As this isn’t about Carbon Capture, I’ll just say that Carbon Engineering’s solution is only fit for enhanced oil recovery using unmarketable natural gas, which is exactly what it’s doing in the Permian Basin with Oxy.
Getting up a to a million tons of CO2 a year would require two kilometers of 20-meter high, 8-meter thick fans running 24/7/365 for 0.0025% of annual CO2 emissions, and 0.0001% of the historical problem. As I calculated while assessing Carbon Engineering, an alternative technology which is also funded by the crowd around Bill Gates, you have to filter a Houston Astrodome’s worth of air to get a ton of CO2.ĭirect air capture’s failure of scale is that while the space blanket of 415 ppm of CO2 is enough to warm the planet, it’s very expensive to extract. Similarly, while I haven’t specifically torn apart Carbon Capture, it’s just another direct air capture solution, requiring absurd amounts of manufactured materials and energy to separate 415 ppm of CO2 from the air. Getting attached to a technology and not realizing that it was time to let it go isn’t a good sign. It appears that Gross has loved concentrating solar power for a couple of decades, with two previous CSP ventures before Heliogen.
I tore apart Heliogen’s claims and results 2.5 years ago ( part 1, part 2), pointing out that a small percentage improvement on concentrating solar power’s generation efficiency would still not make it competitive with photovoltaic solar, and that its claims of being an industrial heat provider made no sense at all as heat isn’t required in a 1-meter disc 100 meters off the ground, but deep inside industrial complexes. Gross wasn’t really on my radar screen, but certainly his companies have turned out to be. Many in the Breakthrough circle are still stuck in the mid-2000s, when there were a lot more unanswered questions, and they haven’t updated their assumptions.
But they do lead to Gates and others thinking that we need breakthrough solutions when we have the vast majority of the solutions in mature technologies which just need incremental innovation and continued economies of scale. These critiques are only on his efforts around energy and renewables, not on the rest of his body of work, of which I have no opinion. As I asked and answered two years ago, What Does Bill Gates’ Favorite Energy Guru, Vaclav Smil, Get Wrong? Smil misreads the energy transition, especially around natural gas, and ignores rejected energy and economies of scale for manufacturing. This isn’t to say that either Gross or Gates’ hearts aren’t in the right place, but they are clearly listening to the wrong technical advisors when it comes to energy. And like Bill Gates, he keeps getting a lot of money thrown at marginal climate technologies. Like Bill Gates, he made his money in computers, although in the dot-com era with a bunch of shrewd and lucky bets. But I didn’t count on the SPAC craze which is so heavily distorting cleantech markets, or the ongoing ability of Bill Gross to get a lot of money for poor ideas.
I expected it to wither and die, unmourned. Energy Vault was so obviously flawed in so many ways in its first incarnation that I didn’t even bother to critique it.
0 kommentar(er)
