To DAC or Not To DAC?
The slings and arrows of carbon capture, utilization, and storage
Updates
Do you ever find yourself wondering, “What do people even mean when they talk about the electric grid? What’s the big deal?” Well, then have I got the opportunity for you! Our next 1.5C panel event is coming up fast! May 4, in SF, we will be discussing Grid Infrastructure with a fascinating panel from some of the hottest Bay Area startups, including Camus Energy, WattTime, and WeaveGrid. Register today!
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CTAN is looking for paid help! We are looking for a mission-driven and detail oriented part time (5 - 10 hours a week) event coordinator and executive assistant. Email matt@ctan.cc for details.
I am also hiring a junior ML engineer for my team at Toyota Research Institute. If you love data, machine learning, and climate tech, and have at least 3 years of experience as a software engineer, you should check it out.
Fundraising
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To DAC or Not To DAC?
A friend of mine is looking to pivot into climate tech (yay!), and asked me, “What do you think of carbon capture?” This is a great question, because one of my personal reasons for getting into climate tech is to maximize my impact, and people are very divided on the question of direct air capture (DAC).
DAC is the process of pulling carbon dioxide out of the air directly. A second, related industry is “carbon sequestration”, which is figuring out what to do with all the carbon dioxide that we’re going to someday pull out of the atmosphere, in theory. The options range from pumping it down to the bottom of the sea to making it into jet fuel. Collectively, these are known as Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS).
A lot of people believe that CCUS is a fig leaf that will allow fossil fuel companies to continue pumping stuff out of the ground for as long as they can, and there’s some truth to that: oil companies have an immense amount of money invested in oil and gas infrastructure, and if they can find a way to prolong the life of that investment, they absolutely will, even if it’s not really the best way to solve the problem.
The best way to solve the problem is simply not to pull the carbon out of the ground at all. Think about it: we pull the oil out of the ground, burn it, expend energy to collect all the carbon (now in an extremely inconvenient, diffuse, and dirty form), and expend energy to compress it back into a durable form. That’s insane!
Mark Jacobson from Stanford makes this case in detail in a study of the efficiency of carbon capture:
“Not only does carbon capture hardly work at existing plants, but there’s no way it can actually improve to be better than replacing coal or gas with wind or solar directly,” said Jacobson. “The latter will always be better, no matter what, in terms of the social cost. You can’t just ignore health costs or climate costs.”
So, I think it’s very true that if you were colonizing a planet for the first time, and wanted to design a zero-carbon energy grid, you probably wouldn’t pick “Dig up dead dinosaurs1 and burn them and then build a Maxwell’s Demon to get the carbon dioxide back and turn it into diamonds.”
But that’s not us and our planet. This world, the real world, is chock-a-block with biases, vested interests, existing infrastructure, sociopaths, grifters, Donald Trumps and Elon Musks, and a wide variety of uncontrolled variables. And an unfortunate fact of life in the early 21st century is that the people who are going to get the most fucked by climate change are poor people, and the people who make most of the carbon dioxide are rich people.
Effectively, this means that it will continue to be in the interests of most rich people to continue to foot-drag through the transition to carbon-free energy, while people in Sudan are being immiserated.
Not only that, but CO₂ has a residence time of up to 1000 years in the atmosphere, and global average temperature might not return to pre-Industrial levels for another 100,000 years. This means that the longer we foot-drag, the longer it will take for that carbon dioxide to naturally leave the atmosphere.
Let me be clear: It is indisputable that we need to invest rapidly in scaling up carbon-neutral energy, and getting rid of fossil fuels in every sector, as quickly as possible. I just have very little faith that we, as a society, are capable of pivoting that quickly. Consider this: Cars being sold today will be on the road for another 20 years, and their carbon intensity will get worse over time, as the vehicles age.
Aviation is extremely difficult to decarbonize, and if we’re going to keep using airplanes, it might be several decades before we figure out how to do that. Often times, you hear people say things like “Americans will need to learn to live more simply, and travel less” and I think that’s a nice sentiment and also you might as well wish for a pony that eats CO₂ and shits hydrogen, because Americans have absolutely no intention of giving up steaks and cars and flying, unless the climate situation deteriorates so far that we are living semi-post-apocalyptically.
Even the IPCC report assumes that we’ll need some kind of DAC, saying
However, some hard-to-abate residual GHG emissions (e.g., some emissions from agriculture, aviation, shipping, and industrial processes) remain and would need to be counterbalanced by deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods to achieve net zero CO2 or GHG emissions (high confidence).
So, this is a pretty bad position to be in: DAC will be really hard to scale up, and I am not convinced that we will be able to make it effective at all. And, also, we should absolutely be investing money in it, and paying people to work on it, and rewarding those people who figure out how to do it richly and handsomely with stock options and Discovery Channel biopics, because if it works, it will save a lot of people’s lives.
So, here we are, late stage capitalists, and that rock is looking very rocky, and the hard place is looking very hard. But I wouldn’t count us out just yet. I remember reading a story once about Polish physicists under the Iron Curtain who used to rig up car tape players with batteries, a transmitter, and a weather balloon, and they would float mini anti-Communist pirate radio stations over the cities, while running the Soviet spies around in circles, looking for the source of the signal. The conclusion, they said, was: Don’t piss off physicists; they are a crafty lot. And, indeed, if we can send people to the moon and split atoms and build computers, we can certainly unfuck the climate if we throw enough capital at it. (Bonus: I will give a shoutout next week to the person who can tell me what all three of those technological developments have in common in the comments.)
I want to make it very clear that I know that fossil fuels come from dead plants, not dead dinosaurs. I will continue to call fossil fuels “dead dinosaurs” because it’s funny. c.f.
I'll take "What are technologies invented during WWII to get an edge on the enemy?" for $800, Alex.
That's rockets (Germany), computers (US & Britain), and nuclear fission (US & Germany (attempted)).