Pilot test of storing carbon dioxide in rocks | Hacker News Reader

Pilot test of storing carbon dioxide in rocks

arstechnica.com

75 pointsjseliger63 comments

Humans put out 40 billion tons of CO2 every year. Offsetting all of this would require 1 trillion gallons of water which sounds like a lot but is only 1 cubic mile of water. It doesn't say how fresh the water needs to be but if salt water is possible to use, then these injection systems could be setup all over the world in places where access to ocean water and basalt bedrock is plentiful. That energy company says they plan to setup facilities to inject 10000 tons of CO2 every year. It would still take 4 million more of these facilities to offset all carbon emissions.

At this point, the CCS tech is all there; cost is the main problem. Currently we're at or above $100/tonne of CO2 captured, transported and stored, with capture being the main cost driver.

To make this economically feasible, it requires a carbon tax equivalent to a price increase on gasoline of around $1/gallon (IIRC). Which would be unpopular, to say the least.

Gas prices vary a lot more than that between countries today (largely due to differences in existing taxes).

http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/Europe/

That's stated in dollars per liter (an unusual unit). In dollars per gallon, Germany would be $5.79/gallon today and the U.K. would be $6.13/gallon.

Here in Italy it varies a lot even within the country. Yesterday I drove ~600km from the south to Rome and prices varied between €1.45 and €1.75 per litre.

In Norway prices can vary by 10-15% on the same gas station withing hours. In many places the cheapest gasoline is on Sunday evening with significantly higher price coming on Monday.

The oil and gas industry benefits from 5.3 trillion dollars[0] in subsidies currently. End those and raise taxes on the industry and the taxes won't need to be that high on the consumer end.

[0]http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

Wouldn't they necessarily pass those costs on to the consumer?

Depends these firms are highly profitable, if one decided to eat some or all of those costs their product would cost less than its competitors and they would sell at much higher volume.

The water can be saltwater, and if you set up the system as a loop, you can reuse the same water as it comes back up without the CO2. The limiting factor is the drilling -- you need lots of deep holes in the ground, and making those is costly. It's not a surprise that this was pioneered by a geothermal company, as drilling is their main expertise.

The big remaining unknown is how long can they reuse the same hole before all basalt in there is covered in calcium carbonate. Since drilling is the main cost, and this determines how often you have to drill, it can either make this project feasible or totally unusable.

Neat! Storing carbon stably is huge. We have much easier ways to get to 10,000 year storage (turning fast-growing biomass like miscanthus or other giant grasses into charcoal and throwing it in an old mine), but i haven't heard of other super-long-term storage options.

Link(s)?

And why is 10,000 year storage not good enough for us to already be doing it?

Apparently I mentally added an order of magnitude - best link I could find says 1,000 year storage

http://www.carbolea.ul.ie/files/Biochar%20Swift%20Hayes%20Ch...

and

biochar.org

But even 1,000 years is a long time.

I'm really curious what economists, or business-people, think about biochar. Not only is it apparently inexpensive but it also improves plant yields! That seems too suspiciously like a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. Why has no one picked it up yet?

The following paper doesn't explicitly state that this is the case, but it certainly seems like biochar is not as relatively effective a fertilizer, or fuel source, as alternatives and that therefore it's relative advantage when compared to its alternatives or substitutes lies in its ability to sequester carbon:

- http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40095-014-0106-4

So I guess it's really a $0 bill until the price of carbon rises (for whatever reason).

Thanks for the link!

Indeed. Either the people 10,000 years from now will be smart enough to figure out something better, or they'll be hunter-gatherers who won't be too deterred by a little sea level rise on the very edge of their territory.

I know geo-engineering schemes are well-intentioned, but I'm worried that once productionized, country-specific motivations are going to move from "status quo" to "arms race"

Yeah we all know global warming will cause chaos etc, but some countries will be net winners, and some net losers. Canada and Russia have a lot to gain from global warming, with sea routes and more farmland. African nations, Bangladesh, India have huge amounts to lose.

Once we have sequestration technology working, would anyone put it past the Indian / Egyptian / etc governments to set a goal CO2 PPM below the "historic" status quo to lower temperatures for the benefit of their people?

Would anyone put it past Russia to be upset about this and intentionally release methane to counteract the cooling effect?

I think it would be very hard to prevent weaponization of this tech; "keep everything how it is" is easy to say but I don't think will actually happen.

>Canada and Russia have a lot to gain from global warming, with sea routes and more farmland.

Is this really true? I'm Canadian. I think we have less to lose, but I'm not sure we'll gain.

Currently we have a boreal forest wildfire larger than Delaware that's still burning out of control and already destroyed much of Fort McMurray. From what I've read, the Boreal forest is at risk of fire and ecosystem death, and not much is suited to replace it in the near term due to soil quality.

We'll also lose cities due to sea level rise.

"More farmland" to me reads "highly sensitive to drought".

Warmer does not mean better if it brings with it less rain.

Look at all the water available in Canada, you can even see it on the map: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.6040128,-73.1500427,7z

Not all of Canada is like that, of course, but in parts they get a lot of rain

> Canada and Russia have a lot to gain from global warming,

If Canada stands to gain big and the neighboring country that outspends most of the rest of the world combined on its military stands to lose big...

Well, I wouldn't feel secure about Canada's gains.

It's a shame we can't just temporarily erase all the geopolitical boundaries, let everyone stuck in a "climate death zone" pick up and move to the nearest hospitable region (with public-works-sponsored rebuilding at the destination), and then put the countries back on the map as simple Voronoi polygons delineating the places each group of people ended up—basically the way most US states were created, but on a larger scale and for environmental rather than political/religious reasons.

(Hell, if we had done that a long time ago, maybe humanity as a whole could have abandoned the hotter parts of the middle-east and the colder parts of Canada+Russia, and nobody would be fighting over those today, any more than people fight over Antarctica.)

The hotter parts for the Middle East overlap substantially with the location of valuable resources, so I don't think that would work.

So do the colder parts of Canada and Russia. It's an interesting coincidence. :)

But do imagine if we had had the sense to abandon all those places a good thousand years or so before we figured that out. We'd probably be treating such land as the treaty equivalent of "international waters"—not anyone's in particular, because nobody has the resources to live there to defend it. So oil there would be treated roughly like (an easier-to-access version of) oil in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or oil in Antarctica: the subject of fraught international negotiations, perhaps able to be steamrolled by a treaty-organization like OPEC, but otherwise politically inaccessible.

One would hope that the MAD doctrine would kick in and curtail at least more blatant attempts at offensive geoengineering.

On the other hand, at this point we can't really afford not to do anything. So it might be worth the risk to actually try and implement such a scheme.

98% of a trees mass comes from "carbon capture".

True! But it also returns to the atmosphere when it burns or decays. Turn it into charcoal [1] and you have about 1,000 years of stability. Turn it into a mineral and you have indefinite stability.

[1] http://www.carbolea.ul.ie/files/Biochar%20Swift%20Hayes%20Ch...

> it also returns to the atmosphere when it burns

Don't burn it?

> or decays

In a healthy forest, a decaying tree is replaced by new growth, and part of the carbon is captured into soils (including high-carbon peaty soils, which is what's under the forests currently being burned for palm in south-east asia), so a growing forest is a large carbon sink and a stable grown forest is at best carbon-neutral, possibly a small sink depending on its composition.

> Turn it into a mineral and you have indefinite stability.

The lithospheric carbon cycle is still a cycle[0]. Lithospheric carbon gets released by volcanoes and by acidified oceanic water.

[0] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/page2....

Carboniferous period, pt. II

I look forward to our descendants' giant cockroach overlords

The flipside of this is that mineral precipitation (though not necessarily carbonate) is also a problem for CO2 injection into aquifers, which are more readily available and for which we have better understanding, better technology and better infrastructure.

(No disrespect for the CarbFix people implied, they do great work.)

This seems like a great result, and its pretty easy to parallelize if you have a lot of basalt available.

It will be interesting to see if we succeed at encasing CO2 before we get another "oxygenization event".

Great! Now all that needs to be done is establish that anthropogenic CO2 represents a significant risk. That has not been proven.

I'm going to have to flag this comment and have it deleted, because I disagree with it. Or something.

Can we start panicking now?

We need to get to 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and we're above 400, with no easy solutions on the horizon.

There's certainly something good that there isn't an "easy" solution. If it were trivial to reduce CO2 from 400 ppm to 350 ppm, it would be easy to get to 0 parts per million, which would extinguish all plant life on the planet and also kill us.

What if we just planted more trees?

Trees are great short-term carbon storage. When they burn or rot, they re-release most of their carbon back into the atmosphere though.

On the other hand burning trees are one of the better ways to produce heating and power because (using fast growing trees) it's a fairly closed cycle of CO2 release and capture. Modern wood burning stoves are incredibly efficient, the one my Dad has approaches 90% if you use it correctly.

More expensive than not cutting down existing trees.

What about genetically engineered trees that reproduce and spread for free? Ones designed for removing CO2

Doesn't this describe almost every tree?

Yes, except for the "genetically engineered" and "designed for removing CO2" parts. (Presumably "designed for removing CO2" means "designed for removing more CO2"...)

Inadvertently create a species of flora that out competes others, leading to their extinction?

Could be, but more likely the opposite: the species will be at a disadvantage compared to its competitors in the wild (which are, naturally, optimized for survival and not correcting humanity's mistakes). It will not thrive on its own and will need help from humans to do its work i.e. probably not scalable.

You need them to want to grow where we don't want to farm, and there's more and more people to feed. Not a bad idea though.

I would really like if americans could stop using deprecated units like gallons and miles. Especially when starting a paragraph using regular tons. It would really make the whole thing more meaningful.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11872371 and marked it off-topic.

> It would really make the whole thing more meaningful

No, it would make the whole thing easier to understand. The meaning is unchanged by the units.

Pedantry aside, it's very possible that the share of HN users who understand US units natively would be similar to the share who understand English natively.

I think it's fine to be irritated that someone used a system you don't understand natively, but we do it constantly on this site by using English (and it isn't fair to judge someone else for using the units they're comfortable with).

Agreed, but since this is an American website your complaint is unlikely to change any minds.

When I lived in other countries, I adapted to metric and learned enough of the native languages to get by. Maybe it's not too much to ask that we let Americans use their own units on their own websites. I don't whine about people speaking French on Skyrock.

Oh I'm so sorry, I feel like I'm intruding. How did I end up here? They should have used an IP blocker..

Nobody cares if you participate. It's just pointless to complain that US styles are used in a US article posted on a US website.

It really is at this point. All but what, 3 countries?

America deserves to take a bit of a beating for their embarrassing inability to learn the metric system.

Please stop posting flamewar-style comments here.

Sorry I'll get back to circlejerking.

[deleted]

Thank you! I had absolutely no idea there was 3 different units named 'ton' with 3 different conversions factor (<- this is nuts).

Obviously, "regular tons" were -to me- the ones weighting 1000 kilograms.

They are all close enough in mass for colloquial use though. It doesn't affect your understanding of this article if a ton / tonne is 1000 kg, 1016 kg, or 907 kg. I agree with the parent tho - let's just all start using metric :-)

Why would I even want to know the conversion ratios to silly old fashioned units?

It's hilarious how certain people keep talking about "clean coal" like it's plausible and scientists don't even have this basic requirement worked out yet.

"Clean coal" doesn't usually mean "no CO2". It means "no mercury" or "no particulates".

That is absolutely not the implication of clean-coal marketing in the US.

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