MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide from air (2019)
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
But keep this in mind: plants evolved lignin to make their structures (trunks, branches, all that) hundreds of millions of years before bacteria and other microorganisms evolved the ability to break down that lignin. So, for hundreds of millions of years, plants captured carbon dioxide by photosynthesis and sequestered it. That's what changed earth's atmosphere from reducing to oxidizing. Fossil carbon is the geological remains of that carbon capture.
It's hard to imagine carbon-capture tech that has the longevity of those planet-wide lignin forests.
You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.
Just a detail: forest are not tree next to each other’s. The relationship between organisms change the energy efficiency and life outcome of most of the participants.
Vertical versus horizontal scaling.
> You can take each part of that and make a sizable facility that's dedicated to only handling a specific part very efficiently. As an example, if the process needs electricity you could set up small self contained solar panel units, or you can produce a few magnitudes more with one nuclear powerplant. No point in digging a hole with a thousand spoons when an excavator can do it in one swoop.
Microservices versus monoliths.
Why have thousands of individual car fuelling stations when everyone could drive to one giant one in the middle of the country?
Why have a steam turbine in your nuclear plant with many small blades?
If your thousand spoons work pretty much untended and cost half a million each, then an excavator that requires a crew of a thousand which costs ten billion is just as stupid as all of the above.
TLDR:
* there is evidence for partial lignin breakdown in existing deposits, so we know it was a thing back then
* if it were just lignin breakdown, then we'd see orders of magnitude more deposits. that is, if you look at the per year deposit rate, you'll see only a small fraction of lignin being deposited.
* a large fraction of deposits doesn't even contain lignin, often below or above deposits with lignin, but without there being a different rate of depositions between them.
H2O technically affects the temperature even more than CO2 but it's not a driver, because the total H2O in the atmosphere depends on overall temperature. Emitting more H2O, from hydrogen cars or something, would just mean you get more rain somewhere.
And it's very likely any fixes will not simply be a matter of reducing atmospheric carbon.
Here's a first principles explanation for why carbon net zero and sequestration are not the direct, most expedient path towards reducing temps.
"Dr. Ye Tao on a grand scheme to cool the Earth" https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand#d...
TLDR: Given the time and resources we have, focus on strategies for cooling the atmosphere the fastest way possible.
My book: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
The Great Oxygenation Event occurred about 2.3 billion years ago, around the same time as complex cells emerged. We didn't see multicellular eukaryotic life until 1.6 billion years ago, give or take. Plants certainly played and still play a hugely important role, but they probably weren't responsible for the initial change to an oxidizing atmosphere.
My sources: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
The only other part that would really require software devs is heavy duty physics simulations perhaps.
Some things you just can't fix with software :)
(Having said that - of course every hardware project needs some sort of software - be it microcontroller programming, or a website. But it's such a small part that it can be outsourced to a generic software house really)
https://jobs.lever.co/thalolabs/73ca7b6c-50ff-4902-9d32-8c86...
From chemistry point suggested process is indistinguishable from the following process: pass air over CaO or Ca(OH)2 solution to turn it into CaCO3. Heating of CaCO3 will release CO2 thus regenerating CaO, which could be reused again. This process would require energy input — like MIT tech.
Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing. More CO2 in atmosphere means more carbon will be available for capture by plants, which means more crops and trees.
And of course we have ways to produce energy now without burning fossil fuels.
I am convinced that climate is changing — just not fully convinced what is the human role in it.
Also there are several chapters in Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren that go into the geological record, with multiple lines of evidence that all point to a similar sensitivity of the planet's average temperature to CO2 levels.
(Regarding invasive diseases, I meant primarily things affecting forests.)
> Excess of CO2 in atmosphere is not necessarily bad thing.
This runs counter to everything we know about climate change.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/cracking-carbon-removal-challenge-....
https://news.mit.edu/2022/cracking-carbon-removal-challenge-...
The fundamental problem with carbon capture is that 1) carbon comprises a tiny fraction of Air, and 2) requires energy input in some form. This means whatever methodology you use, will require you to expand energy to move huge volumes of air to remove a small number of particles (i.e. ~400 particles of Carbon, for 1 million Air particles).
This tells us a few things about the energy efficiency of those processes, but, as importantly, they would be economically viable in that price range. (A $1/gallon gas tax would have much less economic impact than the war in Ukraine, or prior wars in the Middle East.)
Carbon Capture isn't real
Here's a link to a relevant publication (from a university that unfortunately doesn't have the prestige or marketing team of MIT): doi.org/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1
Where with MIT's method, you put a machine next to a good spot for geological storage and turn it on. According to articles I've seen on similar methods (Climeworks etc), it would be about a thousand times more efficient in terms of land area.
I'm definitely not an engineer but I feel like injecting CO2 directly into the earth has to use a ton more energy.
Carbon capture cost is half of the equation - if this sytem can be scaled and deliver it with less price, then the price of the whole ccs gets lower.
Personally - having spent some time in the CCS field, I am very excited about this technology. If they manage to scale up the production (which is not certain), it will be extremely energy efficient to capture carbon with their method. The alternatives require pressure or temperature swing - so they waste a lot of energy either compressing gasses, or heating up sorbents.
This is just one of the myriad of ways our malinvestment in cheap nuclear energy condemns us to try to build a type of perceptual motion machine.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220422005027/en/Ver...