Scientists Develop Technology That Burns Natural Gas With No CO2 Emissions (scienceblog.com) 163
New submitter Ben Sullivan writes: Researchers and engineers in Vienna have developed a way to burn natural gas without releasing CO2 into the air through a combustion method called chemical looping combustion (CLC). In this process, CO2 can be isolated during combustion without having to use any additional energy, which means it can then go on to be stored. The method had already been applied successfully in a test environment, and has now been upscaled to allow use in up to a 10 MW facility. ScienceBlog.com reports: "A granulate made of metal oxide circulates between the two chambers and is responsible for transporting oxygen from air to fuel: 'We pump air through one chamber, where the particles take up oxygen. They then move on to the second chamber, which has natural gas flowing through it. Here is where the oxygen is released, and then where flameless combustion takes place, producing CO2 and water vapor,' explains Stefan Penthor from the Institute of Chemical Engineering at TU Wien. The separation into two chambers means there are two separate flue gas streams to deal with too: air with a reduced concentration of oxygen is discharged from one chamber, water vapor and CO2 from the other. The water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored or used in other technical applications."
Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
"The water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored or used in other technical applications."
Hmmmm, quite a lot of CO2. Probably more than needed for "other technical applications" - besides which, what will be done with it after those "applications" are complete?
Anyone need 10 Gigatonnes of CO2? How many big tanks would it take to store? Or will it be cleverly stored underground, somewhere we can be absolutely sure it will never suddenly re-emerge into the atmosphere?
Underground (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
"“The large-scale underground storage of CO2 in former natural gas reservoirs could be very significant in the future,” believes Stefan Penthor. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also sees underground CO2 storage as an essential component of any future climate policy. However, CO2 can only be stored if it has been separated as pure as possible – just as it is with the new CLC combustion method."
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
"Hmmmm, quite a lot of CO2. Probably more than needed for "other technical applications" - besides which, what will be done with it after those "applications" are complete?"
People are ignoring the obvious here.
Mix CO2 with Water, add some flavorings and a heap of Sugar, probably Corn-Derived, and launch it into Space.
Who will be the first to market this to Alpha Centauri, Coca Cola or Pepsi?
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, there is a nice place where you can use all of this CO2 - make the richer mixture of CO2/Air and use it in greenhouses. If I remember my high-school biology correctly, more CO2 in air (up to 0.07%) would make plants have better photosynthesis process and much higher yield.
Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at it this way - If you grow plants to absorb all the CO2 a power plant produces, you would be growing enough plant matter to run the plant on the biomas. That's going to be a lot of farms under plastic.
Re:Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need. (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that your plan is to grow greenhouse biomass to burn for power. Which would be a pretty weird plan.
CO2 has plenty of uses (a big one is in enhanced oil recovery), but yes, the amount produced in generating baseload power is far more than industry needs. That said, the objective is not to have CO2-intensive power as baseload - only peaking. With an ideal generation infrastructure (solar + wind, HVDC links connecting different regions), the amount of CO2 generated drops by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Which puts it more in the range of industrial needs.
algal ponds (Score:2)
Algal ponds also need a cheap source of CO2 to sparge. I don't know what fraction of it is taken up and what is lost but given the algae are hungy for it perhaps it is a lot.
That's not my plan. That's not anyone's plan. (Score:2)
My point isn't that we should grow biomass to run the power plant. Farming plants to power a power station is ridiculously impractical.
But it is exactly what you are trying to do - in reverse - if you capture the CO_2_ and feed it to plants, with the intent of consuming all the CO_2_ the power plant produces. You are trying to use plants to un-burn the fuel you used to run the power plant - and the scale is the same as trying to grow the fuel.
Re:Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's an interesting tech, but I'm not all that sanguine about it.
1) Presenting it as being some sort of lossless, no-downsides system isn't accurate. There's always going to be some losses when you add an extra chemical intermediary step in (in this case, a solid-state oxygen transfer mechanism).
2) It's not really all that fundamentally different from what's done to capture CO2 today. To capture CO2 you have the exhaust stream flow through a bed of CO2 absorbers, which you then reversibly degas. Here they're having the input air stream flow through a bed of O2 absorbers, which they reversibly degas for combustion. They've just moved it from the output side to the input side and switched absorbers. I can see some potential advantages to this (for example, the broader range of O2 absorbers; all other pollutants being captured with the CO2 rather than just a fraction of them; etc), but when it comes down to it, it doesn't look like some huge game changer.
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If you filter CO2 from regular combustion gas, it is highly diluted by the nitrogen being present. So, the flow rate is higher (or you need a bigger bed). I think the new way of operating is rather smart. You don't care too much how much oxygen happens to slip through the particles in the other stream. A further advantage is that this process can run without nitrogen oxides forming. Which is quite nice too.
A possible advantage may be that higher combustion temperatures might be achievable (depends on how m
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All very good points. And the possibility of higher temperature combustion didn't occur to me, but that may well be possible - you get higher adiabatic flame temperatures in pure oxygen combustion. If the oxygen absorber isn't very costly, the higher Carnot efficiency could potentially pay for the cost.
Another interesting possibility that now occurs to me is high pressure combustion (also greater efficiency). The oxygen-rich absorber is almost certainly going to be dramatically more oxygen-dense than even c
Re:Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need. (Score:4, Interesting)
Doing some math here... if we say that the absorbed oxygen is 20% of the absorber's mass, burned stoichiometrically with methane, at 50% efficiency due to high temperatures and pressures, then storing a day's worth at 1MW would require 62 tonnes of absorber. At iron oxide bulk costs and iron oxide densities, that'd be about $44k and 11 cubic meters, respectively. 1GW-day, $44m and 11000 cubic meters (say, a storage yard 50x50x4,4m). None of this seems at all unreasonable, given that a thermal plant usually runs about $1/W or more in capital costs; the absorber could be far more expensive and the storage time far more than a day's worth without being prohibitive.
Nifty. :)
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Who said anything about things being destroyed?
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You don't get it, do you?
You simply bury all this biomass in a downward-sucking rift valley, so that the glorious post-civilization reboot a billion years from now has a convenient carbon source to prime the pump.
Only they won't call it "priming the pump". They'll have a new word, meaning "better than prime".
Here's the thing.
If "better" maps onto "b
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, there is a nice place where you can use all of this CO2 - make the richer mixture of CO2/Air and use it in greenhouses.
Isn't that what we're doing right now?
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Only problem is that you need an airtight greenhouse, complete with airlocks. Compared to modern greenhouses made out of plastic, it is unlikely to be economical.
The thing is, we actually don't have a problem growing enough food. Modern farming is already more than efficient enough. What we need is to make it more sustainable.
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Only problem is that you need an airtight greenhouse, complete with airlocks. Compared to modern greenhouses made out of plastic, it is unlikely to be economical.
No, no you do not. I don't know who told you that, but they were full of shit, and I cannot understand why you are repeating it. There are people all over the place doing CO2 enrichment without airtight grow spaces, and it works. The down side is that humans shouldn't be in the room while it is active. Elevated CO2 levels affect mood and health. They are actively bad for you.
The thing is, we actually don't have a problem growing enough food. Modern farming is already more than efficient enough. What we need is to make it more sustainable.
This part is true. There's more than enough food for everyone to eat. The problem isn't there being enough food. The problem is having the will to feed them.
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:4)
No, no you do not. I don't know who told you that, but they were full of shit, and I cannot understand why you are repeating it. There are people all over the place doing CO2 enrichment without airtight grow spaces, and it works. The down side is that humans shouldn't be in the room while it is active. Elevated CO2 levels affect mood and health. They are actively bad for you.
You misunderstand. The point is to find a use for large amounts of CO2 that doesn't involve releasing it into the atmosphere (to meet the zero emission goal). If you use it in a non-airtight greenhouse I'm sure it will help the plants, but it will also leak out into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.
So my point was that rather than using it to grow more of what we already have enough of at the expense of creating some emissions, or building an airtight greenhouse, we should do something else.
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The point is to find a use for large amounts of CO2 that doesn't involve releasing it into the atmosphere (to meet the zero emission goal). If you use it in a non-airtight greenhouse I'm sure it will help the plants, but it will also leak out into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.
It's going to do that anyway. Not all the CO2 will be used. Instead of figuring out ways to capture CO2 while burning fuel, we need to be finding ways to capture CO2 while making fuel, instead of releasing trapped carbon. Then it doesn't matter if we release the carbon when we burn it. With carbon-neutral fuels, we could all but ignore the CO2 emissions, and focus on HC, NOx, SOx, and PPM which are plenty to deal with — and all more immediately life-threatening than CO2. I like to bang on about Butano
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Do you understand the truly small concentrations of CO2 we're talking about here (as used in greenhouses)?
I swear... due to the relentless hysterical propaganda about climate change some people's brains have fallen out. Or it's all politics; a molecule used as a stick to beat your opponents with.
But hey, I used to work for a company that recover
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Yes, I understand it perfectly. We are talking about potential applications for the CO2 produced here, which will be very large amounts. That implied very large greenhouses, using massive quantities of CO2.
Otherwise it makes even less sense because it doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the CO2 generated by this system.
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The "CO2 generated by this system" is CO2 that would have been generated elsewhere for existing applications anyway, is it not?
I have a feeling you believe there's some perfect CO2 concentration that must be maintained and that we're already doomed at the current 0.04%.
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That kind of happened in the 1960s and 1970s and was called "the green revolution".
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That kind of happened in the 1960s and 1970s and was called "the green revolution".
The green revolution was a great handout to chemical companies but it is not clear that it actually reduced deaths by starvation, it only postponed them slightly. Meanwhile it is selling out our future by destroying topsoil upon which we depend for growing crops. It leads to a future in which all food is grown hydroponically in an inert dirt medium, which is basically the present for many crops — indeed, it is the current state of affairs for any field not fertilized with shit.
Using synthetic fertiliz
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I'm in Ohio, each spring I see more and more fields switch over to more sustainable practices such as no till and better crop rotations.
That's nice, but do the math, look up the statistics. The vast majority of food comes from factory farms. And then there's corn for ethanol fuel, which is typically farmed continuously! They don't even use crop rotation, let alone let fields lie fallow!
Small farms are overwhelmingly shifting to superior farming practices because they can charge more money and otherwise they go out of business and turn into part of a large farm which will destroy the soil with no regrets.
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WTF?
You are not supposed to SMOKE the green stuff you are supposed to EAT it.
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What's your excuse for the rant I replied to when you'd already heard of the green revolution? It's starting to look very dishonest and "political" instead of just ignorant.
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And all the rest as well. It was about applying science to agriculture in a major way.
It was about applying synthetic fertilizer and pesticide to agriculture in a major way. If we were applying science, then we would have cared about soil health. Instead, all we cared about was yields. The time at which we applied science to agriculture in a major way was not the green revolution, it was solving the dust bowl. That's when the feds began aggressively communicating things we consider to be absolute basics of farming today like crop rotation to farmers. Only, guess what? Now many food crops are
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And also many, many other things.
Me? You are the one that says the only relevant advances were synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.
Globally? No. Locally? Rarely. Even in the countryside near the city where you obviously rarely left a lot of changes would have been driven by
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If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things
I'm not against tractors, where they're useful and/or necessary. For initial clearing and tilth they are highly useful. Overuse of any good thing, however, can turn into a bad one.
I'm also not against fertilizer, but we don't need to make it out of oil. We already make all we need, and then we throw most of it away. I am, of course talking mostly about feces (both human and nonhuman) but also about compost. In places with severe landfill problems this is already typically separated. As well, in places with
Re: Hmmmmmmm (Score:2)
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The Green Revolution actually started in the United States in 1938. That was the time and place that agricultural productivity abruptly shifted from an annual productivity growth of near zero (less than 0.1%) which stretched back hundreds of years, to about 1.5% every year. Here is an illustration of the phenomenon [usda.gov]. This USDA chart starts in 1948, setting everything equal to "1", but the trend goes back to 1938. After WWII this trend spread from the U.S. to the entire world, and has (so far) tripled agricul
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is having the will to feed them.
Yes, well, it's a bit more complicated than that... let's say the US had the "will" to feed all of the world's hungry. Some (most?) of the world's "hunger" problems are actually political problems. Without threat of force, these political problems aren't going away. So really it comes down to a willingness to toss aside the old notions of sovereignty and actively intervene where help is needed, no matter whose jurisdiction. So yeah, you could feed the starving North Koreans, but you risk killing most of Seoul's population for that endgame.
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Sorry, when I said "we" I didn't mean the USA, although that is also true. I meant humans. We have the means, men and material to solve most of the world's problems if only there weren't so dang much money in operating businesses whose profit margins depend on preventing it.
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This part is true. There's more than enough food for everyone to eat. The problem isn't there being enough food. The problem is having the will to feed them.
There are plenty of other uses plants can be used than food. Especially if those become more economically viable with higher yield.
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There are plenty of other uses plants can be used than food. Especially if those become more economically viable with higher yield.
The problem there is that we are growing fuel out of topsoil. As I have stated in several other recent posts, virtually all of that fuel feedstock is being grown continuously, which depletes the soil. Making topsoil into fuel is insane! There is basically only one [family of] plant[s] which it actually makes sense to use as a fuel feedstock: algae. Algae can be grown in dirty water, and at a variety of Ph levels. There is no need to engineer it because nature has made so many varieties; if you leave some wa
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What about the remaining 9.9 or so Gigatonnes?
Even if plants in greenhouses converted all the CO2 into themselves, the total used is nowhere close to the order of gigatons. Meanwhile, a lot of the CO2 will have escaped into the atmosphere, which undoes the benefit.
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That doesn't actually solve the problem at all though, it just kicks it down the road by a few months. Once those plants die, the fossil carbon still gets released into the ecological carbon cycle when they get eaten, burned, or decay. All you've done is make the first uptake happen under glass at a slightly increased rate.
If you grow woody plants you could potentially produce biochar and dig it into the soil - that's actually fairly stable, and would also enrich the soil for centuries to come: you're esse
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In colder regions, this is already done. Many of the greenhouses in BC are setup such that in the winter, they run their boilers during the day, blowing a portion of the exhaust into the greenhouse to increase the CO2 concentration. The hot water produced is stored in large insulated tanks. At night, the hot water is used to keep the plants and greenhouses from freezing.
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The problem is scale. We're produce enough CO2 to turn the entire planet into a greenhouse. Even if we freely supplied all of this captured CO2 to the actual greenhouses, it likely wouldn't add up to more than a fraction of a percent of what we generate.
Same thing with using it for making carbonated beverages or whatever.. sure that's a use for it but the scale difference is staggering.
Underground storage is really about the only option. Its probably a net carbon generator to try sending it into space wi
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You'd better look at the numbers if you think you can use all the CO2 in this way.
A ton of CO2 is perhaps enough to fill a 1000 sqft greenhouse with 100% CO2. The world emitted some 40 billion tons of CO2 in 2014 by burning fossil fuels. How many greenhouses per person are we building a year now?
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Although it's not yet understood what would be the full effects of higher CO2 levels. Clearly that would stimulate further plant growth, which would emit more oxygen...
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty well understood. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere means more energy is trapped in the lower atmosphere and on the surface. In general terms, that means heat, though it also means more energetic storm systems and other atmospheric phenomena as well.
It's been known for over a century what happens if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. For anyone to act like somehow it's all still a mystery is to basically ignore the actual, real, verified physical properties of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.
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Yes, a single O2 molecule per CO2 molecule.
As we are measuring CO2 concentration in parts per million (PPM) in relation to other molecules in the atmosphere, you probably can imagine how meaningless small that increased O2 out put is.
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It does indeed stimulate plant growth. The planet will almost certainly survive. Life will most likely survive in some form or another. What won't survive is life as we know it.
Evolution is slow. It will take life tens or hundreds of thousands of years to fully adapt to the new carbon reality. Unfortunately, the things that are unable to adapt will be going extinct on the scale of tens or hundreds of years. That's a significant gap between what we currently enjoy and we know supports humanity pretty g
Re: We had 12 times more CO2 in THE FUCKING ICE AG (Score:3)
Re:We had 12 times more CO2 in THE FUCKING ICE AGE (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know why these global warming idiots just don't do their own research before opening their mouths.
Did you ever think that maybe we did [skepticalscience.com]?
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Here's a fun experiment to show you why your argument is dumb:
1) Find a brick wall.
2) Slowly walk into it.
3) Now try running into it headlong.
You see how #2 was fine while #3 gave you brain damage? Yeah that's pretty much the same difference between historic carbon highs and today. Historically, it took hundreds of thousands of years to switch between carbon highs and carbon lows (and similar for temperatures, though carbon isn't the only factor there so the two aren't always 100% in sync.)
This time, inst
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For production of H2 as far as I know, for refucing CO2 I doubt that is easy.
In plants badically the same is happening, with captured photons they split water into OH and H and craft from CO2 and OH etc. sugars and fibres.
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Probably more than needed for "other technical applications"
Including methane synthesis from future renewably generated hydrogen? What goes out must go back in.
Re: Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
If you are pumping it into an underground reservoir that used to hold natural gas, then you already know the reservoir can hold gas for geological time periods. (Or at least it could until someone drilled into it.)
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I'm sure it will work, I'm a random guy on the internet with an idea. Those always work.
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Basically that's the idea. Except the ice part. It would be stored as a compressed gas (which would be hot.) Because we haven't found any natural caverns with -80C temperatures yet.
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Yes - exactly. The insane quantities of CO2 that ANY sequestration method generates ("Clean coal"...yeah...right) would be vastly more than we could use industrially - or otherwise. CO2 simply isn't a very useful gas - it's not in high demand.
So you're down to storing it somehow.
But storing it as a CO2 gas at atmospheric pressure would require a VERY large volume of storage space - even ideas like pumping it down into the underground voids where we extracted the natural gas from doesn't work because natur
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So that just says "let's make batteries" because that's what using energy to reverse the process is doing.
But battery technologists (energy storage technologists in general) are not saying this is a great idea - because it's exceedingly inefficient.
Better to pump water up a mountain while you have energy - and let it drive turbines when you need energy - or just let Elon Musk build a few more gigafactories and use mountains of batteries.
Those kinds of approaches are MUCH more reasonable than trying to shunt
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It'll get put into the ground, in rock formations in appropriate shapes and with appropriate porosity-permeability vertical profiles to keep it there for a few million years, and a sufficiently saline pore water that in those several million years, it'll mostly be converted to carbonate minerals which
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Wealth transfer is a facet of civilization, and has been since the beginning. You act as if it's a bad thing.
And frankly, I think transferring some wealth from those that are profiting from CO2-emitting fuels to those who aren't is a good thing. Technology plays its part, but so long as we are subsidizing fossil fuels, either directly through tax incentives, or indirectly by doing nothing and thus handing it to future generations to pay the costs (and really, we are already paying the costs), looks to me exactly like transferring wealth from those least able to pay for it to those who actually are already making money hand over fist.
Fossil fuels are bad, and we need to abandon them. It's that simple. I think heavy regulation is a mistake. Heavy regulation is expensive and can be fairly unreliable. A flat-out carbon tax, that's what you need. If indeed market forces are the answer, and I believe they are, then slap a tax or tariff on carbon, which everyone that extracts or uses fossil fuels pay for; from the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico right down to the guy gassing up his Honda.
Re: Hmmmmmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a fundamental flaw in the capitalist system that you have to pay for raw materials, pay for labor, pay for R&D, pay for marketting, pay for the land your business occupies - but disposing of the waste that you generate is a freebie.
This biases things in favor of businesses that generate waste compared to businesses that either don't generate waste - or pay to clean it up.
Which explains why we're trashing the planet so efficiently.
The only way to make capitalism sustainable and fair is to make the cost of disposing of waste become a part of the cost of producing the product.
High waste products would then cost more - fewer people would buy them - and if they did, the cost of cleanup would be included, so no big deal.
Making this a "tax" only works if the organization that collects the tax spends it on doing the cleanup...but that's probably not gonna happen. Instead the tax is seen as a punishment for dirty businesses - and that's not something that's really popular.
An alternative would be to have the polluters be required to do the cleanup. This is more direct than taxation - and fairer - and it removes "the middle man" - which is also good.
In pure abstract capitalism theory - we might argue that if people wanted a clean environment, that they'd simply boycott products from businesses that didn't give them what they need. But we have a "Crisis of the Commons" situation here. For each individual person, their benefit from cheaper/dirtier products exceeds their perceived loss...and that would be a problem if the vast majority of people didn't do that. But they do - it's human nature.
But however you slice it - capitalism is broken and we need to fix it somehow. No matter what, government has to be involved because "market forces" are failing miserably.
So a "carbon tax" would work - or a law that said "You make the pollution - you fix it!" would work. The former can be graduated and controlled more easily than the latter - especially for things like carbon emissions that really cannot be fixed. The latter would prevent things like plastic waste in the oceans from being a problem more effectively than a "plastics tax" and a proliferation of other taxes.
The German "green dot" program is a good example of the "you did it - you fix it" approach. Products labelled like that REQUIRE the manufacturer to provide recycling processes to de-manufacture these products...either themselves - or by paying a contribution to centralised recycling plants in proportion to the cost of recycling their products.
However, for other businesses - a carbon tax would also work.
Re:Hmmmmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with "you break it, you fix it" is that companies caught heavily polluting tend to have this habit of going bankrupt, in which case the taxpayer is still on the hook. A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.
The big debate to my mind is how the tax is ultimately used. Some have a significant issue with it simply going into a jurisdiction's general revenue account. But that's a side issue, the point is to price carbon to reflect the damage it does. Whether governments use that money to fund other programs, hand it back as some sort of rebate, or use it to fund renewables is a political question.
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That's why they should clean up early, so that early on they know their business plan won't work. If they wait until there is actually significant polution, then they've been given a free pass. (ok, they may go bankrupt but the CEO is still retiring to a golden palace)
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A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.
The other thing that a Carbon tax does (assuming it is applied universally) is provide a direct incentive for people, and corporations to become more efficient in their use of energy, and potentially select less carbon intensive energy sources.
I volunteer with an organization that is next to an environmental remediation site where the runoff from an old mine is being put through a treatment plant. Due to the remoteness of the location, they are currently powering the treatment plant using Diesel generators,
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As opposed to a simple carbon tax, there is another proposal which I rather like, though I've sadly forgotten the details. Maybe knowing a little about it would enable you to learn more. It was also proposed by someone conservative-leaning, but that doesn't stop me from liking it.
He proposes something like a carbon tax, but really more of a carbon transfer. As I said, I don't remember the details, but essentially high-carbon-emitting parties put money into a fund that is QUICKLY transferred to low-carbon
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We should eliminate the limited liability corporation. If the corp goes bankrupt, then go after the shareholders.
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Considering it is poor peoplewho will suffer the worst from climate change, I could ask you the same.
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"Wealth transfer is a facet of civilization, and has been since the beginning. You act as if it's a bad thing."
Crippling the economies of Western nations to make the Chinese rich is certainly a bad thing if you happen to be poor and living in the West.
Why do you hate poor people?
Either you are racist (against the Chinese) or just don't get it.
There are more poor people in China and they are poorer than those in the West.
Wealth transfer from the polluters to those who suffer from pollution, is fair. Poor people tend to pollute much less than rich people, by the way. Smaller cars, smaller houses, less air travel.
The US just has to reduce its CO2 emissions by something like 90% and then you could complain and start asking China for money. Until then... shut up.
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It doesn't matter. If US consumerism create pollution, it must be discouraged. The only effective way to do it is by taxes or cap and trade.
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Hey dipshit, you're so ignorant you've got your "wealth transfer" argument backwards.
In reality, the only inequitable transfer of wealth comes from the fact that polluters are free-riders, able to inflict expensive damage on everyone else with impunity.
They have no right to fuck up everyone else's air, and it is exactly the 100% correct "free market" solution to make them pay for it!
Every free-market libertarian should support abolishing the SUBSIDY on pollution.
Better title (Score:3)
A better title would have been :
Scientists Develop Technology to Recapture CO2 Produced by Burning Natural Gas.
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So when we apply this process to recapture the CO2 and send it down deep wells, what happens to the cost advantage of natural gas over all other sources?
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A better way of phrasing the question would be:
"So when we apply this process to recapture the CO2 and send it down deep wells, what happens to the externalized cost of releasing it into the atmosphere?"
And the answer is:
"The people creating that cost get to pay it for a change."
Re:Better title (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what researchers from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and the Associated Press—NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago set out to better understand. Their nationally representative poll found that 43% of Americans were unwilling to pay an additional $1 per month in their electricity bill to combat climate change—and a large majority were unwilling to pay $10 per month. That’s despite the fact that a whopping 77% said they think climate change is happening and 65% think it is a problem the government should do something about. Support plummets as the amount of the fee increases.’
This is an upside-down result. The best available science tells us that Americans should be willing to pay considerably more, because the damages from climate change are so great—including to them personally. If we use the federal government’s estimate of the combined social cost of carbon pollution and apply it to the typical U.S. household’s electricity consumption on today’s national grid mix, the average household faces damages of almost $20 per month. Yet just 29% of respondents said they would be willing to pay at least that much.
https://blogs.wsj.com/experts/... [wsj.com]
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That's what the government is for. As a whole we know we need to do something about climate change. Individually we are unwilling to pay for it. The best solution humanity has come up with so far is for our collective will, through democratic government, to force it to be paid for.
Doing it that way has the additional benefit of spreading the cost more fairly and making that cost lower than if individuals had to pay it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... [abc.net.au]
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Eh, how much beer would you need to make to temporarily store even one ton of CO2?
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The thing I linked to is effectively "greenwashing" since it's not actually a saving in hydrocarbon use to produce the industrial carbon dioxide. The new process may be better than that - a more efficient way to do it that actually saves on energy use, so not quite "greenwashing", but still it's not something you'd do to
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I wonder just how much handwaving there is in the actual technology, given that you have entertaining remarks in the article like
It is much cleaner to burn natural gas than to burn crude oil or coal. However, natural gas has the huge disadvantage that it generates CO2 during combustion, which has a detrimental effect on the climate.
This can be read as implying that crude oil or coal, when burned, produces combustion products that are dirtier than natural gas, but don't produce CO2, because it describes producing CO2 as specifically being a disadvantage when compared to coal and oil. Since all three fuels produce CO2 when burned, natural gas producing CO2 when burned is not a 'disadvantage' in comparison.
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In other words (Score:2)
In other words: They have found a combustion process that produces one stream of almost pure CO2. So it's not removing any CO2, but splitting it.
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ACTUALLY they found an easy way to separate pure oxygen from air and then transport it to methane burning chamber. If they had access to cheap pure oxygen in tanks, this method would be the same. The problem before this was how to split CO2 from all the nitrogen in standard air.
The laws of physics say (Score:2)
leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored
And guess how much energy you need to "store" the CO2.
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Depends... you might be pumping shit down into the ground anyway to displace oil. Might as well use the captured CO2 - that would significantly lower the marginal "storage" cost.
Problems still exist (Score:2)
Ever heard of a still? (Score:2)
Burning natural gas cleanly creates water vapor and CO2. If you simply run the exhaust through a still, the water vapor will condense down to liquid water and the gas will be almost pure CO2. I'm not sure what their fancy combustion method actually brings to the table.
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I'm not sure what their fancy combustion method actually brings to the table.
Exhaust gasses that are only CO2 and H2O, thus making your still example work.
Normally, combustion is not complete in these systems, so the exhaust contains other chemicals (CO, NOx, unburnt fuel). Also, the normal exhaust contains regular atmospheric air.
This method separates the oxygen from the air and then uses that for combustion. The combustion is (supposedly) complete, and you can only get CO2 and H2O in the exhaust.
Give it cheap/free to greenhouses (Score:2)
to boost plant metabolism. Saves them on burning natural gas or propane to generate it
No = Pure? Rube Goldberg ... whats the point? (Score:2)
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To put (very rough) numbers on the difference mentioned by AC - the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels to produce 1W of heat will capture an average of around 1,000,000W of solar energy before it leaves the atmosphere. Get rid of the CO2, and global warming goes away.
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We are pulling the gas and oil out of the ground. Formerly, it was not available for use by plants or trees. We burn the gas and oil, and now all of that stored carbon is available for use by plants or trees. This is a change to the equilibrium, and so our world is changing in somewhat unpredictable and rapid ways that will be traumatic to people and ecosystems.
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The system has more than us and plants in it. It also has burning massive amounts of formerly-sequestered carbon (AKA coal, oil and natural gas).
That extra CO2 input means we already upset the balance you speak of, in that we're putting out lots more CO2 than plants can absorb. So there is zero danger of exhausting the oxygen supply by slightly reducing that lots. We'll still be putting out more CO2 than plants can absorb.
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There's a lot more O2 than CO2 in the air. We'll run out of fossil fuels before we run out of O2.