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How Carbon Capture Works · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
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  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: from house stuff works dot com. Hi, and welcome to
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  Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, staff writer here at how
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  Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com. With me is my fellow staff writer,
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  Speaker 1: guy like to call Chuck Charles Chuck Bryant. How are
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  Speaker 1: you doing, Chuck? I'm doing great, Joshua. How are you?
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  Speaker 1: I'm doing pretty good, Chuck. Um. You know, I've been
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  Speaker 1: thinking a lot about carbon dioxide, as you are often
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  Speaker 1: wanted to do. Yeah, yeah, I've I've come up with
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  Speaker 1: the theory that carbon dioxide is getting an awfully bad
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  Speaker 1: rap these days. Yeah. All you hear about is your
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  Speaker 1: carbon footprint, Your carbon footprint like your sasquatch stepping on
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  Speaker 1: every beautiful thing on Earth. Exactly. And I think that,
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  Speaker 1: you know, we are having a problem with carbon dioxide,
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  Speaker 1: but um, it's it's really us. It's a human problem exactly.
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  Speaker 1: There's a type of carbon dioxide emission called anthropogenic, which
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  Speaker 1: means it's exclusively human created. No um. Carbon dioxide is
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  Speaker 1: a vital part of Earth's processes as part of a
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  Speaker 1: biogeochemical process. Um, the carbon cycle. It's like the rain cycle,
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  Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Um. And there's carbon dioxide stored
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  Speaker 1: in the atmosphere, in the ocean soil. This is where
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  Speaker 1: these are stored plants exactly. Another place that it's stored
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  Speaker 1: is in decaying uh carbon based life forms or former
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  Speaker 1: life forms, say dinosaurs or things like that, you know,
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  Speaker 1: stuff that's become things we use for fossil fuel. Now,
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  Speaker 1: rather than this carbon dioxide being released organically, we're digging
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  Speaker 1: this stuff up, burning it, and releasing this carbon dioxide
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  Speaker 1: on mass in a very inorganic way, which is oh
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  Speaker 1: yeah right, I thought you were abbreviating something acronym No, no,
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  Speaker 1: just good old fashioned oil. We burn it in the
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  Speaker 1: in the CO two leaves as way. Its just like
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  Speaker 1: in a snap instead of taking place over, which is
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  Speaker 1: where our problem comes in. What's the solution. Well, one
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  Speaker 1: solution would be too if you could somehow capture this carbon.
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  Speaker 1: You're blowing my mind here, Chuck, what are you talking?
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  Speaker 1: I know you can actually do this. There's three ways
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  Speaker 1: you can capture carbon uh. One before it's burned, called
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  Speaker 1: pre combustion, one after it's burned called post combustion. Before
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  Speaker 1: it leaves the old smoke stack and then the old
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  Speaker 1: oxy fuel combustion, which is when you add almost pure
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  Speaker 1: oxygen to the CEO two and when it burns, it
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  Speaker 1: just makes it allows you to separate it a little easier.
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  Speaker 1: So that's kind of like a post combustion taken to
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  Speaker 1: an extra step. It's post combustion supreme. Nice Okay, alright,
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  Speaker 1: So so we've got a way to capture it. And actually,
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  Speaker 1: as I understand it, UM, a typical electrical utility or
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  Speaker 1: power plant that outfits itself with a self sustaining carbon
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  Speaker 1: capture system can can run it like uh with eight
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  Speaker 1: percent or less carbon dioxide emiss. Pretty amazing, that's pretty significant.
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  Speaker 1: But you've got all this carbon dox of what are
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  Speaker 1: you gonna do with it? Well, ideally you could throw
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  Speaker 1: it in zip block bag and put it in the
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  Speaker 1: dark recesses of the back of your fridge. You can't
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  Speaker 1: do that. But we have something almost as good called
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  Speaker 1: the abyssal plane. Uh do you know what that is?
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  Speaker 1: I do. That's where the Titanic is, baby, right, which
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  Speaker 1: is deep, deep, deep into the ocean and a half miles. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: it's two and a half miles, four thousand four thousand
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  Speaker 1: meters for Canadian friends. Right, and uh, down there it's dark,
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  Speaker 1: my friend, very dark. Nothing lives, nothing grows. No, there's
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  Speaker 1: no photosynth. That's very cold now, and there's a heck
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  Speaker 1: of a lot of pressure, almost six thousand pounds per
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  Speaker 1: square anch of pressure, which we had to do about
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  Speaker 1: fourteen pounds on the surface. I would think they crumple
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  Speaker 1: a full soup can, which is pretty much my measure
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  Speaker 1: of power. Right. You know it's very cold down there too,
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  Speaker 1: Yeah it is. It's very cold. It's about two degrees
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  Speaker 1: which is chili. Okay. So all this makes makes it
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  Speaker 1: an ideal setting the abyssal plane and ideal setting for
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  Speaker 1: um carbon dioxide storage, right exactly. But the question is
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  Speaker 1: how you get it down there and contain it? Well, okay,
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  Speaker 1: all right, I've got one for you. There was a
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  Speaker 1: group in the late nineties who figured you could just
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  Speaker 1: put it at the bottom because of the pressure of
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  Speaker 1: the temperature, liquefied carbon dioxide should be negatively buoyant, which
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  Speaker 1: means not only will it not float, it will actually
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  Speaker 1: sink and ideally stick to the bottom of the sea floor. Um.
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  Speaker 1: When they tried it, they injected some into a beaker,
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  Speaker 1: it turned into this lava lampy gloss. Yes. So a
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  Speaker 1: guy named Dr David Keith came up with an idea
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  Speaker 1: put in bags just like the ziplux, except you know
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  Speaker 1: right exactly um and uh, we also already have carbon
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  Speaker 1: dioxide pipeline technology, so we could just build it down
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  Speaker 1: to these planes and you know, just capture this CEO
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  Speaker 1: two UM and put him in these giant bags, which
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  Speaker 1: by Dr Keith's estimate, could hold um two days worth
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  Speaker 1: of all the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions that we put out,
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  Speaker 1: which is great, and you never know, you might be
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  Speaker 1: able to use it one day in the future. Exactly,
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  Speaker 1: we may be able to synthesize a fossil fuel, uh
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  Speaker 1: from this this captured carbon. That's crazy, it is My
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  Speaker 1: brain is melted. Nice. That's what I'm here for. So
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  Speaker 1: if you want to learn all about carbon capture and storage,
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  Speaker 1: we have a lot of articles on it. Go on
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  Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot Com. Type in c O
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  Speaker 1: two capture and storage in the search bar for more
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  Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
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