What a great article! Thanks for the chemistry lesson. I was quite convinced of the futility of CC, now I’m certain. If we get too good at pulling CO2 out of the air…won’t we kill all the little plants?
A dose of reality - thanks. I love physics. In physics, I had a course on fluid dynamics, but either didn't learn Le Chatelier's principle or had forgotten it. Same with Sherwood's plot. Your post is very educational. I intuitively knew DAC didn't make sense. In fact, I'm also skeptical that CO2 "sequestered" in subterranean rocks will remain there - it will probably leak out given enough time - although I don't have proof. If I'm right, all that work will have been for nothing. But you're saying the same thing for a different reason, as scientific proof - equilibrium/LeChatelier's principle. DAC is a waste of time, money and energy.
It's crazy to capture CO2 out of the air, it is far less expensive to take it out of seawater where it has 140X the density and is already in a bicarbonate form, so it is much easier to separate. At $94-$1000/ton for DAC CO2 vs $20/ton via seawater separation. And also yields H2 which can be combined to make liquid fuels for transportation, building heat, process heat and energy storage (i.e. at gas turbine generators).
Most of the ocean is deserted of life due to a lack of nutrients. You can put floating nuclear power plants out in the deep ocean. They can pump seawater up from the ocean bottom, which is nutrient rich, causing a bloom in phytoplankton, which starts the marine food chain, while storing vast amounts of carbon, ultimately from the atmosphere. That carbon ends up in ocean biota, easily replenishing more than the fish consumed by humans. And the same nuclear power plants can extract carbon from the seawater, converting it into liquid fuels which we are the most practical fuels, since they are so easy to store and transport. We burn those liquid fuels anyway from fossil, so the synthetic liquid fuels replace fossil CO2 directly. A far, far more sensible and practical option than DAC.
"Heather Willauer from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) joins the FLC for their Tech Focus energy webinar on nuclear and fossil fuel energy. Willauer presents on the work being conducted by NRL to solve the cost of fuel stability for the U.S. navy and the Department of Defense (DOD) through creating “designer fuel” from water and carbon sequestration. Willauer explains the process of combining carbon dioxide and hydrogen with an electricity source (i.e. nuclear, wind, solar) to create designer fuel when in a remote location such as out at sea."
Fascinating - again nuclear makes sense in many applications requiring high energy density and reliable baseload operation 24 x 7 and now in portable form factors, or have always been in subs and the like.
Hargraves is a legit guy! Great fundamental chemistry and physics here in that pdf. I have the NRL video on my watch later list. Much of this makes good sense at least at 1st blush.
I would further comment that creating synthetic fuels from ExxonMobil catalyst processes via nuclear and a more concentrated CO2 feedstock may have merit, but you are looking at probably $10 to $20 per gallon.
That I imagine is for gasoline/diesel/jet fuel. I would think methanol can be made at at much lower cost. Which can replace gasoline directly, diesel with an engine replacement or converted to DME. The only thing you really need the FT fuel for is jet fuel as methanol has too low an energy density.
While CO2 injection has been successfully used for fracking and pressuring oil and gas fields. It's never even been attempted at the scale required for this nonsense, so yes the effects can only be guessed at. And... we know how good at guessing the climate clowns are.
GHE theory fails because of two erroneous assumptions: 1. near Earth space is cold & w/o GHE would become 255 K, -18 C, ball of ice & 2. radiating as a 16 C BB the surface produces “extra” GHE energy aka radiative forcing (nee caloric).
Both
Are
Just
Flat
Wrong
!!!
Without the atmosphere, water vapor and its 30% albedo Earth would become much like the Moon, a barren rock, hot^3 400 K on the lit side, cold^3 100 K on the dark.
“TFK_bams09” GHE heat balance graphic & its legion of clones uses bad math and badder physics. 63 W/m^2 appears twice (once from Sun & second from a BB calculation) violating both LoT 1 and GAAP. 396 W/m^2 upwelling is a BB calc for a 16 C surface for denominator of the emissivity ratio, 63/396=0.16, “extra” & not real. 333 W/m^2 “back” radiating from cold to warm violates LoT 1 & 2. Remove 396/333/63 GHE loop from the graphic and the solar balance still works.
Kinetic heat transfer processes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules (60%) render a terrestrial BB (requires 100%) impossible as demonstrated by experiment, the gold standard of classical science.
Since both GHE & CAGW climate “science” are indefensible rubbish alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.
On, and on, and on this written word goes, without telling you that the expense of this is covered by the oil and gas it produces. And that our government pays for it with subsidues. The people writing this may know thatthus is yet another subsidy of the oil and gas industry.
In most of the oil fields of yore, we long ago depleted their resources, which existed in lower carbonate rock. The industry turned to premature source rock, shale, which has not gone deep enough to get hot enough under enough pressure to become naturally occuring oil and gas, so they cook it with heat and chemicals to turn it to fossil fuel. The main chemical treatment used is liquid carbon dioxide, held in critical state in the shale rubble that is made with nitroglycerin. It stays there for months and chemically convert it to oil and gas and mush.
This degrades our bedrock. This allows mantle heat to escape faster. This creates perpetual methane leaks and perpetual exothermic methane oxidation, a production of ongoing formaldehyde and heat trapping water vapor, which descends into our waters, on to our soil, and into our waters.
This IS global warming. In the global warming scheme of things, sun warming carbon dioxide is an also ran, but the much marketed Al Gore, friend of Occidental Petroleum, story work out well for the fossil fuel industry. It got them money for a new source of the carbon dioxide they need to turn the rest of the world's solid shale bedrock into mush and fossil fuel for the next fifty years. Warren Buffett and his heirs will make lots of money because now the industry can get rid of an old source of the carbon dioxide they needed to frack, coal power plants. They can, will, already are- changing them to their fuel, methane .
Well, I guess if you don't know, just blame oil and gas. The subsidies for DAC are coming directly from the green new deal. Just like solar, wind, and battery grifters.
There should not be a penny more to oil and gas. We need to give it all to water power, like Norway, who gets 96 percent of its electric power from water, despite supplying much fossil fuel energy product to others.
Where do you propose to get all this water? Water happens to be the only real environmental emergency we have. Comparing the Continental US to Norway is ridiculous on its face. The only geographic area in the US comparable is Washington state and possibly Maine.
That battery is nothing more than pumped hydro. At roughly 900MW gross and two billion bucks, and 14 years, let's discuss it. First it does dissipate water, not as bad as above ground storage, but it does. Remember the axiom, "man can make no perfect machine. " Secodly let's discuss the losses. Every time you transform energy there is loss. The losses here are x5. (This does not include construction) water from above is released to the Penn stock, channeled through a generator, 5% or more lost there, captured in the lower reservoir and stored. No storage is perfect. So x loss there. Then it is pumped to the upper reservoir. 40% electrical loss in the motors, 7% loss in leakage and friction (that's the numbers from the best systems made) so a gift of roughly 5%. Then stored again x loss.
This s the case of Jack and Jill went up the hill 'carrying a bucket of water'. It was dumb when the idea was first thought of.
Imagine carrying water up a hill in a bucket just to dump on a water wheel that operates the pump you are getting water from...
It is put in motion and runs itself. Loss no more than evaporation. Do you understand what they do to get oil and gas, destructive well shooting, acidic carbon dioxide stuck in the ground and held there for months to turn solid bedrock holding the mantle heat in to gas and mush? !!! And huge amounts of water put under ground below the water table where it can never come back?!!!
Looking forward to hearing more about how the water batteries work over time.
Norway is greatly blessed with hydropower potential energy and is a unique and special country. They have unfortuntely made a terribly wasteful error with regards to hydropower and EVs.
Norway EViscerated: ICE Vehicles are More Efficient than EVs
In the article we just alluded to this subsidy scheme and the isolation of CO2 for use as a chemical feedstock and fracking "fluid". The chemistry of fracking is fascinating actually as you are familiar with - the shale rock has a higher affinity for CO2 than it does the hydrocarbons that are carried around, about or within it, so CO2 is especially efficacious..
I don't like it, but I can't say I blame Occidental, Shell, Chevron, and BlackRock and others for taking advantage of the gusher of tax payer dollars and subsidies to remove CO2 via DAC and then use it as a chemical feedstock or as a fracking fluid.
Thanks for a nice overview of the physics problems with DAC! This is one to save!
Thank you so much for the read and comments.
Thank you for stopping by and the kind words. Your doing great work over there.
What a great article! Thanks for the chemistry lesson. I was quite convinced of the futility of CC, now I’m certain. If we get too good at pulling CO2 out of the air…won’t we kill all the little plants?
Thank you for the read and the thoughts
A dose of reality - thanks. I love physics. In physics, I had a course on fluid dynamics, but either didn't learn Le Chatelier's principle or had forgotten it. Same with Sherwood's plot. Your post is very educational. I intuitively knew DAC didn't make sense. In fact, I'm also skeptical that CO2 "sequestered" in subterranean rocks will remain there - it will probably leak out given enough time - although I don't have proof. If I'm right, all that work will have been for nothing. But you're saying the same thing for a different reason, as scientific proof - equilibrium/LeChatelier's principle. DAC is a waste of time, money and energy.
Thanks for the excellent comments as always Al.
Per your comment, we are back to 101 logic and reason, and which balloon is different!
It's crazy to capture CO2 out of the air, it is far less expensive to take it out of seawater where it has 140X the density and is already in a bicarbonate form, so it is much easier to separate. At $94-$1000/ton for DAC CO2 vs $20/ton via seawater separation. And also yields H2 which can be combined to make liquid fuels for transportation, building heat, process heat and energy storage (i.e. at gas turbine generators).
Most of the ocean is deserted of life due to a lack of nutrients. You can put floating nuclear power plants out in the deep ocean. They can pump seawater up from the ocean bottom, which is nutrient rich, causing a bloom in phytoplankton, which starts the marine food chain, while storing vast amounts of carbon, ultimately from the atmosphere. That carbon ends up in ocean biota, easily replenishing more than the fish consumed by humans. And the same nuclear power plants can extract carbon from the seawater, converting it into liquid fuels which we are the most practical fuels, since they are so easy to store and transport. We burn those liquid fuels anyway from fossil, so the synthetic liquid fuels replace fossil CO2 directly. A far, far more sensible and practical option than DAC.
Transportation fuel, sea CO2, hydrogen, pH swing, SOEC, seafineries, Robert Hargraves:
https://hargraves.s3.amazonaws.com/HOT/HOT3.pdf
Heather Willauer, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOCepaqnCOc
"Heather Willauer from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) joins the FLC for their Tech Focus energy webinar on nuclear and fossil fuel energy. Willauer presents on the work being conducted by NRL to solve the cost of fuel stability for the U.S. navy and the Department of Defense (DOD) through creating “designer fuel” from water and carbon sequestration. Willauer explains the process of combining carbon dioxide and hydrogen with an electricity source (i.e. nuclear, wind, solar) to create designer fuel when in a remote location such as out at sea."
Fascinating - again nuclear makes sense in many applications requiring high energy density and reliable baseload operation 24 x 7 and now in portable form factors, or have always been in subs and the like.
Hargraves is a legit guy! Great fundamental chemistry and physics here in that pdf. I have the NRL video on my watch later list. Much of this makes good sense at least at 1st blush.
I would further comment that creating synthetic fuels from ExxonMobil catalyst processes via nuclear and a more concentrated CO2 feedstock may have merit, but you are looking at probably $10 to $20 per gallon.
That I imagine is for gasoline/diesel/jet fuel. I would think methanol can be made at at much lower cost. Which can replace gasoline directly, diesel with an engine replacement or converted to DME. The only thing you really need the FT fuel for is jet fuel as methanol has too low an energy density.
Copy that.
See Porsche Sinful Sun fuel Scheme:
https://tucoschild.substack.com/p/porsches-green-fuel-gambit-keeps
Far out!
Because injecting captured CO2 into the soil Wil likely have no environmental impact at all. 🤦♂️
While CO2 injection has been successfully used for fracking and pressuring oil and gas fields. It's never even been attempted at the scale required for this nonsense, so yes the effects can only be guessed at. And... we know how good at guessing the climate clowns are.
GHE theory fails because of two erroneous assumptions: 1. near Earth space is cold & w/o GHE would become 255 K, -18 C, ball of ice & 2. radiating as a 16 C BB the surface produces “extra” GHE energy aka radiative forcing (nee caloric).
Both
Are
Just
Flat
Wrong
!!!
Without the atmosphere, water vapor and its 30% albedo Earth would become much like the Moon, a barren rock, hot^3 400 K on the lit side, cold^3 100 K on the dark.
“TFK_bams09” GHE heat balance graphic & its legion of clones uses bad math and badder physics. 63 W/m^2 appears twice (once from Sun & second from a BB calculation) violating both LoT 1 and GAAP. 396 W/m^2 upwelling is a BB calc for a 16 C surface for denominator of the emissivity ratio, 63/396=0.16, “extra” & not real. 333 W/m^2 “back” radiating from cold to warm violates LoT 1 & 2. Remove 396/333/63 GHE loop from the graphic and the solar balance still works.
Kinetic heat transfer processes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules (60%) render a terrestrial BB (requires 100%) impossible as demonstrated by experiment, the gold standard of classical science.
Since both GHE & CAGW climate “science” are indefensible rubbish alarmists must resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.
Carbon dioxide stuck into shale in the ground does not stay carbon dioxide, it is acidic, and it dissolves shale into methane gas and mush.
On, and on, and on this written word goes, without telling you that the expense of this is covered by the oil and gas it produces. And that our government pays for it with subsidues. The people writing this may know thatthus is yet another subsidy of the oil and gas industry.
In most of the oil fields of yore, we long ago depleted their resources, which existed in lower carbonate rock. The industry turned to premature source rock, shale, which has not gone deep enough to get hot enough under enough pressure to become naturally occuring oil and gas, so they cook it with heat and chemicals to turn it to fossil fuel. The main chemical treatment used is liquid carbon dioxide, held in critical state in the shale rubble that is made with nitroglycerin. It stays there for months and chemically convert it to oil and gas and mush.
This degrades our bedrock. This allows mantle heat to escape faster. This creates perpetual methane leaks and perpetual exothermic methane oxidation, a production of ongoing formaldehyde and heat trapping water vapor, which descends into our waters, on to our soil, and into our waters.
This IS global warming. In the global warming scheme of things, sun warming carbon dioxide is an also ran, but the much marketed Al Gore, friend of Occidental Petroleum, story work out well for the fossil fuel industry. It got them money for a new source of the carbon dioxide they need to turn the rest of the world's solid shale bedrock into mush and fossil fuel for the next fifty years. Warren Buffett and his heirs will make lots of money because now the industry can get rid of an old source of the carbon dioxide they needed to frack, coal power plants. They can, will, already are- changing them to their fuel, methane .
Well, I guess if you don't know, just blame oil and gas. The subsidies for DAC are coming directly from the green new deal. Just like solar, wind, and battery grifters.
There should not be a penny more to oil and gas. We need to give it all to water power, like Norway, who gets 96 percent of its electric power from water, despite supplying much fossil fuel energy product to others.
Where do you propose to get all this water? Water happens to be the only real environmental emergency we have. Comparing the Continental US to Norway is ridiculous on its face. The only geographic area in the US comparable is Washington state and possibly Maine.
Running water, like Switzerland and Norway, does not disapate water. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/switzerlands-water-battery-operational
https://businessnorway.com/articles/how-norway-produces-hydropower-with-a-minimal-carbon-footprint
That battery is nothing more than pumped hydro. At roughly 900MW gross and two billion bucks, and 14 years, let's discuss it. First it does dissipate water, not as bad as above ground storage, but it does. Remember the axiom, "man can make no perfect machine. " Secodly let's discuss the losses. Every time you transform energy there is loss. The losses here are x5. (This does not include construction) water from above is released to the Penn stock, channeled through a generator, 5% or more lost there, captured in the lower reservoir and stored. No storage is perfect. So x loss there. Then it is pumped to the upper reservoir. 40% electrical loss in the motors, 7% loss in leakage and friction (that's the numbers from the best systems made) so a gift of roughly 5%. Then stored again x loss.
This s the case of Jack and Jill went up the hill 'carrying a bucket of water'. It was dumb when the idea was first thought of.
Imagine carrying water up a hill in a bucket just to dump on a water wheel that operates the pump you are getting water from...
We are supposed to work smarter, not harder.
But again I ask, where are you getting the water?
It is put in motion and runs itself. Loss no more than evaporation. Do you understand what they do to get oil and gas, destructive well shooting, acidic carbon dioxide stuck in the ground and held there for months to turn solid bedrock holding the mantle heat in to gas and mush? !!! And huge amounts of water put under ground below the water table where it can never come back?!!!
Looking forward to hearing more about how the water batteries work over time.
Norway is greatly blessed with hydropower potential energy and is a unique and special country. They have unfortuntely made a terribly wasteful error with regards to hydropower and EVs.
Norway EViscerated: ICE Vehicles are More Efficient than EVs
https://tucoschild.substack.com/p/eviscerated-ice-vehicles-are-more
Minimal is pumped, most is free flow and stored. The fuel is free, repeat FREE, and most importantly, if we move quickly, we might prevent the catastrophy that is in motion like a train speeding toward a cliff, blowing up the bedrock on which Viv stands to turn it to mush and methane gas. https://www.bfe.admin.ch/bfe/en/home/supply/renewable-energy/hydropower/large-scale-hydropower.html#:~:text=In%20Switzerland's%20hydropower%20plant%20statistics,flow%20plants%20(562%20MW).
Thanks for stopping by and commenting on this.
In the article we just alluded to this subsidy scheme and the isolation of CO2 for use as a chemical feedstock and fracking "fluid". The chemistry of fracking is fascinating actually as you are familiar with - the shale rock has a higher affinity for CO2 than it does the hydrocarbons that are carried around, about or within it, so CO2 is especially efficacious..
I don't like it, but I can't say I blame Occidental, Shell, Chevron, and BlackRock and others for taking advantage of the gusher of tax payer dollars and subsidies to remove CO2 via DAC and then use it as a chemical feedstock or as a fracking fluid.