From Sept 2, 2022
I was confused yesterday. I was listening to Science In Action interview “University of Toronto chemist Geoff Ozin and Eric Bachman, founder of the start-up CO2 Rail, explain their vision.”
I was confused because their vision is to add rail cars to existing trains everywhere that capture CO2 as they go. And the part that confused me was about energy. They kept saying that they would have huge batteries in the rail cars to run the CO2 extraction, and that these batteries would be continually charged from the WASTED energy of regenerative breaking. The confusing part was the “otherwise wasted,” bit. Electrified rail, like used all over China and Europe does not “waste” regenerative breaking energy. It feeds back into the system powering vehicles that are not breaking…
But then it dawned on me. There is a more primitive kind of rail engine. Almost all rail drive units are electric motors, but in savage countries like Canada those motors are supplied electricity by huge onboard diesel generators…
It suddenly dawned on me that their carbon extraction system depended on adding heavy loads to trains and increasing diesel fuel consumption. Burning extra fossil fuel to extract fossil fuel emissions.
People sometimes put yard waste in big paper yard waste bags. And fine, that may be the only way you have of getting rid of a bag-load of leaves. But the net resource cost of each bag, if price is indicative, is like 50¢ per bag. But the material you are conserving, by diverting the yard waste, is certainly worth less than 50¢. You are using 50¢ worth of resources to conserve 5 to 10¢ (¿?) worth of resources. This is a net waste of resources.
And this is what I was immediately reminded of by Geoff and Eric’s vision. A scheme which takes some CO2 out of the atmosphere, while probably putting more, or at least a large fraction of the amount of CO2, back.
And there it is. Another fantasy environmental ‘solution’ which on closer examination turns out to likely do more harm than good.
