Climate Change Tracker

I'm starting to wonder whether the conventional wisdom of reducing carbon emissions in favour of more electricalisation is really solving the actual problem. As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives, and generate other pollution along the way. Furthermore, we're digging our lithium brines from the environment, without really understanding what all this lithium will do once it's leached out into the environment or what impact the mines themselves will have.

With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

Naively, it feels like we understand C, O and H, better than we understand some of the rare metals we're now introducing in the name of climate change.

> As is often pointed out on HN, electrical cars are substantially heavier than their fossil fueled alternatives

Curb weight:

  Ford Taurus: 3917 lbs.
  BMW 330i: 3536 lbs.
  Tesla Model 3: 3862 lbs.

Is this supposed to be a massive difference?

> With the recent advances of turning CO2 into other substances, such as propane, should we be focusing more on closing the carbon cycle and simply be producing fossil fuels from the waste products of yesteryear?

There is nothing prohibiting anybody from doing this. Make it cost effective and people will buy it. But those things are all theoretical or uneconomical right now, so until that changes we should carry on with the thing we know works.

Without a change in legislation, there is no chance for "Make it cost effective".

Any new technology like making hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide requires the spending of a very large amount of money before becoming cost effective.

There are already several decades since almost all companies have stopped doing long-term research. Now everybody does research for things that will either become profitable next year or in any case when they are multi-year projects they are just improvements of established techniques, with known market, so that there is a very low risk that they might not be profitable.

The only way in which hydrocarbon synthesis would see the level of investment that is required for making it cost effective would be with some form of governmental intervention.

We could have had already today cost-effective hydrocarbon synthesis if a lot of money and research time would not have been wasted with research in various directions that have been considered as futile by most since the very beginning, especially for methods of hydrogen storage and for hydrogen fuel cells.

Institute a carbon takes and those kinds of technologies may find an application for things like aviation fuels even at their existing pricing, after which you might see enough economies of scale to get the price down.

But you might not. That kind of technology is highly questionable thermodynamically. You're going to burn coal for energy and then turn the CO2 back into fuel for somehow less energy? Good luck with that. Just leave the coal in the ground where you found it.

The most promising thing in that ballpark is biofuels, but they compete with food production for farmland. Which could plausibly work for aviation but isn't likely to scale to transportation in general, much less production of electricity.

The technology is not at all questionable thermodynamically, because it has been working for billions of years in the form used by plants.

We are already able to do the conversion from solar light to electrical energy at better efficiency than the plants and sooner or later we should be able to reach similar efficiency with the plants at carbon dioxide reduction into hydrocarbons.

If someone will succeed to solve the difficulties of the direct electrolysis of CO2 or of carbonates, we may exceed the efficiency of the plants, which reduce CO2 indirectly, with hydrogen obtained by the photolysis of water.

The conversion of CO2 into hydrocarbons is precisely the only solution to the CO2 problem that cannot be questioned in any way, because it is the only solution about which it is known with certainty that it works, as anyone can see by just opening a window and looking outside.

Using energy from fossil fuels for carbon capture is so obviously absurd that nobody could do such a silly thing.

Normally any carbon capture installation must be powered by solar or wind energy, simultaneously solving the problem of the energy storage.