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I prepared my real estate license exam with the test prep at californiarealestatelicenseschool.comtheir practice tests covered all the following areas that you will see in the California Real Estate Exam Salesperson or Broker:Property Ownership and Land Use Controls and RegulationsLaws of Agency and Fiduciary DutiesProperty Valuation and Financial AnalysisFinancingTransfer of PropertyPractice of Real Estate and Disclosures (Includes Specialty Areas)Contractsmore info here: califorinia-real-estate-exam.business.siteNOTE: To pass the salesperson examination and become eligible for a license, examinees must correctly answer at least 70 percent of the questions on the test. Property Ownership and Land Use Controls and Regulations (approximately 15% of exam)Classes of PropertyProperty CharacteristicsEncumbrancesTypes of OwnershipDescriptions of PropertyGovernment Rights in LandPublic ControlsEnvironmental Hazards and RegulationsPrivate ControlsWater RightsSpecial Categories of LandLaws of Agency and Fiduciary Duties (approximately 17% of exam)Law, Definition and Nature of Agency Relationships, Types of Agencies, and AgentsCreation of Agency and Agency AgreementsResponsibilities of Agent to Seller/Buyer as PrincipalDisclosure of AgencyDisclosure of Acting as Principal or Other InterestTermination of AgencyCommission and FeesResponsibilities of Agent to Non-Client Third PartiesProperty Valuation and Financial Analysis (approximately 14% of exam)ValueMethods of Estimating ValueFinancial AnalysisFinancing (approximately 9% of exam)General ConceptsTypes of LoansSources of FinancingGovernment ProgramsMortgages/Deeds of Trust/NotesFinancing/Credit LawsLoan BrokerageTypes of Loan OriginatorsTransfer of Property (approximately 8% of exam)Title InsuranceDeedsEscrowTax AspectsSpecial ProcessesTransfer through Court SupervisionTypes of VestingPractice of Real Estate and Disclosures (Includes Specialty Areas) (approximately 25% of exam)Trust Account ManagementFair Housing LawsTruth in AdvertisingRecord Keeping RequirementsAgency SupervisionPermitted Activities of Unlicensed Sales AssistantsDRE Jurisdiction and Disciplinary ActionsLicensing, and Continuing Education Requirements and ProceduresCalifornia Real Estate Recovery FundGeneral EthicsTechnologyProperty ManagementCommercial/Industrial/Income PropertiesSpecialty AreasTransfer Disclosure StatementNatural Hazard Disclosure StatementsDisclosure of Material Facts Affecting Property ValueNeed for Inspection and Obtaining/Verifying InformationReportsServicing Diverse PopulationsContracts (approximately 12% of exam)GeneralListing AgreementsBuyer Broker AgreementsOffers/Purchase ContractsAgreementsPromissory Notes/SecuritiesPurchase/Lease OptionsAdvanced FeeCalifornia Real Estate Exam Prep is a series of Practice Exam, Questions and answers and flashcards to study for the California Real Estate License Exam and it is available at https://californiarealestatelicenseschool.comHistoryThe California real estate exam prep is designed for the most current California Real Estate License Exam Salesperson & Broker, this is an online practice exam available to the public and it is the most up-to-date exam prep material for the California Real Estate License Exam that you can find on the market.Features Covering all areas of the current California Real Estate License Exam with practice tests ( questions and answers ) and exam prep on topics such as:Property Ownership and Land Use Controls and Regulations Laws of Agency and Fiduciary Duties Property Valuation and Financial Analysis Financing Transfer of Property Practice of Real Estate and Disclosures (Includes Specialty Areas) ContractsClasses of Property Property Characteristics Encumbrances Types of Ownership Descriptions of Property Government Rights in Land Public Controls Environmental Hazards and Regulations Private Controls Water Rights Special Categories of LandLaws of Agency and Fiduciary Duties Law, Definition and Nature of Agency Relationships, Types of Agencies, and Agents Creation of Agency and Agency Agreements Responsibilities of Agent to Seller/Buyer as Principal Disclosure of Agency Disclosure of Acting as Principal or Other Interest Termination of Agency Commission and Fees Responsibilities of Agent to Non-Client Third PartiesProperty Valuation and Financial Analysis Value Methods of Estimating Value Financial AnalysisFinancing General Concepts Types of Loans Sources of Financing Government Programs Mortgages/Deeds of Trust/Notes Financing/Credit Laws Loan Brokerage Types of Loan OriginatorsTransfer of Property Title Insurance Deeds Escrow Tax Aspects Special Processes Transfer through Court Supervision Types of VestingPractice of Real Estate and Disclosures Trust Account Management Fair Housing Laws Truth in Advertising Record Keeping Requirements Agency Supervision Permitted Activities of Unlicensed Sales Assistants DRE Jurisdiction and Disciplinary Actions Licensing, and Continuing Education Requirements and Procedures California Real Estate Recovery Fund General Ethics Technology Property Management Commercial/Industrial/Income Properties Specialty Areas Transfer Disclosure Statement Natural Hazard Disclosure Statements Disclosure of Material Facts Affecting Property Value Need for Inspection and Obtaining/Verifying Information Reports Servicing Diverse PopulationsContracts General Listing Agreements Buyer Broker Agreements Offers/Purchase Contracts Agreements Promissory Notes/Securities Purchase/Lease Options Advanced FeeReferences:Real Estate Test Prep Law Enforcement Test PrepCalifornia Real Estate ExamCalifornia Real Estate ExamCalifornia Real Estate ExamEveripedia

PMC bank exemplifies the extreme rot that exists in our banking system & regulations. On one hand it is quite understandable that few banks will mis-behave due to political influence. What surprises however is the lax regulatory oversight on the books & systemic sabotage of the accounting norms. By the end of this article, you should be convinced why you can’t trust any co-operative bank in India.But the puzzle is – Why are regulators so silent on this systemic issue ?Consider the case of this bank: Pratibha Mahila Sahakari BankIn February 2003, the RBI revoked the bank's licence due to concerns relating to serious financial irregularities. Among other points, the RBI noted that the bank's loan policy was suspect and that members of Patil's family, including brothers and nephews, had received favourable treatment regarding loans. Allegations listed by the RBI include a faulty loan policy of the bank and loan interest waivers given to Patil's relatives. It said that there was no-one on the board with knowledge of either management generally or banking in particular. The RBI determined that six of the ten largest loan defaulters were connected to Patil's family.The person in question is none other than Pratibha Patil, the former president of India. The bank was named after her name when founded in 1973. And there were depositors who were still waiting for settlement of their money when she became president. Her family denied any wrongdoing in the matter or the failure of the bank. This when 6 of the top 10 NPAs were connected to Patil family. Beat that !This is not a new issue. Political interference in co-operative banks is inevitable since almost all of them are chaired by the powerful local politician. Think of this – Who is the chairman of private banks like ICICI bank, HDFC bank, etc ? Those are people of eminence in banking & have an illustrious career. Compared to that, co-operative banks are headed by the local MLA or MP. Will this be sensible banking ? Why is the politician sitting as chairman in the first place ? For public good you think ? Well we have an ex-president’s case above & see where it ended.So what happened in the PMC bank case? What is the fraud exactly?I would say the fraud is below what meets the eye. I tried to look at the balance sheets of the bank which are available on the website. I am surprised by what I found:What is wrong with the above metrics ? Don’t overthink. They’re all fine. Indicate a good healthy bank. The NPAs at 3.76% are high but certainly manageable. And the bank is still profitable, at-least on paper. But there is more…..Look at what the banks writes in the annual report about its advances & credit policies:ADVANCES: Your Bank’s total Advances for the financial year 2018 -19 is ` 8383.33 crore, indicating a net increase of 12.86% i.e 955.25 crore on previous financial year 2017-18. Your Bank has shifted its focus to priority sector advances i.e. MSME advances to be in line with the regulatory requirements of Reserve Bank of India. Your Bank has also focused on different lending strategies according to the MSME lending rules so that the priority sector portfolio is increased. Further, your Bank has revised rate of interest on priority sector advances during the financial year 2018-19.See the fancy English it writes in the international banking section:INTERNATIONAL BANKING DIVISION : Your Bank has completed seven years of independent foreign operations and holds permanent AD- Category I license issued by Reserve Bank of India. The Bank is maintaining Nostro Accounts in 5 foreign currencies i.e USD, GBP, EUR, JPY and AED. The Bank has correspondent relationship with leading International Banks and overseas branches of Indian Banks. The Trade war between USA and China has affected International business and financial markets. The restriction imposed by USA on Iran has an impact on crude oil price resulting into price rise and disturbance in international trade. The Indian rupee depreciated by 6.10% during F.Y. 2018-2019.Hmm… so what about the stressed assets? At-least there should be some mention of stress there. Nothing. All is well here as well.STRESSED ASSETS: The concerted efforts were taken by Bank’s Monitoring Cell to curtail the NPA at all levels. For speedy recovery, the several recovery tools are used by the Bank’s recovery team. This effort has yielded desirable result. The Bank has made requisite provision as per the guidelines of Reserve Bank of India, pursuant to which, the Bank’s percentage of Gross NPA to Gross Advances is 3.76% while Net NPA to Net Advances is 2.19% for the year ending March 31,2019.Not only this, there is a mention of audit & vigilance also. But most of it is plain English. Fancy works, no numbers, names or actions.AUDIT AND INSPECTION : The success of any institution is depending upon its governance. The Bank has formed an Audit Committee consisting of the directors who are experienced Banking Experts as per the requirement of the RBI. The said committee meets regularly and reviews the overall Audit and Compliance posture of the Bank. This has helped in ensuring transparency in financial statements and protecting shareholders interest.So what is the real picture at the bank ?The complaint against the bank is that they lend about 75% of the total loans to promotors of just one group company ie HDIL, a now bankrupt real estate company of Mumbai. But this was never disclosed to RBI that these loans were not getting paid in full. So this was the real picture:Now here is where the problem starts. There are reports in the media that almost 75% of the Rs 8383 crores loans were given to just one group, in this case HDIL. This obviously is way above the RBI threshold of group exposures. It is almost like a personal bank of the company in question. That too a real estate company where banks are not expected to lend. Is there a mention of this high exposure to one company in the balance sheet that is 88 page long ? Nothing. Not even once !And that is the issue with our disclosure norms. How can a bank get away without even disclosing the top 10 borrowers of the bank ? This when we saw how Pratibha Patil’s bank (quite literally) lend to the family & then most of those accounts became NPAs.Also how is it possible that the interest payments were not coming on time by HDIL (It want bankrupt recently) but the auditors did not find anything wrong with the numbers during audits? I quote from the annual report:INDEPENDENT AUDITOR’S REPORT9. As required by the Rule 27(3) of the Multi-State Co-operative Societies Rules, 2002, we report on the matters specified in clauses (a) to (f) of the said Rule to the extent applicable to the Bank.a. During the course of our audit, we have generally not come across transactions which appear to be contrary to the provisions of the Act, the Rules or the Bye-Laws of the Bank.e. During the course of our audit, we have generally not come across any violations of guidelines, conditions etc. issued by the Reserve Bank and National Agriculture and Rural Development Bank.For Lakdawala And Co - Chartered AccountantsWhat the hell ? The bank had lend 75% to one group, the interest payments were delayed several times to the tune of Rs 3000 to 4500 crores & the charted accounts find nothing during audits !!! That is almost 50% of their lending. No wonder RBI moved swiftly to put restrictions on the bank withdrawals & any further lending. But what about the auditors ? Is there any accountability of audit reports when such mass scale frauds happen at ease. What is the point of signing the annual reports then. In my view, I would not trust any audit report from this group henceforth. I am rather surprised that they are still allowed to carry their business as usual.Note what RBI said in its complaint against the bank recently. The auditors should hang their heads in shame:“The actual financial position of the bank was camouflaged, & the bank deceptively reflected a rosy picture of its financial parameters,” said the complaint, noting that the fictitious loan accounts were not entered into the bank’s core banking systemMeanwhile, have fun looking at some interesting milestones & awards the bank proudly mentions on its website. Implies that these things actually mean nothing in our system. Some of them are even amusing. See for yourself -Milestones• The Bank was conferred with Scheduled Status by the Reserve Bank of India in the year 2000. It is the Youngest Bank to achieve the ‘Scheduled Bank’ status.• The Multi-State Status was conferred on the Bank by the Central Registrar in the year 2004.The Bank thus entered into the National platformAwards and Achievements• All India Bank Depositors’ Association, well known body of the bank depositors, felicitated the Bank in appreciation of “work ethics oriented to depositors’ service” in 1999.• The Bank has been awarded with ‘Padmabhushan Vasantdada Patil Award’ as the ‘Best Urban Co-operative Bank’ by the Maharashtra State Co-op Banks’ Association Ltd. for nine times.Special mention• With 70% Women employees, the Bank believes in women empowerment. The Bank charges 1% less ROI for education loan to girls/women. It has special saving account scheme for women. Women are given benefit of additional rate offered to senior citizens at the age of 58 years.Ah ha……there is the catch. So all women depositors were paid higher rate of interest on deposits, similar to senior citizens. That’s why we see more women in the crowd of people demanding money. And this when 70% of bank employees were women.If this is what women empowerment results in, we don’t need any more of it. Don’t do this in the name of women empowerment pls.My advice to all readers is this.Pls stay away from the lure of additional interest from co-operative banks. This will not end well. All banks are not equal. And those with politicians as chairmen are certainly not. Park your funds only with scheduled commercial banks only. Because if you chase the extra 1% interest & lose money, some dirt will also come on you. You are not being smart here. It indicates that while you see the returns, you don’t quite understand the risk.Feel free to mail or write to me on twitterHonest - Unbiased - Simplified, as always.References:Pratibha Mahila Sahakari Bank - WikipediaDistrict Co-operative Central Bank - WikipediaScheduled Banks (India) - WikipediaDifferent types of banks in India, explainedIndia's PMC Bank created over 21,000 fake accounts to hide loans: complaint

The solution burns natural gas sufficient to create half a ton of CO2 in order to capture a ton of CO2 from the air. They assert that they capture about 90% of the natural gas upstream and process CO2 emissions. They actually have three separate CO2 extraction technologies running in order to just take CO2 from the air with one of them. The technology won’t scale to anywhere near the size of the problem. The only potential use case for it is enhanced oil recovery, pulling more carbon from underground in tapped out oil wells.The magic bullet in question is an air carbon capture solution within a company called Carbon Engineering[1]. It’s based in Squamish BC and just received $68 billion in funding from three fossil fuel majors. One of the company’s principles is a seriously intelligent engineer who accepts the science of global warming, but likes geoengineering, burns fossil fuels to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and doesn’t like wind generation. Bright, but not wise.To scale to an inadequate million tons of CO2 a year, they would need 2,000 two-meter fans blowing air into contactors in an array 20 meters high, 8 meters thick and two kilometers long (broken up into 10 chunks) surrounding a central gas-fired CO2-processing plant. They currently have a single fan working with a portion of their solution and aren’t achieving the efficiencies required for their goals, although they have an explanation for that.The current Carbon Engineering prototype facility in Squamish, BC.I’ve published about the fundamental scale problem of carbon capture and sequestration a few times[2][3][4][5], so I’m not predisposed to find something magic in yet-another-air-carbon capture scheme.I reached out to Professor Mark Z. Jacobson[6] of Stanford for a comment on the technology. He’d already assessed it of course:SDACCS (synthetic direct air carbon capture and storage) is not recommended in a 100% renewable energy world. SDACCS is basically a cost, or tax, added to the cost of fossil fuel generation, so it raises the cost of using fossil fuels while reducing no air pollution and providing no energy security. To the contrary, it permits the fossil fuel industry to expand its devastation of the environment and human health by allowing mining and air pollution to continue at an even higher cost to consumers than with no carbon capture.Anton Carver’s points that Carbon Engineering are short of the right scale by four orders of magnitude and scaling appropriately would cost $3.7 trillion USD are bang on. I’ll extend that by saying that all of these carbon capture technologies like to talk up the price of capture, which Carbon Engineering puts at $100 per ton , but they neglect to count in storage, distribution and sequestrations, easily half of the cost.The total CO2 load for the energy required for capture, processing, compression, storage, distribution and sequestration is almost certain to be greater than the CO2 removed from the atmosphere.The $68 billion is a fig leaf. It’s 0.03% of the companies’ combined annual revenue. It’s change they found in the couch. It gives them a nice slurry of green paint to pour over their tarnished images and is cheap at twice the price.The process is energy intensiveFor the sake of this assessment, I’ll do a bottoms-up assessment of likely energy needs and potential energy supplies and CO2 implications, and then I’ll contrast it to their technology and claims per their published papers in a couple of academic journals. The contrast is illuminating.The headline of one of those assessments I published, triggered in part by a previous glowing article about Carbon Engineering, is Air Carbon Capture's Scale Problem: 1.1 Astrodomes For A Ton Of CO2. You have to push a lot of air through a small and resistant space for absurd amounts of time to get a ton of CO2 with a perfect capture method. I estimated that with close to 100% efficiency and several other conservative assumptions, it would take about 0.44 MWh just for moving the air to capture 1 ton of CO2. I excluded back pressure, heating, cooling, movement of physical components and the like.For much of this assessment, I’ll posit a device which captures a ton of CO2 an hour, then later extrapolate to a million tons a year of capture, Carbon Engineering’s reported per plant target.The article[7] on Carbon Engineering’s technology refers to two additional energy concerns in their process, one pushing the air through the liquid efficiently and at a large scale, and the second the 900 degree Celsius heating process which bakes the CO2 out of the precipitate. Let’s suppose that a more reasonable number with at minimum air flow through a sorbent technology, a processing cycle, a cleaning cycle and then pressurization and storage. That is probably in the range of 4.4 MWh of electricity for a ton of CO2.Let’s model this out with electricity as the primary energy source to start. What’s the carbon load of 4.4 MWh of electricity? Carbon Engineering is based in BC which has a lot of hydro and as a result, very low grams of CO2e per kWh[8]: 15.1 grams CO2e / kWh.That doesn’t seem like a lot, but there are 4,400 kWh in 4.4 MWh. A little math and it’s apparent that in order to capture the ton of CO2, you end up with electricity that emits about 66 kilograms. If Carbon Engineering were using electricity as the primary energy source and the demand were 4.4 MWh, this would be reasonable.What does 4.4 MWh of electricity cost in BC? It’s running 6 cents CAD per kWh for large customers and Carbon Engineering would definitely qualify. At BC rates, 4.4 MWh would cost about $265 CAD or $200 USD. Running it for a year with 5% maintenance downtime would be an electricity cost of about $2.1 million CAD or about $1.6 million USD, and would only capture 8,300 tons.Carbon Engineering is claiming $100 per ton USD according to the BBC article, or about $133 per ton CAD. That’s a big gap from $265. That means that their claimed process would only consume about 2.2 MWh per ton of CO2 if they were running it off electricity as a primary energy source.Could they really be 50% cheaper? Well, it’s hard to see how. And Carbon Engineering doesn’t actually claim that in their underlying peer-reviewed publication. The paper[9] that triggered the latest round of headlines was published in Joule[10], a brand new cross-disciplinary journal focussing on energy at all scales which has no impact factor yet. (Yes, the lack of an impact factor and the vagueness of Joule’s mandate is a red flag, implying challenges with getting the right peer reviewers on submissions. A bit more on this later.)Here’s what they actually say in that paper (their dollars in USD):Levelized costs of $94 to $232 per ton CO2 from the atmosphereThat’s $125 - $310 CAD per ton, nicely bracketing my bottoms-up electricity-only model of $265 CAD. Okay, we have some hyperbole from the press and a paper published in a brand new and weak (so far at least) journal which is more realistic. But my bottoms-up numbers are in the ballpark.The paper also claims moving the air only takes 61 kWh per ton of CO2. My modeling with lower scale fans (hence less effective and efficient) suggested 440 kWh per ton of CO2. That’s a very large gap, especially as the 440 kWh I modeled doesn’t include back pressure. Let’s leave that alone for now.What if they set up right next door in Alberta and ran this off electricity from the grid? Well, Alberta’s electricity is at 820 grams of CO2e per kWh. That’s over 50 times worse than BC. The required 4.4 MWh of electricity would produce 3.6 tons of CO2e to capture one ton of CO2e. And the bottom end 2.2 MWh? That’s still 1.8 tons of CO2e emissions. Even at their claimed energy intensity in Alberta they’d be significant net emitters.They use a lot of natural gas to capture CO2So capturing carbon from the air requires energy. Working it up using electricity showed that in BC they would okay, but they would be deep underwater in Alberta. But how are they actually powering their process?When CO2 is delivered at 15 MPa, the design requires either 8.81 GJ of natural gas, or 5.25 GJ of gas and 366 kWhr of electricity, per ton of CO2 captured.That’s interesting in a couple of ways. First off, how does the actual energy consumption compared to my modeled consumption? They need 8.81 gigajoules per ton of CO2 and 3.6 GJ is equal to 1 MWh. They are asserting a total energy demand in the range of 2.4 MWh per ton of CO2, slightly higher than the 2.2 MWh the bottoms-up assessment suggests. And with their 61 kWh for air movement instead of my modeled 440 kWh, they are using around 75% of their energy to get the CO2 out of their solution after it’s captured.For contrast, the average BC residential natural gas consumer uses about 125 GJ[11] per year so the gas for heating a home and cooking for a year could capture about 14 tons of CO2. Put another way, the natural gas required to capture a million tons of CO2 could providing heating and cooking for over 70,000 households in BC. That’s about 4% of the households in that Canadian province.Each GJ of natural gas is about 27 cubic meters, so getting a ton of CO2 burns about 240 cubic meters of natural gas. Each cubic meter weighs about 0.7 kg, so that’s just under 0.2 tons of natural gas to get a ton of CO2.If Carbon Engineering is burning natural gas for energy, then it creates CO2 as well. The Joule paper indicates that for every million tons of CO2 they capture from the atmosphere, they also capture about 500 thousand tons from the natural gas they are burning with no grid electricity.Their process boils down to capturing a ton of CO2 from the air by creating half a ton of CO2 from fossil fuels.That would great if it could be carbon neutral even powered by natural gas. It would just take their technology to approach 100% effective at removing CO2 from a source volume of gas. But are they at 100%?At an inlet velocity of 1.4 m/s the contactor ingests air at 180 t/hr, yielding a 45 kg-CO2/hr maximum capture rate at 42% capture fraction.That’s for the air that’s being pulled through their primary contactor. Note that they make a much higher claim in the predecessor paper[12] to the recent Joule piece, 75% under optimal conditions. That paper was published in 2012 in the journal The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society[13], which has been around a long time and does have an impact factor. The claim in 2012 was $60 per ton of CO2 USD rather than the 57% higher $94 they claim as their current bottom end, never mind their 250% higher current top end of $232.There’s a bit of a glitch in the matrix here. They are using 74.75% as their capture fraction in their recent Joule paper, despite only achieving 42% with their prototype unit. They assert: “performance model validated by pilot data” but that’s not well explained in my opinion.Brentwood structured packing[14] used by Carbon Engineering is second from leftThey assert that the prototype uses only 3 meters of Brentwood structured packing as opposed to ~8 meters in the production design (per my understanding), which does explain the capture fraction difference, but it’s unclear if they’ve modeled the significantly increased back pressure from 8 meters vs 3 meters for air movement. I’m more uncertain about their air movement numbers having looked into this than I once was. One good thing that they are doing is using off-the-shelf commoditized components, albeit in a novel way, so they should have good metrics on this. I’ll suspend judgment for now.For the emissions from the natural gas, they are going to bolt on a completely separate pair of carbon capture technologies which operate at a claimed 97.5%. Their further claim is that with the upstream emissions of natural they are at about 90% efficiency in terms of captured CO2 to emitted CO2. That’s not bad if true. But they are still creating 50% more CO2 from fossil fuels as they capture CO2 from the air. That CO2 could just be left in the ground as an alternative solution.Spelling that out a bit, they are targeting 1 million tons of air CO2 capture per year with a plant. Each ton includes a net loss of 10% of the CO2e emissions inherent in their fuel. Each ton of captured CO2 has a 0.1 ton emissions tax. A million tons means that they are committing to production of 100,000 tons of uncaptured CO2 from using natural gas in order to get a million tons of CO2 from the air. If they didn’t do anything and taking their numbers at face value, they would achieve 100,000 tons of CO2 not emitted for zero cost compared to a million net tons sequestered for $94 million to $232 million. Hmmm, which has the best cost benefit ratio?Complexity is increasing. With increased complexity comes increased cost and diminished efficiency.As a note, they also require 4.7 tons of water for every ton of CO2, most of which is reused. A lot of the energy consumption goes to heating that water to create steam required as part of the process. Very heat intensive, which is why they need the waste heat and energy of burned natural gas to power their process.It doesn’t scaleThey are claiming a million tons of CO2 per year, not 8,300. That’s a factor of 120. The example I provided uses 44 ~1 meter diameter fans to get 8,300 tons without back pressure with a total surface area of about 90 square meters probably covering about 14 meters long and 5 meters high. Given back pressure, let’s assume a realistic number is 88 fans. That would be probably 28 meters long by 5 meters high simply because of engineering and wind load etc. Then multiply by 120 to get over 10,000 fans. The 1 meter industrial fans cost about $500 a piece in bulk, so that’s $50 million as a top end number. The surface area would be around 10,000 square meters of fans alone. Assuming their numbers and BC grid prices, that would be about $100 million CAD or $75 million USD in electricity per year.There are, of course, much more efficient air-moving technologies when you get up to this scale, so one assumes we wouldn’t need something that big, but still, it’s going to be an enormous volume of moving air. Let’s look at that for a minute. Getting a ton of CO2 requires moving 1.3 million cubic meters of air at 411 ppm. That means that to get a million tons of CO2 you have to move 1.3 trillion cubic meters of air.A big passenger jet engine like the ones in the Airbus A340 moves about 0.465 tons of air per second[15] and each cubic meter weighs about 1.2 kg. If you used a big jet engine, you could move all of the required air in about 100 years. That means you’d need about 100 jet engines operating day and night for a year to get a million tons of CO2. They’re about 2 meters across with a surface area four times the size of the modeled 1 meter fans, so you’d have have a 20 meter by 20 meter howling maw of noise and flame. Also it would be burning hydrocarbons, so why bother doing air carbon capture again? Illustrative of scale, but not a solution anyone is suggesting.Carbon Engineering models of their contactor arrayThe image is an engineering design[16] for their contactor array. A lot of liquid solution flows in the top and gravity trickles it down through the packing and blowing air where it captures the actual 42% to the claimed potential 75% of the CO2, then carries it into the processing system that retrieves it. If we can believe the ant-sized man with a lunch box in the diagram on the right is to scale, the fans are about 4 meters in diameter for the end product. Their diagram implies stacked four heigh with some additional space on the bottom implying roughly 20 meters or 65 ft heigh, and with slower moving fans, a lot more of them then the jet engine at a quarter of the surface, but fewer than the basic industrial fan at a 16th of the size.It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the fans aren’t going to be pushing a quarter of the volume of the jet engine. Going back to bottoms-up estimates to help assess Carbon Engineering’s claims, let’s call it 10% per fan so instead of a 100 jet engines, you’d need a 1,000 of the four-meter fans. Stacked four high, that’s 250 fans or a full kilometer wide. It’s not really viable given the design and the need for air flow to buttress it allowing it to be a lot taller. But if you want these things in stacked rows, say four of them, you’d need to space them out a lot or the ones further back will be sucking the CO2 light air from the ones in front. Probably a 100 meters is more than enough, maybe less. Call it a 400 meter by 250 meter howling field of huge fans. And as a note, they include that point clearly in their papers. There is little evidence of basic engineering incompetence in the work, albeit I’m still skeptical about the air movement energy..Their earlier paper in the Royal Society Journal bears out this bottom-up approach.The engineering study described in §2b arrived at an optimized air-contactor design that is roughly 20 m tall, 8 m deep and 200 m long. In CE’s full-scale facility design, roughly 10 contacting units would be dispersed around a central regeneration, compression and processing facility, to cumulatively capture 1 Mt yr−1.It turns out the bottoms-up was off by a factor of two, which is reasonable. They need 2 kilometers worth of their slab construction which implies that they are getting 5% of the jet engine’s air through each four-meter fan per unit of time. Remember that this only gets a million tons a year when the problem is in the gigatons per year, four orders of magnitude off of the scale of concern. Imagine 10,000 of these clusters of arrays of contactors with all fans running 24/7/365.It’s going to be a very noisy neighbor. No one will be able to live within a mile of this beast even with noise shrouding tech. You can make it quieter by making it slower or spreading it out more, but there are absurdities involved in this process.And that’s only half of the problemAnd as I said, that’s only capture and storage. Moving tons and tons of CO2 takes energy. Sequestering it or turning it into something else takes energy. There’s no real win here.There are ways to reduce this. One is to use waste industrial heat for a portion of the energy problem. Global Thermostat’s[17] model works that way. The principals of that firm, Graciela Chichilnisky[18] and Peter Eisenberger[19] realized early that in order for air carbon capture to be used, it had to deal with the heat issue carefully. Not the Carbon Engineering team, they burn natural gas.Another is to do the air carbon capture at the place where it’s needed or will be sequestered. That gets rid of a lot of the distribution costs. Once again, that’s Global Thermostat’s business model. They talk about the 400 square kilometers of greenhouses north of Beijing that all run on high CO2 concentrations to optimize growing and have lots of waste heat to run through the system. They talk about concrete plants that have high heat and can use CO2 as a feedstock with binding into the finished product and is sold. What Carbon Engineering is a rather different thing, which will be discussed later.Another approach is to run it off of a bunch of renewable energy that you build for the purpose. Imagine, if you will a big solar farm with one of these plugged in on the side. Well, let’s play that out, shall we? Let’s assume that ton per hour, because that seems reasonable. So you need 4.4 MW of capacity of solar to get a ton of CO2 in an hour we decided. This is also assuming accepting ‘free’ solar energy when it’s available to run the process rather than running it full time. This means we get about a ton at peak sunlight, but less the rest of the day and none at night.Well, that’s approximately another $4.4 million in capital costs for the solar farm. You need about 7.6 acres per MW of capacity, so that’s 33 acres or 13 hectares. You won’t be building one of these in the city, that’s for sure. How would it be near Squamish, where Carbon Engineering is located? About $100,000 per acre asking price for larger acreages per real estate sites? So another $3.3 million for the land. That’s close to $8 million before you get to the device. And that only captures about 15–20% of what the machinery can do because that’s the capacity factor for solar. That’s not looking good.Want a mixed wind, solar and battery farm for 24/7/365 operation? That’s in the range of $100 million capital costs for power production, storage and management, and at that you’d be selling a lot of wind energy to the grid because it doesn’t make sense to build a wind farm for only 4.4 MW peak demand, so you’d be building a 10 MW wind farm minimum. The batteries are the kicker. Tesla Gridpack is in the $70 million range by itself for three days if you want to stay off grid. Yes, battery storage is still expensive; thankfully storage is much less necessary on grids than people assume. You can probably scale back and find some workable model, but still, it’s unlikely that anyone would power this low-value solution with purpose-built renewables.You could hang this thing off the near side of an offshore wind farm with an inadequate transmission pipeline to population centers so there’s frequently some excess electrical generation capacity with no use for it. You could sop up some of the excess by doing air carbon capture and combining it with hydrogen electrolyzed from seawater to create a clean, synthetic biofuel. But basically you need sub 1 cent per kWh before this becomes viable. Of course, that’s close to what some fossil fuel companies in Europe[20] want to do with that situation, but they just want to make hydrogen and inject it into the gas lines for a 20% reduction in gas generation CO2 emissions. That looks like a bigger win than air carbon capture, even though it’s wasteful of energy. You could just deliver that carbon-free electricity to useful demand areas and let it be used productively and displace a MW of coal or gas emissions instead.Finally, you could use a combined heat and power natural gas generator to provide both the electricity for the fans and the heat. That would get you down to the 2.2 MWh number fairly easily. But wait. What are the CO2e emissions of an efficient natural gas generator? About 500 grams of CO2e per kWh. And that’s where they are. They are burning natural gas, producing 50% of the CO2 from that that they are capturing from the air and producing 150% of the CO2 in the air without an observable market or business case. I wonder what organizations might like something that demands a lot of natural gas, gets a nice CO2e fig leaf to advertise and costs only marketing dollars?There is no market for the CO2There isn’t a lot of use for CO2 at anywhere near the scale of the problem. I did the math a couple of years ago for the largest single consumer of industrial CO2 in the USA, the enhanced oil recovery oil wells in the south. That massive operation consumed the output of only 13 coal plants for a year. And there were hundreds of coal plants and then gas plants too in the USA.Want concentrated CO2? Burn some wood and work with the gases which are produced. A kilogram of wood turns into 1.9 kilograms of CO2. And the carbon in that came from the atmosphere and was concentrated naturally without a huge wall of fans over an extended period of time. The density of the CO2 is much, much higher in wood smoke than in the atmosphere; it’s already been massively concentrated by nature. Oh, and you get that waste industrial heat you need for another part of the process to reduce overall energy costs. If Carbon Engineering was using waste wood from the various nearby lumber mills, and capturing the CO2 produced by burning the wood and sequestering it, that would be something more interesting. Instead, they are pumping a lot of fossil fuels into their process instead of leaving them in the ground.A work up later in this article posits the criteria for air carbon capture to make sense. And includes the use case that Carbon Engineering and its fossil fuel investors are probably thinking of.The investors are fossil fuel companiesThis particular magic bullet article has a very telling point about Carbon Engineering. I’ll just quote it:It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.What are those? Are they all fossil fuel companies? What would they want with an investment in air carbon capture of one of their products’ primary wastes: CO2. That uses massive amounts of one of their products? And makes them look good on casual inspection?Chevron had a revenue of $159 billion in 2018. Occidental made $17.8 billion. BHP made $43.6 billion. So that’s $220 billion combined annual revenue vs $68 million in ‘investment’. That’s about 0.03% of their annual revenue going to this initiative.As with almost all carbon capture approaches, the only group which still thinks it has merit is the fossil fuel industry. They spend a tiny fraction of their money so that they can tout the wonders of their technology around the world while continuing to produce gigatons of CO2e annually.In reality, this technology would use 70,000 households worth of natural gas in order to capture a million tons of CO2 a year. It’s more a new market for natural gas than a solution.That’s a very thin slurry of green paint over a tailings pond.Where might air carbon capture make sense?Air carbon capture makes sense under the following conditions:It’s co-located with an industrial site which requires CO2.The site needs tons of CO2 as feedstock per day, perhaps for concrete.The site doesn’t have access to a lot of biomass because it’s already a concentrated source of carbon which you can bind with oxygen. Greenhouses need not apply.The site generates a lot of waste industrial heat or biomass to tap for energy so that you don’t have to burn a lot of fossil fuels for heat.The site has access to a lot of very cheap electricity that’s also carbon neutral.A pipeline for CO2 to the site isn’t viable. CO2 is a purchasable commodity. Per one source[21] it costs about $40 per ton to get it trucked in. If you have a pipeline, then it works out to $0.77 per ton per mile and $1.50 per ton, but with another big capital cost. That’s on top of the commodity price for industrial CO2 of $30 to $50 per ton, if memory serves. Smaller volumes are much more expensive. When you start seeing $90 per ton delivered, you can see that there might be some circumstances in which $100 per ton might be worth doing, and that if you can eliminate energy costs it becomes reasonable. That’s if the capital cost wasn’t going to be absurd; you need an awful lot of CO2 in order to justify millions in capital costs.But even then, let’s look at that greenhouse example. For greenhouses, you only need concentrations at 3–4 times atmospheric levels. That’s pretty easy to manage with a simpler tech than the Carbon Engineering ‘magic bullet’. Just burn some biomass, probably dried waste stems, and capture the CO2[22] from the biomass smoke which has much more density, once again. Oh, and get some waste heat for warming the place as necessary.So what sites might actually be useful for Carbon Engineering’s solution as it’s designed? Well, let’s return to the 2012 paper the principals published:an AC facility operating on low-cost ‘stranded’ natural gas that is able to provide CO2 for enhanced oil recovery at a location without other CO2 sources might be competitive with post-combustion capture in high-cost locations such as Canadian oil sands operations.Years ago, the principals in Carbon Engineering realized that their market was likely the fossil fuel industry. From their investors’ perspective, this is a great technology. It uses a lot of one of their products, possibly even a reserve that they have no economic use for today. It allows them to get more of another of their products, oil, out of tapped out wells. And it gives them a nice big marketing win in headlines that they are saving the planet from global warming.That’s a trifecta of goodness for the fossil fuel companies. Not so much for the rest of the world. That 10% tax of emissions on the natural gas isn’t looking so good now.What would net emissions for using this for enhanced oil recovery look like? Per a high-citation 1993 study on the subject:For every kilogramme of CO2 injected, approximately one to one quarter of a kilogramme of extra oil will be recovered.That’s interesting. How much CO2 is created from a 0.25 kg of oil, well to wheels? Well, just burning oil produces about 3.2 times the CO2[23] by weight excluding processing. Processing is a 10% to 20%[24] hit depending on the quality of the crude. So that 0.25 kg of CO2 turns into about 0.8 kg of CO2 and processing adds another chunk, bringing it perhaps to 90%. With the 10% emissions tax on the natural gas, that means that there are roughly zero net extractions of CO2 from the atmosphere if it’s used for enhanced oil after all is said and done. At a cost of $94 to $232 for the air carbon capture.Who came up with this idea?So we have a technology that burns so much natural gas that they produce and must capture 500 tons of CO2 for every 1,000 they capture from the air. And its natural market is to increase oil extraction. And the alternative to do nothing is free and has lower net carbon emissions. Why would anyone think this is a good idea? It’s a really smart bad solution, but deeply unwise if you actually care about global warming.Enter Dr. David W. Keith[25], stage right. He’s the primary engineer behind Carbon Engineering. His name is on the published papers. He’s mentioned in all the articles. He’s very bright, very credentialed, very connected guy. He took first in Canada’s national physics competition, picked up an MIT prize for experimental physics and Time Magazine picked him as one of its Heroes of the Environment.Wait. What? The guy who just sold a net loss air carbon capture technology using natural gas to people who will use it for enhanced oil recovery is a Hero of the Environment? Why does that sound so familiar? Perhaps it’s because I’ve published a series of pieces[26][27][28] recently on the ill-founded, cherry-picked and biased views another of Time Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment, Michael Shellenberger[29], who really doesn’t like renewable energy as a solution, preferring nuclear in its place. What is it with Time Magazine’s HotEs that they get things wrong so badly after they are noticed?Dr. Keith has game in this regard. Keith runs The Keith Group[30] affiliated with Harvard and funded by a bunch of folks including the Gates Foundation (which really ought to look twice at giving money to it) and is devoted to a focus on the science and public policy of solar geoengineering.What’s solar geoengineering? That’s putting lots of stuff in the atmosphere to avert warming by masking the effects of CO2, which most ethicists and pragmatists agree will do three things[31]. First, it will mean we keep burning fossil fuels and increasing the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere further with all of the detriments to marine life that comes with that. Second, it will be an expensive, annual cost which will have to be done pretty much forever which we will stop doing and lead to another massive warming spell. And finally, have tremendous unknown and hard to predict impacts on our ecosystems and the like.It’s a great thing to research, but a terrible thing to do. Keith is a strong advocate at top policy levels for this. Fossil-fuel companies love geoengineering. Some engineer types love geoengineering. The rest of the world rightly considers it akin to open heart surgery by a nine-year old without anesthesia and would prefer to simply stop emitting CO2 instead. If we ever resort to geoengineering, we’ve failed.But there’s more about Dr. Keith. Not long ago he co-authored a study[32] with one of the members of his geoengineering group stating that wind farms would create global warming. Yes, that’s right. One of the major solutions to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels is actually a problem. He and his collaborator’s thinking was deeply shoddy and much mocked when it came out. Once again, that paper was in Joule, the no-impact-factor, brand-new journal that his latest Carbon Engineering paper is in. Perhaps there’s something to be learned from that? The co-author, Miller, was lead author with Keith as co-author in another much-derided attack[33] on wind energy claiming it had massive limits to the ability to provide power.Basically, Keith really doesn’t understand or like renewables but loves fossil fuels, and is building a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. As I said, very smart but not very wise.Who else is pointing out that this emperor has no clothes?Well, returning to Dr. Jacobson, he doesn’t include air carbon capture in his models for a 100% renewable future. He’s globally acknowledged for his team’s modeling of 100% renewables by 2050 for all US states and the majority of countries globally, providing a clear and sensible policy path. Why doesn’t Jacobson include air carbon capture? He explains it in Why Not Synthetic Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (SDACCS) as Part of a 100% Wind-Water-Solar (WWS) and Storage Solution to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Security[34].By removing CO2 from the air, SDACCS does exactly what WWS generators, such as wind turbines and solar panels, do. This is because WWS generators replace fossil generators, preventing CO2 from getting into the air in the first place. The impact on climate of removing one molecule of CO2 from the air is the same as the impact of preventing one molecule from getting into the air in the first place.The differences between WWS generators and SDACCS equipment, though, are that the WWS generators also (a) eliminate non-CO2 air pollutants from fossil fuel combustion; (b) eliminate the upstream mining, transport, and refining of fossil fuels and the corresponding emissions; (c) largely reduce the pipeline, refinery, gas station, tanker truck, oil tanker, and coal train infrastructure of fossil fuels; (d) largely eliminate oil spills, oil fires, gas leaks, and gas explosions; (e) substantially reduce international conflicts over energy; (f) reduce the large-scale blackout risk due to the distributed nature of many WWS technologies; and so-on.SDACCS does none of that. Its sole benefit is to remove CO2 from the air. To do that, it costs more than renewable energy.All of that electricity that’s used to move all that air to find the 411 parts per million could be used for productive purposes and be much more efficient at removing CO2 from the air along with a bunch of other benefits. Seems obvious.What about carbon capture at fossil fuel source of generation of electricity instead? You know, where all that CO2 is concentrated in the first place? Well, a study[35] led by Sgouris Sgouridis at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi found it wasn’t worthwhile either.“We show that constructing CCS power plants for electricity generation is generally worse than building renewable energy plants, even when we include the effects of storage systems like batteries and hydrogen,” says Sgouridis. The researchers also discuss significant challenges that CCS promoters would need to address to upscale the technology sufficiently for it to become useful. “These challenges should make the energy policy community very apprehensive about relying on such a solution rather than considering it as a last resort,” Sgouridis says.That 50% of natural gas CO2 emissions required to fuel the air carbon capture? That’s what the Sgouridis paper is talking about. Modeling and peer-reviewed research is showing that even the 97.5% CO2 capture from the natural gas combined heat and power solution isn’t worth it.The first rule of being deep in a hole is to stop digging. Wind and solar electricity being used for productive purposes is much better than using it for air carbon capture.SummaryAir carbon capture is a fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry outside of very specific niches. It won’t and can’t scale to the size of the problem. There is no need for the scale of CO2 that would be created in order to be usefully effective. The total CO2 load for the energy required for capture, processing, compression, storage, distribution and sequestration is almost certain to be greater than the CO2 removed from the atmosphere. It’s easier to get CO2 from biomass, or just bury the biomass than to do air carbon capture. And it’s much more efficient to just not emit the CO2 in the first place.Footnotes[1] Carbon Engineering: CO2 capture and the synthesis of clean transportation fuels[2] Capturing Carbon Would Cost Twice The Global Annual GDP[3] No, Magnesite Isn't The Magic CO2 Sequestration Solution Either[4] Air Carbon Capture's Scale Problem: 1.1 Astrodomes For A Ton Of CO2[5] Carbon Capture Is Expensive Because Physics[6] Mark Z. Jacobson - Wikipedia[7] Climate change 'magic bullet' gets boost[8] Low-Emitting Electricity Production[9] A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere[10] Joule[11] Page on cbc.ca[12] An air-liquid contactor for large-scale capture of CO2 from air[13] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences[14] Parts Sales Fill[15] How much air, by mass, enters an average CFM56 turbofan engine cruising per minute?[16] An air-liquid contactor for large-scale capture of CO2 from air[17] Global Thermostat[18] Graciela Chichilnisky - Wikipedia[19] Earth and Environmental Sciences[20] Europe Stores Electricity in Gas Pipes[21] The Physical CO2 Market[22] DigiTool Stream Gateway Error[23] How much CO2 produced by burning one barrel of oil - Pyrolysium.org since 2011[24] https://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-600-2007-004/CEC-600-2007-004-F.PDF[25] Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences[26] Public Fear Of Nuclear Isn't Why Nuclear Energy Is Fading[27] US Could Achieve 3X As Much CO2 Savings With Renewables Instead Of Nuclear For Less Money[28] US Commentators Point At Germany For Bad Energy Policies, But Live In Glass Houses[29] Michael Shellenberger - Wikipedia[30] The Keith Group[31] Geoengineering Is Not a Solution to Climate Change[32] Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant warming[33] Two methods for estimating limits to large-scale wind power generation[34] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/AirCaptureVsWWS.pdf[35] The catch with carbon catching