Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"This concealed the underlying process until an investigation by Jeff Severinghaus and Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory using isotopic analysis showed that carbon dioxide was reacting with exposed concrete inside Biosphere 2 to form calcium carbonate in a process called carbonatation, thereby sequestering both carbon and oxygen."
The drama starts in the Group dynamics section of the article amd continues to the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#Group_dynamics:_ps...
The fundamental project conflict between — as I understanded them — we’re here to prove this works vs we’re here to learn and iterate is fascinating food for thought.
Many farmers are land rich, cash poor, labour costs eat up profit margins. Many will die. And with these farms, the knowledge. They will sell the land and retire on the proceeds as rich farmland is paved over.
What they need is accessible, affordable tech. And where their inherited generational and practical knowledge can be tested and validated and adopted by tech. It needs to be with trustworthy partners who don’t see farmers as future consumers but as collaborators and partners.
Current Agtech is geared towards commodity crops and industrial Ag. All farming knowledge that is soil and environment oriented comes from small family farms. Their goal is to keep the soil fertile. The purpose of a farming corporation is to make profits. Not soil health or environment.
By asking big Ag concerns to take care of soil, we are burdening them with a job they don’t want..but that requirement towards soil and environment should be part of the tech they use.
So the domain experts of soil..the ones who actually have dirty hands by working in the soil should be the ones who help create the tech. Right now, wrong allocation of responsibility to skill is what’s not working.
Farming is intuitive. A farmer tries to maintain the soil and make it better. Industrial Ag razes* down soil with each harvest and supplements With inputs and brute mechanical force, they bring soil back to a threshold that is bare minimum for cultivation. That’s why a farmer says that only sun, water and soil is needed to grow food. Industrial Ag needs inputs, machinery and data.
As a small acreage soil focused farmer, I say that we need soil, water, sun...and tech. Tech that would replace manual repetitive labour ..labour costs that is killing our profits can be boosted by small acreage automation/mechanization.
*i like to illustrate this with a personal example. When I wanted to redo my garden, I wanted to move a couple of structures, add a fountain, plant a few trees, remove some vegetation and put down a walking path with pavers.
When I called a landscape architect, he said that we will have to remove everything, create a blank slate and implement the landscape design.
That is the difference between farmers and industrial Ag.
In other words, are there problems that software alone can help solve or is it simply down to replacing some of the manual labor with robotics and smarter machines?
Software can be helpful but it’s enhancements contribute very little to the profit margins.
Take for example this cost analysis of orient eggplant for 2005(I picked this eggplant because it’s not a commodity crop grown by industrial Ag and is niche. In other words, it’s not like lettuce or strawberries or corn or soy)
http://sfp.ucdavis.edu/crops/coststudieshtml/BpEggplantOrien...
Check the percent of labour costs and capital/equip costs wrt operating costs. Software will help as part of the bigger systems approach, but at the end of the day, the urgent problem we need to tackle is labour costs and labour availability.
“Simply” automating the existing systems doesn’t seem the right approach either.
The energy loss comes in 3 different parts - water waste, extra fuel in shipping, and in energy to dehydrate. Everyone pays more.
The system solution would be to price the tomato solids, not the water.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23781972
And this:
That’s a 5 month chunk of field work I can outsource to a Robotics As A Service type outfit. I like to divide chores by seasonality.(that’s how a farmer like me would see it..an engineer might not see that as optimal). It doesn’t require my knowledge or skill, it just needs horsepower. That’s capital and infrastructure cost and maint/labour expenses I can consolidate and probably will save.
It’s a diff set of automation when growing season starts. Of course, that flips when a farmer has winter/fall croppings.
To be honest, we have great soil in CA and I can’t speak broadly ..but almost every big farm will have their own system. Broadly, there is standard tillage, bed disc system and strip/conservation tillage in CA.
Strip tillage is often conservation tillage and sometimes used near Davis/Sacramento area where our wheat and tomatoes are intercropped..(our most impressive crop) In Salinas valley , our lettuce producing ‘salad bowl’, they have almost always had minimum tillage protocols. A sub soiler/ripper. I know a farmer who rips it in the beginning of the season and discs it FOUR times before listing.
You can’t really make a decision without evaluating soil, moisture and soil microbial activity.
Having said that..I am interested only in small acreage farm automation..that is sub 100 acres ..2-3 times bed flipping vegetable growing farms. I don’t have experience with industrial ag systems. That’s like factory production assembly line. They got all their ducks in the row. My interest is in automation for small farmers and market farms. It’s super sub optimized market.
I would recommend a minimal till-no till approach focused on soil health. Maybe rip the fields every 2-3 years. Single pass implements will reduce compaction due to machinery but when you make a light farm bot, compaction of paths between short semi permanent beds shouldn’t be an issue. The holy grail would be a no toll system. But it’s not without its issues.
So..to your question. A single pass Solution with implements on a gang. Yes. It’s possible. But you have to remember that this would mean higher HP. Upwards of 200-350. At which point, it defeats the purpose of finding automation for small farms. Which small farm can afford those mega tractors? It becomes a scale/$ issue.
If it’s electric, then HP decision is even more complicated because now you have to decide between draft implements or PTO implements. And as that adds up, so does the weight of the tractor/pulling unit. And boom! We are back to ‘size matters’. We can only grow in 1000+ acre farms.
Small acreage automation is a difficult but interesting challenge. That’s why I am interested and also because right now because food crops are mostly Imported and cheap, Agtech doesn’t care. But that will soon change. Sooner than we expect. We should build.
Just liked your FB so I can follow your adventure.
If family farms are gonna use tech to automate and survive as such, the tech will come from smart rural folks. Think more Temple Grandin and less Elon Musk.
This is only a problem for people who own agricultural land, not a problem for operating a farm.
Of course, often farmers both own agricultural land and operate the farm. But the roles are separate in principle, and some people farm on leased land.
Now to substantiate my claim: in the longer run, any change in the amount of profit a typical farm makes, will just drive prices of agricultural land up or down. (For the usual arbitrage reasons.)
The rest of your comment is, of course, still very worthwhile. It just has little to do with being land-rich.
The uncertainty of labour and it’s lack is one more nail on the coffin.
Fun fact: insurance companies and pension funds routinely invest in farmland. This is a risk and speculative game at this point.
This paper estimates how much carbon could be captured globally and at what price point.
It would not surprise me if farmers have been saying the first for decades, but it would surprise me if they already did those calculations decades ago.
Crush the rocks using solar power, and it's zero.
The river bed is full of minerals that it had carried with it..perhaps flowing over different rocks, it brings some with it? Contrast that today..where we have a 45 billion dollar Ag industry in California ..legit Desert.
If your energy generation process is CO2 friendly you might simply offset other energy use with this energy and generate a better CO2 balance by this, skipping all the rock crushing.
Transportation of tons of material is not free either. Neither is spreading it on field (labor notwithstanding).
That said, if farmers are already putting tons of imported materials, this could be a matter of switching it up. But if it would be better just to not do this, the whole thing just starts to look silly and worth it only locally at best.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22853398
The Botanist (2018)
Directors Maude Plante-Husaruk and Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis met expert botanist Raïmberdi while travelling in Central Asia. His reflections on the nomadic life, and on practices that are rooted in an ancient rural lifestyle, offer a fascinating personal record of the region's history, and the extreme hardships its population experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
https://www.greensand.nl/en/about-greensand/greensand-explai...
Project vesta has the additional benefit that it works directly on the oceans, which may be the more pressing problem.
They could sell carbon credits to companies.
See the Stripe blog post announcing the purchase: Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
Our post: Stripe and Project Vesta, and what this means for us https://projectvesta.org/stripe-and-project-vesta-and-what-t....
Reuters coverage of the purchase: Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe....
If I donate now, what will the money be used for? Will it put green sand on beaches, or be used for bureaucratic paperwork, or be used for marketing to raise awareness?
See their blog post announcement: Stripe’s first negative emissions purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
Our post: Stripe and Project Vesta, and what this means for us https://projectvesta.org/stripe-and-project-vesta-and-what-t...
Reuters coverage of the purchase: Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe...
There was a lot going on in the world at the time when it was announced (and for whatever reason Stripe's post or the following article didn't receive traction on HN), but that announcement made it into Reuters-> Stripe picks $1 million in carbon-removal projects to spur industry https://www.reuters.com/article/climate-change-stripe/stripe...
This was our first bigger article, that came from our poster in December at the American Geophysical Union with our plan to take our coastal enhanced weathering "from the lab to the beach"-> Could putting pebbles on beaches help solve climate change? https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Could-puttin...
Recently, we were in MIT Technology Review - How green sand could capture billions of tons of carbon dioxide https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/22/1004218/how-gree...
Fast Company -> Ever been to a green sand beach? The newest geohack to fight climate change https://www.fastcompany.com/90510254/ever-been-to-a-green-sa...
Popular Mechanics -> How This Strange Green Sand Could Reverse Climate Change https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a327992...
Inhabit -> Can manufacturing green sand beaches save our planet? https://inhabitat.com/can-manufacturing-green-sand-beaches-s...
And more are on the way! That said, we are working really hard right now to have our pilot projects and foundational research completed, published, peer-reviewed, and CDR process certified in time for the UN IPCC's first global stocktake in 2023. At that time, countries will have to take account for how they will meet their targets and update their plans. We are working to make sure our process is ready to go by then for deployment.
>"The Paris Agreement offers a dynamic but durable framework for increasing climate action over time. One of the sources for this dynamism is the “global stocktake“ – a moment every five years for all countries to pause and account for what has been achieved so far, and what must still be done, to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement." https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/05/insider-designing-global-st...
> The researchers are clear that cutting the fossil fuel burning that releases CO2 is the most important action needed to tackle the climate emergency. But climate scientists also agree that, in addition, massive amounts of CO2 need to be removed from the air to meet the Paris agreement goals of keeping global temperature rise below 2C.
Basically we need to stop burning fossil fuels and spread rock dust. Short of some miracle, humanity is screwed.
Anything that can be done to remove and incinerate HFCs before they get vented pays handsomely. A ton of HFC traps as much heat as 2500 tons of CO2.
HFCs, ironically, were once considered world saviors, supplanting CFCs that were destroying the ozone. Now We Know. Ammonia is the best refrigerant I know of, now. I gather it is heavily used in big industrial applications, but people still worry about it in consumer applications. Toxicity is extremely unlikely to be an actual problem, but people panic if they smell a trace amount.
Removing CO2 may be necessary; stopping CO2 addition has to become a critical priority.
= between 1,320 and 2,970 USD per year for keeping our planet in check. Maybe multiply by 3x to exclude children, retired and unemployed. Not too bad for a median USA income. Same for Indian - 10x less emissions so about 130-300 USD per year.
There are indeed a ton of rocks out there bound less tightly to other things.
High heat (say, magma) would break up the carbonate so thats why the rocks arent already in that chemical state.
(simplified answer from a non specialist)
[1] https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gp/bgp/3_1_Cement_P...
I assume farmland because it's convenient for mass spreading and well-irrigated.
Basalt is one of the types of rock that can react with CO2 to trap carbon.
I assume the authors accounted for the carbon footprint of distribution, since this was peer-reviewed and published in Nature.
Or, you might hear about the moral hazard of suggesting that technological approaches could reduce the need for reduced consumption [1]
These seem to be compelling arguments for many people -- including those who fund science. Geoengineering is, one might say, a dirty word in the sciences today. Are there any scientists who could weigh in?
[1] Hale, B. (2012). The world that would have been: moral hazard arguments against geoengineering. Engineering the climate: The ethics of solar radiation management, 113.
<citation required>
If the production process is happening anyway, and if the waste exists anyway, why is it definedly crazy to re-purpose it? It isn't neccessarily the best at scale economic source of the kinds of rock dust we need, but if you have it, and it worked, then (without citing specifics like cross contamination risks or at scale problems) why is this specifically more crazy than the idea itself?
A: "lets fit a defibrellator at the pool" B: "but what if we get sued" ?
outcome: nothing. Were they sued? were they less likely to be sued? what if they are sued for NOT having a defib? This is racionation to endless effect.
yes, there will be bad actors who contaminate their dust. There are bad actors who contaminate food, drugs, water, fertiliser, music, books, Luis Vuitton suitcases, Lobsters...
Check this out:
https://vtdigger.org/2020/04/12/sewage-sludge-spreading-lead...
So it's not like this category of problem is totally unprecedented. Spreading waste products from mines is a bad, bad idea.
It's probably on the list of things that cause cancer in California.
Just because it seems very mundane doesn't mean it's harmless.
- glaciers grind up rocks - ground up rocks end ice age promote life - fresh ground rocks get used up and new ice age - rinse and repeat
1. Why did they choose the two axis powers to draw their comparison?
2. What would be the cost, in additional carbon emissions, to procure, distribute, and deploy all that basalt?
Post WWII Germany and Japan are not the axis powers, so this question seems quite irrelevant. More likely Germany and Japan are two industrialized nations the sum of whose carbon emissions roughly equals the amount of carbon that could be offset by this process.
> 2. What would be the cost, in additional carbon emissions, to procure, distribute, and deploy all that basalt?
For the procurement, they claim near zero:
"Basalt is the best rock for capturing CO2, and many mines already produce dust as a byproduct, so stockpiles already exist. "
"Basalt is one of the most common rocks on Earth, and waste dust from mining could be used for ERW, as could waste from cement and steel manufacturing. This would remove the need to grind the rocks into fine particles, which requires energy. But how big these waste stockpiles are is unknown."
"“We are calling on nations to make inventories,” said Beerling. He said mines in Northumberland, UK, that produce basalt aggregate for construction produced 20-30% waste dust. But he said some mining specifically to produce basalt rock dust would probably still be needed, using existing mine capacity rather than new mines."
Even if I'm misreading it and parent is instead saying there's no correlation, there's still no need to be mean.
It's probably a really bad idea to spread rock dust on arable land. The mixture will probably retard the natural soil microbiota, and at worst render land unusable.
Just try adding a bunch of concrete dust to your basil plant in the window sill, see what happens. Most likely this will be the source, as concrete waste is a huge issue in most population centers. Natural microbiota, the life in soils, are our best bet at sequestering our overabundance of atmospheric ghg, because we literally have to do nothing. Just leave it the fuck alone. Most land is not past the point of no return, and most land is not being used to grow essential food crops. Our actual food is grown on a very small part of farms worldwide and has lots of room to intensify while reducing energy and chemical inputs.
Rebuilding and growing bogs, marshes, and wetlands should be our top priority if we want our great-grandchildren to enjoy the world outside of a cave or a bubble.
your example of "try this at home" is not actually good. concrete dust before hydration is completely different to the dust made post hydration, or fly ash, or surplus rock dust from mining. The properties of the pre-build and post-build chemical reactivity of concrete (its an exothermic reaction) need to be borne in mind.
That said, aggressive de-carbonisation of industry and agriculture, biochar, wetland remediation, re-forestation are probably vital, and urgent.
Concrete dust should be the result of demolition of concrete (already hydrated when it was cement to form the concrete, i.e. post exothermic reaction).
But, allegedly, the concrete surfaces (not reduced to dust) exposed in the Biosphere2 was sequestering both CO2 and oxigen, and - at least in that case - the "solution" was a supplement of oxygen, so maybe the concrete (not cement) dust uses both CO2 and oxigen while basalt only or mainly uses CO2?
Also, whether it is basalt or concrete dust, wouldn't this treatment alter the pH of the soil? (at least here historically where there is an excessively acid soil it is often corrected with additives like calcium carbonate or similar).
altering the PH can be desirable or harmful depending. thats where the 'get a soil agronomist into the convo' comes in.
from memory, there can be a significant non-bound component of concrete, and it can persist for years. so I accept there is a continuing risk of aggregation of the dust, because it doesn't completely process in immediate time-frame of the pour (I am told that the hoover dam continued to bake off for years afterward)
>Just try adding a bunch of concrete dust to your basil plant in the window sill, see what happens. Most likely this will be the source, as concrete waste is a huge issue in most population
About aggregation, there are usually big differences between the different kinds of cement, modern Portland cements tend to end hydration (and thus hardening) within months, whilst good ol' Pozzolanic went on for years.
But I wouldn't be surprised if such a massive pour as a dam would go on hardening for many years.