Why is there so much focus on producing less CO₂ rather than investing in technology to recycle it?

Question

There are endless debates about climate change and CO₂ reduction. The US decided to withdraw from the Paris agreement, although there are no legally binding requirements.

Also, this article argues about Kyoto protocol effectiveness:

Overall, the result is that global emissions have showed no sign of slowing down, as the chart below shows. In that sense, the Kyoto protocol has been a failure. But it was unquestionably an important first step in global climate diplomacy.

For me, it is quite clear that it is very hard to control CO₂ emissions. However, there are emergent technology to recycle CO₂ such as this one or this one. Using such technologies may reduce pressure on industry to produce less CO₂.

Question: Why is there so much focus on producing less CO₂ rather than investing in technology to recycle it?

Answer 1

Both of your examples use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel. They are cutting edge, meaning that they haven't yet been engineered into usable systems that people could buy. The proof of concept was only published in 2016 and 2017 for each.

So, reasons:

1. They don't actually exist in usable form (yet).
2. It's not clear that we are better off burning fossil fuels and then using solar power to capture the carbon dioxide that is produced than to just use solar power directly.
3. We already have methods to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into fuel. That's the basis of the biofuels movement. Plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into plant matter. We harvest the plants and turn them into fuel.
4. We don't know if these processes will be power positive. We especially don't know that if we have to transport the fuel from somewhere with plentiful solar (e.g. New Mexico or Saudi Arabia) to somewhere that needs fuel (e.g. Illinois or Romania).
5. Converting carbon dioxide into fuel does not reduce the pressure on industry.

One of the problems that we currently face is that many alternative power sources use more power to produce than they provide. For example, fusion power reactions currently draw more power than they provide, so they are not self sustaining.

Another issue is that these examples produce fuels. Fuels get burnt and turned into energy, releasing their carbon dioxide. That doesn't actually sequester any carbon dioxide. I.e. these examples are for reducing the net production of carbon dioxide, not for reducing existing carbon dioxide. Yes, they briefly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide. But they then turn around and release it again. That doesn't offset existing carbon dioxide production. The goal is instead to replace current production with more sustainable process like these might be.

There is significant investment in searching for ways to convert carbon dioxide into fuel. That's why there is a biofuels movement and is why these examples were funded.

Answer 2

tl;dr- Recycling CO₂ at the scale that we're producing it's pretty expensive. Sure, we can technically do it, but it'd have to be cheaper than just switching to clean technologies to be worthwhile.

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It's a technical issue rather than a political one.

First, CO₂ does have some industrial uses. For example, it's useful in carbonating soft drinks — though we produce way more than that use could have. More practically, oil companies pump it back under ground to help drive the oil out of the ground in enhanced oil recovery. That's also kinda limited though.

Next, there are research efforts into carbon-neutral fuel. Most of the stuff I've seen is basically an attempt to get bacteria to do photosynthesis (like green plants do) to fix the carbon into molecules. It's basically the same thing as planting trees to soak up the CO₂, but bacteria can do it faster.

Scientifically speaking, the trouble with using CO₂ is that it's in a "low-energy state". Roughly:

• Burning fuel gives off CO₂ because CO₂ is what's left after the fuel loses its energy.

• Making CO₂ into other things requires putting the energy back into it.

The "energy" in this case is the enthalpy of formation, as can be seen in this Born–Haber cycle for the combustion of methane (CH₄) resulting in a net energy release due to the reactants' higher energy state than the products':

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The relevance here is that the laws of thermodynamics are pretty hard to get around; so, converting CO₂ into other chemicals takes a lot of work.

When plants do photosynthesis, they're investing the energy that they get from the sun by making CO₂ and water into sugar and oxygen. They don't actually want the oxygen, so they just release it; it's the sugar they want so that they can burn it to get that energy back later.

The gist behind biofuel can be that we basically get huge fields of bacteria to soak up the sun. Then the question seems to be, if we're building solar-collectors for bacteria, why not cut out the middle man and just deploy solar cells instead? That gets into engineering efficiency questions.

So, basically, recycling CO₂'s expensive. Sure we can do it, though other power-production technologies are more likely to be long-term solutions. A lot of CO₂-mitigation technologies are concerned with getting cheap near-term fixes in place.

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Note: Cleaning up the atmosphere isn't currently on the table

As pointed out by @EricTowers in the comments below, the enthalpy problem discussed above is just part of the issue. In practice, most CO₂ is expelled to the atmosphere, so it must be captured before we even get to having to deal with the enthalpy deficit. This can be described as having to pay back the entropy cost — though entropy's pretty subjective, so that's a bit harder to put a number to beyond saying that it's a major problem.

In general, before we do anything with CO₂, we'd have to capture it. Capturing CO₂ from large point sources like coal-fired power plants tends to be most efficient (while still significantly costly) since the exhaust (flue gas) from those power plants tends to contain a high concentration of CO₂, making it relatively easy to separate it.

Once CO₂ is in the atmosphere, then it becomes a problem of open-air capture. Like everything else, this is easy to do from a technical perspective, it just multiplies the cost of capture quite a bit. Due to the significantly increased expense of doing it this way and the availability of large point-sources that don't currently capture CO₂, most engineering efforts aren't currently concerned with open-air capture. Presumably that'll be a costly problem we might worry about in the future, after we deal with the relatively cheap problem of reducing our emissions.

So if we split solution pathways up into three categories,

1. reduce CO₂ from large point-sources (e.g., switch to "clean coal"),

2. switch to renewable energy-sources (e.g., solar),

3. capture CO₂ directly from the atmosphere to clean it up,

at present, we're primarily concerned with (1) and (2), not (3).

Due to the cost of cleaning up the atmosphere, it's not something we're realistically going to worry about in the near future, unless there's some unforeseen technological breakthrough.

Answer 3

It's easier (and more energy efficient) to produce less CO2 than to make it and then try to capture it and break it apart. Rather than use solar energy to break CO2 apart, you could use that same solar energy to replace fossil fuel, and you'd get more energy out of it.

It takes more energy to break CO2 apart than you get out of burning carbon to produce CO2, just as electrolysis uses more energy to break water into oxygen and hydrogen, than one gets out of burning the resulting hydrogen and oxygen. Heat loss in the process of both electrolysis and and combustion accounts for much of the inefficiency.

Bypass that cycle and use the solar energy directly to replace fossil fuel, and you also eliminate the other pollutants produced by combustion.

Ironically, a solar powered device to break CO2 down into oxygen and carbon already exists, at zero cost, and it has been functioning for at least a billion years. It's called a rain forest. However, we don't hear any talk about deforestation any more. Either deforestation was completely arrested (which it wasn't), or deforestation doesn't serve the political agendas that appear to be driving much of the AGW discussions taking place today.

Answer 4

The production of carbon is a negative externality. It's a cost of production that is spread very thin (to the entire world essentially), instead of being paid for by the producer of the carbon generating process. Taxes can attempt to account for this and ideally redistribute the money to address the people affected. Regulations can raise the cost of carbon production so that it's no longer 0. Subsidies towards substitute technologies can lower costs to reflect the lack of carbon.

The problem is that regulating this on a global scale is extremely difficult because each country can be seen as a producer of carbon. The externality of carbon production is placed on the whole world, so individual countries have no incentive to curb emissions without guarantees of very wide scale reciprocity.

Any truly effective large scale carbon sequestration technology would have these problems in addition to others. Taxes are just a redistribution of money, it's quite possible for a particular tax to fund policies with greater economic benefits or social utility than whatever the tax payer could have done with that money. So as a policy a carbon tax can address the problem while having other upsides. This also applies to regulations or subsidies; carbon emission reductions can probably be tied to reductions in other pollutants for example, and the development of renewable energy can have benefits towards national security and fill new economic niches on the global market.

In contrast, some sort of carbon sequestration technology would be a pure positive externality with no way for the producer to recoup the cost. Whoever sequesters carbon would bear all the costs while helping out the entire world, thereby incentivizing others to avoid also participating in sequestration or reductions in emission. For it to develop would require political leadership on a global scale that's even more difficult than emission reductions. For it to be costed fairly, there would have to be some sort of world wide carbon tax with a supra-national organization then carrying out the sequestration.

Answer 5

Politically, it's easier, more effective, and gets results faster to regulate existing industries and carbon producers than it is to promote new, untested at scale technology.

Technologically it's easier and generally cheaper to slow down an existing "leak" than it is to clean up the spill after the fact. Would you recommend fixing a leaking water pipe, or putting a pump in the basement?

Environmentally the carbon does its damage until it's collected, so while it doesn't do permanent harm, think of it like a loan. While it's "out there" it costs interest. It's better that it never become a loan, and never collects interest (changes in heat retention, water carbonation, etc.) than to borrow from the environment and cause "interest" to be accrued.

Emotionally (important to politics and activists in general) it's important to "blame" someone. It's hard to fight against a problem, and force people to change unless there's a scapegoat, and a concrete point of action.

Financially it's less costly, both in terms of government cost, and energy required, to regulate industries than it is to promote new technology. For every dollar or kilowatt-hour spent, some carbon can be removed from the atmosphere, but generally speaking more carbon can be "removed" from the atmosphere per dollar or energy spent by not producing it, while still maintaining the same industrial process output. In either case you have to spend resources, but the same final result is obtained more cheaply by reductions than by captures.

Answer 6

If you consider CO2 emission as the source of climate change, then only a reduction of CO2 emission can be the ultimate solution to the problem. Thus, emitting less CO2 is the goal. However, some fields lend themselves more to CO2 reduction than others. While it is relatively straight forward to replace cars with internal combustion engines with electric vehicles; electricity generation can be switches only in a much larger time frame. Whereas e.g. steel production will turn out to be a very tricky one. You simply can't run a blast furnace with electricity.

That is where the technologies which focus on recyling or storage of CO2 come into play. If you can't stop a blast furnace from emitting CO2, you can capture the CO2 and do something, e.g. turn it into other chemicals.

However, in total more CO2 reduction is achieved by not emitting the CO2 in the first place.

Answer 7

There is another problem: If you partly recycle CO2, there is the risk of people (and thus, politics) developing the mindset that the problem is somehow "solved", which decreases the pressure to lower the CO2 emissions. You may end up in a situation where finally you have equal or even more emission of CO2 due to careless production, with all the additional problems that come along with CO2 production (emission of other pollutants, depletion of limited resources etc.).

Compare this to the similar Jevons paradox, where an increase in resource efficiency leads to an increase in resource consumption instead of a decrease.

So, the most sustainable way is to reduce CO2 emissions by simply using less resources.

Answer 8

There are some very good answers already, but I don't see this specific point being addressed and it's important. New technology doesn't always pan out. Period. If we go back to the late 1970s, when there was genuine belief that oil shortages were here to say, scientists and politicians were talking about the electric car and solar power as a gasoline alternatives. 40 years later the electric car is still around, and it's been significantly improved, but it's very far from a practical replacement for the gas-combustion engine. Solar power has considerably improved as well and it's price of manufacture has fallen precipitously, but it's limited by battery technology, transmission efficiency and intermittent sunshine. Pardon my language but technology is a bitch. It can be wonderful but it's not a guarantee.

It's also worth pointing out that the Paris accords were April 2016, and your articles are from July 2016 and September 2017. It's unclear if progress in the field of solar energy conversion of CO2 had been announced at the time of the Paris meetings.

Moving onto your question, and I think it's a very fair question:

Why is there so much focus on producing less CO2 rather than investing in technology to recycle it?

The talk that came out of the Paris accords was reduction, that's 100% accurate, and fair arguments can be made (pointed out in some of the other answers) that reduction is the most effective approach given current technology.

That doesn't mean that research is being ignored. Find me a politician who says "Reduction is the only solution so I'm cutting off research into new technology". Have you ever heard that? I've never heard a politician say that. I've heard politicians say that about their opponents. It seems to me that the politicians who want to address climate change and make goals of reductions are also the politicians who are willing to fund research. Your two articles mention government funded research (The University of Illinois Chicago and the department of energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) so, government funding is behind the two articles you posted, that counts for something (though it's possible some of the funding is corporate/private)

It's also possible that some politicians and some nations have other agendas in play, like an oil importing nation might have a vested interest in reducing it's demand for oil imports, or (and this happens on both sides), they may be speaking to their audience who wants to hear the words "reduction" or the flip side, wants to hear the words "hot air" or "conspiracy". Politicians talk to their audiences, but that doesn't mean they don't consider technological alternatives.

Obama, for example, got a lot of heat for Solyndra and Solyndra had promising technology, but it was a business with plummeting prices and lots of international competition, which makes it hard to turn a profit. There are accusations of China stealing the Solyndra technology and mass producing it while avoiding the development costs, but such accusations, whether true or not, go outside the scope of this question.

There's also the issue that it's problematic to announce a solution based on a technology that isn't finished. The ready date is out of their hands, so any agreements based on same are like houses built on sand, but they can reach an agreement on proposed reduction.

You're right that such promises may not be met and the effectiveness of un-kept promises is, well, borderline, but keep in mind actual CO2 footprint numbers do take into account carbon capture, so they aren't ignoring new technology in their agreements at all. They may not be talking up new technology, but they aren't dismissing it.

Given the nature of politics, politicians are between a rock and a hard place. As you said, reducing the CO2 footprint is hard. Politicians say what they can sell and, as pointed out in other answers, based on today's technology, reduction appears to be the way to go. So there's a few reasons why politicians focus on reduction.

Scientists don't have a constituency to answer to so they can be more brazen in their words. Few politicians, for example, propose nuclear power as a key first step solution to climate change, but some scientists have proposed exactly that. Few politicians will say "the ocean will rise 7 feet in 50 years", but some scientists will give that borderline alarmist warning to anyone who will listen (note, Michael Mann didn't say the next fifty years, he said we could see that kind of rapid rise at some 50 year interval in the future). His words being twisted aside, Politicians tread more carefully and talk to their constituency.

It's easier for a scientist to be pro nuclear power than a politician with an environmental base. (and not all scientists are pro nuclear power as a way to address climate change, nor am I advocating that, I'm just pointing that when they are pro nuclear, it's easier or them to come out and say so). Nuclear power also raises security concerns in many parts of the world, and I feel that I'm sidetracking, so I'll stop now.

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A bit of science:

The problem with CO2, as noted in one of your articles is that it's a very stable, very tightly bound molecule. We can't "recycle it" without putting more energy into it than the oil or coal gave us when burning it and that defeats the purpose. It's also problematic to capture and transport because it's a gas. Consider that 1 kg of oil when burned, produces about 3 kg of CO2 gas. Even if we don't recycle and just capture, capturing that much gas is logistically intensive and expensive and for vehicles, impossible. For coal power planets, CO2 capture is possible but expensive (see clean coal). CO2 recycling/capture is nothing new, and it's been researched since the Carter administration, but it's never been cost effective.

Most people don't understand climate change even though it's reasonably straight forward, but it's remarkable how many people don't understand it. Veritasium did a video where he interviewed people about climate change and asked what they did and the most common answer was recycling, which, he pointed out, was a good thing to do, but not a solution for man made climate change. Given voters limited understanding, I'd give politicians some leway in providing simple answers (reduction), though I hope that in their meetings they get into more specifics.

Your articles

However, there are emergent technology to recycle CO2 such as this one or this one. Using such technologies may reduce pressure on industry to produce less CO2.

First, your two articles are basically the same technology. I read both articles, haven't researched them in detail, so they may use different methods, but it's essentially the same approach, solar energy, using some tricky chemistry involving "nanoflake tungsten diselenide" (article 1) and "copper-silver nanocoral cathode" . . . and an "iridium oxide nanotube anode" (article 2). to convert the stubborn CO2 molecule into some kind of fuel - yeah!!!. Great stuff if it works.

It's worth mentioning That article 1 specifically mentions silver being used in the past, but being too expensive to be practical and article 2 mentions the use of "copper-silver nanocoral" so, lets not get too excited until we actually see the cost effectiveness in action.

To remove a couple hundred billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere (that's what it would take to realistically address climate change - 33 billion tons is added every year, about 15 of that goes into the oceans every year, we've added, in the last decade alone, nearly 200 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. To "solve" climate change or bring it down to 1980s levels, we'd probably need to pull about 500 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by this method.

How long would that take? How much would it cost? How much area would need to be covered by these man made "leafs" It's said that solar panels 335 km square (about the area of Arizona) could supply the world's energy needs, but that ignores storage and transmission.

Source of image.

This proposal would supply electricity to Europe, and it's expected to cost half a trillion dollars.

I like your articles. Don't get me wrong. They're actually very cool and if they work, downright brilliant, but they've not even left the drawing board. To be practical, we'd need to know what they would cost, how long they would be effective, how much CO2 they could capture, who would pay for them and any other possible effects like toxicity. If progress is made, and some projects are built as a test run, it's possible that politicians will discuss the ideas in your articles at the next climate accord in 2020 something. (the date's probably out there, but a quick google search didn't provide it).

Answer 9

Global warming as an issue has been ongoing for thirty years. The focus has been on reducing emissions because no technology had been produced that scaled up to extract carbon dioxide.

Note that the two technologies that you point out have only been developed on the last two years; and I'd hazard a guess that the investment into these strategies was indirectly or directly prompted by fears of global warming and looking for other alternatives.

If they scale up then we will be hearing a lot more about it.

Answer 10

Population is the root problem, it's convenient to ignore that and focus on high tech stuff. There are 3 times as many of us as there were in 1950, 30 times as many as when Christ lived. We're using more energy, burning more fossil fuels, because there are more of us doing it. You can refine the process until it's 99.9% efficient and it still won't work. We need international population control like yesterday.

Answer 11

The reason why people like to dream so devoutly about reducing CO2 emissions is because it appears like the easiest solution.

Not doing something seems like a comparatively easy undertaking compared to doing something. Doing something (like developing, marketing and using technology for energy storage with CO2 as the storage medium) requires knowledge, intelligence and team spirit.

Following this line of argument, not doing something only requires you not to do it. Seemingly no higher education, no brainy arguments, not even any form of mutual consent is necessary to just stop what you are doing. Even a stone can do nothing, doesn't it?

What makes it difficult for more scientifically inclined individuals to follow this reasoning is the apparent fact that there is a cause for previous behavior. In a similar sense as the obese person cannot stop eating because he has access to abundant food resources, and the scarcity of food has been encoded in our genomes over aeons, humanity will not be able to stop consuming our fossil energy resources until complete exhaustion because it is actually the foundation of even our most modest pretensions about civilization.

There will probably be a temporary slowdown due to successful deceptive efforts in the interests of those who would like to keep the remaining resources for themselves. But people will find all kinds of excuses to restart burning fuels again (and, btw. also using nuclear fission), and eventually the fight around the cold-buffet will regain traction. Just like the obese individual loses 20kg in one year, and gains 40kg over the next four years.

One thing that is lightly forgotten in the discussion about man-vs-nature is the fact that we are part of nature, and this doesn't only include the convenient facts, like enjoying flowers, furry animals, and playing kids, but also the facts that disturb the civilized mind, like eating meat, waging war, killing and torturing of other people, and destroying our own basis of existence.

Answer 12

Think about the goals of somebody on the political left - a bigger state, more regulation, higher taxes, perhaps even world government and the end of capitalism. The crisis created by man made climate change is an opportunity to promote this left wing agenda. The only solution, as the left sees it, is to for the state to curb the free markets in order to cut CO2 emissions and save the world.

Politically then, any potential solution to the issues caused by climate change that does not require the state to exert greater control of the economy is problematic for the left: with the failure of communism already one historic chance to destroy capitalism has been lost, the need to tackle climate change offers one more opportunity.

None of this is to say that cutting CO2 emissions isn't also the best policy to follow - it may very well offer us the best chance of success. However the left (who dominate the arts, education, entertainment, media etc) won't welcome attempts to find other solutions.