Farm Tap Yearly Inspection Report: Fill & Download for Free

I don’t think it’s something you can explain or people that don’t get British humour will ever get from having something explained to them either. It’s just one of those things either you get completely or you don’t and never will.A weird one really but we tend to have humour that’s either immensely witty, clever and done so well it can easily be dismissed or mistaken for just sheer stupidity (Monty Python, Blackadder perfect examples) or it is sheer daft, stupid stuff based on observations of different types of British people and characters we manage to cram into this one small little patch of land.We live smack bang at the arse end of nowhere in-between three farms and my husband and I can still stop each other whilst out and about, point and go to each other “See that - that there. It’s chicken. ACTUALLY MADE OF CHICKEN”Few years ago now I was out and about with the dogs and walking up a dirt farm track to go sort the horses. Passed a field with several cows laying out right by the fence and went “Oooh hello cows”Without missing a beat this voice from the darkness went “HELLO NICE LADY” I nearly shit myself. Was an engineer from Network Rail inspecting the tracks running alongside the opposite side but it tickled me for ages afterwards how quick he was.Know some people that wouldn’t get that in a million years and be all “Why…why did he pretend to be a cow? Did he think you’d believe it was the cows actually talking back???”Find people like that soul destroying I can’t be around them.Comedy sketch shows like Big Train were originally shown as intended minus the laugh track it was so disappointing when they later added it on presumably to appeal to a wider audience and the rest of the world going “What the fuck??!”That's what made it and as it was with the sketch of wild jockeys being stalked by the artist formerly known as Prince was brilliant because it had the authenticity of a BBC wildlife documentary and caught you off guard.Same with Annoying Devil from Balls of Steel. It was such childish stuff like offering free face painting for kids and writing Poo on their heads, handing out free umbrellas with TWAT and ANUS written on the top of them that made it.One of the funniest things that still makes me belly laugh is the “Sticker on Your Front” game from Dick n Dom which was broadcast as a kid's Saturday morning show but oh God the one where that guy has a giant picture of Dom's head stuck on the front of his jumper and no idea at all and Dick is literally screaming with laughter.I think it's fair to say we have a love for really childish shit.Another thing I forgot to add is when people overhear something we say that most people don’t and you see this look of confusion, mild fear and slight concern that somebody somewhere is out searching for a missing person.I must threaten to ring the police on my dogs at least five times a day. They’re always the naughtiest black and white dogs I ever seen in my entire human life and I will pick up the phone”Police? Yes I’d like to report the two naughtiest black and white dogs I have ever seen in my human life”It’ll be for nothing like if I Catch one or both rolling on top of the muck heap at the yard they’re the naughtiest, shittiest dirty bastard black and white dogs I have ever seen and I’m not covering for them any more. The police are gonna hear all about this and so on.About a year ago I called them back from over the far end of the river and when one didn’t come straight back I went marching and stomping over pretending to be angry going “RIGHT I AM NOT HAVING THIS YOU ARE BEING REPORTED TO THE POLICE!!! NAUGHTIEST BLACK AND WHITE DOG I EVER WITNESSED WITH MY HUMAN EYEBALLS JUST WHAT ON EARTH??”Wasn’t my dog. Someone else’s black and white collie sat there looking at me and his owner looked genuinely worried. When you try to explain stuff like that to someone that doesn’t immediately see the funny side there’s no point. You make yourself look even more deranged.Only two of the dogs in this photo are mine. One is not mine.Same when I used to fall out with one of my horses on a daily basis at our old place. He would nick the hay from the pony and be a real meanie just mean and nipped him on the arse, chased him off and took the tiny amount of hay meant for so I stuffed all the hay of his in my arms, stomped off with it and was really giving it what for “You fucking greedy spotty-arsed bastard that was horrible! HORRIBLE!! Well you know what? You know what? You’re not having any now - none of it . Suck my ass if you think I’m letting that one go”I stomped off muttering to myself then would get a sudden burst of anger and stomp back out again with handfuls of hay “Look? Look at what you could have had you had - like five times the amount of hay ready and waiting and now what do you have? FUCK ALL that’s what. Well tough tits you can stand there and think about why the pony has hay and you have none. That’s it we’re done. FAT BASTARD”Courier driver gently tapped on the side of the stable “Erm.. parcel for Mrs Webster”My husband said he would not be at all surprised if primary schools were sending out letters telling parents not to let their children use the public footpath running through the farm as there have been reports of a mental bitch up there divorcing her horses every other weekend and rings the police on her naughty dogs.Me having a massive thrombie at the horse for nicking the tiny bit of hay constantly going back to show him just how much he could have had.

In addition Ryan Carlyle's excellent answer, electrical engineers:Design,plan and engineer the high voltage work at refineries - Refineries use a large number of compressor,furnaces and assorted assorted equipment that uses higher voltages (480VAC-4160 VAC). While some smaller facilities outsource much of this work to contractors, even they need an EE on site to make the final decisions and write the reports for the refinery manager and the company.They write,amend and approve the electrical MOC's - Management of Change documents which are complex sets of instructions which are required for any major upgrades or new installations at refineries. These are not welcome documents for them to create as they are scrutinized closely by the company, the insurer, the state where the refinery is located and the Department Energy. Errors can result in fines and delays to projects.They coordinate and in some cases actually create the schematics for the electrical and electronic systems refinery-wide - This is also another difficult (one that I worked on a few years in New Jersey) because the US stopped constructing refineries in 1980s. The electrical systems on site anywhere from 1−75+ years of age and many of the schematics were hand drawn or single line prints (computer aided drafting, or CAD, has been commonplace for almost 30 years so that gives you an idea of how old many of the schematics are). While most of this is also farmed out, the EE has inspect and approve the final drafts. They are responsible for making certain that the drawings the maintenance departments uses are up-to-date (although this is a mixed bag)Any new construction of buildings that occurs within the refinery grounds has to be planned in part by the EE's . - They approve the schematics, coordinate with vendors and make certain that all of the local electrical permitting is taken care of prior to the beginning of construction.All of the lighting in the refinery falls under an EE. - Any major changes and/or upgrades have to be detailed,planned and approved by the EE'sThe electrical maintenance department depends heavily upon the EE's. - While at some refineries (the last one I worked for example had several EE grads working as maintenance electricians as the pay in the union was better than salaried work) they were not PE's (Professional Engineers) and as such they couldn't sign off certain repairs, installations or modifications. The maintenance supervisors and even the manager (if such a person exists on site) are also rarely EE's , so they often have consult with the EE's for any work which needs to be performed.Some smaller refineries don't have an instrumentation engineer on staff, so guess who gets that job? - Even though they outsource much of the work, the EE would still need to approve and write any MOCs required (see also #2)The EE acts as a coordinating resource with local electrical utility - Usually if the refinery does not have an on site power station ( usually the smaller ones) they are among the largest, if not THE largest consumer of electricity locally. This can mean meetings with the utility and being the contact point in case of outages and service upgrades.All of the planning and scheduling of the electrical and electronic repairs for the 5-year outages at refineries (called turnarounds) are handled through the EE - This is in addition to their normal tasks and it can take up much of the limited time that they already have to do their very complex jobs.I have actually oversimplified much what occurs at refineries as there are dozens individual tasks which the EE's perform. Most refineries are in need of EEs (as the IT industry pays better and isn't as potentially dangerous, so they have tapped many of the best grads) and for someone looking to gain a wide range of experience and a great deal of responsibility in a short order, it may be an ideal position.

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