Google Signs $10 Million Carbon Capture Deal, At $100 Per Ton of CO2 (datacenterdynamics.com) 40
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Data Center Dynamics: Google has signed a $10 million deal to pull 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air. The company will buy direct air capture (DAC) credits from startup Holocene, to be delivered in the early 2030s. The deal is the lowest price on record for DAC, at $100 per ton -- a price the Department of Energy previously said was needed to make carbon capture mainstream. Google will provide the funds up front, but there is no guarantee that Holocene will hit that goal. Running Tide, a carbon removal company that Microsoft paid to capture 12,000 tons of CO2 in 2023, shut down in 2024. The $100 price was also made possible thanks to the US government's 45Q tax credit, which provides DAC suppliers $180 per ton of carbon removed.
Holocene passes air through a waterfall with an amino acid added to it which binds CO2. This is then mixed with guanidine to form a solid crystal mass. Next, the amino acid is sent back to the beginning of the loop, while the solid is lightly heated to release pure CO2 -- which can then be stored. The company plans to capture and store 100,000 tons of CO2 by the early 2030s. "The structure of this partnership -- providing immediate funding to achieve an ambitious but important price in the medium term -- is just one way to support carbon removal as it scales," Randy Spock, carbon credits and removals lead, said.
Holocene passes air through a waterfall with an amino acid added to it which binds CO2. This is then mixed with guanidine to form a solid crystal mass. Next, the amino acid is sent back to the beginning of the loop, while the solid is lightly heated to release pure CO2 -- which can then be stored. The company plans to capture and store 100,000 tons of CO2 by the early 2030s. "The structure of this partnership -- providing immediate funding to achieve an ambitious but important price in the medium term -- is just one way to support carbon removal as it scales," Randy Spock, carbon credits and removals lead, said.
Expensive (Score:4, Funny)
Just chop down a tree and burn it, there's your ton of CO2. And it's free.
Wood pulp (Score:3)
Just chop down a tree and burn it, there's your ton of CO2. And it's free.
Chop down a tree, put it through a chipper, make a slurry of wood chips and water, then pump it back into oil wells.
(Assumes mostly electric vehicles for transport and processing, powered from renewable sources.)
Or drain it directly into old, unused salt mines or natural caves - those things are huge!
Seal off the entrance and let things ferment for a few years, then capture, bottle and sell the natural gas. Just like garbage landfills, but cleaner.
Or compress it into bricks that are heavier than water, drop
Easier, get tax credits for wood chips (Score:3)
International Paper got billions in alternative fuel tax credits in 2010s by using wood chips/pulp plus liquid as alternative fuel
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Paper industry pushed further into the black by ‘black liquor’ tax credits By Steven Mufson April 26, 2011 at 8:25 p.m. EDT
The paper industry — which in 2009 raked in billions of dollars in federal subsidies originally intended to promote alternative highway fuels — is now using a different biofuel tax credit to cut its tax
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Or grow trees in West Virginia, harvest them, and bury them in played-out coal mines.
They have everything you need - hills for growing, roads to move the wood, labor force from abandoned mining.
Not sure if you can profitably grow, dry, and bury 2 tons of wood (dry wood is about 50% carbon [sciencedirect.com]) for $100... but this is at least a potential business model.
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Or grow trees in West Virginia, harvest them, and bury them in played-out coal mines. They have everything you need - hills for growing, roads to move the wood, labor force from abandoned mining.
Not sure if you can profitably grow, dry, and bury 2 tons of wood (dry wood is about 50% carbon [sciencedirect.com]) for $100... but this is at least a potential business model.
Unless Google is failing me, a seasoned cord of wood weighs 1.5-2.5 tons and can be had, delivered, for $200-300. Call it a ton, using your 50% figure. It compares favorably to the $400 per ton of carbon described in the article (with CO2 only being ~25% carbon).
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Re: Expensive (Score:2)
skeptic of these schemes (Score:5, Interesting)
The carbon neutral advertising by big tech has been questionable. Why would such a well known energy hungry company, just 2 months ago, be claiming that it is not carbon neutral? https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
So which is the real Google, carbon neutral, not carbon neutral, VC funded green tech profits, greenwashing, or just PR to appease its eco friendly allies and their voter base?
Google Is No Longer Claiming to Be Carbon Neutral
The tech giant, which has seen its planet-warming emissions rise because of artificial intelligence, has stopped buying cheap offsets behind the neutrality claim. The company now aims to reach net-zero carbon by 2030.
By Akshat Rathi
July 8, 2024 at 7:30 AM CDT
Google has ended its mass purchase of cheap carbon offsets and thus stopped claiming that its operations are carbon neutral, according to the tech giant’s latest environmental report. The company now aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
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It's important to be skeptic of specific schemes while accepting that the underlying concept is none the less sound.
You think you've posted an interesting dichotomy but in reality you ignored one key part of the article, the word "cheap". Google has ended mass purchase of "cheap" carbon offsets. This story here is not about "cheap" carbon offsets, but rather expensive ones.
When you purchase carbon offsets for cents from someone who promises not to cut down a tree that wasn't going to be cut down anyway, tha
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For now, it's roughly 3x cheaper to capture carbon by buying coal and burying in a coal mine, than to extract CO2 from the air. Of course that won't help with the fact that (in theory) we want to remove roughly 1/2 the CO2 from the atmosphere, but as a matter of fact, we're still adding even more.
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These units are for delivery around 2030, i.e. Google is saying that it is currently carbon neutral but expects to require emitting more CO2 in the future. Likely for AI stuff.
Of course their claim to be neutral today is questionable, but at least the pressure on them is creating a market for this technology. I'm sceptical if it will ever scale up to the levels we really need, but at this point it's worth trying.
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It's called paying indulgences to the priesthood who lead the faith of people that matter. The problem is that old priesthood that was selling offsets got really hit by a scandal recently, which got a lot of believers to stop believing in it.
So they need a new priesthood to pay indulgences to. This is them trying to create one.
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Kinda expensive (Score:2)
Carbon Tax Now. (Score:2)
Now we know how much Carbon Tax should be : 400$/ton minimum
100$ for the recapture of the actual carbon, and 200 for the recapture of formerly released carbon, 100$ for the cost overruns.
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And use that money to fund a Universal Basic Income. Then we could eliminate the minimum wage and various forms of welfare. Would the left and the right agree to do this?
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Yes your tech is worth $0 and that's what you're getting. On the flip side Holocene has demonstrated a functioning pilot plant, which is why someone is willing to invest money in them.
You have some catching up to do if you want more than $0 for what you're offering.
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Google is giving them $10M. That is essentially nothing for somebody the size of Google. They may just pay that for a bit of PR.
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Yes your tech is worth $0 and that's what you're getting. On the flip side Holocene has demonstrated a functioning pilot plant, which is why someone is willing to invest money in them.
You have some catching up to do if you want more than $0 for what you're offering.
For the right price, I'll stop driving to work. I'll quit my job so the company no longer has to run the A/C as hard and won't have to use the electricity to run my computer.
If you think about it, I'm a hero!
an interesting development but... (Score:2)
The proposal seems to be to store that extracted CO2 as a super-critical fluid. Some big names have taken this seriously, eg Bill Gates and Al Gore. But if this was done on a grand scale, how can there possibly be enough subterranean volume to take it all up, considering that the waste is rather less carbon dense than the original fossil fuels? I simply don't trust the estimates of the available volume to take up all that CO2.
I'd be rather more impressed if they then used some non fossil-fuel source of ener
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It's worse than my carbon capture. They're proposing to capture 1 ton of CO2 at a cost of $100, or $366 per ton of carbon. But I'm smarter. The cost of coal is $140 per ton, and when burnt a ton of coal becomes 3.6 tons of CO2. My plan is to capture this carbon, and store it safely underground, perhaps in an unused coal mine or something. My plan only costs about $38 per ton CO2 equivalent.
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Having read the fine article, I should clarify that my plan doesn't include the $180 per ton credit included in the other plan. With the credit, I'd happily capture this carbon for $0 per ton.
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Who cares about scalability? Fleece the taxpayers and use the CO2 for improved oil recovery on the side.
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Look at the size of this deal (or rather the lack thereof). This is not something serious. This is about a bit of PR.
Maybe they could... (Score:3)
Why? (Score:2)
BTW, this doesn't mean that I accept carbon capture & storage as anything other than greenwashing & misdirection. Fuck Google & anyone else who does this.
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The problem with capturing CO2 at the source is that then there is somebody that produces that CO2 and would rightfully taken to task for the cost. As these people have politicos in their pocket via bribes (and a lot of useful idiots in the conservative spectrum), that is not going to fly.
Obviously, from an engineering point-of-view, it is pure insanity to not capture the CO2 at the source, where it would be massively easier to do so and, as a bonus, would motivate the industries affected to look for less h
There's room under my mattress (Score:2)
How about a step up, and make fuel? (Score:2)
Audi has been working on synthetic gasoline which works exactly as normal gasoline. Other companies have been doing synthetic diesel. It isn't carbon capture for the long haul, but it might be productive to pull CO2 from the air and have it used for fuel, which is a way to keep more carbon from being pulled from the earth.
This is in addition to long term carbon sequestration.
Perpetual motion machine (Score:3)
burning money (Score:2)
The way this saves the planet is that Google is sending $10M up in smoke, but thankfully no CO_2 from flushing that money down the toilet.
That's 1 part in 500,000. (Score:1)
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Re: That's 1 part in 500,000. (Score:2)
But your general point is valid. It is a negligible amount.