How Carbon Capture Works

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from house stuff works dot com. Hi, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, staff writer here at how
stuff works dot Com. With me is my fellow staff writer,

(00:22):
guy 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. Um. You know, I've been
thinking a lot about carbon dioxide, as you are often
wanted to do. Yeah, yeah, I've I've come up with
the theory that carbon dioxide is getting an awfully bad
rap these days. Yeah. All you hear about is your
carbon footprint, Your carbon footprint like your sasquatch stepping on

(00:45):
every beautiful thing on Earth. Exactly. And I think that,
you know, we are having a problem with carbon dioxide,
but um, it's it's really us. It's a human problem exactly.
There's a type of carbon dioxide emission called anthropogenic, which
means it's exclusively human created. No um. Carbon dioxide is
a vital part of Earth's processes as part of a

(01:08):
biogeochemical process. Um, the carbon cycle. It's like the rain cycle,
that kind of thing. Um. And there's carbon dioxide stored
in the atmosphere, in the ocean soil. This is where
these are stored plants exactly. Another place that it's stored
is in decaying uh carbon based life forms or former

(01:28):
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
on mass in a very inorganic way, which is oh

(01:50):
yeah right, I thought you were abbreviating something acronym No, no,
just good old fashioned oil. We burn it in the
in the CO two leaves as way. Its just like
in a snap instead of taking place over, which is
where our problem comes in. What's the solution. Well, one
solution would be too if you could somehow capture this carbon.

(02:13):
You're blowing my mind here, Chuck, what are you talking?
I know you can actually do this. There's three ways
you can capture carbon uh. One before it's burned, called
pre combustion, one after it's burned called post combustion. Before
it leaves the old smoke stack and then the old
oxy fuel combustion, which is when you add almost pure

(02:33):
oxygen to the CEO two and when it burns, it
just makes it allows you to separate it a little easier.
So that's kind of like a post combustion taken to
an extra step. It's post combustion supreme. Nice Okay, alright,
So so we've got a way to capture it. And actually,
as I understand it, UM, a typical electrical utility or

(02:54):
power plant that outfits itself with a self sustaining carbon
capture system can can run it like uh with eight
percent or less carbon dioxide emiss. Pretty amazing, that's pretty significant.
But you've got all this carbon dox of what are
you gonna do with it? Well, ideally you could throw

(03:15):
it in zip block 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. Uh do you know what that is?
I do. That's where the Titanic is, baby, right, which
is deep, deep, deep into the ocean and a half miles. Yeah,
it's two and a half miles, four thousand four thousand
meters for Canadian friends. Right, and uh, down there it's dark,

(03:36):
my friend, very dark. Nothing lives, nothing grows. No, there's
no photosynth. That's very cold now, and there's a heck
of a lot of pressure, almost six thousand pounds per
square anch of pressure, which we had to do about
fourteen pounds on the surface. I would think they crumple
a full soup can, which is pretty much my measure
of power. Right. You know it's very cold down there too,

(03:57):
Yeah it is. It's very cold. It's about two degrees
which is chili. Okay. So all this makes makes it
an ideal setting the abyssal plane and ideal setting for
um carbon dioxide storage, right exactly. But the question is
how 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 nineties who figured you could just

(04:18):
put it at the bottom because of the pressure of
the temperature, liquefied carbon dioxide should be negatively buoyant, which
means not only will it not float, it will actually
sink and ideally stick to the bottom of the sea floor. Um.
When they tried it, they injected some into a beaker,
it turned into this lava lampy gloss. Yes. So a

(04:39):
guy named Dr David Keith came up with an idea
put in bags just like the ziplux, except you know
right exactly um and uh, we also already have carbon
dioxide pipeline technology, so we could just build it down
to these planes and you know, just capture this CEO
two UM and put him in these giant bags, which

(05:01):
by Dr Keith's estimate, could hold um two days worth
of all the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions that we put out,
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, uh
from this this captured carbon. That's crazy, it is My
brain is melted. Nice. That's what I'm here for. So

(05:24):
if you want to learn all about carbon capture and storage,
we have a lot of articles on it. Go on
to how stuff works dot Com. Type in c O
two capture and storage in the search bar for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot Com brought to you by the reinvented

(05:45):
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