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Just checked the numbers, for those interested.
A gas power plant produces around. 200-300kWh per tonne of CO2.
Capture costs 300-900kWh per tonne captured.
So this is basically non viable using fossil fuel as the power. If you aren’t, then storage of that power is likely a lot better.
It’s also worth noting that it is still CO2 gas. Long term containment of a gas is far harder than a liquid or solid.
Who says you power that thing with fossil fuels? The real way to do that is via giant nuclear reactors or reactor complexes.
Fission power can be made cheaper per MW by just making the reactors bigger. Economies of scale, the square cube law and all that. The problem with doing this in the commercial power sector is that line losses kill you on distribution. There just aren’t enough customers within a reasonable distance to make monster 10 GW or 100 GW reactors viable, regardless of how cheap they might make energy.
But DACC is one of the few applications this might not be a problem for. Just build your monster reactors right next door to your monster DACC plants.
But then the power generated by those reactors is better used to power things that burn fossil fuel in a less efficient way or to simply replace the fossil fuel powered electricity generators…
Quebec transports its electricity over more than a thousand kilometers, surely distance from nuclear reactors isn’t an issue if you build the infrastructure around it.
Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear now. The main problem is it’s not sunny and/or windy every day. A carbon capture system doesn’t need to be running 24/7 though.
If we build way more wind/solar than we use then the excess can dumped into things like this.
Sorry but the economics of nuclear just doesn’t work for everything.
One of the interesting energy capture ideas I’ve seen with Solar and wind is based on kinetic potential energy in high-rise buildings. So you build a sort of heavy weight elevator that is elevated during windy and sunny hours and then it slowly gets released and gravity driven friction generating energy.
This coupled with solar windows and it’s a pretty neat idea (not sure how viable though)
Edit: examples: https://spectrum.ieee.org/gravity-energy-storage-elevators-skyscrapers
There are 3 use cases I’ve seen.
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Making fossil fuel power stations “clean”.
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CO2 recovery for long term storage.
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CO2 for industrial use.
It’s no good for the first, due to energy consumption. This is the main use I’ve seen it talked up for, as something that can be retrofitted to power plants.
It’s poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn’t do.
The last has limited requirements. We only need so much CO2.
The only large scale use case I can see for this is as part of a carbon capture system. Capture and then react to solidify the carbon. However, plants are already extremely good at this, and can do it directly from atmospheric air, using sunlight.
The only DAC variant i could see working out is if it takes the CO2 from high-concentrated sources (such as portland cement factories) and transforms it into something practical, like liquid fuel or methane.
It could be leading to cheaper methane than from biological sources, because technological processes can have higher efficiency, and therefore lower prices.
It’s poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn’t do.
Why wouldn’t the device include or feed a compressor to liquidize the CO2? It takes just a little over 5 atm of pressure which is trivial.
You also need to sustain 5 atm, with no leaks for years. Where is it being stored, and who’s paying for the maintenance? All it would take would be a bit of civil unrest, or corruption, and the work could be undone in mass.
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Yes, it works as a “plan B” (along with many other things).
Don’t loose hope. We can still win. Keep pushing for producing less CO2.
So power it with solar/wind?
Co2 is liquified before storage.
And how do you plan to keep it liquefied, on a large scale, for 100s of years? It’s currently done using pressure vessels amd chillers, that require maintenance etc.
