Of course, people writing the software for the control systems and monitoring is always needed :) I think the area is hard to get into unless you have education and some sort of certification in it though, can't just jump into it like when building web apps (as an example, don't know your background obviously).
There is a very limited need. There's a ton of co2 calculators and energy markets out there, but supply of those outstrips demand.
The only other part that would really require software devs is heavy duty physics simulations perhaps.
Some things you just can't fix with software :)
(Having said that - of course every hardware project needs some sort of software - be it microcontroller programming, or a website. But it's such a small part that it can be outsourced to a generic software house really)
Software is needed to accurately simulate CO2 injection into saline aquifers and depleted gas reservoirs. It is complex stuff - simulations typically run for 100s/1000s of years into the future, modelling chemical reactions, cap rock integrity, etc. Measurements are regularly obtained from the site which are fed back into the simulation. There are definitely jobs in this space.
The developers working on these types of simulations typically have a background in a more traditional engineering field like petroleum engineering or chemical engineering. Not saying that it isn't possible to break into the field with a different background, just sharing my experience.
It is necessary to run thousands of simulations, collect and analyze data, etc. The scale can be enormous. There are definitely software engineering roles.
I wonder what the extra energy required to take this "pure stream of ejected CO2" into the ground is compared to using a different style of removing CO2 that just requires extra energy during capture.
I'm definitely not an engineer but I feel like injecting CO2 directly into the earth has to use a ton more energy.
Yes, this system handles carbon capture. For storage there are other systems.
Carbon capture cost is half of the equation - if this sytem can be scaled and deliver it with less price, then the price of the whole ccs gets lower.
Personally - having spent some time in the CCS field, I am very excited about this technology. If they manage to scale up the production (which is not certain), it will be extremely energy efficient to capture carbon with their method. The alternatives require pressure or temperature swing - so they waste a lot of energy either compressing gasses, or heating up sorbents.
I sometimes have the feeling we're being nudged to terraform our own planet by an alien civilization that's really into CO2. Best case scenario, they're really just into gin and tonic.
But keep this in mind: plants evolved lignin to make their structures (trunks, branches, all that) hundreds of millions of years before bacteria and other microorganisms evolved the ability to break down that lignin. So, for hundreds of millions of years, plants captured carbon dioxide by photosynthesis and sequestered it. That's what changed earth's atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing. Fossil carbon is the geological remains of that carbon capture.
It's hard to imagine carbon-capture tech that has the longevity of those planet-wide lignin forests.
That's all well and good, but natural selection has the tendency to only find a good enough solution that happens to work in a niche, not an optimal one for all cases. There may very well be a technique that doesn't work as well in small individual plant-sized systems but can become far more efficient when scaled up. I suppose it is somewhat unlikely though.
As I was reading your comment, I couldn’t help but laugh as it reminded me of the quote “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Scaled beyond a single tree-sized entity I mean. Sure you can put a lot of trees together to do more, but each tree has to do its own small scale sourcing of water, sun, air, etc.
You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.
Just a detail: forest are not tree next to each other’s. The relationship between organisms change the energy efficiency and life outcome of most of the participants.
> Scaled beyond a single tree-sized entity I mean. Sure you can put a lot of trees together to do more, but each tree has to do its own small scale sourcing of water, sun, air, etc.
Vertical versus horizontal scaling.
> You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.
Why use a sand blaster when you could polish something by hitting it with one huge rock?
Why have thousands of individual car fuelling stations when everyone could drive to one giant one in the middle of the country?
Why have a steam turbine in your nuclear plant with many small blades?
If your thousand spoons work pretty much untended and cost half a million each, then an excavator that requires a crew of a thousand which costs ten billion is just as stupid as all of the above.
I think focusing on longevity in terms of geological timescales isn't necessary. Finding short term solutions will give us more time to come up with longer term solutions before our planet goes completely to hell.
FTR the evolutionary delay hypothesis used to be popular, but for the carboniferous, the most carbon-deposing period on earth, that theory has been dismissed. See this paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517943113
TLDR:
* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then
* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.
* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.
Adding to this CO2 is just one symptom of climate change. Treating a symptom rarely has long lasting benefits whereas curing the root causes may be preferred. Tinkering with just one feedback loop can lead to unintended consequences, a nasty lesson I learned from prescription drugs.
People talk most about CO2 because it has the most total effect as a driver of climate change. CH4 for example has a greater effect per kilogram, but we emit a lot less of it and it doesn't last nearly as long.
H2O technically affects the temperature even more than CO2 but it's not a driver, because the total H2O in the atmosphere depends on overall temperature. Emitting more H2O, from hydrogen cars or something, would just mean you get more rain somewhere.
Maybe most sensible approach: use SRM to reduce temperature directly and head off nasty positive feedbacks like melting permafrost, but treat that as buying time to get CO2 down to a safe level.
Huh? We are clearly tinkering with the atmospheric CO2 levels on a massive scale.
But also CO2 is a cause not a symptom. It only becomes a symptom when the solubility of the ocean changes and carbon is released.
Human civilization cycles technologies on timescale of centuries or even decades. No long lasting benefits are needed, just a little while to tide us over to the next better thing. Like burning coal was a giant environmental breakthrough that saved planet's forests from being chopped for firewood and now we have decent nuclear and renewable energy sources that are even cleaner.
The Great Oxygenation Event occurred about 2.3 billion years ago, around the same time as complex cells emerged. We didn't see multicellular eukaryotic life until 1.6 billion years ago, give or take. Plants certainly played and still play a hugely important role, but they probably weren't responsible for the initial change to an oxidizing atmosphere.
Also they started a company in 2019, and got $80 million invested in 2022, including from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures. They're improving the tech and are working with their first commercial client.
>Wow its been 3 years, where did all these great tech go?
The fundamental problem with carbon capture is that 1) carbon comprises a tiny fraction of Air, and 2) requires energy input in some form. This means whatever methodology you use, will require you to expand energy to move huge volumes of air to remove a small number of particles (i.e. ~400 particles of Carbon, for 1 million Air particles).
Although this is a big problem, air tends to mix itself. Most solutions that are being commercialized are targeting $100/ton at scale. Due to convenient unit conversions, this translates to $1.00/gallon of gasoline burned.
This tells us a few things about the energy efficiency of those processes, but, as importantly, they would be economically viable in that price range. (A $1/gallon gas tax would have much less economic impact than the war in Ukraine, or prior wars in the Middle East.)
Not quite everyone. Last year they got $1M from the Musk Foundation and $80M from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and they're working with their first commercial client.
I have an impression that in recent years MIT produces much ado about nothing. In that particular case, capture method requires energy input from, let me guess, coal burning? Moreover, you can't trick chemistry: more efficient capture implies higher affinity of CO2 towards this "CO2 battery". Higher affinity means that more energy would be required for regeneration of the "battery".
From chemistry point suggested process is indistinguishable from the following process: pass air over CaO or Ca(OH)2 solution to turn it into CaCO3. Heating of CaCO3 will release CO2 thus regenerating CaO, which could be reused again. This process would require energy input — like MIT tech.
Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing. More CO2 in atmosphere means more carbon will be available for capture by plants, which means more crops and trees.
It only means more crops and trees if you magically don't get other effects like drought, heat stress, erosion from drought followed by torrential rainfall, loss of icecap melt for irrigation, invasive insects and disease, and forest fires, all of which we're seeing quite a bit.
And of course we have ways to produce energy now without burning fossil fuels.
I should admit that my specialty is chemistry and not environmental science so it is hard to make arguments here. Just a few comments:
- it should be proven that these other effects are the causes not correlations.
- what invasive diseases you are talking about? smallpox or syphilis?
- drought was always a thing, e.g. great famine of 1921 in USSR was caused by it. That was way before modern levels of global warming.
- There were at least 5 ice ages. Are the humans responsible for their endings?
I am convinced that climate is changing — just not fully convinced what is the human role in it.
Since you have a science background, I'll strongly recommend the recent short book The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss, which details how our CO2 emissions change the planet's temperature. It's fairly basic thermodynamics and was predicted with decent accuracy over a century ago.
Also there are several chapters in Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren that go into the geological record, with multiple lines of evidence that all point to a similar sensitivity of the planet's average temperature to CO2 levels.
(Regarding invasive diseases, I meant primarily things affecting forests.)
Check Lehninger "Principles of Biochemistry".
RuBisCo (most abundant enzyme in nature) fixates CO2 before they could be turned into sugars but this enzyme operates in suboptimal conditions at current CO2 concentrations. Thus increased CO2 concentration would improve crop yields.
Burying old trees underground seems like the simplest solution to this issue. An old tree represents hundreds of years of removing carbon dioxide out of the air and converting it into a form that is convenient for storage. We only need to do the last step of making sure that invested carbon sequestration is not put back into the atmosphere through decomposition or fire.
Here's a link to a relevant publication (from a university that unfortunately doesn't have the prestige or marketing team of MIT): doi.org/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1
It sounds simpler but would involve a lot more logistics. You'd be moving lots of heavy stuff around, building new roads for it, monitoring to make sure the logging companies really are gently removing sustainable bits here and there instead of just clearcutting valuable ecosystems, etc.
Where with MIT's method, you put a machine next to a good spot for geological storage and turn it on. According to articles I've seen on similar methods (Climeworks etc), it would be about a thousand times more efficient in terms of land area.
Cool, but isn't it better to use naturally occurring alkaline minerals so that energy doesn't have to be expanded to re-release CO2? I suppose that energy to mine and pulverize minerals could exceed energy to cycle this battery. But minerals can potentially be put to dual use during or after capture, for example for construction or erosion control.
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https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220422005027/en/Ver...
The only other part that would really require software devs is heavy duty physics simulations perhaps.
Some things you just can't fix with software :)
(Having said that - of course every hardware project needs some sort of software - be it microcontroller programming, or a website. But it's such a small part that it can be outsourced to a generic software house really)
https://jobs.lever.co/thalolabs/73ca7b6c-50ff-4902-9d32-8c86...
I'm definitely not an engineer but I feel like injecting CO2 directly into the earth has to use a ton more energy.
Carbon capture cost is half of the equation - if this sytem can be scaled and deliver it with less price, then the price of the whole ccs gets lower.
Personally - having spent some time in the CCS field, I am very excited about this technology. If they manage to scale up the production (which is not certain), it will be extremely energy efficient to capture carbon with their method. The alternatives require pressure or temperature swing - so they waste a lot of energy either compressing gasses, or heating up sorbents.
This is just one of the myriad of ways our malinvestment in cheap nuclear energy condemns us to try to build a type of perceptual motion machine.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/88/
But keep this in mind: plants evolved lignin to make their structures (trunks, branches, all that) hundreds of millions of years before bacteria and other microorganisms evolved the ability to break down that lignin. So, for hundreds of millions of years, plants captured carbon dioxide by photosynthesis and sequestered it. That's what changed earth's atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing. Fossil carbon is the geological remains of that carbon capture.
It's hard to imagine carbon-capture tech that has the longevity of those planet-wide lignin forests.
You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.
Just a detail: forest are not tree next to each other’s. The relationship between organisms change the energy efficiency and life outcome of most of the participants.
Vertical versus horizontal scaling.
> You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.
Microservices versus monoliths.
Why have thousands of individual car fuelling stations when everyone could drive to one giant one in the middle of the country?
Why have a steam turbine in your nuclear plant with many small blades?
If your thousand spoons work pretty much untended and cost half a million each, then an excavator that requires a crew of a thousand which costs ten billion is just as stupid as all of the above.
TLDR:
* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then
* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.
* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.
H2O technically affects the temperature even more than CO2 but it's not a driver, because the total H2O in the atmosphere depends on overall temperature. Emitting more H2O, from hydrogen cars or something, would just mean you get more rain somewhere.
And it's very likely any fixes will not simply be a matter of reducing atmospheric carbon.
Here's a first principles explanation for why carbon net zero and sequestration are not the direct, most expedient path towards reducing temps.
"Dr. Ye Tao on a grand scheme to cool the Earth" https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand#d...
TLDR: Given the time and resources we have, focus on strategies for cooling the atmosphere the fastest way possible.
My book: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
The Great Oxygenation Event occurred about 2.3 billion years ago, around the same time as complex cells emerged. We didn't see multicellular eukaryotic life until 1.6 billion years ago, give or take. Plants certainly played and still play a hugely important role, but they probably weren't responsible for the initial change to an oxidizing atmosphere.
My sources: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
https://news.mit.edu/2022/cracking-carbon-removal-challenge-...
The fundamental problem with carbon capture is that 1) carbon comprises a tiny fraction of Air, and 2) requires energy input in some form. This means whatever methodology you use, will require you to expand energy to move huge volumes of air to remove a small number of particles (i.e. ~400 particles of Carbon, for 1 million Air particles).
This tells us a few things about the energy efficiency of those processes, but, as importantly, they would be economically viable in that price range. (A $1/gallon gas tax would have much less economic impact than the war in Ukraine, or prior wars in the Middle East.)
Carbon Capture isn't real
https://news.mit.edu/2022/cracking-carbon-removal-challenge-....
From chemistry point suggested process is indistinguishable from the following process: pass air over CaO or Ca(OH)2 solution to turn it into CaCO3. Heating of CaCO3 will release CO2 thus regenerating CaO, which could be reused again. This process would require energy input — like MIT tech.
Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing. More CO2 in atmosphere means more carbon will be available for capture by plants, which means more crops and trees.
And of course we have ways to produce energy now without burning fossil fuels.
I am convinced that climate is changing — just not fully convinced what is the human role in it.
Also there are several chapters in Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren that go into the geological record, with multiple lines of evidence that all point to a similar sensitivity of the planet's average temperature to CO2 levels.
(Regarding invasive diseases, I meant primarily things affecting forests.)
> Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing.
This runs counter to everything we know about climate change.
Here's a link to a relevant publication (from a university that unfortunately doesn't have the prestige or marketing team of MIT): doi.org/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1
Where with MIT's method, you put a machine next to a good spot for geological storage and turn it on. According to articles I've seen on similar methods (Climeworks etc), it would be about a thousand times more efficient in terms of land area.