The quest to trap carbon in stone
wired.com
wired.com
Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.
I think people trying to find anything possible to avoid or alleviate that issue perhaps deserve a bit more consideration of their position and reasoning. Because the U.S, Europe, China and India and Pakistan have a lot of people to prioritize over the rest of the world, and how they decide if and when to adopt provisions may be different than other nations, but they have just as big of sticks to try to protect what they see as their own best course of action.
The theory of evolution tells us that over centuries, reproduction rates will not drop.
Massive emissions reductions can also be paired with CDR to have even more impact since reductions alone — basically no matter how steep at this point — are not going to get us to where we need to be.
In any case, at this point even if we stopped emissions tomorrow we'd still need negative emissions to get back to a safe level.
Besides, technology can help us leave fossil fuels in the ground. It's not like all those solar panels and batteries aren't advanced technology.
PS, I love that you’re making that comment using…a technological solution which would’ve been considered wizardry not too long ago.
Do you have any examples of a successful political solution like the one you describe?
With respect to failures of politics, I would suggest you look to nuclear proliferation. All political solutions to this have been miserable failures.
How would you suggest to proceed?
I can already hear the "true communism hasn't really been tested yet!"
> But even if that bears out, multiply $100 by even a single gigaton—barely enough to make a dent in our annual emissions—and you’re talking about $100 billion. (The National Academy of Sciences has estimated that by 2050 we need to be removing at least 10 gigatons of carbon. Every year.) That’s on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars that would be required to build the plants themselves.
Big numbers, sure. But if they can hit the promised $100 per ton at scale, and we have to remove 10 gigatons per year by 2050... we're talking like $1T per year in operating costs. That's a bit more than one percent of current global GDP.
Maybe I'm missing something, but for an existential threat, that kinda seems like a pretty good deal? Even if it ends up a couple times that at scale... still a pretty good deal?
The caveat is that technology alone can't be expected to solve social-political-cultural issues
Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. Over the past few years, the idea has attracted significant attention among academics and social movements, but for people new to the idea it raises a number of questions. Here I set out to clarify three specific issues: (1) I specify what degrowth means, and argue that the framing of degrowth is an asset, not a liability; (2) I explain how degrowth differs fundamentally from a recession; and (3) I affirm that degrowth is primarily focused on high-income nations, and explore the implications of degrowth for the global South.
Although the political influence and PR of incumbent extractive industries is overwhelming, how we talk about climate change in the face of manipulation vs choosing strategies that will have the most significant impacts are different things. We shouldn't let the presence of PR prevent the promotion of effective solutions, especially when current political realities makes the ability to make changes to society very tenuous.
Based on this model, my opinion is that technology is part of the solution to climate change. Degrowth can be part of the solution, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. Perhaps MIT is wrong or has made invalid assumptions, this may be the case, but we can only make decisions based on models, and we have to choose the models we think are valid and use them to focus on what we can promote. I think carbon pricing and carbon removal are possible for society to undertake, I think degrowth will be a hard sell.
Massive reductions and degrowth are not going to happen in a democracy. People can say they are all for fighting climate change, but the minute the price of gasoline goes up, they are ready to vote out the leaders. Look at the US where Biden's approval rate has an inverse correlation with the price of gasoline.
Look at France and the yellow vest protests.
Expecting people to reduce consumption to fight climate change is like Malthus expecting people to embrace celibacy to combat overpopulation - not going to happen. Thankfully, for overpopulation, safe, cheap, effective birth control (a technological solution) turned things around. We will need the same for climate change.
Carbfix, has been researching the storage part for a while now, and they plan to import CO2 to their facilities in Iceland with tankers from European polluters (crazy idea, but apparently works out).
If so, then I disagree that this is a scam. Liquid carbon fuels are going to continue being mission critical for civilization for many decades to come. So much of our infrastructure is built with the assumption of liquid carbon fuels that it's going to take a very long time to migrate completely. And there may be some applications that can never be carbon fuel free.
So, projects like these are still very valuable, because they potentially reduce the need to extract and burn fossil fuels, which necessarily inject additional carbon the atmosphere. Slowly down the rate we add is just as important as permanent capture projects like this one that can actually reverse the trend.
Also, I am increasingly of the opinion that permanent carbon capture tech is absolutely critical to civilization sustainability. I think humans are going to burn every ounce of volatile carbon fuel stored up in the Earth's crust. The incentives to do so are just too great. Converting the excess carbon to a non volatile form is the only way we'll be able to control how much remains in our atmosphere.
Petroleum industry CCS also includes pumping captured CO2 directly into underground reservoirs. Not only is this unstable (it's not chemically transformed), and inefficient (solid chemical forms take less space, less pressure, don't need cooling to remain liquid, etc.), but those reservoirs are typically old oil/gas wells: "capturing" CO2 in those wells will push out any remaining oil/gas, which the company can then sell for burning.
Back in the early 90ies, i can see that, but today/in 20 years it does not sound too ridiculous. Or am I missing something?
Burning ancient sunlight is expensive.
In, like, setting up petawatts of nuclear electrolysing plants that will split seawater into H2 and O2, where the gases will dilute the atmosphere enough that CO2 levels drop.
This harebrained idea is on par with those CCS projects, but has the nice side effect that the nukes can sometime later be repurposed to more useful things.
From Wikipedia:
"Misuse of watts per hour
Many compound units for various kinds of rates explicitly mention units of time to indicate a change over time. For example: miles per hour, kilometres per hour, dollars per hour. Power units, such as kW, already measure the rate of energy per unit time (kW=kJ/s). Kilowatt-hours are a product of power and time, not a rate of change of power with time.
Watts per hour (W/h) is a unit of a change of power per hour, i.e. an acceleration in the delivery of energy. It is used to measure the daily variation of demand (e.g. the slope of the duck curve), or ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h.
Other uses of terms such as watts per hour are likely to be errors."
The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance, with regards to carbon; a bunch was trapped in biomass, and cycled through the carbon cycle [1]. Then humanity did two things; we destroyed a lot of carbon stores (with agriculture, deforestation and setting off soil erosion), and (more importantly) dug up and released even more carbon into the carbon cycle. It will not be enough for us to only trap it in biomass, we need to permanently remove it from the cycle.
We definitely need to do both, and storing carbon in biomass is probably more cost-effective currently, but if we're going to restore the balance, we'll need more than biomass.
Maybe if you want to remove the carbon permanently, creation of synthetic polymers like plastics and things similar in composition to oil might be the trick.
I guess we could create synthetic polymers and store them, but the scale of the problem is just so insanely massive. We'd need a place to store all that plastic (I don't even know where to begin to do the math, but we use around 10 gigatons of carbon each year [1] so it would take up some amount of space), and we'd also have to hope that bacteria won't develop that can digest it
[1] https://www.wri.org/insights/co2-emissions-climb-all-time-hi...
I wonder how fast the carbon was sequestered to produce oil in the natural process. We don't know how much oil there is in the ground, so we really can't tell how much faster we are releasing it than it was captured. I wonder if there's data on the effect on the biosphere from that process and some other way to gauge the speed and also total carbon that has been sequestered naturally to create oil and gas.
Nit pick but, is there anything that says the earth isn't or won't be at a balance?
Sure, climate change will be hugely impactful, especially for humans, but I figure the earth will still be in balance, just not the one we are used to.
https://www.facebook.com/climeworks/posts/we-often-receive-q...
The short version is: We should be doing all the things. Growing trees is cost-effective but requires a lot of land and water, which we don't have infinite supplies of.
That leaves basically two solutions; capture the carbon from the air, which takes a lot of energy, or ship it with tankers. The first is being done (at a small scale) and the second is being worked on.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't have power plants that release carbon, but that's another discussion :)
Another idea you could deduce from this is that if we remove plant matter from the forest, and lock that carbon up so it doesn't go back into the atmosphere, it could become a long term carbon-sink. Even better if the plant matter can be useful. So vast lumber farms with the fastest growing trees you can get could be a good carbon capture technology.
6CO2 + 6H2O + (light) ---> C6H12O6 + 6O2
For reference, some googled numbers:
- The amazon rainforest holds about 123 billion tons of carbon in total.
- For the past decade, we've emitted about 35 billion tons of CO2 (around 10 billion tons of carbon) annually.
You'd need to plant a whole new amazon forest every 10-20 years to balance out our emissions. And that's assuming our emissions don't keep growing exponentially like they've done in the past - otherwise you'll run out of land to plant forests on in a couple of decades.
Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist"..
To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse.
It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive that that is the case right now. Also it seems counterproductive and extremely short sighted to make the blanket statement that the problem is impossible to solve with technology when so many problems throughout history have been solved by technology.
Other solutions exist that still allow us to live good lives, but the real barrier is entrenched and stubborn systems resistant to change. Even simple things like the urbanism movement being implemented would help a great deal, but getting American urban planning to change course is like trying to push a boulder up mount everest, it would seem.
In my mind, we should aim to solve climate change however we can, while minimising lifestyle harm. But if its a choice between the irreversible destruction of the environment we live in and my lifestyle changing somewhat, I'll choose the latter.
I hardly call that degrowth, That's just efficiency.
Focusing on decreased happiness on the assumption that it'll also decrease co2 is just 21st century puritanism.
For more than two decades politicians, academics and industrialists have promised great things from carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But after years of trial and error and multiple project cancellations due to prohibitive costs, this highly expensive technology stores less than one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions a year. Even JP Morgan in its 2021 annual energy report sarcastically notes that the “highest ratio in the history of science appears to be the number of academic papers written about CCS compared to its real life implementation.”
The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil considers CCS a ridiculous endeavour because it will never scale up fast enough to make a dent in global emissions. The global economy now produces about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Tackling 10 per cent of that problem (roughly four billion tonnes) would require the same infrastructure that now supports the entire global oil industry, which produces four billion tonnes of oil a year.
Like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture doesn’t scale up very well. Researchers recently calculated that if the world deployed direct air capture using a chemical reaction that relies on caustic soda to break down CO2 emissions to water and sodium carbonate, it would require a new mining industry.
Just to capture 25 per cent of global emissions, it would need a system of extracting caustic soda that is 20 to 40 times greater than current global production. And this system would consume 15 to 24 per cent of the world’s primary energy spending to get the job done.
The technology also has a big footprint. An industrial factory, powered by natural gas and capable of removing just one billion tonnes of carbon out of the 37 billion tonnes emitted per year, would occupy an area five times greater than Los Angeles. If powered by solar energy such a factory would require a landmass 10 times greater than Delaware.
In other words don’t expect a direct air capture unit in your backyard soon. One group of researchers concluded that the technology “is unfortunately an energetically and financially costly distraction in effective mitigation of climate changes at a meaningful scale.” Another recent study concluded that carbon capture and storage and direct air capture projects emit more carbon than they remove or store.