Huge amounts of CO2 can be injected into Saline Aquifers

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR01...

Capturing CO2 from a power plant, biofuel factory, oil refinery, petrochemical plant or other point source and disposing of it underground is a developed technology. Very little of that is happening because the financial incentives aren't there and the financial incentives that do exist go to carbon sequestration schemes which are low-cost, low-quality and generally not measurable (pay us $ and we won't cut down these trees... for now, let's crush some rocks and apply sand to the beach and hope for the best, ...)

With aquifer injection you can measure the gas going in but there are also questions such as: how long does the CO2 stay there? do you have seismic problems?

This scheme is similar to aquifer injection but is more secure at the expense of requiring unusual rock formations and 25 tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured.

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

I think it gets way too much press but assuming energy is available you can build a direct air capture in a place where you have reactive rocks and water.

We agree that saline aquifers are be a compelling strategy given the huge volumes available & measurement capabilities you mentioned. As verification standards emerge in the (currently nascent & somewhat fragmented) CO2 removal ecosystem, precise & accurate quantification is going to be a huge driver to differentiate the highest-quality CO2 removal solutions.

Thats only 6,250 gallons of water.. less than a single 10K water truck you've seen everywhere.

THe question is how many tons does this plan to produce over what period?

If you want to delay the impact of climate change by 1 year by sequestering one year of of CO2 added to the environment through saline sequestration, that's about 40 billion 10K water trucks worth of storage, or about 40 Lake Tahoes turned into saline storage ponds, and you need to add that much storage capacity every year just to keep atmospheric CO2 from getting worse than it is (you're not yet to the scale of reducing atmospheric CO2 at this rate). The oceans have enough volume for this, but most other containers are too small to be meaningful.

Hopefully this will help people realize it will be a lot more impactful to reduce GHG emissions as a priority rather than focusing on trying to capture and store the growing output. Yes both can help, but first stop the bleeding.

K, I would like to pose the following Q

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What ~~would be the balance btwn the effort for climate change, vs,~~

What the heck are we doing?

We keep talk of CO2 offsets, and Sequestering...

WE FUCKING NEVER SPEAK OF PROCESS OPTIMIAZATION WHICH REDUCE CO2 T BEGIN WITH??? !!!

Band-aid much bitch. WTF?!

It’s hopeless.

Feel so powerless.

Why? There are ~8 billion humans to get stuff done — it’s not all on your shoulders. Even if only 1% of the world both can and will fix it, it’s still in the realm of stuff that can be fixed.

and zero fictitious dollars to fund such motivation to fix.

Only dollars too fund(sustain) suppression....

"""Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Clean Energy Technologies estimated at US$283.9 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$452.8 Billion by 2027""" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05817952/Global-Clean-Energy-T...

And that’s just the people who want to get rich while saving the world, not charities like Greenpeace, or government interventions like Feed-In Tariffs and fuel taxes.

> We're still a long way from pulling off the sequestration that's actually needed at the scale that's needed.

How so? The simple fact that natural gas and oil still exists, when it comes from 100 million year old biomass, proves beyond a shadow of doubt that geological sequestration holds its integrity at geological timescales.

We have also been injecting CO2 at a rate of 1 million tonnes per year at the Sleipner field in the North Sea since 1996, and extensive 3D timelapse seismography shows the CO2 is permanently trapped.

Think about that - we have been demonstrating CO2 storage at scale since before the launch of the first Palm Pilot.

The existence of oil shows CO2 can be stored in solid or liquid form, but doesn't show we know how to convert CO2 into that stored form at scale or keep our hands off it once it's stored that way. It's easy to burn oil, it's hard to make it, and it's harder still to not burn it when you know it's readily available.

CO2 is in the dense supercritical state at the temperature and pressure conditions in storage reservoirs. It's density is between 750 and 850 kg/m3 then (water is 1000). You just have to compress it and pump it down there, and it will stay like that.

Honestly, the storage part is a solved problem from the feasibility side. The remaining challenges are mainly cost optimization, across all of capture, transport and storage.

And the biggest hurdle is forcing businesses to actually pay for the currently externalized cost of CO2 emissions.

I agree with your thermodynamics, I'm just concerned about finding a volume big enough to store climatically meaningful amounts of CO2 in that form. 40 billion metric tons per year of CO2 in the form you describe is around 30 billion cubic meters, and you need to find that much storage volume every year just to keep things from getting worse. If you want to actually make a dent, like rolling things back to the year 2000 (which likely isn't enough, but is a real impact), that's more like 600 billion metric tons or 450 billion cubic meters. That's roughly equivalent to 400 mountains 5000 feet tall. It's a huge volume of material we're talking about finding a place to store if we're actually trying to make a real dent in climate change.

If you asked a pre-industrial person how in the world it would be possible to source, refine, and distribute enough crude oil to power the modern world they would quote some similarly breathless numbers. It's possible because there's a motivation to do it. Simple as that. If we had a similar level of motivation to sequester our excess carbon we could start planning to do that tomorrow and have it done within a decade or three. You can't sequester all the worlds carbon in one place, just like you don't pull it all out of the ground in one place. Big problems seem less so when you realize that solutions are usually distributed.

I don't have the sources or exact numbers on hand, but I remember reading that the world's extractive & production processes create something like ~4 billion tons of oil, ~4 billion tons of iron, ~x billion tons of cement, and ~50 billion tons of sand, per year. These industries developed over many years and as you note are distributed globally. With market demand and regulatory pressure, we believe achieving CO2 removal across different modalities at the giga-ton scale is possible in our lifetimes.

That being said, we try to bring a conservative approach to our scaleup plan. The most immediate challenge is demonstrating CO2 removal at the megaton scale (1 million tons per year) to validate the process and meet short-term demand for voluntary offsets.

For context, Global Natural Gas production is approximately 4,000 billion cubic meters per year.

To sequester the world's carbon emissions, we would need to move and store <1% the volume per year.

That's apples to oranges: we don't store anything like a year's worth of gas.

And anyone in Europe can tell you that natural gas transfer and storage is far from a solved problem.

The idea is not to actively store it, but dump it somewhere where it will store itself.

Europe is a great example of how we have the technology to transfer huge amounts of gas, and the challenges are largely politics and capital.

Nordstream #1 moves 60 billion m3 of gas 1,200 km and cost ~$10 billion

We also got calculations that yielded literal mountains ranges of carbonate... That's not to say carbonate cannot be part of the solution, but maybe it is unlikely to be the only solution.

Inject CO2 into basalt formations, and over the course of a year or so it will turn into rock. There are already several pilot programs doing this, and it's very scalable.

Other projects apply energy to turn the CO2 into liquid fuel. Of course that returns the CO2 to the atmosphere, but it'll be a long time before we electrify long-haul jets so it'd be great if their fuel were carbon-neutral.

>Inject CO2 into basalt formations...

Thanks for this comment - the calculations I'd been doing in the GP comment and elsewhere where pretty darn depressing and this approach you're mentioning is very exciting in that it bypasses the fundamental storage volume problems most other sequestration methods face by leveraging the interstitial spaces inside existing rock volumes, and also exciting in that it leverages undersea rock formations for even lower impact. Thanks for pointing me to this.

For others interested in learning more you might hit [0] or [1].

[0]https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/02/19/solid-carbon-ma...

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-019-0011-8

There are a few startups exploring this and also PNNL is doing great public work on this topic as well. https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177

Thanks, Mark - do you (or anyone else reading this) happen to know offhand any of the startups targeting this approach?

We don't claim to be experts on this subfield & this is may not be an exhaustive list, but Carbfix, 44.01, and the Solid Carbon coalition are some that come to mind to check out. We don't speak for those companies but just want to point out some areas to check out.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1390435 <-- a non-commercial study on this topic.

https://youtu.be/osXq-k84LpA?t=2177 <-- a webinar that addresses this topic

This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2 for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere instead of ground is a huge net benefit.

Most of the gasses we pull from the ground are byproducts of oil and natural gas production. We don't pull them from the ground because we want them on their own, we just go ahead and capture them because they are coming up with the stuff we want for fuel - they'll still continue to be captured (or worse vented to the atmosphere) as long as we're pulling those fuel sources from the ground.

Industrial CO2 also mostly comes not from the ground but from other industrial processes.

We use so much CO2 (on beverages, inert atmospheres, cooling devices, fire extinguishers, etc). Does all of it come as side-product of some industrial process? Or do we burn extra fuels to get it?

Most all of it comes as a side product. The amount of CO2 used for the applications listed pales in comparison to the amount used for urea (fertilizer) production.

What is different is that urea requires a power source that creates more CO2 than the chemical process uses. So you will certainly (as long as you are using fossil fuels) have a source available.

Those things I mentioned buy their CO2 on the market. I have no idea where it comes from.

Urea production requires ammonia, and the production of ammonia produces co2 in large quantities. It's not without reason the two are almost always loacted closely

Great point & not so often talked about. Something like 230Mton of CO2 are used each year, a little more than half goes straight to urea production. By contrast only about 10% goes to the food/bev, medical, and other applications we are more familiar with on a day-to-day basis.

plot showing the breakdown with some gov't sources. --> https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use

> use it in chemical processes other than ones which sink the carbon into long lasting solid

There are not many chemical reactions that 'fix' CO2. The compound is pretty low energy. Kind of a analogous to 'feed' bacteria with plastics.

The Swiss start-up Climeworks [1] has a business model built around actually already is in operational mode when it comes to pumping CO2 into the ground in Iceland.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-...

Capturing CO2 should be just that, capturing. Capturing and transforming is just costing more problem that other people have to deal with (creating more byproducts, consuming energy and other resources in the process). If it turns out that there is a market for CO2 gas then the product can be used as is, as opposed to burning coal back to CO2. If not, then you will have other companies solving the problem of turning it back to carbon. That's always been how problems are solved, divide an conquer

Isn't the idea to pump the captured co2 underground, where the proper reactions take place to turn this more or less into rock ? I'm not sure anyone was suggesting to actually store the co2 long term as a gas or liquid

What happens if you bring CO2 to insane temperatures? Will that break C from O2? Could we reuse the stored heat somehow?

Could we put them into pods and throw them at Mars so we start dumping Co2 on Mars for Musk's Mars Mushroom Mart! too grow.

The rocket you use to sling them at Mars will produce orders of magnitude more CO2 than it could carry to Mars.

And this is completely ignoring the CO2 cost of building the rocket.

Remember the slingshot company?

THAT is a viable reason for them

Even then, the amount of energy required to accelerate the CO2 to escape velocity will still result in more CO2 being created.

Well, then.

We should just put this entire debate to bed, shouldn't we?

JUST ONE MORE THING

Go fuck yourself

Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to get rid of CO2, though.

> Could? Yes. It'd probably be the most expensive way to get rid of CO2, though.

So? I in this context that is a plus not a minus!

How is that a plus? If it's more expensive it means you're pulling less CO2 out of the atmosphere than if had gone with a cheaper method.

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU CONCERNED WITH EXPENSE RATHER THAN SURVIVAL?

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Serious question.

-- musk. (and ppl like Thiel cooncerned with eternal life (Rocks, Roths, etc)....

Lovelock (of the Gaia Hypothesis) had the bright idea to put all the CFCs onto all the old ICBMs and launch them at Mars to kick start the greenhouse effect there.

Ah yes, this was all planned from the start, we actually need that CO2! Wait a second... wouldn't it be more efficient to transport solids and burn them on mars?

Okay, I only responded because of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. I watched a video about lovelock and Gaia Hypothesis yesterday.

I am dismissive of this tech. On the face of it.

CO2 stored underground, at huge expense? What could possibly go wrong with that?

Yeah. It kinda smells like fracking 2.0 to me in terms of what the potential unforeseen consequences could be... and look what happened there.