in scuba rebreathers. An idealized system can capture 500 mg per gram, but in practice you only capture around 250mg/g. This outperforms the method in the article but it’s one-shot. There are interesting proposals to use this for direct capture at industrial facilities and to turn the waste material into bricks for building.The key advantage of this new material appears to be that it can be heated and reused. That would be very valuable in an interior direct air capture use case. Think about filtering the CO2 from an office or a home to get us back to pre-industrial levels indoors.
• Menu

  jmward01
  I am not against doing research in this area, please do, it is interesting and likely has many applications but global CO2 removal isn't one of them. Nothing proposed, including this, is within any orders of magnitude of a viable solution. The only solution we have is put less in the air in the first place. This tech looks interesting for transporting CO2 but that doesn't mean it sequesters it and even if sequestration was solved the scales here are massive. If we don't have the political will to reduce the amount going into the air then what makes anyone think we would have the political will to build out some system to capture and sequester? We need to focus more on not putting CO2 into the air and less on trying to take it out.
• zeristor
  One thought I had was to go a very cold place and freeze CO₂ out of the air, about -80°C.There’s the katabatic winds off of the glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, which could help things go through.But I soon realised that CO₂ is so potent, that it’s so such a small proportion of the air that not much would be taken out.There’s some renewable storage systems that liquify air, that could remove CO₂ but they don’t mention it;,but air liquification doesn’t seem to be growing fast as an option.The other one from mere A-level chemistry is buffer solutions and using chemical reactions in the Oceans, apart from iron seeding for life, but a chemical that precipitate an insoluble carbonate. Not ideal raining down precipitates, or using the Ocean as a test tube.
• LasEspuelas
  This seems like the actual work of the article: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5c13908And the superbase is 1,5,7-triazabicyclo [4.3.0] non-6-eneIt is an anime based technology. Other amines in water-based solutions also get regenerated at about <200C. It is great to find new molecules to do this work but as I usual, these marketing articles sensationalize the actual work.
• Menu

  PeterHolzwarth
  Well, instead of repeating myself manually, I'll paste in a comment of mine here from a past discussion on carbon capture:It's easy to forget why there is a bit of a challenge to getting C02 out of the air: there's so little of it, comparatively.In order, air is, broadly, made up of the following:Nitrogen: %78.084Oxygen: %20.946Argon: %00.934CO2: %00.042The stuff is essentially beyond a rounding error - it really gives one an appreciation of the "either don't release it, or capture it at the point of release" sentiment, and for the difficulties in making carbon capture outside of these scenarios be even slightly cost-effective.
• Menu

  condensedcrab
  Direct air capture imo can’t escape the scaling problem - when the feedstock has CO2 at ~400 ppm the economics simply won’t work out despite various oil companies backing one off systems around the globe.Capturing CO2 at the source (power plant, etc) would be simpler to reach economic viability but without incentives it’s dead on arrival. I believe the IRA infra bill had put a price ~$50/ton of CO2 captured.
• Menu

  elil17
  A better title would be "More efficient method to capture CO2 from the atmosphere." The method is not objectively efficient, but may be more efficient than other methods (solvents/sorbents) used for DAC.
• Menu

  cyphertruck
  Economics rules everything. How much does this cost vs simply planting trees, when the value of harvesting the trees is included? Since tree farms are generally profitable, and wood is expensive, it seems this method is likely to be economically less efficient.
• rwke
  Without knowing much about the details of it, this might be interesting to evaluate as a potentially economically more attractive alternative to DAC in the supply chain of e-fuel production?
• ReptileMan
  Just use lye to baking soda. You could in theory make an efficient roundtrip.Anyway - CO2 in the atmosphere is here to stay. Much more "realistic" approach is to decarbonize the ocean and let the ocean absorb the atmospheric CO2.
• Menu

  spants
  how about trees? just a thought.
• Menu

  keepamovin
  I have an efficient method. It's called plants. Amazon is re-greening
• Menu

  sfn42
  The thing people don't think about with regards to CO2 capture is that you have to get the atmosphere in order to capture CO2 from it. You essentially have to suck the entire atmosphere into these carbon capture facilities.Using something like this to capture carbon from an exhaust pipe might be viable, but scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere is not even remotely viable. There's just too much air out there.
• Menu

  net01
  What are the use cases of CO2 appart for making my Coke fizz?
• Menu

  Detrytus
  This solves only part of the problem: it captures CO2 and can release it later. But you still need to figure out what to do with this CO2, how to turn it into something useful.
• bobse
  [dead]
• breakingrules3
  [dead]
• dcollect
  [flagged]
• dcollect
  [flagged]