We need to take CO2 out of the sky
orbuch.com
orbuch.com
sources: https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672... https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...
The post goes through numerous sequestration techniques that could reach the scale to sequester 1000B tCO2e
1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions?
2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day.
Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.
While it seems enormous, it's a very small fraction of the world.
However, the Atomic weight of carbon is 12 whereas the Atomic weight of Oxygen is 16, and there are 2 oxygen atoms in every CO2 molecule, so 1 ton of pure sequestered carbon is 12+16+16 = 44/12 = 3 & 2/3 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
2.27 tons of carbon compacted together makes an approximately 1 meter cube.
Of course, that would mean we would have to sequester ~6 billion cubic meters (13.6 billion tons or the equivalent of 4,079 hoover dams in size, probably enough to resurface every highway and road in America 2-3 inches deep) of pure carbon every year to reach carbon neutral, and then we would need to go beyond that to begin to reverse the effects.
It would literally be the largest human undertaking in the history of the planet.
Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. Three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it.
They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude. If we did it in Australia, we could employ the entire country twice over, and they would be the 3 new tallest mountains in Down Under (by 1,772m).
I still really enjoy the mental image of a post-industrial society in a few thousand years sitting on a foundation of diamond bricks. :)
There's almost certainly some coking issues to overcome, but hey, we're already hypothetically taking on the largest industrial project of all time, roughly equivalent to all the effort spent to extract fossil fuels ever.
The only way we can make these things viable is massive funding and incredible carbon emissions reduction. This is very literally the largest industrial project that ever has happened, a re-terraforming of our own planet. There is absolutely no way we are going to succeed without full effort from all countries.
It's not terribly easy to overcome.
There are about 290 million private cars in the US (See https://hedgescompany.com/automotive-market-research-statist...).
If those were all electric with, say 50 kWh batteries they would be able to deliver an instantaneous power of something like 58 TW if the connectors could take it. But even if we assume that they are connected to only 7 kW charging points they could deliver 2 TW instantaneously. They could keep this up for an hour at the cost of losing less than 20% of a full charge.
Average US electricity consumption is about 500 GW so vehicle to grid plus an upgraded and properly interconnected grid should be able to solve the problem of intermittent generation.
I hope I haven't made a mistake in the arithmetic!
Flywheels, molten salt, iron air batteries, literally dozens of alternative systems exist that are all viable and variably scalable power grid stabilization systems that can work harmoniously with renewable generation to keep electricity available to the consumer at both the individual and commercial level.
It needs a lot of financial and engineering investment to make headway, and these decisions would have to come from government leadership as otherwise there are too many cats to corral to ever make is succeed.
If we had a good way to make synthetic gasoline from energy + carbon, we could have a totally carbon neutral fuel cycle where we use nuclear power to extract carbon from the air and produce synthetic gasoline.
"Modern gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%,[1] but road legal cars are only about 20% to 35% when used to power a car. In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 65-80% of total power is emitted as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft" See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Gasoline_(pe...
And the heat engine efficiency limits are only one part of the problem. Extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere also costs a lot of energy.
It is more efficient and simpler to just use the existing electricity grid to charge electric vehicles.
"For an electric vehicle, energy efficiency is estimated at 90%, " See https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/news-on-air/news/the-energy-...
Just because you draw the system boundaries with the inefficiencies outside, doesn't make them disappear.
Power generation, transmission, and distribution is on the order of 30%, before you take into account the inefficiencies of battery charging.
And the huge amount of energy for producing/recycle them.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmen...
You also forgot to take into account that most cars don't drive 300+ miles every day. The average car drives (depending on country) maybe 7000 - 10,000 miles a year. That means it will either be fully charged rarely, or topped up a little bit every night. We don't have to have a grid which can charge every car in the country from empty every night, we just need a grid which can charge a small fraction them.
In fact, in the UK where the average car drives about 7000 miles a year, the overall average power requirement is something like 200 W. That's well within the capacity of our grid.
We will have to take care to limit the surge effect of every car being plugged in at 6pm - but that just means delaying the nightly top up of most cars until the early hours (or whenever electricity is available).
And the assumption was only 50% of the capacity, so that would drop to ~150 miles. Again, it's claimed value, how much you can actually get out of it really varies. If you just want to get 30 miles per day, then you will need ~ 6A, which is within household circuit rating but will still double the load of the ordinary family peak.
Please don't simply use Watts to calculate AC load, it will not give you the real current demand.
If it claims to, it is a political fiction like so many other. In reality transmission losses from the one virtual plant powering the grid to your wall socket range from about 50% to 60% depending on the grid and many other factors.
Anything else is wishful thinking.
What we need is carbon rationing. Everyone gets X amount of carbon and prices of things are both in dollars and carbon rations. The rich, who use most of the carbon will have to buy from the poor who use very little. These rations will become more expensive over time until people don't get anymore. So they will only be able to buy things that are carbon neutral/carbon free.
That’s a bold statement to leave unsourced.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012138741/exxon-lobbyist-cau...
1. Oil companies support carbon taxes because they know they are politically dead in the water.
2. Yellow vest movement shows that if you punish the vast population for problems elite created, you will get mass protests.
3. The tax will be miss priced because it will be set by policy. Likely won't be high enough to stop global warming.
While a carbon ration doesn't have these problems since we know what the carbon budget is. Once it's spent it's spent and provides the right incentive. Instead of punishing regular people with a tax, it rewards people who use less carbon by giving them an asset. Since the vast majority of people use very little carbon if you divide up the the carbon budget evenly, you suddenly have a method to lower inequality and provide the right incentives for industry to move to a zero carbon world because when the rations are expired, they won't be able to have a business.
Carbon taxes simply have too many flaws and bad incentives and don't address the underlying problem, that we have a limited resource (carbon budget).
When you talk about "carbon rations," are you referring just to fossil fuels and petroleum-based products? Or are you referring to everything that contains carbon?
Given that life here is just brimming with carbon (we are, after all, carbon-based life), does that "carbon ration" include food? Pets? Yeast?
I'm not being snarky here, but it's not clear to me what exactly you mean. If you'd expand on that, it would be much appreciated.
I am not sure I understand the math here. 1 gallon of gasoline weights about 5kg, so how is that 10 kg of CO2 are released? Looks like mass will not be conserved in such a process. Am I missing something?
Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2.
It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do.
Switch our entire economy to renewable energy?
No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down.
Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables?
Nope. That won't fix it.
In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise.
We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry.
I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads.
As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
Basic concept:
In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
Limiting warming to 2 or 3 degrees C is going to result in a situation that's a heck of a lot better than what 6 or 7 degrees C looks like. When asked if we should adapt or spend money on renewables/carbon capture/etc, the answer should be "Yes". We should be doing all of these things.
No, I am not doing that. I devoted a little over a year to taking a deep dive into this subject. I really wanted to understand. This was a few years ago, when I started to get this feeling that climate change was becoming a religion. It quickly became obvious that both non-believers and zealots are nothing less than delusional. Nobody devotes one iota of work and effort towards understanding the subject and everyone jumps on their respective bandwagon.
If you study that data --very reliable data going back 800,000 years--, do a little analysis, and read just a few documents, it becomes very obvious that we can't stop it and we sure as heck can't slow it down.
That DOES NOT mean it will not regulate. The planet is far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. The way our planet regulates CO2 is through weather events. That's the first reality we need to understand and accept. We are going to have lots more hurricanes, rains, cyclones, etc.
Every time I post about this people respond with negative comments and not one person bothers to look at the data and documents. I have had this conversation with people with advanced degrees in science over the last several years. Not one person has come back with a scientifically sound dismissal of my hypothesis. It goes as follows:
We know, from ice core atmospheric sample data going back 800K years, without a shadow of a doubt, how the planet behaves without humanity around.
The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 without humanity around (or when we were a rounding error in the planetary context) is about 100 ppm in 50K to 100K years. For easy numbers, let's call it 1,000 years/1 ppm.
Here's the data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
It's a simple matter to fit lines to the up and down slopes and get a rough measurement of what I call the natural rate of change. That is, the rate of change with humanity being insignificant.
That rate of change is the baseline from which anything else has to be measured. Examples:
"Let's shut down the entire United States and move to Mars"
Nope, won't work. That is not better than if humanity left the entire planet, which would give us 1 ppm every thousand years.
"Let's cover the entire ecuatorial band with solar panels and have wind turbines everywhere we can put them"
No, again, how is that better than all of humanity leaving the planet?
"Let's build huge filters and suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in every city"
Nope. First of all, building something like that at a scale sufficiently large to actually make any kind of an impact on a shortened time scale (50 to 100 years) would require resources to build, operate and maintain the systems of an unimaginable scale. Just the processing and transportation of the construction materials to build the thing on every major city on this planet would likely emit more CO2 than the system could ever consume. And then you have to power it. No, solar won't do it.
And then, on top of that, all seven-going-on-eight billion of us are still on the planet, which means that we can't do better than the baseline 1K years for 1 ppm reduction.
"Let's use magic dust to seed the ocean and capture CO2"
I don't even want to imagine the disaster and CO2 contribution just mining, transporting and deploying this stuff would entail. We are far more likely to kill everything in the ocean than to fix a darn thing with the atmosphere.
And, once more, billions of us would still be here, which means we can't do any better than the baseline.
Here's the easiest-to-read paper I found on this. In fact, back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
To paraphrase: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This paper stopped at that conclusion (because it was the answer to the hypothesis they were trying to prove). I wish they had continued or done another paper evaluating the reality of controlling CO2 through any other means. The conclusion would have been the same.
Thankfully a group out of Germany asked that question and published results about a year later (2015):
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...
The summary:
"Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany say that if we were to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 2.5 times that of the current annual emissions, oceans would not recover to a low-emission state by 2700."
And that is a best case scenario. In reality, anyone who has ever done real work of any kind in the real world knows that these estimates are, at best, optimistic and in most cases a complete fantasy. It is useful to have a number of some kind just to get a sense of proportion. The 700 year estimate means "not measured in a scale corresponding to a human lifetime". Generations. And, if we go back to the baseline I introduced, the real number, with all of humanity still around and growing, the real number is in the high tens of thousands of years.
I know I am going to get pounded on any time I post this. The vast majority of people who believe or do not believe have done near zero work to actually understand the subject, they take the conclusions from whatever side of the argument they like and go with it. That's OK. I am one who decided to stop regurgitating what I was being told and actually go out and try to confirm it first. If I just make a few people take that scientifically necessary path of skepticism and do the work, mission accomplished.
Yes, we have to clean-up our act. No, we are not going to save the planet. There are plenty of reasons for which we should clean-up our act. And, yes, climate change is real. And, yes, of course, we made a significant contribution to the problem. We just need to stop pushing fantasies and address reality.
What really worries me about some of these ideas is that they could go horribly wrong. We are talking about changing the fundamental energy equation for an entire planet. We can't even control the ecological effects of our technology at the local level and we are actually convincing ourselves we can hit the mark with a planetary scale process? This is scary.
See http://www.daniel-suarez.com/Delta-v_synopsis.html for a fictional and failed 'Ship of Theseus'-like attempt of doing that.
Nonetheless interesting. (If you are in the mood)
The cost per kilogram to orbit today is likely around $2000. That same kilogram landing on the moon (I also worked on a device that will get to the moon's surface in a future Artemis mission and dealt with all the lander companies) is somewhere in the two million USD range.
And asteroid? And mining equipment? Well, it will be a lot more than that. 10x? 100x? No clue.
Let's assume the cost is the same. Lets' further assume we need, say, 50,000 kg in equipment, supplies and fuel/energy to get there, mine and bring it back.
At $2MM per kg this would mean a one-way trip cost of $100 billion dollars. Round trip? Let's call it $200 billion. My guess is that might bring back somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kg of whatever was mined.
This is all hypothetical, of course. Just having fun.
Let's say we mine gold. Current value per kg is about $60K. So, a thousand kilograms of gold brought back from an asteroid would yield $60 million dollars. That would represent a loss of $199,940,000,000 dollars.
Diamonds? They are worth about 1,000x more than gold per weight. That still represents a loss of $140 billion.
The same is the story with fabrication in space. Getting tools, equipment, energy production means and raw materials there and back cost tons of cash (literally). If it can be done in low orbit it's much more manageable, still tons of cash though. Try to move farther away from earth and costs go exponential very quickly.
Asteroid mining is one of those neat concepts that people keep talking about over the years. Fun and interesting, of course. I just don't see it ever making financial sense.
Minion on mars to build stuff on mars is a different matter. Well, it will still cost tons of cash to get everything there, but at least you don't have to bring it back!
Anyways, read the book I suggested and see if it changes your assumptions, or not.
edit: Btw. nobody needs gold from space. Maybe infrastructure needs gold in space. Be it for reflectors, wires, chips... don't know. Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'.
Very funny.
Hey, if you ever need surgery, repeat the above to your experienced surgeon and ask that they bring over some dumb-shit with a two year old degree who can thing out of the box. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy.
Oh, please.
edit: Oh, btw: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qTDQ3MwvaE8/YTqD9G0zZyI/AAAAAAAAf...
>> Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I agree that the climate crisis is grim and that geoengineering is not a cure all. I do not think your reasoning makes much sense. Say it takes 100x as much energy to capture C02 as to create it. If the energy it takes does not warm the atmosphere it is not a problem. For example, if solar energy was removed to C02 it would not contribute to the warming of the planet either by directly releasing heat or a greenhouse gas.
There's nothing grim about climate change reality. We just have to accept it, clean up our act to the extent possible and adapt. The planet has survived billions of years. We are insignificant. We either pretend we can fix it (which is a mistake) or understand that the planet can make us disappear in an instant.
I mean, look at this pandemic. Had we not developed vaccines so quickly it would have been perfectly plausible for half the population of this plante to perish. Thinking we can control things at a planetary scale is pure ignorant hubris. We cannot. And we stand a far greater chance of killing everything on earth than to save the planet. The planet does not need saving.
It would take more energy than released by fossil combustion to turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons, but not to turn them into inorganic carbonates:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28676598
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...
Also, I did not say "turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons", that would be preposterous. No, it would take an unimaginable amount of energy to go out and take it out of the atmosphere and turn it into anything of any form.
The super simplistic example I use is: Take a bag of flour and let your building air conditioning system spread the dust all over the building. Now go pick up every single particle you released. And no, you can't open the windows and let outside wind clear out most of it. It's a closed building.
This is not a perfect analog, it is just an illustration of how it is very easy to create a mess and many, many times harder to clean it up.
Why is it a closed system? We get solar energy from outside the planet and it's among the top proposed tools to deploy.
No magical vacuum cleaner to fix anything.
Now, go do the math.
You're truly living in a fantasy world if you imagine it's possible to keep the current rate of CO2 production and just adapt to the effects in the long term.
We first need to transition the economy to renewables, drastically reduce production and consumption of many goods, get rid of the incentive structures that have kept things in this state. We could then hope to reach 0 emissions, which would mean maybe 2-4 degrees of warming. Catastrophic, but not world ending. To live in this world, we will indeed have to start looking at adaptation.
If we do it your way, with no reduction in emissions, bit focusing on adaptation, we'll be looking at 6-10 degrees of warming, which there would definitely be no adapting around.
First of all, the transition to renewables is a complete fantasy that has already been debunked:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
The conclusion, paraphrasing: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
> We could then hope to reach 0 emissions
No, we cannot. That is a fantasy.
For starters, we consume about 35 billion barrels of oil per year, nearly 100 million per day. Our very lives are so dependent on this stuff that we are not going to dent this level of consumption. Even if we cut it in half, this will not slow down atmospheric CO2 contributions enough.
And, not, a conversion to electric transportation will not make this happen. There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world. Replacing that entire fleet with electric powered vehicles will likely take somewhere in the order of 50 years, if even possible. We also have to manufacture 1.5 new electric vehicles to replace them, which means producing massive amounts of CO2 and consuming equally massive amounts of resources.
And then we have to CHARGE 1.5 billion vehicles per day, every day, all around the world. The global power generation system cannot handle this. In the US alone we would need somewhere in the order of one hundred giga-watt class nuclear power plants just to be able to deliver the kind of power (not energy, power is the problem) we would need to handle our entire fleet going electric. Even if I am off by 75%, we need 25 new nuclear power plants, along with changes to our power distribution infrastructure to be able to handle it all. We did not build an infrastructure that has a 100% excess generation and transportation capacity. Most power plants operate very close to full capacity.
And then there's the reality of what would happen if we reached 0 emissions (again, impossible, we have forest fires that release more CO2 in a few weeks than the entire fleet of automobiles in the US).
Let's say for a moment that we could actually reach zero emissions world wide. You do understand that if it is only the US or the US and Europe it is pointless, right? You do understand that seven billion people cooking food every day by burning something will produce a massive amount of CO2, right? Analyze any process, making clothes, preparing food, transporting and processing our excrement in towns and cities, you will quickly discover zero emissions is an absolute fantasy.
Let's ignore all of that reality and actually believe we can get to zero emission world wide. The entirety of humanity, zero emissions. Like we do not exist.
Do we actually know what will happen if we could achieve this fantasy?
Yes, we do!
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
These are atmospheric composition records extracted from ice core samples going back 800K years. In other words, we have good reliable and accurate data of a scenario, hundreds of thousands of years in duration, when humanity was "zero emissions" due to either being insignificant or not actually existing as we do today (7 billion people and our toys).
What does this data say?
It says that, if we did achieve zero emissions it would take about 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That is the baseline. Zero emissions == 1,000 years for a 1 ppm drop.
Now, go back and evaluate any proposed solution from this baseline.
"Cover the entire equatorial band with solar panels?"
Nope. This would violate the zero emissions scenario, therefore creating a situation where we would not be able to achieve a 1 ppm drop in a thousand years.
"Convert the entire transportation fleet to electricity?"
Nope. We would contribute even more CO2 and it would take somewhere in the order of 50 years. We would need to build thousands of new power generation plants. And, of course, there is no way to predict what the population of our planet would be, we are at seven billion today. Eight billion? Nine? Ten? More cooking. More clothing. More housing. More food. More everything. More CO2.
It does not take an advanced degree in math and physics to look at this and quickly understand the entire thing is a huge fantasy. This does not mean climate change is not real. It is very real. And this does not mean we should clean-up our act. We should. Yet not for some religious blind belief that we are going to save the planet. We cannot. And, if we act on some of the nonsense being pushed around we are bound to do more harm than good. Climate change has become a horrifically powerful political tool because both believers and zealots are following their "leader" blindly off the cliff. There's delusion on both ends of the scale. Some of us are in the middle saying "No! Stop! This is crazy!". Our voices, for the most part, are being drowned out by the delusion. I can only hope someone listens.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...
About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The only thing that is lacking is political will. This is our great tragedy.
No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever.
To start, read this:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
And then, this:
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...
And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space.
BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second...
How is petroleum made?
Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years
How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil?
n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros>
How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration?
Well, we burned oil.
Why was that so effective?
Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds.
In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287
From the article:
""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change.""
So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that).
Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year?
Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year:
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
BILLION, not million.
Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it.
What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans.
Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.
About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
Apparently I have to teach you that power is energy per unit of time, that is we have 173,000 TJ/s. And then we can do some simple calculation from energy equivalence of 35 billion barrels of oil (213,000,000 TJ) and find that corresponds to about 20 minutes of sunlight hitting Earth. Or calculating from power instead, we burn 6.75 GW of oil, or about 3e-11 of the incoming sun power. There's plenty of energy available, and nowadays sun energy is cheaper than coal. You don't even need high school math for this.
So, as you see, the "not closed system", is kind of relevant. What is irrelevant is how much plant matter that is required to produce said oil. No one, absolutely no one, has suggested that we should make new oil by burying plant matter for a long time.
You are pointing at solar energy coming into the planet as if it were some magical juju bean that can solve all of our problems. Well, it isn't. Had you actually read the report from which you got some of this information you would know just how wrong you are in trying to reduce the entirety of reality into a single variable: Solar energy. The whole idea is preposterous.
In your attempt to look smart and convert power to energy using a google search you fail to understand the key difference between power and energy in real life.
Using a simple example: The solar array I built in the back of my house can produce a theoretical maximum of 14,000 W any given instant (power). Assuming that is true (not even close), this means I could collect a theoretical 104 kW hours of energy over eight hours (also not true). Talking about energy is pointless because we do not use energy, we use power, we use the instantaneous version of, in this case, using electrons to do some work.
If you add-up the energy production capacity of all the power plants in the US (multiply their power output by 24 hours and add them all up) you can easily believe we have enough to charge 300 million electric cars. And that would be wrong. We do not have enough POWER generating capacity to support such a fleet. The energy calculation isn't correct because you can't use it to deliver power beyond the instantaneous power delivery capacity we have. The only way this would be true is if our future electric cars sat there for 24 hours to charge.
And then there's the reality that converting solar energy to anything useful is a horribly inefficient process. My 13 kW array covers about 80 square meters. That is a theoretical 80 kW (round numbers) of solar energy. At best, with all conditions being perfect, I have generated 11 kW. My average peak over several years in operation is about 8 kW. So 10% of the energy that hits it, at the PEAK moment in the day, much worse on either side of that curve. Counting energy, when what you need is power is a fantasy.
Oher solar energy conversion processes are even worse, as an example, geothermal is about 2% efficient, at best.
Do not reduce reality to a single variable. It isn't. It is a complex multivariate problem.
> About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
You probably didn't even read it. Did you? The paper has NOTHING to do with cost. It has everything to do with "can we achieve zero emissions with renewables". And that means all renewables, not just solar. The answer is a solid "no".
> About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
No idea what you are saying. You probably didn't read that either.
I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
Also, of course we need to increase our electricity production if more things, like cars, are going to be run on electricity.
The efficiency of solar panels doesn’t matter much. You remember that ratio between incoming energy and energy usage? We have a lot of zeros to take from. It doesn’t matter that the average solar panel only converts about a fifth of incoming energy, because the incoming energy is abundant and completely free. The same argument can be made about geothermal. And the same argument can be made about storing energy as hydrogen. Yes, the conversation will be inefficient, but that doesn’t matter because you do it sunny, windy days, electricity will be more or less free.
Finally, I’m sorry you think my argument is too simple. But calling it magical juju doesn’t refute it. The amount of solar radiation hitting earth is a very well established, and easy to understand, scientific fact. And if you remember, that fact was used to refute your statement that earth should be seen as a closed system. You didn’t even try to defend that statement, so I hope you never try to use it again without embarrassment.
What this means is that we don't get to claim "and then a miracle occurs" when proposing a solutions. This is exactly what all so-called solutions boil down to. Including what you are talking about.
You are citing the total energy landing on a hemisphere and completely ignoring that we can't harvest even a small fraction of that. Solar energy is very, very far from free. I built a 13 kW array on my property, I can assure you it was not free. I can also assure likely produced far more CO2 than it will ever save us. This is where you need to understand manufacturing and construction. I won't even go into the shit I had to go through with the County of Los Angeles. I have 64,000 POUNDS of concrete anchoring this array to the ground --which LA County forced upon me. How much CO2 do you think it cost to produce, transport and install that? How about the non-trivial structure it is mounted on? I could go on.
This idea that solar energy is free is just plain silly.
You are refusing to read one of the most scientifically honest papers ever done on the question of whether or not solar energy (actually, all renewables combined) can stop atmospheric CO2 build-up and reverse it and you actually want to school me on having a valid argument.
And, speaking of energy vs. power. Lots of sunlight falls above and below latitudes where converting it into other usable forms of energy is just pointless. If you want to be honest about solar energy, well, you have to do the math. It isn't what you think it is. Do you even have solar?
Here's the output of my 13 kW array on an average day:
https://i.imgur.com/LTMNDO1.png
Do you see what happens? No, it isn't magical juju beans. You can't quote some theoretical number and actually believe this stuff is usable.
Besides, you could convert the entire planet to the most optimal forms of solar and wind power and you would still do nothing to stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. Not sure why you are even arguing about solar. It's pointless.
> I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
That's very funny. I have a nasty habit. I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about. Which means I go way --ridiculously so-- out of my way to research things as far as necessary in order to understand and verify my claims. In the case of cars charging in the US, I actually developed a mathematical model that included behavioral elements and charging cars across our various time zones.
This, for example, is one of the outputs of the analysis:
https://i.imgur.com/wTwm82a.png
This includes considering such things as a portion of the fleet fast-charging while others slow charge. I considers the effect of people going to work and coming home at different times across our six time zones, etc. I am not typing stuff I pull out of my ass my friend. You can either make the effort to understand and attempt to do your own math or just ignore it and believe whatever you might wish.
The only thing that would be better than this model would be to write more complex behavioral simulation code and take into account far more variables than I did. I'll do that one day when I have the time. I don't think the end-result will be radically different from the simpler model.
Like I said, unlike most people, I go very far towards actually understanding things before I open my mouth.
Hey. Live long and prosper.
Back to energy and electric vehicles. I told you that my models predicted a requirement for a massive increase in energy generation capacity to be able to go to full electric vehicles. I then shared an image from one of my simulation model run calculations. This one:
https://i.imgur.com/wTwm82a.png
It shows a "new energy" need in the range of roughly 900 to 1,400 GW. Unimaginable. Right? That's over a thousand 1 GW class nuclear power plants.
I am delusional. Right?
Well, I decided to, once again, check my assumptions and math. They make sense to me. And then, looking around some more, I came across this from earlier this year:
https://youtu.be/ESIjxVudERY?t=3680
Here you have Elon Musk saying (paraphrasing) "If we convert all of our transportation to electric, electricity demand more than doubles". He goes on to explain that it isn't just about generation, it is, as I said, about transportation as well (which really means it is about POWER, not energy).
So, what does "more than doubles" mean?
Well, let's start with what our current energy generation capacity is in the US:
https://www.publicpower.org/resource/americas-electricity-ge...
As of February of this year, it sits at 1,200 GW.
Elon's "more than doubles" means we need more than 1,200 GW in new energy generation capacity. Interestingly enough, my model gave a range of between 900 GW and 1,400 GW. I created these models about five years ago.
Yeah, I think I know what I am talking about.
We don't get to use all the solar energy landing on the planet. Not even close.
Why?
Because, if you did, you would kill every single forest and all of agriculture. You would kill every single animal. You would likely kill the oceans. You might kill bacteria, insects and seriously disrupt weather. I can't even think about all the variables that would be deeply disturbed if humanity decided we are going to attempt to use a big chunk of what solar energy lands on the planet.
And blocking it from space? Seriously? Again, refer to the prior paragraph, let's go ahead and kill everything on earth.
These ideas might sound good after a beer or two but are nothing less than laughable once someone sits down and really puts pen to paper.
We are proposing to mess with forces we can't possibly understand. I have said this many times, we can't even take care of small-scale ecosystems and we are actually lending credence to nut-cases suggesting such things as deploying devices in space to block the sun. Wonderful.
You can do it elsewhere, though. And by different means.
Sahara is really big, really empty and has a lot of sunlight. If we had some at least semiefficient method of dumping carbon from the air back to solid form using electricity, the whole mankind could pay Niger or Chad or Libya or Algeria to rent 100 000 sqkm of dry desert, build a huge solar power station there and bury the resulting carbon mass in large, kilometer-deep trenches covered by stone and sand.
This further proves my point. People never bother to even attempt to do the math. People "know" the truth and "believe" in climate change and "solutions", yet nobody seems to have any interest in actually confirming what they are being told.
It's as bad as anti-vaxxers believing the government is installing tiny remote control radios in vaccines to control our minds. It really is that crazy, if not more.
The point is on "millions" of years. We really went too far and there is nothing we can do to "revers" it, for the first time in ~100 years humans will have to adapt to nature and not the other way around.
Capturing CO₂ from typical atmosphere is a very difficult problem, and it's a big problem too. Talking about that distracts from a problem that's much smaller and more accessible, namely capturing CO₂ from the parts of the atmosphere where there's very much CO₂.
The photo shows a number of pipelines that guide CO₂ up and release it. Capturing it at the top of the photo, in the open air, is very much more difficult and expensive than capturing it near the middle, in those big vertical things.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TfTxDMlqODtgyGkRG6-j9Y-Sv50=...
If you start thinking about how to capture it in the middle of the photo, you very quickly also consider other ways of achieving the same goal at the same site. Capturing CO₂ is damned expensive compared to those other ways, and the discussion is a distraction.
IMO capturing old CO₂ is necessary (as the article says) but when discussed it's usually contrasted to current emissions rather than old emissions, and it's hopelessly inefficient compared to current emissions. We can't go back in time and avoid old emissions, so avoiding capture isn't IMO possible. For the time being it's irrelevant because there current level of emissions (the highest of all time) presents us with very much to do that's both simpler and cheaper.
The coal stacks are likely to be much thinner and the gasses less visible.
I'm not saying that's all you're suggesting, and realism is certainly a requirement for working out what we actually need to achieve here, but this enthusiasm is essential. We need it to drive policy in the face of economic penalty and limiting nutritional choice. We need the enthusiasm if we want to be able to tell our kids (and theirs) that we actually tried.
It's a balance. "I love the enthusiasm but" might be accurate, but as-is, serves to smother that spark of hope that we need from everybody right now. Don't give up completely on our species.
I think the idea is potentially harmful, because it give us the relaxation that sometime in the future we can undo it...so why the hurry?
Same with species extinction...no hurry we can clone them later..but forgetting that we haven't found all the species that are already extinct.
Instead, what will get us is, essentially, farting.
The ultimate technological mechanism.
The power system on my solar shed is, admittedly, somewhat overkill in an attempt to get through the winter without having to light the generator (so far, I've failed at this, our inversions are nasty). The flip side is that I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy.
I've considered various methods to use some of the surplus in useful ways, which so far has looked like donating a lot of compute to various BOINC projects (including cpdn, which is now out of work...). But I've not seen much work in the way of "things that could actually capture concrete amounts of carbon and store them" at this scale. It's all huge facilities, big multinational investment, etc.
I've considered an algae grow system that would cycle air through some grow tanks (I have a lot of sun, growing algae in containers is sort of the default around here) and then bury the algae down some holes, but I'm not sure it really accomplishes that much.
Another option I've considered is making use of some of the basalt laying around, getting a rock crusher to grind it into powder, and then either spreading it on the hill, or trying to find some sort of more rapid system for weathering it (tanks of water with airflow through them?). Of course, if algae likes basalt... I could combine the two!
I just can't find any information on smaller scale systems like this, and I lack the bio and chem background to really be able to do things like analyze rock dust for carbon content.
Trees? They make efficient use of solar energy to capture carbon and have a lot of other benefits:
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuou...
Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-doe...
Had humans consumed fossilised carbon the thought would still be wrong since trees only store the carbon temporarily, eventually it is released as CO₂ when the tree burns up or rots away.
This leaves aside the whole discussion on whether there is any need to offset CO₂ from non-fossil sources - which there is not as far as I can see.
As far as I'm aware, the issue isn't with CO2 produced by cellular respiration, the issue is the burning of fuels dug up from the ground and the destruction of natural carbon sinks.
This is yet another stock/flow issue, where the sequestered carbon is a function of the stock of living trees, which itself grows with the delta of trees added - trees removed. You don't need to manually manage the lifecycle of each individual plant, just focus on the increasing the living stock, or rather, letting the living stock increase all on its own in response to more carbon in the air. So this is about land zoning and habitat protection, not building little coffins for individual trees. Let forests grow and protect their habitat, they will grow all on their own if allowed to.
FYI we've added 60 million hectares of forests since 2000. That process can be even expanded.
Of course that doesn't mean that reforestation isn't valuable. It certainly is. But even enormous growth of forest wouldn't make a big dent in atmospheric CO2 levels. The carbon came from underground and almost all of it will have to return underground to get CO2 levels down.
[1] https://innovate-eco.com/storing-carbon-in-plants-and-trees-...
You make it sound like a rapid process. Univ of Arizona did a study that showed CO2 emissions of dead trees was lower than living ones due to the rotting process being very slow compared to a living trees normal respiration cycle
I still favour wetlands over trees as a first priority.
Global warming is already pushing toward more frequent forest fires, or droughts in vast regions that if they have trees will end burning up as well.
Intensive tree planting in relatively small areas probably is a bad idea, or will have a big maintenance cost to try to avoid that risk.
But, in any case, it is the low hanging fruit of carbon capture. I just hope that it is done in the right way.
I also want to say that the planting trees method is a bit more nuanced than everyone makes it out to be. But don't trust me, let's ask someone who knows better: Forrest Fleischman[0][1]. I'm not saying "don't plant trees" (do) but that this is often everyone's go to response to CCS and it is a bit naive (as explained in the threads).
[0] https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/13062214459331297...
[1] https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/14440088233506037...
It will just never be as efficient as an industrial scale operation.
I've got an awful lot of basalt laying around, though...
I've looked into it briefly, and came to the conclusion that the BOINC stuff (it used to be F@H but I gave that GPU to a friend for some CAD work) was more useful than crypto mining, because I simply couldn't mine enough to matter out here - a dollar or less a day sort of thing, with my annual power profile.
I know you said grid-tie isn't worth the trouble, but until the USA moves to more renewable energy for power production, that might yield the best carbon reduction, depending on how much you could otherwise sequester per KWh.
The national average CO2 emissions for power production is 947.2 lbs CO2 per megawatt-hour [1] (or 0.947 lbs/KWh).
So unless you can sequester 10-15lbs or more of CO2 a day, then you may be better off sending your excess power to the grid if your goal is carbon reduction.
Though I'm not sure how to account for the actual CO2 reduction - is the national average fair? Should you use the average per state since states vary widely in their renewable energy status? Is there some other way to determine how much CO2 you've offset?
[1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
It would easily run me $10k to do all this, before I was able to cross tie a single kWh. And, in the bargain, I'd lose the standalone power system that is my office, because getting battery backed stuff approved out here is basically impossible. I tried for the house system, and after 18 months of fighting red tape that exists to fund the red tape, I gave up and built a grid tie system without a backup.
I get that it sounds easy, but it would cost more to interconnect it than the standalone system cost in the first place, drop me out of a very sweet 25 year net metering grandfathering, and leave me with a far less capable property in the deal. Sorry, just not interested in that.
I get it. I have a solar system too and there's no way in hell I'm updating it.
However, my system is also rather a good bit more reliable than the grid power on the house, which is nice for remote work.
I'm not sure these work at such small scales, but it could at least give you a starting point and a project. If you start a blog about these experiments I'd love to follow. Hard to know if your operating emissions would be offset by your sequestration. If anyone has better ideas I'd also like to know.
There could also be a monetary reason to do carbon capture at home. There can be a lot of CO2 buildup in homes and offices with poor ventilation (read: most).
Here’s how it would work: you pass by a convenience store or gas station on your way home or to work, pick up some depleted battery packs, you get home and recharge those battery packs with your excess solar power, then bring the recharged battery packs back to convenience store or gas station for a bit of money. That way you don’t need to grid tie your solar installation. :P
Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, but if you burn it as fuel it's a carbon-neutral energy source.
Alternatively, you could use electrolysis to make hydrogen, but hydrogen is harder to store.
(I'm not a chemist, so I have no idea if this could work. And it probably wouldn't be very practical even if it did.)
I do like your idea of experimenting with a rock crusher. The article mentions that finding the least-energy means of crushing rocks to the appropriate size is something of an open problem.
Assuming it's possible to use this process on a home scale with a decent solar grid and energy storage, it seems to me that you would be sequestering the carbon only very temporarily. Wouldn't the electrical energy used to produce the methane heat your home more efficiently (assuming you have an electric heating system) as you would be inviting energy losses through the Sabatier process?
Seems you would need to produce industrial levels of methane and distribute it (which would almost certainly be carbon expensive in it's own right) as substitute for naturally occuring methane being extracted from deposits.
It's a cool idea though. If there were a process to produce solid carbon, this would be much more promising (disclaimer: definitely not a chemist).
That's not as satisfying as just plain sequestering the carbon somehow. I mean, it would almost certainly be better to just run an extension cord to a neighbors house and let them run an electric space heater or heat pump off of the excess electricity.
Maybe methane could be used as an ingredient to make something else that's possible to store or bury long term, like some kind of plastic or liquid? (Most of what I know about the processing of hydrocarbons is probably wildly inaccurate because I learned it from Factorio.)
Probably (over) insulating the house is the most efficient way of minimizing energy loss. But then does an over-insulated house get overly warm in summer or easier to cool?
The air-sourced methane could be used for things that are hard to electrify/de-carbonify, and could reduce the use of ground based sources.
I'm wondering at what level of carbon tax it makes more sense to extract the carbon from the air to turn it into plastic than to use ground-based oil.
Birth rate decrease -> demand decrease -> CO2 decrease
If we have the same birth rate as Korea or Japan, the population would drop more than 20% in 50 years according to the population prediction in these two countries. This means lots of demand would not need anymore, and might be the best practice which could be done by individual.
Is there any solution could really reduce around 20%? (Not to mention more than 20% and not to transfer the emission to other countries)
Each of those saves on the order of 20% of emissions and could be done in less than a decade if we put maximum effort into it.
I really doubt convincing a sufficient number of people to not have children is easier than any one of those measures. Just imagine the political backslash if the government suggested not to have kids for the climate. It's a lot easier to convince people to stop eating meat for the climate and even that is essentially impossible.
In the scale of country, East Asia did quite well without any policies (exclude China, they have a special policy on it). Just keep raising the price of estate, and then birth rate would drop and never come back.
For the part of energy, according to the EPA report[1], the emissions by electricity and heat are around 25% in total. If we want to reduce 20% in total, we need to close 80% of fossil plants. For me, it is nearly impossible. There are some countries may not have the land or safe area to place nuclear/renewable plants. (e.g. Singapore...) I know there is a plan for Singapore to buy the clean solar energy from Australia, but it only covers 1/5 of the consumption. Also, there must be security issues for transferring power between countries.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
https://www.sunseap.com/SG/newsroom/2021/sunseap-signs-MOU-w...
I suspect most westerners are not going to be thrilled when receiving the government email about their mandatory sterilization.
Usually the idea floats in circles of people convinced we'll reduce the birth rate of "other" people (wink wink dog whistle yeah they're thinking of Africans)
Advocate for increased carbon taxes, extraction duties, and limits on new uses and loads.
Encourage wetlands and forest preservation and expansion. Wetlands, by unit area are the most productive carbon sequestering ecosystems on Earth.
Grow plants. Compost.
Reduce your own carbon footprint. Reduce meat consumption, use of manufactured goods (most especially with high embedded energy content), and energy useage. Reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order.
I don’t know the details of your site/situation, but I suspect any alternatives to grid-tying your system will turn out to be a lot less efficient than whatever (mostly one-time) trenching, cabling, and paperwork would be required.
Gardening.
If you garden without fertilizers, and compost garden waste, then you are capturing carbon in the soil. If you use a composting toilet too, you capture even more.
If you compost only the garden waste, and only( spread that compost on your garden, then the amount of stored carbon won't increase much, because a lot of what goes into your compost must have come from the soil. But if you also compost food-waste, and if you add soil-conditioners such as farmyard manure, then the amount of stored carbon will increase steadily.
But as has been noted up-comment, the easiest, cheapest way to get carbon into the ground is to not dig it up in the first place.
If connecting into the grid isn't possible you could maybe attempt to charge batteries that you then take home and use there. Would require some calculations to check if it's worth it though... Would maybe be best if it were an electric car that can feed back into the grid.
Or run a desalination plant ;D
The most effective form of carbon capture is to leave it in the ground. We need to stop any form of wacky carbon capture scheme that excuses companies into releasing more of it. This BTW. is exactly what most carbon capture adds up to. Burn a few tonnes of coal and plant a few trees or go to ridiculous lengths of trouble to pump less than a percent of the emissions in some underground cavity. It's a scam and it's the current reality of the industry. You hype it up, get the government subsidies & photo opportunity with the local government stooges and then a few years later it adds up to nothing worth mentioning. The planted forest has wilted away (or burned off), and the vast majority of the carbon that was supposed to go in the ground instead got released into the atmosphere. Australia has a carbon capture facility right next to a brown coal plant. It's beyond cynical if you start looking at the numbers.
The only way of even getting to net zero (never mind negative carbon) is by fixing the economics around the whole topic.
Releasing CO2 needs to be an expensive hobby with extremely low cost alternatives. That removes much more carbon from the equation than the cumulative carbon capture efforts (past, present, and planned future). Better still, it drives companies away from the business of making things worse. We are still subsidizing that even. Just stop doing that.
It actually can work quite fast too. Ten years ago, offshore wind was barely a thing, now it's heading to double digit percentages of energy supply in a lot of places. Same with domestic solar, batteries, etc. EV sales are going through the roof. All of that adds up to CO2 that we leave in the ground. Lots of it. Why is that happening? It's cheaper this way now. Simply accelerating what's already happening here will speed things up.
We need to do both.
Every single comment on an article that talks about one has commenters like you arguing "no but check this out, doing the other is so much easier/better/whatever".
We. Need. Both.
Existing carbon capture should not be subsidized because it's pointless. Sponsoring research into carbon capture would be good, but existing methods don't achieve anything wrt the climate crises.
That line of reasoning would lead you to de-fund any form of carbon capture scheme because there is about a 3-4 orders of magnitude efficiency difference between the two. Much cheaper to prevent a million tonnes from being added than to capture a few tonnes. It just doesn't add up to meaningful results. And arguably keeping the polluters that push for this in business actually adds to the problem to a large extent than their own ability to offset their carbon.
Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap resources in their own.
Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into a format that can't be burned.
wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid. I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy than can be extracted from burning it.
If there's still demand then the market will spur more development and exploration. It turns there's a lot of oil in the world, the fracking revolution in the US proved that. It would take $Ts to make a dent. And it wouldn't even work, as most oil reserves are held by national governments, who would thank you for raising the price of oil.
But let's suppose you did spend $Ts to shut in specific wells. You've spend all that money and gotten no economic benefit, except for other fossil fuel producers. If you had instead spent those $Ts on encouraging the deployment of fossil fuel free transportation and industrial processes you would destroy demand for that oil and (hopefully) leave it in the ground because its not economic to take it out.
I just came up with a funny scheme. Each person submits a bid saying "I'd like to receive X dollars per 1MT increase in net daily emissions, and I'm willing to pay the same sum per 1MT decrease". The tricky part is paying for second derivative: not CO2 concentration, not emissions, but change in emissions. Then as the emissions actually happen, they get tallied up by the government, an average "price per 1MT increase" gets determined, and emitters are forced to pay that price, so everyone gets paid (or pays) exactly as they asked. If carbon capture also happens, then carbon capture companies also get paid, either by emitters if there's a net increase, or from people's stated bids if there's a net decrease.
This seems weird at first, what if everyone submits million-dollar bids? Well, then emitters reduce emissions for a short time and take everyone's money. On the other hand, what if everyone submits zero? Then emitters keep increasing emissions, and everyone misses out on being paid. So there's some optimal bid in between. Anyone who wants emissions to go down just submits a larger bid.
Once you get to the hardest marginal cases, I’m not actually sure what the most efficient way of offsetting the carbon emissions of airplanes is. It might actually be more efficient to just capture and sequester enough CO2 to offset the emissions of jet engines than to find a new energy source that works on airplanes.
Most importantly, it's not certain that runaway warming can't happen even at our current temperature. Methane is being released from permafrost at our current levels of warming and is 20x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Also, our natural carbon sinks (the ocean, macroalgae, forests, soil) are in decline whether or not we stop emitting CO2 - so CO2 may keep going up anyway as we lose biomass.
And let's be honest with ourselves here, we're not cutting emissions to 0 tomorrow. Or next year. Or by 2030. Or by 2050 most likely.
We have to reduce emissions, at a level that seems inconceivable. We ALSO have to pull CO2 back out, again, at a level that seems inconceivable. The ability to scale up CO2 removal to a planetary scale requires that we accelerate development right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
A byproduct of increased atmospheric CO2 levels is an increase in vegetative growth. My naive assumption is that more plant mass means more food and habitat for insects.
We've created a world that is vastly different in climate than what came before. This is the problem with the climate crisis in general, all our ecosystems are in the wrong places
Can't speak to Taiga, but trees are growing just fine in California. Overgrowth of trees creating fuel for fires is as much a problem as anything.
But what do we do next when we're running out of these low hanging goals? It's more of death by a thousand cuts spanning across every industries you can ever imagine. And we've had a long, hard time to make politics work even on a very few number of those obvious low hanging fruits and it's still dysfunctional... Political will is a limited resource and we cannot really waste them on efforts with negligible impacts.
This is why we need to prepare more general and economically scalable solutions that directly deal with carbon emission itself. Keep in mind that we're not trying to handle all of carbon emission problems with carbon capture. It's more of an auxiliary one on top of highly optimized carbon reduction solutions.
Housing insulation retrofits next, and then metro-area roading and zoning reform to heavily encourage walking, with neighborhood shops, cafes, and communal spaces every few streets, and public transport to get between neighborhoods.
The first hangs lower than restructuring built-up areas, true. The second has great public health benefits though.
But I agree about political will. The political way to deal with climate change is not in policy documents, it's to produce policy documents.
Stratospheric aerosols are extremely well understood and the tech is mature today. We know from historical volcanoes exactly how the climate respond to dosage. The cost is dirt cheap, $10 billion/year, a rounding error for the US military budget. Moreover it requires no exotic tech, simply pre-existing missile delivery systems.
The only downside is that the aerosols have to be refreshed semi-annually. So if civilization breaks down for some reason we get a sudden slingshot heating effect. For that reason, it’s not a long-long term solution. But it will more than suffice for 50-100 years to get carbon scrubbing tech enough time to mature.
Ah yes, I so missed the good old concentration camps.
/S
This thread is pure totalitarian thinking. You think you know the Truth (TM) because there's a "science" label on it but in fact you're listening to humans that may or may not be good at science (or are just lying to advance an agenda).
When people think they know the Truth and start to discriminate society based on that it will ALWAYS end with camps.
In any event, you believe what you do, and I'll believe what I do, and we'll see who's society does better. That's the only test that counts, in the end, and requires neither our consent or interaction.
This has already been tested to oblivion. Remember the cold war, the West vs Communists? Freedom works even with chemtrail and flat earth crowd.
Note that "caring" != sympathise, hear out, or otherwise contenance repeated misinformation and disinformation. It does mean being aware of what responses might be and/or are.
Fortunately it doesn't matter, because we can just get started, buy in is nice, but not really necessary. Heck I don't even think congressional buy in is necessary, as Biden can order the military to start doing this.
Sure, let's short-circuit democracy, it's useless...
steak and tropical fruits for dinner tonight!
But your idea is somewhat correct, and it has to do with desalinization tailings. There are companies like Heimdal which can take the high mineral runoff from desalinization and use it to make concrete. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heimdal
"SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately 150 times higher than its concentration in air, making extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to remove CO2 from the enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities."
"SeaCURE will combine and refine existing approaches to develop a new system that removes CO2 from seawater and releases the CO2-depleted water back to the ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, at the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory we will benchmark established approaches to prepare seawater for CO2 extraction, strip that CO2 from the seawater, and collaborating with Brunel University concentrate the CO2 to high purity. TP Group, a UK based technology and engineering firm with world leading expertise in gas extraction from seawater, will then develop and upscale the most cost effective approach from this toolkit. The SeaCURE team will design a portable pilot plant to remove at least 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Future testing using the pilot plant would generate the data required to develop commercially viable CO2 removal at the megaton scale, aimed at public and private sector offsetting and the carbon trading market."
A set of papers, several of which address energy costs of carbon sequestration from seawater:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
I wonder how salt-tolerant it is? Could it be grown in salt lakes, and the mature ferns be skimmed to compost unproductive soil or feed livestock?
Downside of that is it would reduce the albedo of the lakes.
For the sake of illustration:
CO2 -> CaCO3
44 -> 100 (molar numbers)
That's a mountain range per decade. :)
Or do the quantities just not work out, and (to the non-naïfs) that's too obvious for words?
Hundreds of gigatons of carbon require removal from the atmosphere and/or oceans.
8 billion cal * 1 million / (4 cal/g) / 1 million g / tonne = 2 billion tonnes net carbohydrate
That's a rough estimate (carbohydrate is neither pure carbon nor CO2, there is a humidity content) and undercounts total ag production (animal protein consumes a large amount of input feed for a much smaller amount of protein) , but gives a rough order-of-magnitude sense: 1e9 tonnes food vs. 1e11 tonnes net emissions.
FWIW, Our World in Data gives 2.7 billion tonnes net cereal production in 2018:
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production
Total global live biomass is on the order of 550 billion tonnes:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/05/15/1711842115.full...
So take all the food grown on Earth in a year, multiply it 100x, and multiply that 1,000x, to come up with the volume of gas you'd be dealing with sequestering somehow.
Gas doesn't like being sequestered, less so for hundreds or thousands of years. (Natural gas formations are interesting accidents of geological history in which sufficient source material, methane conversion of that material, and a geological substrate in which that gas is trapped in the earth, all coincide.) There's also the fact that eventually re-introducing that gas to the biosphere is probably beneficial (on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of years), as biologically-active carbon is weathered out of the system (though solar irradiance will also be increasing over this period, and by various accounts, the happy music stops in about 800 million to 1 billion years).
It really is difficult to convey the volumes of resources humans use on an annual basis. Vaclav Smil's books on the topics of energy and material resource uilisation are highly recommended, especially Making the Modern World:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world-mater...
I've been converted by Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate: a new story" - he makes a strong case that we're only obsessed with carbon because we don't have good ways of measuring anything else, and that while of course the greenhouse effect is real, the negative effects of climate change including unpredictable weather and stronger storms can be mitigated by restoring forests, coral reefs, marshes, barrier islands, anything that lives will act as a buffer to fast changes in weather.
There's some good stuff in there too explaining the feedback loops between life and the weather, such as forests releasing aerosols that act as cloud seeds that bring moisture toward the forest.
Bogs are actually great sinks of carbon, all of the biomass created in the bog will sink below the waters surface and remain inert.
I believe this is no longer the consensus for the large coal deposits of the Carboniferous: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442
Also I think your mountain estimate is off. Mt Everest is 158.76 gigatons (~350e12 lbs). I don't think this detracts from your point (that's a TON of mass each year) but I thought I'd make the correction. I mean we're still talking half an Everest every year.
For reference, I did also find a source that says we mine between 32 and 50 billion tonnes of aggregate (sand and gravel) every year. So maybe 80 isn't that bad?
If we did plant a hundred trees and the average age of a tree is even 50 years. It gives us 50 years to workout what to do next.
This would drive up the cost of rib eye, and drive down the production of methane from cow burps. Cutting methane would be a quick win.
We need to make our farm land as efficient as possible and return as much land to forests that we can. We also need to repopulate the worlds oceans.
It's a deep hole we're in, and its going to take considerable effort and a lengthy process to dig ourselves out.
Subsidies won't change that. Yes, it takes time to shift an entire economic sector to a significantly different distribution of production and consumption. That just means we need to get started on the shift now--by stopping subsidies. Shifting the subsidies to something different just makes it take even longer to get to the only really sustainable state, which is nothing being subsidized and the free market determining what gets produced and what gets consumed.
For those jumping in the climate train, welcome on this long slow painful journey. It appears there is some movement to fix it again, and I am hopeful that the balance of power swings towards climate and protecting the planet. We are a funny creature and I don’t trust us in large numbers to do the right thing.
Energy system transformation, reforestation/protecting against development, political power and policy change, are some of the great high impact areas that are already getting lots of momentum but need continual work and effort.
There’s lots in the agricultural arena as well.
All static content, no trackers:
This doesn't just apply to mining/drilling companies; it applies to all of us. We all need energy - individuals, our employers, our suppliers. None of us want to pay a lot of money for that energy; even eco-nutters will blench at the prospect of higher bills or taxes.
So I'm against all excuses for mining and burning fossils. I'm against offsetting and (feeble attempts at) CC&S. And I'm against attempts to reduce emissions by means of taxes and regulation - that's all very well, but many places in the world have quite weak law enforcement, and many large countries seem to be perfectly OK with building new coal-fired power stations.
Instead, we need to just stop digging up and burning fossils. EVs, solar and wind-power, enery storage systems, CHP systems and so on can't (easily) be used as excuses for continued fossil energy generation.
Frankly, I despair. The biggest producers of emissions is rich people. Rich people also have the greatest lobbying clout and the most influence on governments. Their pensions are invested in oil and gas companies. Even if an individual expresses support for climate-change mitigation, the manager of his pension fund may well have other views.
So I'm pretty certain that my grand-daughters are going to be faced with worse problems than we face today. The sooner we act, the easier and cheaper it will be; but evidently we are not willing to act, until we are face-to-face with death and apocalypse. That will be my legacy to my grand-daughters, I fear.
It's attractive for a few reasons:
1. The actual carbon capture is pretty hands off
2. You can extract some (carbon negative) hydrocarbon fuel from the pyrolisis process to help pay for everything
3. The carbon you get is fairly stable as solid carbon - there's no worrying about CO2 gas escaping.
There's pretty much no way we could do this at a scale big enough to cancel out current emissions (I'd say maybe 10-20% would be feasible). But as a way of reducing CO2 once we've managed to stop burning as many fossil fuels, it's pretty attractive.
I'm not exactly thrilled to be at the "let's build an electric drone fleet that sprays sulfure dioxide into the sky", and that or whatever else would have some probably ungood reprecussions. But I think we've got to. The existential risk of not starting right now is too damned high.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716717 https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html
It's more or less exactly how we got where we are now. "More of the same, but in the opposite direction" isn't very convincing.
I don't see doing radical things to try to improve the earth as "exactly how we got where we are now." I see exploitation and capitalism & lack of governance & steerage as how we fucked shit up wicked bad. I see a lack of trying bold ambitious things to try and help rectify our situation as causing a colossal negative impact on earth, already, against our cloud cover, against our ocean oxygenation, against our planetwide survivable temperatures, against our more-moderate weather.
We need some big projects. The earth is huge, massive. To begin to have a real effect, we need to start, start making, start experimenting, start scaling. We can assess & learn as we go. We can adapt. With hope, we (Earth) can find sufficient leverage to not become another Drake Equation casualty.
What we cant do is what you propose: refuse to adapt. To gently seek peaceful global consensus, to reach unanimity before we start.
The projects work by circulating chemicals through the smokestack that latch onto the CO2 in the flue gas. The chemical is then heated up to remove the CO2 which is then pumped underground where it is sequestered, hopefully forever. The chemical is recycled back to the smokestack for the process to begin again.
When working well such systems capture around 80% of the CO2 at a energy penalty of around 20%. The problem is that the system rarely work well, so in the real world those numbers aren't achieved. This is why there are relatively few such systems deployed in the world despite $Bs in subsidies spent.
Lately, oil companies have been feeling the pressure to show results on this, so there are a lot of projects that have gone into development.
[1] Remember, throw plastic away don't try to recycle it or it'll mostly end up in the middle of the Pacific https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...
Making less out of plastic would be a good step. Making more out of plastic isn't a good idea.
The one thing I'm not sure of is food packaging. There's a lot of plastic used in that, but I don't know if we have any alternatives. It's tough to package food because you want much of it to be sealed air-tight. But food packaging does have an advantage because it only has to last as long as the food inside.
Having said that, plastic production itself is a far bigger GHG emitter than burning it. Plastic product production emits 1.5 Gt of CO2e per year while global CO2 emissions are 35 Gt [1]. That's 4% of global emissions coming from plastic production. Incineration is hardly anything in comparison.
Just shoving carbon into the soil doesn't mean it actually stays there. Definitely an open question not settled science.
Personally I dont think we will able to reduce the co2 growth before 2030-2040 since population in developing countries will increase their energy consumption while the west might decrease theirs but in total the energy consumption is going to increase. It takes a while to change from 80% of energy from fossil fuels to 0.
If you agree with the article (I do and so do others, e.g. renowned swiss climate physicist Prof. Dr. Reto Knutti at ETH Zurich) and use Stripe, you can setup some percentages to pay for CO2 removal through Stripe Climate (I do). I helps kick-start early stage technologies.
If taking CO2 of the atmosphere may take a long time then at least keeping our indoor environments at low levels will prevent the cognitive & health issues.
why? just because there's cognitive decline when co2 is above atmospheric levels, doesn't mean you get super-intelligence when it's below atmospheric levels. In that case you're better off ventilating your building than to scrub co2 from the air.
You can't use ventilation to bring the indoor CO2 concentration down to, say, 350ppm like it used to be outdoors.
But I think the answer is... practical, sure I guess. expensive? energy intensive? waste intensive? also yes.
Of course, the data is necessarily all about short term exposure, not non-stop. I'm inclined to think that it won't be too bad, if there is a direct effect at lower levels.
I'm wondering if there is room for a kind of magazine that's focused much more heavily on data than narrative, filled wit such articles.
Apparently, spreading CO, SO2, NOx, VOCs, O3 is just fine
Some side effects likely.
It's not about planting the trees. You have to make sure they survive and thrive for at least 50 years, and that they are sequestering carbon while not destroying downstream ecosystems and livelihoods.
It's not "plant a trillion trees" but "cleverly create huge, benign carbon-sequestering ecosystems".
Politicians can't brain that much.
Increasing the world's forest cover is worth doing for its own sake, on biodiversity grounds, but its at best a small part of the solution to global warming.
Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon).
Nature is circular. Any "waste" from one process is an input into another process. It's humans that think in linear "Resources into products into waste" ways.
No, you can get it to sequester carbon if you plant trees (or other plant matter), harvest it, convert it to charcoal, then spread that around. Apparently in that form (biochar) it stays sequestered for a few thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
Left alone, nature's cycles are mostly carbon neutral.
But outside equilibrium, the forest canopy will expand until equilibrium is reached, or the forest canopy will shrink until equilibrium is reached. You will also see more hungry plant life supported in environments with more carbon again until starvation levels are reached.
It is like any other kind of food. We can think of food as sequestered in the living bodies of a population, with deaths matched by births, a constant amount is sequestered. But increase food and population goes up until starvation levels are reached and now more is sequestered. Decrease food and population falls so less is sequestered. It doesn't matter where the food comes from. Currently 20% of the earth's carbon is sequestered in plant biomass. This is why various carbon offset programs do include increasing forests as a legitimate offset, but the land has to be allocated to the forest in perpetuity. It's not like you can grow 10 trees, the point is to support a bigger forest where there are 10 more trees permanently.
Thus nature regulates carbon levels at those altitudes that trees can feed from. I have no knowledge about equilibrating mechanisms in the atmosphere as a whole, this discussion is for carbon accessible to plants.
Obviously violent combustion will put a great percentage in the air, but I don't see a strong reason to believe that a rotting tree trunk will completely put carbon in the air and none of it in the ground.
All the carbon that makes up most of the mass of plant is from the CO2 in the air. Decay and rot release whatever carbon was captured back into the air.
The same way the food you eat turns to CO2 you breathe out but due to fungi and bacteria.
If you wanted to zoom out and squint and get a little biblical, this is a Garden of Eden situation. There was an atmosphere that could not support our lives. There was a perfect mix of things at the same time to change that atmosphere into the one in which humans flourished. It was something too powerful we'd never be able to replicate ourselves. All we had to do was not exploit buried hydrocarbons. But we've instead made a race to dump as much carbon in the atmosphere as possible, it would seem. And now the comfortable world we live in will doom us to live outside of paradise.
If carbon-free energy were money-free...
I'm still accepting funding in the from of rare stamps.
Not if they keep growing, which if there's plenty of CO2 to feed them, they will.
Not all tactics will be equally effective. It's worth investing in the approach(es) that are most effective in proof-of-concepts trial runs guided by a first principles perspective. That's how to maximize change. GMO kelp and phythoplankton for oceanic BECCS seem like the leading candidates.
Doing "something" is futile if it's ineffective, not permanent, and not scalable.
Reforestation is a feel good pipe dream as explained using logic by Phil Mason. Dry weather = fire hazard = no sequestration.
The greenest the earth has ever been was when CO2 levels were high, and the earth was incredibly fertile.
https://holoceneclimate.com/temperature-versus-co2-the-big-p...