CO₂

“We're monitoring for methane and CO₂ The data that's been coming back over the last year is fantastic. We're way below what we modeled. Definitely way below what is allowed. So, like, we are not seeing that decomposition.”

“And what he has advocated for very publicly and has said many, many times, is that, yes, the climate is changing, and like, yes, you know humans have burned fossil fuels over the last hundred years, and that has contributed to CO₂ in the environment. The thing…”

“For one, it's easier to remove CO₂ from the ocean where it's a 150 times more concentrated.”

“Well, so SAFs, sustainable aviation fuels would be an example, and in particular, you know, CO₂ to fuels. That is a case where, you know, CO₂, you know, decomposing molecules is highly energetic, and that's where electrochemistry has that advantage that I refe…”

“Well, as far as the CO is concerned, I didn't keep him. I had More than one nice talk with him. I intended to, and I told him that he was still a potential, ah, successor to me. So I kept him at the same job grade, we have job grades, and the same salary and b…”

“And you know that, you know, for a fuel, if you want to get anywhere close to economically competitive, you know, subsidies decide you have to have hydrogen that's going to be on the order of a dollar per kilogram, and you have to have CO two that's in that 10…”

“If you get A better conversion of CO two and hydrogen to methanol on a single pass. It just really doesn't move the overall economics in a huge way because again, back to a previous point, CO two and hydrogen are the big cost drivers in that system.”

“So removing the methane is going to be much, much harder, or at least much, much more expensive if we're doing it the same way.”

“With methane, there is one key difference, which is that you can oxidize it. You can turn it into CO₂ rather than just capturing the gas and finding a place to sequester it, which is a big advantage relative to what you need to do to remove CO₂ from the atmosp…”

“It's about, there's about 200 times less methane by volume than CO₂, and one of the major controls On the efficacy of removal is concentration, so that difference in concentration, for one, is just going to make it that much harder to do the atmospheric methan…”

“Because that methane would have gone away eventually over time, to maintain that temperature impact over time, you actually need to continue to remove the methane, not at the original scale, But there's this concept of effective methane removal, so you have yo…”

“Almost all of that methane Business as usual would convert to CO₂ anyway. So as soon as you're releasing methane to the atmosphere if it's a fossil source methane, then yes, that CO₂ that is eventually converted to is additional CO₂ that would, that's being ad…”

“Unlike CO₂, which you, is sticky in the sense that, you know, it's amenable to acid-base chemistry, there are ways that you can grab a hold of a CO₂. Methane doesn't really have that same, the same properties. It is symmetric, It doesn't have acid-base chemist…”

“So we have something on the order of 47 facilities around the world that operating today that capture CO₂ and keep it out of the air and oceans for climate. Broadly, that's about sixty million tons a year.”

“And the reason why is because methanol is going to be an important maritime fuel. About two, two and a half percent of global emissions are shipping stuff around the world with boats. And it turns out that they need a clean fuel too. As we've talked about befo…”

“We can't just reduce emissions anymore. It won't be enough to stop climate change if you've emitted too much. And, you know, you can reduce emissions you've already emitted, so we have to start removing some of that carbon from the atmosphere. By some I mean i…”

“If you look at, like, a global scale, actually plants photosynthesize about 400 gigatons of CO₂ every year, and that actually shows up in, like, our CO₂ readings.”

“You know, even if you have free electricity and free hydrogen, which you don't, and you still need CO₂ at scale, and that cost alone plus some conversion cost kills you here.”

“For a fuel, if you want to get anywhere close to economically competitive, you know, subsidies decide, you have to have hydrogen that's going to be on the order of a dollar per kilogram, and you have to have CO₂ that's in that 100 to 200 dollar per ton range, …”

“The worst case is really that there's really no requirements for hydrogen production from grid electricity, which means, in the end, you end up creating more emissions than what fossil hydrogen production is already creating today. So let's say the U.S. Actual…”

“Most of the scenarios in the IPCC's sixth assessment report, which is the most recent one, include capturing and storing literally hundreds of gigatons, cumulatively, of CO₂ between now and the end of the century.”

“With CDR in particular, I think we would do well to really recognize this as essentially a depletable resource in some ways. You know, there's an amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere that means we're not going to run out anytime, you know, in the foreseeable future…”

“One of the other really big infrastructure distinctions between mitigation CCS and removal CCS is basically that it matters if the CO₂ is re-released in a very different way for something that's mitigative versus removal. This even maybe applies to compensator…”

“Methane, on the first year you spill it, it's a 120 times higher global warming impact than CO₂.”

“So, when you emit CO₂, it stays in the atmosphere for a really long time. Thousands of years. Tens of thousands of years. People argue, but you wouldn't be totally wrong by saying there was a 20,000 year lifespan.”

“First, over a 20 year period, rather than a hundred year period, methane traps 84 times more heat than CO₂.”

“Net zero by 20 50 for CO two is critically important for managing long-term warming, but we cannot forget about the other pieces primarily around short-lived client pollutants that are going to be even stronger levers towards managing that near-term warming, t…”

“So when you cut CO₂, you stop warming it, stop warming the atmosphere even more than it already is. When you cut methane, you eventually, over about a decadal time span, start actually bringing that warming down. It's a fundamentally different dynamic.”

“Whenever we compare things on a GWP 100 basis between methane and CO₂, what we are fundamentally doing is actually making a trade-off, one that we're not always conscious of, between near-term warming and long-term warming.”

“And, you know, on average one ton of cement, just rounding up to big numbers, one ton of cement produces one ton of CO₂.”

“Cement being the most massive industry by volume in the world also produces an almost equivalent amount of CO₂, and that's, you know, again, speaking, speaking in big even numbers, it's roughly half from the fossil fuel needed to get to a thousand degrees and …”

“Like to take a ton of CO₂ out of ambient air, you need to filter around two million cubic meters of air.”

“By cooling with these methods or with any methods, we would not be just turning back the dial of time to a time where there was less CO₂, because the sulfates do cool differently than the CO₂ warps. And even if maybe we can try and get it as close as possible,…”

“A study we did is on the order of two and a half to five and a half billion tons of CO₂ could be removed by just using that waste.”

“It's more of a cost problem, because as it stands today, basically, like, both input costs, hydrogen and CO₂, are too high, and then the process costs, turning those things into e-fuels, are too high. So you've got to solve for all three of those things and sc…”

“An emission is permanent, basically. Like, an emission of CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years, not forever, but hundreds of thousands of years. And if you want to somehow net that out with a proportional removal, like, it's not propo…”

“People were looking at how CO₂ levels were impacting the cognitive function of building occupants, and seeing that strategic decision making and deep thinking were really impeded by Higher levels of CO two. And by higher, I mean like, 700 or 800 PPM. Not reall…”

“We're probably going to have to pull most of the CO₂ that we're putting into the atmosphere here today back out.”