Carbon Capture With Solar and Wind: One Doesn't Often See Perpetual Motion Machines in the Scientific Literature, but...

[NNadir]

...here one is.

We don't need California, Texas, Wyoming, Montana and Alaska or their useless wilderness for anything but a giant solar and wind industrial plants in a giant perpetual motion machine.

Sigh...Unbelievable...

Here's the paper: The Potential and Cost of Carbon Dioxide Removal Using Direct Air Capture with Land-Based Wind and Utility-Scale Photovoltaics Elwin Hunter-Sellars, Tao Dai, Nathan C. Ellebracht, Hélène Pilorgé, Maxwell Pisciotta, Alexander P. Bump, Edna Rodriguez Calzado, Susan D. Hovorka, Corinne D. Scown, and Simon H. Pang
Environmental Science & Technology 2026 60 (7), 5430-5441.

The paper is free to read at the link. Read it if you want to, but be warned: it's fossil fuel greenwashing and nothing else.

Here's a map, from the paper, indicating the lower 48 areas the authors propose for their perpetual motion machine:



The caption:

Figure 4. Identified suitable land for wind (blue) and solar photovoltaic (green) electricity generation for Adsorbent DACS facilities in the long term deployment scenario and the overlap with quantifiable geologic storage. Installations are color graded based on their generation potential, with darker colors indicating higher potential..

I'm really not going to spend a lot of time on this remarkable line of another "by XXXX" bullshit, where XXXX is some year off in the future when the speaker or writer evoking it will be dead or retired or otherwise in no position to pay the costs. In this case XXXX is 2050, just 24 years from now.

Ain't gonna happen.

Solar and wind at a cost of trillions of dollars has done not a fucking thing to reduce the use of fossil fuels because their operations depend on the use of fossil fuels. Therefore, as should be obvious on inspection, this is a perpetual motion machine. The real task is to rapidly phase out fossil fuels. There is one, and only one, tool to do this, nuclear energy, because it's 1) carbon free, 2) infinitely expandable, 3) high temperature (and thus amenable to process intensification), 4) has low mass requirements, and 5) miniscule land requirements.

The purpose of the reactionary impulse to make our energy supplies on the weather, abandoned for a reason in the late 19th and early 20th century for a reason, precisely at the time we have destabilized the weather with dangerous fossil fuel waste, was always, is always, and always will be about attacking the only clean sustainable form of primary energy there is: Nuclear energy.

Have a nice evening.

[Easterncedar]

1. I appreciate the information, as always

[thought crime]

2. It's not about nuclear energy.

from the post:

"The purpose of the reactionary impulse to make our energy supplies on the weather, abandoned for a reason in the late 19th and early 20th century for a reason, precisely at the time we have destabilized the weather with dangerous fossil fuel waste, was always, is always, and always will be about attacking the only clean sustainable form of primary energy there is: Nuclear energy."

Actually no. Solar and Wind energy is about using abundant and free sources of energy with zero emissions to avoid climate change and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. It has nothing to do with nuclear energy; that's just a different solution, but NOT the only solution. There is no Zero-sum competition between Nuclear vs Solar/Wind. The idea that there is some conspiracy against Nuclear Energy is paranoid and frankly, unhinged. It appears to be motivated by resentment that more Nuclear plants aren't being built, but that is due to the enormous capital costs of such projects, which requires government subsidy and extraordinary safety regulation. There is no reason to blame renewable energy for the failures of nuclear energy. Just fix it or get over it.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. Indeed

A rational response might see that intermittent power sources like wind and solar could be used to “make hay while the sun shines,” reserving (relatively) constant sources like nuclear fission to supply the electrical grid.

However, any proposal to use renewable sources for any purpose is gainsaid, by our local Nuclear Zealot, for irrational reasons.

If the proposal were to build large numbers of nuclear plants to power carbon capture, I’m confident it would be enthusiastically endorsed.