Carbon capture

[Jarhyn]

So, I've been reading on people who propose industrial processes to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and a thought keeps recurring to me, namely that we already have a huge number of machines that already remove carbon from the atmosphere: plants, and more specifically, algae.

We are seeing HUGE algae blooms that create major problems for the planet, notably turning our oceans into jellyfish farms. So... Why aren't we farming algae en masse, sterilizing it with caesium, and putting it into the ground? It seems to me that the easiest way to offset the unfortunate burning of fossil fuels is to start doing the same thing that created the oil in the first place. Perhaps it wouldn't even be so awful an idea to add something to the algae we farm to make it more aggressively capture carbon?

What technical details are preventing us from doing this instead of investigating more industrial ways which themselves will create other wastes?

 

[barbos]

Carbon capture does not mean capturing it from the atmosphere. It means capturing from exhaust of coal plants.
Industrial carbon capture from the atmosphere would be rather hopeless.

 

[Malintent]

I have seen (videos of) bio-heated power generation from algae farms. Its a green liquid (from the organisms) that is circulated through a system that extracts the heat, and as the algae population increases, some is filtered out, dried, and compressed into fuel pellets for burning as well.

 

[JonA]

What technical details are preventing us from doing this instead of investigating more industrial ways which themselves will create other wastes?

You have to get more energy out than you put in.

 

[Sea of red]

Carbon capture does not mean capturing it from the atmosphere. It means capturing from exhaust of coal plants.
Industrial carbon capture from the atmosphere would be rather hopeless.

AKA 'Clean Coal'.

 

[Jarhyn]

Carbon capture does not mean capturing it from the atmosphere. It means capturing from exhaust of coal plants.
Industrial carbon capture from the atmosphere would be rather hopeless.

No, I'm talking about repairing the damage already done, not mitigating the damage at industrial sites. We have housing surpluses and agricultural surpluses. We have food, and shelter, and potentially even water depending on the designs of the system.

Algae is essentially mostly carbon, and at any rate, crude oil contains all the stuff that composes a whole organism, hence why it contains so much sulphur and other toxic shit.

I'm not talking about making fuel, at any rate. Im talking an endeavor purely to remove carbon. Maybe we can turn our agricultural, labor, and housing surpluses to these ends.

The point isn't to make money, it's to use all the stuff we already have laying around to put carbon back under the ground.

 

[barbos]

Carbon capture does not mean capturing it from the atmosphere. It means capturing from exhaust of coal plants.
Industrial carbon capture from the atmosphere would be rather hopeless.

No, I'm talking about repairing the damage already done, not mitigating the damage at industrial sites. We have housing surpluses and agricultural surpluses. We have food, and shelter, and potentially even water depending on the designs of the system.

Algae is essentially mostly carbon, and at any rate, crude oil contains all the stuff that composes a whole organism, hence why it contains so much sulphur and other toxic shit.

I'm not talking about making fuel, at any rate. Im talking an endeavor purely to remove carbon. Maybe we can turn our agricultural, labor, and housing surpluses to these ends.

The point isn't to make money, it's to use all the stuff we already have laying around to put carbon back under the ground.

Someone suggested that? while coal power plants are still pumping CO2 into atmosphere?

 

[Jarhyn]

You seem to misunderstand. Perhaps you are jumping to conclusions or making false dichotomies in your mind. Whatever malfunction is happening in your head is not really for me to say, though.

Putting scrubbers on coal plants and industrial sites is something that should be done when such a site is necessary, to be sure. But the problem is that we are taking carbon that was put out of ecological circulation and putting it into the atmosphere. While we need to stop that entirely, the damage caused by this activity will only continue to compound, even if we stopped pumping out carbon entirely.

The point of my question was to find out what people thought of using biomass generation and sequestration to permanently remove the carbon we never should have released in the first place, completely independent of any discussion about reducing future emissions.

Essentially, is this a thing that has been discussed as a potential solution. To take all those assholes farming shit we don't need that we are currently subsidizing, and subsidize their removal of carbon from the atmosphere by farming shit that literally pulls carbon from the atmosphere en masse.

 

[James Brown]

This author discussed the possibility of building artificial island colonies, growing vast beds of algae (which would absorb carbon out of the atmosphere) then sinking the algae to the ocean bottoms. Unlike planting trees (which then release their captured carbon back once they die) this would effectively remove the carbon from the biosphere.

 

[Sarpedon]

The most ready way we have of removing carbon from the atmosphere is reforestation. There are massive areas of the world that were cleared for agriculture, who then through soil depletion or other reasons became uneconomical, and now lie unused. Trees come back by themselves eventually, but if we were to select the best capturerers (probably long lived, deep rooted trees) we could give it a boost.

 

[Jarhyn]

This author discussed the possibility of building artificial island colonies, growing vast beds of algae (which would absorb carbon out of the atmosphere) then sinking the algae to the ocean bottoms. Unlike planting trees (which then release their captured carbon back once they die) this would effectively remove the carbon from the biosphere.

Honestly, I would rather find a way of putting it somewhere where we can recover it, and where other stuff can't eat it, like in artificial oil wells. Perhaps even contaminating oil wells currently in use with it, to make the oil useless for a couple hundred or thousand years.

 

[barbos]

You seem to misunderstand. Perhaps you are jumping to conclusions or making false dichotomies in your mind. Whatever malfunction is happening in your head is not really for me to say, though.

I can assure you there is no malfunction in my head. I think it's ridiculous to try to extract CO2 from the atmosphere while at the same time burning coal at global scale.
It took millions and millions of years for nature to bury carbon in the ground.

 

[DrZoidberg]

So, I've been reading on people who propose industrial processes to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and a thought keeps recurring to me, namely that we already have a huge number of machines that already remove carbon from the atmosphere: plants, and more specifically, algae.

We are seeing HUGE algae blooms that create major problems for the planet, notably turning our oceans into jellyfish farms. So... Why aren't we farming algae en masse, sterilizing it with caesium, and putting it into the ground? It seems to me that the easiest way to offset the unfortunate burning of fossil fuels is to start doing the same thing that created the oil in the first place. Perhaps it wouldn't even be so awful an idea to add something to the algae we farm to make it more aggressively capture carbon?

What technical details are preventing us from doing this instead of investigating more industrial ways which themselves will create other wastes?

It's not a question of lacking the ability. It's a question of economy. It would be prohibitively expensive. It's a lot cheaper to fix the problem in the other end, release less carbon. But that has political problems. It's basically just making ourselves poorer. Nobody likes poverty. So... problem.

 

[bigfield]

You seem to misunderstand. Perhaps you are jumping to conclusions or making false dichotomies in your mind. Whatever malfunction is happening in your head is not really for me to say, though.

I can assure you there is no malfunction in my head. I think it's ridiculous to try to extract CO2 from the atmosphere while at the same time burning coal at global scale.
It took millions and millions of years for nature to bury carbon in the ground.

It is a ridiculous thing to do, but not the most ridiculous:

While the best solution is to simultaneously stop burning coal at a global scale and capture carbon from the atmosphere using algae, doing either one of those things is still better (i.e. less ridiculous) than doing neither of them.

While a watertight boat is better than a leaky one, it's better to bail out a leaky boat than simply let it sink.

 

[barbos]

I can assure you there is no malfunction in my head. I think it's ridiculous to try to extract CO2 from the atmosphere while at the same time burning coal at global scale.
It took millions and millions of years for nature to bury carbon in the ground.

It is a ridiculous thing to do, but not the most ridiculous:

While the best solution is to simultaneously stop burning coal at a global scale and capture carbon from the atmosphere using algae, doing either one of those things is still better (i.e. less ridiculous) than doing neither of them.

While a watertight boat is better than a leaky one, it's better to bail out a leaky boat than simply let it sink.

So you suggest to bail planet Earth and go where?

 

[Jarhyn]

You seem to misunderstand. Perhaps you are jumping to conclusions or making false dichotomies in your mind. Whatever malfunction is happening in your head is not really for me to say, though.

I can assure you there is no malfunction in my head. I think it's ridiculous to try to extract CO2 from the atmosphere while at the same time burning coal at global scale.
It took millions and millions of years for nature to bury carbon in the ground.

No, it didn't really take millions of years to bury it, and at any rate, it doesn't matter how long it took nature. I'm not talking about committing to a natural process, so discussions of how long natural process takes is irrelevant.

I'd rather stop burning coal as soon as we can replace those plants with nuclear and solar sources.

So, I've been reading on people who propose industrial processes to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and a thought keeps recurring to me, namely that we already have a huge number of machines that already remove carbon from the atmosphere: plants, and more specifically, algae.

We are seeing HUGE algae blooms that create major problems for the planet, notably turning our oceans into jellyfish farms. So... Why aren't we farming algae en masse, sterilizing it with caesium, and putting it into the ground? It seems to me that the easiest way to offset the unfortunate burning of fossil fuels is to start doing the same thing that created the oil in the first place. Perhaps it wouldn't even be so awful an idea to add something to the algae we farm to make it more aggressively capture carbon?

What technical details are preventing us from doing this instead of investigating more industrial ways which themselves will create other wastes?

It's not a question of lacking the ability. It's a question of economy. It would be prohibitively expensive. It's a lot cheaper to fix the problem in the other end, release less carbon. But that has political problems. It's basically just making ourselves poorer. Nobody likes poverty. So... problem.

Except that we CANT fix the problem on the other end. Too much plus *any positive ammount* is still going to be *too much and then some*

We need to find a way to create negative carbon, and the only way to do that is to remove it from the atmosphere.

It doesn't matter what is cheaper. Yea, we need to stop belching it out into the air. I never said we shouldn't. But we will all be bones on a scorched sterilized rock I'd we don't actually start capturing the carbon again, because the process of global warming is compounding.

 

[bigfield]

While a watertight boat is better than a leaky one, it's better to bail out a leaky boat than simply let it sink.

So you suggest to bail planet Earth and go where?

My mistake--I meant 'bail' as in the act of removing water from a boat, not 'bail out'.

 

[barbos]

So you suggest to bail planet Earth and go where?

My mistake--I meant 'bail' as in the act of removing water from a boat, not 'bail out'.

You are suggesting removing water with a spoon. And I am suggesting stopping that massive leak first.

 

[barbos]

I can assure you there is no malfunction in my head. I think it's ridiculous to try to extract CO2 from the atmosphere while at the same time burning coal at global scale.
It took millions and millions of years for nature to bury carbon in the ground.

No, it didn't really take millions of years to bury

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

it, and at any rate, it doesn't matter how long it took nature. I'm not talking about committing to a natural process, so discussions of how long natural process takes is irrelevant.

It gives you scale of the problem.

I'd rather stop burning coal as soon as we can replace those plants with nuclear and solar sources.

Stopping burning fossil fuels is a first thing which must be done.

 

[bigfield]

My mistake--I meant 'bail' as in the act of removing water from a boat, not 'bail out'.

You are suggesting removing water with a spoon. And I am suggesting to stopping the leak first.

Why is algae capture comparable to bailing a boat with only a spoon? How much carbon could algae farming remove from the atmosphere? If the capacity of such a system is insignificant, then that would be a valid technical reason that answers the OP. So far I haven't found any information on those capacity.