Search results are dependant on who is searching. But still:
When you use DuckDuckGo the first result is wikipedia.
When you use Google the first results are corporations.
When you use Bing the first result is a corporation, then Wikipedia.
Brave search gives an AI summary of carbon capture, an investment page, one of the corp pages, and then a breakdown on why ‘carbon capture’ is a misleading tactic.
Edit: All this to say, maybe stop using Google.
If you Google anything the first results are sponsored links.
Carbon capture, Carbon footprint, Carbon offsetting…
All things invented by oil and gas corporations to greenwash themselves in the public eye while they destroy the planet.
Good old offsetting.
Where it’s OK to cheat on your wife, as long as you slip 5 quid to a guy in another country, and he’ll tell you he’s stayed celibate.
That metaphor doesn’t apply. CO2 in the atmosphere is fungible. Taking a gram out after putting a gram in works out to zero.
Where it’s a problem is that they aren’t actually taking a gram out. Regulatory oversight is little to nothing. That has allowed companies to pay a token amount into offset programs and pretend the problem is solved. What they’re paying is far too cheap to accomplish what they claim.
It should be blatantly obvious just from basic thermodynamics that carbon capture cannot ever possibly be cheaper than not burning the fossil fuels in the first place.
Thermodynamics tells us it takes exactly as much to put the carbon back in as you got out of it by taking it out. So best case scenario we double the price of energy (which also means increasing the price of everything by a lot due to production costs increasing with higher energy costs) and capture as much carbon as we release.
However this is the real world and in the real world processes aren’t 100% efficient. Even a hyper efficient combustion engine is only like 40% efficient in converting the stored energy into a usable form. Our carbon capture techniques suck hard at the moment, but say we improve the tech. That means in the real world we would need to increase energy costs by 4-6 times. Which probably means increasing the pricing of everything by a factor of 10.
That shows just how unsustainable our current consume heavy economy actually is. And that is assuming we have a way of capturing carbon out of the atmosphere in a way that’s both efficient and long term. And do this in time before the processes we’ve set into motion spiral out of control.
And like you say, it puts into perspective how big of a win not releasing the carbon is.
There’s nothing thermodynamically wrong with burning methane, releasing the water, and putting the CO2 back underground. Sequestration does not require un-oxidizing the carbon.
Though if we’re going to bury harmful waste underground, nuclear power reduces the quantity of waste by a factor of a million.
and putting the CO2 back underground
Tick…tick…tick…
I’m not sure what you’re trying to convey here. Carbon sequestration is unarguably a way to mitigate climate change, and sequestration of CO2 is probably the most reasonable way to do so. It doesn’t need to be as a gas, as taking CO2 and exposing it to various oxides creates carbonates, which are generally very stable compounds like limestone.
The other commenter simply said carbon could be captured as CO2 and sequestered without being reduced, which is absolutely true and frankly makes much more sense from a physics/thermodynamics POV.
Caveat: it’s been a few weeks since I read up on this so I’m fuzzy.
It’s also worth noting we will need carbon capture to actually keep catastrophic global warming from occurring. Even if we cut emissions to 0 by 2035 we’re blowing past 1.5C and maybe even 2 as I recall.
Doesn’t mean that we can fix the climate with CC, but we can’t fix it without.
