I feel like it is missing most of the important questions. What's the impact on sea life (one sentence saying we need monitoring...) The techniques used mean that all the microorganisms, planktons, algaes will be destroyed by those processes. What is the yield of those approaches, you remove 1000 tons, but how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them,
the boats... What do you do with the CO2, that's now weight you have to move as well and put in containers that required CO2 to be made. This all should count in the equations for the credits, and from what we have seen in the past it is unlikely it will.
> how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats
Boats consume way more fuel than a layman may think. I’ve been on a ~80m / 20people crew coast guard ship for 6 weeks and did a napkin math onboard based on tank levels and refueling date. It was +1000l/person/day of diesel (can’t remember precise numbers). We were moving ~50% or the time. In addition of the motors there were many BIG generators to make everything work: heating, sewage, hot water, AC, pumps, motors for cranes, anchor raising… you also need your motors running at least in low speed even when still to control your position and direction.
I’m sure boats acting like platforms and with less crew to accommodate does consume less, however it’s still nothing comparable to an onshore plant.
It work "economically" because you often manage to refuel in an port with low fuel price.
I have wondered if you could tow a barge with the processing, then incentivize the box transports to pull the barge along behind. There are challenges with seas and storms and things like the tow line breaking.
I read a proposal for an air extraction system that fit in a container, so that you could stack a few on a container ship and they would process air as they went from port to port. Typically power challenged though (you want some clean energy powering them). Nuclear powered container ships would be good for this.
Timewizard post is dead so I respond here. Disclaimer I should have put above: It was my first and only time I worked on a big ship. My position was deckhand but had the chance to learn a lot from others crew members.
> This is not remotely representative of "boats."
I talked about the consumption with the first mate and he wasn’t surprised. He’s a long time sailor. I’m sure there is a variety of boat types but I don’t think we were representative of those that consume the most.
> Were you on a ice cutter or a research ship?
It wasn’t an ice cutter. We were sailing mostly around The Channel (France/UK) so "average" air temperature (~ 5-15 celcius)
> This is why they made anchors and why sailboats can function even without power
If the seabed is too deep you can’t. Also dropping or pulling a big anchor isn’t trivial: you need to find the right spot (wind, currents, coast rocks, seabed material…), do some calculation for chain length, some deckhands to operate it, time to drop it slow enough and not destroy your boat (see anchor fails on YouTube) and sometimes a few trials to "anchor" the anchor (it can drift of above parameter we’re not optimal). Also there’s always a chance to break the chain during the process. I’m sure all of this is easier or even trivial for smaller boats or in easy condition like an archipel with not much wind, waves or current.
Sailboats are great but another level of navigation techniques.
Also, you don’t completely shut down the engines even if drift isn’t a problem : startup isn’t trivial either.
Yeah this is seems like it's reduced the complexity down to one dimension (removing the CO2) and has blown past any of that, didn't even think about the algae initially, just energy expenditures getting this up and running, but yeah, that's pretty much saying you'll solve climate change by chopping down trees and planting golf course grass
> Captura’s Port of Los Angeles pilot can remove about 100 tonnes of CO2 per year from seawater. The company’s new plant under construction in Hawaii will capture 10 times that amount—a measurement the company can definitively quantify.
Only if you ignore the who knows how many tons of CO2 was put into the atmosphere to create the thing.
In reality that thing probably need to run several years to break even.
So back of the sticky note math, 1,000 ton/yr, at $7.37/ton carbon credit resell value per Google "AI" header thing, that's $7,370/year profit. Hopefully that covers the boat, employee salaries, and fuel. Good job team.
Yeah, this is a common reason that environmentalists oppose nuclear power. First you have to prove that what you're going to do is making an improvement. The key element to remember is that we got everything right until the 1970s. After that, it's best to not touch things.
What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences.
It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will be obvious only on hindsight, and by Murphy it will end being something essential. Like what happened with the mandate of reducing the sulphur content in ship's fuel oil.
> If you want to strip out 1 gigatonne of CO2 from the ocean, you probably have to put the upper few meters of the Atlantic through your machines every year
That sounds…drastic! And this seems quite hand-wavy about the risks:
> a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove that marine carbon-removal strategies aren’t harming aquatic life
It's also "only" a gigatonne, out of around 40 Gt of emissions per year. It's not nothing, but a mediocre year of global economic growth will outweigh it, and outweigh twice the year after. Unless we get our species' electrical generating shit together on a war footing level of effort, which we won't, global GDP will be a proxy measurement for carbon emissions for a good while.
It’s true that this could lead to unintended consequences as humanity is directly experimenting with a complex balanced natural system. But another perspective is that we have already done/are doing exactly that by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at rates that wouldn’t have happened in nature. I know “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but it’s perhaps worth considering the price of course correcting our already hugely impactful behaviours, as the butterfly had flown years ago.
I wrote a short story the other day about making the carbon problem obvious to every human on earth[1]. I’d love to read yours when you finish it. We need more fiction that focuses on this along with the nonfiction imo.
I had the same thought. This idea sounded like the beginning of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie to me. When you start making ocean-sized changes to the earth, you better get it right. My second thought was: where are they going to put all that CO2?
In my sci-fi addled mind, and massive ship would trundle over the worlds oceans extracting readily available uranium and CO2 to make synthetic fuels for all time from nuclear energy.
This skips a lot of important steps that likely cannot fit on one ship, but I love the idea of it.
Hal Clement posited schools of "pseudolife" fish processing seawater to extract gold/platinum and harvested by tenders in his short story "The Mechanic" --- it, "Raindrop" and "Halo" are still relevant today and highly recommended.
Costs to operate the ship would be more than the recovered uranium would generate. Meaning you wouldn't recover near enough uranium to break even on refueling the ship when it was needed. Same problem with gold (Fritz Haber famously tried this scheme thinking he could erase Germany's WWI war debts, usurious though they were, with gold from seawater). Concentration is just too low to make such processes feasible.
The synthetic fuel is what you sell. The uranium keeps you producing fuel for cheaper than O&G traditional extraction.
But you're right: Just put a off-the-shelf modular reactor on the ship, then use that power to synthesize payload fuel from CO2, and the gold, uranium, etc are just helpful extras.
The oceans are big, so why limit it to one ship. Have a fleet of ships where each ship serves different purposes. Navies have been doing this for most of naval history.
This needs to really be slowed down. Just like we need changes in the FDA for approval of food ingredients as opposed to the current process that allows ingredients by default, this needs to change to a process of examining what the impacts might be and gaining approval first. This will of course hurt innovation with startups by slowing things down and making it expensive, but I worry about irreversible consequences.
That said, I doubt any of this will be stopped in time. Our governments (state and federal) aren’t even quick enough to understand the impact of offshore wind farms on marine life. These geoengineering projects are far more complex and have less data available. So I think the default is that they’ll continue.
Whenever I read about Geo engineering stuff like this, I remember the last episode of "Dinosaurs" [0] and immediately get a bad feeling about it. Hopefully I'm just paranoid.
The most compelling of fiction tends to be compelling because it's based on reality. History is chock full of grand ideas intended to achieve some desired outcome only to create far worse problems than that you aimed to solve.
Irrigation has destroyed entire seas, crop pests have been near exterminated only to learn those pests were eating far more dangerous pests - resulting in mass starvation, and so on endlessly.
This entire idea really seems like the sort of action we're really not thinking through. Even the article points this out... "What’s not easy to quantify is what happens after the CO2-depleted effluent is returned to the sea. Theoretically, if.." To say nothing of the million other possible issues mostly just handwaved away.
There's hard sci-fi, for starters. Even outside that realm, nothing wrong with using them as cautionary tales. Asimov's tales excel at this, even if they're not "physically accurate"; who tf cares about that, honestly.
No one in their right mind would treat this literature as if they were textbooks.
Algae seeding and having it sink to the sea floor taking the carbon with it also seems plausibly physically-possible on the face of it since it uses the exponential growth of microorganisms in rich growth media. And it's even using the same relatively concentrated carbon source as this plan. And it's almost 100% solar powered to boot (the iron seeding ships presumably would not be).
Very little organic carbon actually reaches the seafloor, though, because it is remineralised while sinking through the water column. Then, most of the organic matter that actually does reach the seafloor is similarly remineralised rather than buried.
But say we did manage to get massive amounts of organic matter into the deep ocean, we could feasibly end up creating a so-called "dead zone" that is depleted in oxygen like we see elsewhere in the ocean, which would be detrimental to deep sea life.
I didn't say it's a good idea, or even that it actually works, just that it's one of the few schemes that I could even be convinced has some hope of even presenting two-digit gigatonnes of carbon to some reaction of interest a year. Which is what you'd need to be doing in the face of 40Gt/yr emissions.
Processing millions upon millions of cubic kilometres (top 5m of the sea is a bit under 2 million) through machinery just screams science fiction or greenwashing to me, simply based on "you want how many pipes?!". Current human water use is 4000km^3/yr: so it's 500 times more than that to cycle the water once.
If we could build that much processing infrastructure, we could just build decarbonised generation capacity in the first place. IEA estimates that 150ish GW of nuclear power would displace 1Gt, or maybe 600GW of solar. That's way less than pumps and handling plants for 100 Lake Baikals per year. China installed a third of that in just solar this year.
It seems like they will do anything except the obvious because that would affect the economy. Why harm one business by forcing them to reduce emissions and profits when you can have two profitable companies where one pollutes and the other cancels that out (ideally...)?
There has to be some other, unannounced benefit to funding these things like contributing research insights to naval warfare problems.
CDR technologies are being developed for the 2040s and 50s, when we have (hopefully) cut new carbon emissions down close to zero, and need to start repairing the sins of earlier decades.
By having a second company, it becomes an expense of the polluting company. Now the MBA’s can put a cost savings into their decision model to reduce their emissions. If their CO2 cost is X and the upgrade costs are Y they can optimize, calculate paybacks, determine ROI. For some companies the calculus comes out the outsourcing CO2 capture is the best solution.
I suspect that the unannounced side benefit is that it sounds cool. You get to be the guy who had the brilliant idea that saved the planet with no effort on anybody else's part.
Benefiting the economy is good, actually. Having resources to consume is good. It's not a conspiracy to do something stupid.
We also probably benefit from geoengineering regardless of what happens to CO2 production (depending on whether we think the weather was better a few decades ago or not).
The entire carbon removal "industry" is a dangerous joke. None of the systems and proposals are able deliver anything even remotely approximating planetary-scale CO2 mitigation without side effects in a range between making things worse and killing or destroying entire ecosystems. Not to mention requiring more energy, materials and resources than the planet might be able to provide. And nobody ever answers the question about violating some of the most basic laws of physics in the process.
So long as money keeps flowing into this ridiculous industry and politicians keep using FUD to drive their voter-base, the flow of nonsensical non-solution will not stop.
It is inevitable that, at some point in the future, people will finally understand reality for what it is.
As an example, it has taken around twenty years for people to finally start understanding the scale of the energy problem we have in order to support full electrification of ground transportation. And now, with AI data centers likely doubling that requirement, this is finally leading to the --surprise!-- conclusion that nuclear power is a necessary solution. I have been brutalized here on HN in the past for daring to (years ago) bring-up the simple math related to the EV problem. Today we are at a point where the issue is starting to float to the surface. That took about twenty years. The math was the same back then. It's just that people refuse to think past what is being shoved into their heads from every angle.
The next bridge to cross is the carbon removal scam. It will take time. I get it. People will eventually understand. I just hope we don't do irreparable damage to entire ecosystems between now and then.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425415 (and elsewhere in the same thread) I corrected you the last time you made some of these false assertions. In the above comment, however, you seem to be repeating some of the claims that I demonstrated were incorrect, as well as adding some new ones. I did the math. I even had to correct my own math errors in that thread because you couldn't find them.
In particular, as I showed there, no ecosystems need to be killed or destroyed for direct air capture; much less energy and materials are needed than the planet can provide (and which other resources do you have in mind?); and no laws of physics need to be violated.
Here are some existence proofs that contradict your argument:
A) It’s easy for a typical US family of four to net produce electricity with about 800-1000 sq ft of solar panels, assuming all electric appliances and vehicles (with reasonable commutes). The EV’s are basically rolling powerwalls, so this solves the storage problem.
B) Some of the direct air capture systems rely solely on industrial processes that we know how to scale. They target ~$1-2 to remediate a gallon of burnt gas. (They haven’t scaled quickly yet because no one with enough money has placed a big bet on them.)
I also think we should invest heavily in nuclear, and think most of the current carbon removal schemes are frauds, fwiw.
> It’s easy for a typical US family of four to net produce electricity with about 800-1000 sq ft of solar panels, assuming all electric appliances and vehicles (with reasonable commutes). The EV’s are basically rolling powerwalls, so this solves the storage problem.
Not really. Our solar array is almost 900 square feet (4 x 20 meters). However, most people, even those with solar, have a misconception about the realities of solar power. This, because most people don't have technical backgrounds and never really look at their systems analytically. And, BTW, most arrays are significantly smaller than this one.
For example, this is what the array can look like on a good day:
Yes! Those are white puffy clouds in sunny southern California!
I have posted the math here on HN in detail in the past. The idea of using your EV as a battery simply will not work on multiple fronts. One of the most basic problems is that you'd age your battery prematurely by adding charge/discharge cycles. Need to travel somewhere? Too bad, your battery is down to 25% because it was powering your home. The reality of the situation is that you need many times the storage that an EV is able to provide in order to deal with the unreliability of solar production.
If I remember correctly, when I did the math for our system, the conclusion was that we would have to triple the size of the array and have over 400 kWh of storage in place.
The effects of unpredictable weather events and just plain clouds during otherwise beautiful sunny days makes this problematic. We had a particularly rough set of days in January of 2023 (and other times, I just have screen grabs for that period):
It is quite sobering to do the math for what it would take to mitigate this. Adding EV's to charge at home to this equation makes it even worse.
> Some of the direct air capture systems rely solely on industrial processes that we know how to scale.
When you add-up the realities of manufacturing (which in some cases might include mining), transportation, construction, deployment, operations and maintenance, not one system has yet surfaced that can conclusively operate beyond the lab or, at best, a small test area (like a small farm patch). It is quite a different matter to operate at a the scale of a city, province/state, country and globally. I'd love for it to work, but, so far, everything is in the category of a fantasy.
We should focus on cleaning-up our act. Nature will take care of the planet over time. I think I can say that hurricanes and large storms are probably the largest carbon capture mechanism. This is how the planet handles the problem. So, yeah, places like Florida might need to adapt to more intense weather for the next few hundred years. That's just an unavoidable fact as far as I am concerned and until proven otherwise.
There are realities that are inconvenient and nobody wants to discuss. Current example: The effect of the fires in Australia.
So far, 55K hectares burned and no stop in sight. At 130 tons of CO2 per hectare, that's over seven million tons. Passenger cars in the entire US produce approximately 370 million tons PER YEAR. In other words, in just a few days, a single fire in Australia generated approximately 2% of the CO2 produced by vehicles in the US during an entire year. There are thousands of massive fires around the world, including mine fires that have been burning for hundreds of years. Which means that this idea of achieving net zero or capturing enough CO2 from the atmosphere through technical means is, well, simply not reasonable. As I like to put it, even if all of humanity left this planet it would still take 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2...because this isn't a lab experiment, it's a planet-scale problem.
> When you add-up the realities of manufacturing (which in some cases might include mining), transportation, construction, deployment, operations and maintenance, not one system has yet surfaced that can conclusively operate beyond the lab or, at best, a small test area (like a small farm patch).
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425985 I corrected you the last time you made this false claim, providing verifiable calculations on lime burning, the simplest system that can conclusively operate beyond the lab, though possibly not the cheapest. So I'm surprised to see you repeating the same false claim again in a different thread.
> I have posted the math here on HN in detail in the past.
Links to the math you've posted previously to HN (rather than bare assertions that it exists) would be appreciated. If it's correct, it will inform others; if it's incorrect, the correction will inform you.
> The idea of using your EV as a battery simply will not work on multiple fronts. One of the most basic problems is that you'd age your battery prematurely by adding charge/discharge cycles.
Battery aging has cost, but grid-scale energy storage has value. It isn't sufficient to establish that the cost exists; you must establish that it exceeds the value provided. As we'll see below, the value is typically about five times the cost.
> The reality of the situation is that you need many times the storage that an EV is able to provide in order to deal with the unreliability of solar production.
Again, I'd like to see your calculations. The Tesla Model Y's LFP battery capacity is supposedly 60 kilowatt hours, and a house averages about a kilowatt, only a small fraction of which needs to be active at night, perhaps 250 watts. So I think an EV provides about 240 hours' worth of nighttime backup power, but only needs to provide about 18 hours' worth.
So, rather than needing many times the storage that an EV is able to provide, an EV is able to provide many times the storage you need.
LFP batteries are particularly good on the wear-and-tear front, lasting around 5000 cycles. The car costs US$50k, so if we junk the car when the battery wears out, each cycle costs about US$10, about 17 cents per kilowatt hour. This is enormously more expensive than solar energy but still cheaper than grid power in many places. In California it's about half the cost of grid power.
However, evidently replacing just the battery costs only US$10-15k: https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/1cf1fkr/how_mu... which means each cycle only costs about US$2.50, 4 cents per kilowatt hour. So if otherwise you'd be paying 24 cents per kilowatt hour from the grid, the net value from draining your Tesla battery is about 20 cents per kilowatt hour.
Other companies such as BYD, which outsells Ford, Honda, and Tesla, have even cheaper batteries.
> we would have to triple the size of the array and have over 400 kWh of storage in place.
Where are you getting that? It sounds like you want weeks' worth of energy, not nights' worth. Batteries aren't a practical way to store weeks' worth of power. That doesn't make them useless.
> 55K hectares burned and no stop in sight. At 130 tons of CO2 per hectare, that's over seven million tons
Burning forests is, counterintuitively, carbon-neutral. The carbon in the forest had been removed from the atmosphere previously, and when the forest grows back, it will be removed from the atmosphere again. Only long-term changes in land use affect the greenhouse effect over more than a few years.
I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulphur dioxide to reduce energy in. Maybe not as a permanent fix, but a better fix than this nonesense.
Because (1) sulfur-dioxide injection is a short term solution that doesn’t solve the problem long term, (2) there is a huge risk of termination shock if civilization ever stops injecting it, (3) the only long term route to a stable client is to stop emitting and to remove the CO2 excess we’re adding, (4) all of this assumes that solar radiation management doesn’t have terrible unexpected effects on the climate.
Why is the goal to get something "stable" in the first place?
Climate on earth never was and never will be stable, so this should not be our goal in the first place.
The goal should be to keep the change fairly slow because most living things have trouble with fast changes. That's it we don't need more than that.
"Fairly slow" on an evolutionary timescale and "stable" across human timescales are functionally the exact same thing.
The difference between the two is negligible compared to the difference between either of them and what we currently have, which is "unprecedented" on human timescales and euphemistically "radical" on evolutionary ones.
You might as well say "look I just don't understand why people say we need to stop the car, obviously slowing down to walking speed would be enough" while the car continues to accelerate at full throttle towards a cliff edge.
I feel like it is missing most of the important questions. What's the impact on sea life (one sentence saying we need monitoring...) The techniques used mean that all the microorganisms, planktons, algaes will be destroyed by those processes. What is the yield of those approaches, you remove 1000 tons, but how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats... What do you do with the CO2, that's now weight you have to move as well and put in containers that required CO2 to be made. This all should count in the equations for the credits, and from what we have seen in the past it is unlikely it will.
> how much do you produce to make the devices, maintain and run them, the boats
Boats consume way more fuel than a layman may think. I’ve been on a ~80m / 20people crew coast guard ship for 6 weeks and did a napkin math onboard based on tank levels and refueling date. It was +1000l/person/day of diesel (can’t remember precise numbers). We were moving ~50% or the time. In addition of the motors there were many BIG generators to make everything work: heating, sewage, hot water, AC, pumps, motors for cranes, anchor raising… you also need your motors running at least in low speed even when still to control your position and direction.
I’m sure boats acting like platforms and with less crew to accommodate does consume less, however it’s still nothing comparable to an onshore plant.
It work "economically" because you often manage to refuel in an port with low fuel price.
I have wondered if you could tow a barge with the processing, then incentivize the box transports to pull the barge along behind. There are challenges with seas and storms and things like the tow line breaking.
I read a proposal for an air extraction system that fit in a container, so that you could stack a few on a container ship and they would process air as they went from port to port. Typically power challenged though (you want some clean energy powering them). Nuclear powered container ships would be good for this.
Timewizard post is dead so I respond here. Disclaimer I should have put above: It was my first and only time I worked on a big ship. My position was deckhand but had the chance to learn a lot from others crew members.
> This is not remotely representative of "boats."
I talked about the consumption with the first mate and he wasn’t surprised. He’s a long time sailor. I’m sure there is a variety of boat types but I don’t think we were representative of those that consume the most.
> Were you on a ice cutter or a research ship?
It wasn’t an ice cutter. We were sailing mostly around The Channel (France/UK) so "average" air temperature (~ 5-15 celcius)
> This is why they made anchors and why sailboats can function even without power
If the seabed is too deep you can’t. Also dropping or pulling a big anchor isn’t trivial: you need to find the right spot (wind, currents, coast rocks, seabed material…), do some calculation for chain length, some deckhands to operate it, time to drop it slow enough and not destroy your boat (see anchor fails on YouTube) and sometimes a few trials to "anchor" the anchor (it can drift of above parameter we’re not optimal). Also there’s always a chance to break the chain during the process. I’m sure all of this is easier or even trivial for smaller boats or in easy condition like an archipel with not much wind, waves or current.
Sailboats are great but another level of navigation techniques.
Also, you don’t completely shut down the engines even if drift isn’t a problem : startup isn’t trivial either.
Also, ‘economically’ in this context is so far outside of what a normal person can process that it’s absurd. $500k/day-$3mln/day?
Hamilton class?
Won’t say more on the boat, I hope you understand, sorry…
My apologies, understood.
[dead]
Yeah this is seems like it's reduced the complexity down to one dimension (removing the CO2) and has blown past any of that, didn't even think about the algae initially, just energy expenditures getting this up and running, but yeah, that's pretty much saying you'll solve climate change by chopping down trees and planting golf course grass
They’re not even removing that much CO2 either
> Captura’s Port of Los Angeles pilot can remove about 100 tonnes of CO2 per year from seawater. The company’s new plant under construction in Hawaii will capture 10 times that amount—a measurement the company can definitively quantify.
So 1,000 tonnes of CO2 / year?
To help quantify this further, a typical passenger car emits ~5 tonnes of CO2 per year. So we’re talking about offsetting 20-200 cars per year.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Only if you ignore the who knows how many tons of CO2 was put into the atmosphere to create the thing. In reality that thing probably need to run several years to break even.
So back of the sticky note math, 1,000 ton/yr, at $7.37/ton carbon credit resell value per Google "AI" header thing, that's $7,370/year profit. Hopefully that covers the boat, employee salaries, and fuel. Good job team.
My god, exactly. But I think you mean $7,370/year revenue.
Meh, words. /s
Oh no, the algae, nobody thought of them!
We like them for breathing purposes. They produce about 70% of the oxygen.
And an important food source for the fish we like to eat.
Yeah, this is a common reason that environmentalists oppose nuclear power. First you have to prove that what you're going to do is making an improvement. The key element to remember is that we got everything right until the 1970s. After that, it's best to not touch things.
What could go wrong? Something must be done, that is for sure, and this approach targets the main carbon capture engine of the planet. But at the scale it must reach to do something significant it will probably (surely?) cause unintended consequences.
It's like the butterfly effect applied to complex systems, if you do something big enough for causing a change it will probably affect a lot of things, most that will be obvious only on hindsight, and by Murphy it will end being something essential. Like what happened with the mandate of reducing the sulphur content in ship's fuel oil.
I had the same thought when I read:
> If you want to strip out 1 gigatonne of CO2 from the ocean, you probably have to put the upper few meters of the Atlantic through your machines every year
That sounds…drastic! And this seems quite hand-wavy about the risks:
> a lot of environmental monitoring needs to be done to prove that marine carbon-removal strategies aren’t harming aquatic life
It's also "only" a gigatonne, out of around 40 Gt of emissions per year. It's not nothing, but a mediocre year of global economic growth will outweigh it, and outweigh twice the year after. Unless we get our species' electrical generating shit together on a war footing level of effort, which we won't, global GDP will be a proxy measurement for carbon emissions for a good while.
It’s true that this could lead to unintended consequences as humanity is directly experimenting with a complex balanced natural system. But another perspective is that we have already done/are doing exactly that by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at rates that wouldn’t have happened in nature. I know “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but it’s perhaps worth considering the price of course correcting our already hugely impactful behaviours, as the butterfly had flown years ago.
I've had this idea for a short story for a while, where humans try to do carbon capture and end up going too far, leading to a snow ball.
I wrote a short story the other day about making the carbon problem obvious to every human on earth[1]. I’d love to read yours when you finish it. We need more fiction that focuses on this along with the nonfiction imo.
[1] https://jck.earth/2024/12/20/heaven-scent.html
Very nice! mine is not likely to get written unfortunately.
Haven't seen Snowpiercer yet I take it?
I had the same thought. This idea sounded like the beginning of a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie to me. When you start making ocean-sized changes to the earth, you better get it right. My second thought was: where are they going to put all that CO2?
In my sci-fi addled mind, and massive ship would trundle over the worlds oceans extracting readily available uranium and CO2 to make synthetic fuels for all time from nuclear energy.
This skips a lot of important steps that likely cannot fit on one ship, but I love the idea of it.
Hal Clement posited schools of "pseudolife" fish processing seawater to extract gold/platinum and harvested by tenders in his short story "The Mechanic" --- it, "Raindrop" and "Halo" are still relevant today and highly recommended.
Costs to operate the ship would be more than the recovered uranium would generate. Meaning you wouldn't recover near enough uranium to break even on refueling the ship when it was needed. Same problem with gold (Fritz Haber famously tried this scheme thinking he could erase Germany's WWI war debts, usurious though they were, with gold from seawater). Concentration is just too low to make such processes feasible.
The synthetic fuel is what you sell. The uranium keeps you producing fuel for cheaper than O&G traditional extraction.
But you're right: Just put a off-the-shelf modular reactor on the ship, then use that power to synthesize payload fuel from CO2, and the gold, uranium, etc are just helpful extras.
The oceans are big, so why limit it to one ship. Have a fleet of ships where each ship serves different purposes. Navies have been doing this for most of naval history.
If you haven’t already read it, Arthur C Clarke’s The Man Who Ploughed the Sea, which addresses this idea, is a short story that’s pretty interesting.
This needs to really be slowed down. Just like we need changes in the FDA for approval of food ingredients as opposed to the current process that allows ingredients by default, this needs to change to a process of examining what the impacts might be and gaining approval first. This will of course hurt innovation with startups by slowing things down and making it expensive, but I worry about irreversible consequences.
That said, I doubt any of this will be stopped in time. Our governments (state and federal) aren’t even quick enough to understand the impact of offshore wind farms on marine life. These geoengineering projects are far more complex and have less data available. So I think the default is that they’ll continue.
I'm sure this will end well =-)
Whenever I read about Geo engineering stuff like this, I remember the last episode of "Dinosaurs" [0] and immediately get a bad feeling about it. Hopefully I'm just paranoid.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_Nature
Beware of generalising from fictional evidence.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
The most compelling of fiction tends to be compelling because it's based on reality. History is chock full of grand ideas intended to achieve some desired outcome only to create far worse problems than that you aimed to solve.
Irrigation has destroyed entire seas, crop pests have been near exterminated only to learn those pests were eating far more dangerous pests - resulting in mass starvation, and so on endlessly.
This entire idea really seems like the sort of action we're really not thinking through. Even the article points this out... "What’s not easy to quantify is what happens after the CO2-depleted effluent is returned to the sea. Theoretically, if.." To say nothing of the million other possible issues mostly just handwaved away.
What a dumb take on the topic.
There's hard sci-fi, for starters. Even outside that realm, nothing wrong with using them as cautionary tales. Asimov's tales excel at this, even if they're not "physically accurate"; who tf cares about that, honestly.
No one in their right mind would treat this literature as if they were textbooks.
wow good read
And interesting website in general, thanks for sharing!
I don’t see how any approach where you have to put the CO2 somewhere is ever going to work.
Artificial weathering is the only approach that I’ve ever read anything remotely convincing about.
Algae seeding and having it sink to the sea floor taking the carbon with it also seems plausibly physically-possible on the face of it since it uses the exponential growth of microorganisms in rich growth media. And it's even using the same relatively concentrated carbon source as this plan. And it's almost 100% solar powered to boot (the iron seeding ships presumably would not be).
Very little organic carbon actually reaches the seafloor, though, because it is remineralised while sinking through the water column. Then, most of the organic matter that actually does reach the seafloor is similarly remineralised rather than buried.
But say we did manage to get massive amounts of organic matter into the deep ocean, we could feasibly end up creating a so-called "dead zone" that is depleted in oxygen like we see elsewhere in the ocean, which would be detrimental to deep sea life.
I didn't say it's a good idea, or even that it actually works, just that it's one of the few schemes that I could even be convinced has some hope of even presenting two-digit gigatonnes of carbon to some reaction of interest a year. Which is what you'd need to be doing in the face of 40Gt/yr emissions.
Processing millions upon millions of cubic kilometres (top 5m of the sea is a bit under 2 million) through machinery just screams science fiction or greenwashing to me, simply based on "you want how many pipes?!". Current human water use is 4000km^3/yr: so it's 500 times more than that to cycle the water once.
If we could build that much processing infrastructure, we could just build decarbonised generation capacity in the first place. IEA estimates that 150ish GW of nuclear power would displace 1Gt, or maybe 600GW of solar. That's way less than pumps and handling plants for 100 Lake Baikals per year. China installed a third of that in just solar this year.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-direct...
It seems like they will do anything except the obvious because that would affect the economy. Why harm one business by forcing them to reduce emissions and profits when you can have two profitable companies where one pollutes and the other cancels that out (ideally...)?
There has to be some other, unannounced benefit to funding these things like contributing research insights to naval warfare problems.
CDR technologies are being developed for the 2040s and 50s, when we have (hopefully) cut new carbon emissions down close to zero, and need to start repairing the sins of earlier decades.
By having a second company, it becomes an expense of the polluting company. Now the MBA’s can put a cost savings into their decision model to reduce their emissions. If their CO2 cost is X and the upgrade costs are Y they can optimize, calculate paybacks, determine ROI. For some companies the calculus comes out the outsourcing CO2 capture is the best solution.
I suspect that the unannounced side benefit is that it sounds cool. You get to be the guy who had the brilliant idea that saved the planet with no effort on anybody else's part.
Bill Bryson's description of an ecological disaster of zinc smelter superfund site being amazing for GDP comes to mind.
Benefiting the economy is good, actually. Having resources to consume is good. It's not a conspiracy to do something stupid.
We also probably benefit from geoengineering regardless of what happens to CO2 production (depending on whether we think the weather was better a few decades ago or not).
The entire carbon removal "industry" is a dangerous joke. None of the systems and proposals are able deliver anything even remotely approximating planetary-scale CO2 mitigation without side effects in a range between making things worse and killing or destroying entire ecosystems. Not to mention requiring more energy, materials and resources than the planet might be able to provide. And nobody ever answers the question about violating some of the most basic laws of physics in the process.
So long as money keeps flowing into this ridiculous industry and politicians keep using FUD to drive their voter-base, the flow of nonsensical non-solution will not stop.
It is inevitable that, at some point in the future, people will finally understand reality for what it is.
As an example, it has taken around twenty years for people to finally start understanding the scale of the energy problem we have in order to support full electrification of ground transportation. And now, with AI data centers likely doubling that requirement, this is finally leading to the --surprise!-- conclusion that nuclear power is a necessary solution. I have been brutalized here on HN in the past for daring to (years ago) bring-up the simple math related to the EV problem. Today we are at a point where the issue is starting to float to the surface. That took about twenty years. The math was the same back then. It's just that people refuse to think past what is being shoved into their heads from every angle.
The next bridge to cross is the carbon removal scam. It will take time. I get it. People will eventually understand. I just hope we don't do irreparable damage to entire ecosystems between now and then.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425415 (and elsewhere in the same thread) I corrected you the last time you made some of these false assertions. In the above comment, however, you seem to be repeating some of the claims that I demonstrated were incorrect, as well as adding some new ones. I did the math. I even had to correct my own math errors in that thread because you couldn't find them.
In particular, as I showed there, no ecosystems need to be killed or destroyed for direct air capture; much less energy and materials are needed than the planet can provide (and which other resources do you have in mind?); and no laws of physics need to be violated.
Here are some existence proofs that contradict your argument:
A) It’s easy for a typical US family of four to net produce electricity with about 800-1000 sq ft of solar panels, assuming all electric appliances and vehicles (with reasonable commutes). The EV’s are basically rolling powerwalls, so this solves the storage problem.
B) Some of the direct air capture systems rely solely on industrial processes that we know how to scale. They target ~$1-2 to remediate a gallon of burnt gas. (They haven’t scaled quickly yet because no one with enough money has placed a big bet on them.)
I also think we should invest heavily in nuclear, and think most of the current carbon removal schemes are frauds, fwiw.
> It’s easy for a typical US family of four to net produce electricity with about 800-1000 sq ft of solar panels, assuming all electric appliances and vehicles (with reasonable commutes). The EV’s are basically rolling powerwalls, so this solves the storage problem.
Not really. Our solar array is almost 900 square feet (4 x 20 meters). However, most people, even those with solar, have a misconception about the realities of solar power. This, because most people don't have technical backgrounds and never really look at their systems analytically. And, BTW, most arrays are significantly smaller than this one.
For example, this is what the array can look like on a good day:
https://i.imgur.com/aNnbmDp.png
This is what it can look like during a cloudy day:
https://i.imgur.com/breTHQd.png
Yes! Those are white puffy clouds in sunny southern California!
I have posted the math here on HN in detail in the past. The idea of using your EV as a battery simply will not work on multiple fronts. One of the most basic problems is that you'd age your battery prematurely by adding charge/discharge cycles. Need to travel somewhere? Too bad, your battery is down to 25% because it was powering your home. The reality of the situation is that you need many times the storage that an EV is able to provide in order to deal with the unreliability of solar production.
If I remember correctly, when I did the math for our system, the conclusion was that we would have to triple the size of the array and have over 400 kWh of storage in place.
The effects of unpredictable weather events and just plain clouds during otherwise beautiful sunny days makes this problematic. We had a particularly rough set of days in January of 2023 (and other times, I just have screen grabs for that period):
https://i.imgur.com/bo0s7b0.png
It is quite sobering to do the math for what it would take to mitigate this. Adding EV's to charge at home to this equation makes it even worse.
> Some of the direct air capture systems rely solely on industrial processes that we know how to scale.
When you add-up the realities of manufacturing (which in some cases might include mining), transportation, construction, deployment, operations and maintenance, not one system has yet surfaced that can conclusively operate beyond the lab or, at best, a small test area (like a small farm patch). It is quite a different matter to operate at a the scale of a city, province/state, country and globally. I'd love for it to work, but, so far, everything is in the category of a fantasy.
We should focus on cleaning-up our act. Nature will take care of the planet over time. I think I can say that hurricanes and large storms are probably the largest carbon capture mechanism. This is how the planet handles the problem. So, yeah, places like Florida might need to adapt to more intense weather for the next few hundred years. That's just an unavoidable fact as far as I am concerned and until proven otherwise.
There are realities that are inconvenient and nobody wants to discuss. Current example: The effect of the fires in Australia.
https://apnews.com/article/wild-fires-australia-victoria-d3f...
So far, 55K hectares burned and no stop in sight. At 130 tons of CO2 per hectare, that's over seven million tons. Passenger cars in the entire US produce approximately 370 million tons PER YEAR. In other words, in just a few days, a single fire in Australia generated approximately 2% of the CO2 produced by vehicles in the US during an entire year. There are thousands of massive fires around the world, including mine fires that have been burning for hundreds of years. Which means that this idea of achieving net zero or capturing enough CO2 from the atmosphere through technical means is, well, simply not reasonable. As I like to put it, even if all of humanity left this planet it would still take 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2...because this isn't a lab experiment, it's a planet-scale problem.
> When you add-up the realities of manufacturing (which in some cases might include mining), transportation, construction, deployment, operations and maintenance, not one system has yet surfaced that can conclusively operate beyond the lab or, at best, a small test area (like a small farm patch).
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42425985 I corrected you the last time you made this false claim, providing verifiable calculations on lime burning, the simplest system that can conclusively operate beyond the lab, though possibly not the cheapest. So I'm surprised to see you repeating the same false claim again in a different thread.
> I have posted the math here on HN in detail in the past.
Links to the math you've posted previously to HN (rather than bare assertions that it exists) would be appreciated. If it's correct, it will inform others; if it's incorrect, the correction will inform you.
> The idea of using your EV as a battery simply will not work on multiple fronts. One of the most basic problems is that you'd age your battery prematurely by adding charge/discharge cycles.
Battery aging has cost, but grid-scale energy storage has value. It isn't sufficient to establish that the cost exists; you must establish that it exceeds the value provided. As we'll see below, the value is typically about five times the cost.
> The reality of the situation is that you need many times the storage that an EV is able to provide in order to deal with the unreliability of solar production.
Again, I'd like to see your calculations. The Tesla Model Y's LFP battery capacity is supposedly 60 kilowatt hours, and a house averages about a kilowatt, only a small fraction of which needs to be active at night, perhaps 250 watts. So I think an EV provides about 240 hours' worth of nighttime backup power, but only needs to provide about 18 hours' worth.
So, rather than needing many times the storage that an EV is able to provide, an EV is able to provide many times the storage you need.
LFP batteries are particularly good on the wear-and-tear front, lasting around 5000 cycles. The car costs US$50k, so if we junk the car when the battery wears out, each cycle costs about US$10, about 17 cents per kilowatt hour. This is enormously more expensive than solar energy but still cheaper than grid power in many places. In California it's about half the cost of grid power.
However, evidently replacing just the battery costs only US$10-15k: https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/1cf1fkr/how_mu... which means each cycle only costs about US$2.50, 4 cents per kilowatt hour. So if otherwise you'd be paying 24 cents per kilowatt hour from the grid, the net value from draining your Tesla battery is about 20 cents per kilowatt hour.
Other companies such as BYD, which outsells Ford, Honda, and Tesla, have even cheaper batteries.
> we would have to triple the size of the array and have over 400 kWh of storage in place.
Where are you getting that? It sounds like you want weeks' worth of energy, not nights' worth. Batteries aren't a practical way to store weeks' worth of power. That doesn't make them useless.
> 55K hectares burned and no stop in sight. At 130 tons of CO2 per hectare, that's over seven million tons
Burning forests is, counterintuitively, carbon-neutral. The carbon in the forest had been removed from the atmosphere previously, and when the forest grows back, it will be removed from the atmosphere again. Only long-term changes in land use affect the greenhouse effect over more than a few years.
I'll be honest, why even fucking with any other kind of geo-engineering other than high altitude sulfur dioxide injection. We literally have seen a big jump in warming from problably removing the sulfuric byproducts of cargoship fuel. At its heart global warming is an issue of energy in vs energy out. Its a lot harder to remove billions of tons of co2 to increase energy out versus using a couple thousand tons of sulphur dioxide to reduce energy in. Maybe not as a permanent fix, but a better fix than this nonesense.
Because (1) sulfur-dioxide injection is a short term solution that doesn’t solve the problem long term, (2) there is a huge risk of termination shock if civilization ever stops injecting it, (3) the only long term route to a stable client is to stop emitting and to remove the CO2 excess we’re adding, (4) all of this assumes that solar radiation management doesn’t have terrible unexpected effects on the climate.
We’re probably going to have to do it anyway as a Hail Mary, since we’re now seeing clouds disappear due to warming. But it’s an emergency measure and not a solution. https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-s-clouds-are-s...
Why is the goal to get something "stable" in the first place? Climate on earth never was and never will be stable, so this should not be our goal in the first place. The goal should be to keep the change fairly slow because most living things have trouble with fast changes. That's it we don't need more than that.
"Fairly slow" on an evolutionary timescale and "stable" across human timescales are functionally the exact same thing.
The difference between the two is negligible compared to the difference between either of them and what we currently have, which is "unprecedented" on human timescales and euphemistically "radical" on evolutionary ones.
You might as well say "look I just don't understand why people say we need to stop the car, obviously slowing down to walking speed would be enough" while the car continues to accelerate at full throttle towards a cliff edge.
> The goal should be to keep the change fairly slow because most living things have trouble with fast changes.
That's what is meant by "stable". It doesn't mean static.
That sulfur was removed to reduce acid rain, so its not without some pretty terrible side effects.
The idea (in theory being the key word) is by injecting into the stratosphere minimises acid rain production and maximises cooling requiring less SO2
Wont it just fall back down again?
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This will definitely end well /s
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