Stuff You Should Know - How Carbon Capture Works

Episode Date: July 22, 2008

Carbon capture is the process of trapping carbon emissions and storing them away from the atmosphere to prevent global warming. Check out our carbon capture article at HowStuffWorks.com to learn more about the possibility of reducing carbon emissions. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot who would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Brad Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here at HowStuffWorks.com. With me is my fellow staff writer, a guy I like to call Chuck. Charles Chuck Bryant. How are you doing, Chuck?

I'm doing great, Joshua. How are you? I'm doing pretty good, Chuck. You know, I've been thinking a lot about carbon dioxide. As you are often one to do. Yeah. Yeah. I've come up with the theory that carbon dioxide is getting an awfully bad wrap these days. Yeah. All you hear about is your carbon footprint, your carbon footprint, like your Sasquatch stepping on every beautiful thing on Earth. Exactly. And I think that, you know, we are having a problem with carbon dioxide, but it's really us. Yeah. It's a human problem.

Exactly. There's a type of carbon dioxide emission called anthropogenic, which means it's exclusively human created. Now, carbon dioxide is a vital part of Earth's processes. It's part of a biogeochemical process. Right. The carbon cycle. It's like the rain cycle, that kind of thing. And there's carbon dioxide stored in the atmosphere, in the ocean, in the soil. In plants. This is where these are stored. Plants, exactly. Another place that it's stored is in decaying carbon-based life forms or former life forms, say dinosaurs or things like that. You know, stuff that's become things we use for fossil fuel.

Now, rather than this carbon dioxide being released organically, we're digging this stuff up, burning it and releasing this carbon dioxide en masse in a very inorganic way. Right. That's called OIL. Which is? Oil. Oh, yeah. Right. I thought you were abbreviating something. No, no. Acronym? No? No. Just good old fashioned oil. We burn it in the CO2 leaves as waste, just like in a snap. Exactly. There's nothing. Instead of taking place over eons. Right, which is where our problem comes in.

What's the solution? Well, one solution would be to, if you could somehow, capture this carbon. You're blowing my mind here, Chuck. What are you talking about? I know. You can actually do this. There's three ways you can capture carbon. One, before it's burned, called pre-combustion. One, after it's burned, called post-combustion. Logically. Before it leaves the old smoke stack.

And then the old oxy-fuel combustion, which is when you add almost pure oxygen to the CO2, and when it burns, it just makes it allows you to separate it out a little easier. Gotcha. So that's kind of like post-combustion taken to an extra step. It's post-combustion supreme. Nice. Okay. All right. So we've got a way to capture it. And actually, as I understand it, a typical electrical utility or power plant that outfits itself with a self-sustaining carbon capture system can run with 85% or 95% less carbon dioxide emissions.

That's pretty significant. But you've got all this carbon dioxide. What are you going to do with it? Well, ideally, you could throw it in a Ziploc bag and put it in the dark recesses of the back of your fridge. You can't do that, but we have something almost as good called the abyssal plane. Do you know what that is? I do. That's where the Titanic is, baby. Right, which is deep, deep, deep into the ocean. About two and a half miles?

Yeah, it's two and a half miles, 4,000 meters down. 4,000 meters for our Canadian friends? Right. And down there, it's dark, my friend. Very dark. Nothing lives. Nothing grows. No, there's no photosynthesis. It's very cold. Don't kid yourself. No. And there's a heck of a lot of pressure,

almost 6,000 pounds per square inch of pressure compared to about 14 pounds on the surface. Yeah. I would think they'd crumple a full soup can, which is pretty much my measure of power. Right. You know? It's very cold down there, too. Yeah, it is. It's very cold. It's about two degrees, which is chilly.

Okay, so all this makes it an ideal setting, the abyssal planin ideal setting for carbon dioxide storage, right? Exactly. But the question is, how do you get it down there and contain it? Well, okay. All right, I've got one for you. There was a group in the late 90s who figured you could just put it at the bottom. Because of the pressure and the temperature, liquefied carbon dioxide should be negatively buoyant, which means not only will it not float, it'll actually sink.

Right. And ideally stick to the bottom of the seafloor. When they tried it, they injected some into a beaker. It turned into this lava-lampy glob stuff. Right. It just kind of floated away. Yeah. So a guy named Dr. David Keith came up with an idea, put in bags. Right. Just like the Ziplocs, except, you know, they're not Ziplocs. Right. Exactly.

And we also already have carbon dioxide pipeline technology. Right. So we could build it down to these planes and, you know, just capture the CO2 and put them in these giant bags, which by Dr. Keith's estimate could hold two days worth of all the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions that we put out. Right. Which is great. And you never know, you might be able to use it one day in the future. Exactly. We may be able to synthesize a fossil fuel from this captured carbon.

That's crazy. It is. My brain is melted. Nice. That's what I'm here for. So if you want to learn all about carbon capture and storage, we have a lot of articles on it. Go on to HowStuffWorks.com, type in CO2, capture and storage in the search bar. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami.

The cartels, they just killed everybody that was home. Setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Brad Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off.

The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.