Facing brutal climate math, US bets billions on direct air capture
reuters.com
reuters.com
Simple argument: DAC requires energy.
In some places, that energy is stranded. Think of the DAC plant in Iceland using geothermal. Fine. In that case, DAC makes a meaningful contribution.
If the energy used for DAC is not stranded and could instead be used to offset fossil fuels, it would be far better to offset the fossil fuel use. This is trivially proven true when you consider the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Better to prevent the entropy increase from adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place.
Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless. If you can build the energy infrastructure you will need to power DAC, you would be far better off just using it to offset and eliminate fossil fuel use.
Once you have eliminated the use of fossil fuels, sure, DAC makes sense. But the idea that DAC will save or even help us without complete decarbonization as a prerequisite is just nonsense in my opinion.
DAC is still in the research phase, and is probably a decade a way from widespread use.
Solar power, wind power and electric transportation are already well into the production phase and are happening today.
If there aren't enough places with stranded energy maybe we can make more. All that takes is installing more solar in some place than there is infrastructure to transport the electricity out. That excess is stranded.
The amount of energy available for solar is insane. To illustrate how ridiculously abundant solar power if you wanted to build a solar farm whose output during the day matched the power use of the entire world you'd only need about 500 000 km^2 worth of panels.
At night the power falls to near zero, but so what? If all it is doing is running a DAC plant it doesn't need to run overnight.
I'm sure there are hundreds of places around the world with good daytime sunlight, enough room for a DAC plant and a solar farm to power it, and limited grid infrastructure.
That would be enough energy with current DAC technology to remove each year about 50% of the year's CO2 emissions. That would effectively knock us back to 1970 levels of net yearly emissions.
There are 5 subtropical deserts in the world with areas greater than 500 000 km^2. There's room in those 5 deserts for about 30 of those 500 000 km^2 solar farms. That's enough energy to in 1 year bring atmospheric CO2 down to around 320 PPM, which is around 1960 levels. 2 years to get back back to 1800 levels. 6 years to get to pre-industrial levels.
Of course it is possible that at that scale energy isn't the bottleneck for DAC. It may depend on other resources that cannot scale that well.
Because no one has suggested using DAC to offset fossil fuel use without reducing fossil fuel use, this is a straw man. DAC may very well be a valid strategy when used in conjunction with the reduction of fossil fuels to better reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon in a given time frame.
No one is working on carbon-free renewable energy? Solar power hasn't doubled in efficiency since development began? No one is building wind farms? ICE vehicle fuel efficiency has not been massively increased? No one is making electric vehicles? Supply chains are not getting more efficient? There are no waste reduction strategies being implemented anywhere? There are no efforts to reduce methane emissions?
> We see that while emissions from fossil fuels have increased, emissions from land use change have declined slightly in recent years. Overall, this means total emissions have roughly stabilised over the past decade.
There is some hope that fossil fuel emissions are peaking right around now. See the recent Ember info:
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici...
This is not a fatalistic "oh, let's not even try then" statement. It's just facts. Yes, we should try. No, we won't succeed if it's just the US reducing emissions.
So yes, more than nothing has been done to reduce emissions, but you need to look at the right numbers and graphs.
Once we get to sulfide injection we'll just factor it into acceptable levels of CO2 production, to keep things running until nothing can be done about adapting to climate change anymore.
If anything, Covid convinced me that's the kind of scenario to expect.
Of course I hope for something else but better be prepared for the worst.
Everyone is too concerned with their bottom dollar and it’s gonna be too late to change once the collapse starts.
While it sounds great on paper, the secondary order effects will last longer than primary and are very hard to quantify. It's clearly 10x-1000x cheaper to cut CO2 emissions now than to try to block out the sun with geoclimate engineering in a few decades.
EA's point that charities that provide malaria medication and vitamin A supplementation for pour children are very cost effective ways to save lives are very good. That might make other good points too. They are often very good at convincing people that certain charities are worthy of donation. I think it's possible that we'll see similar arguments form members of that group for extreme climate change measures.
As a general rule, EA groups have a tendency to latch onto ideas that are radical, ideas outside the overton window. You shouldn't assume that automatically means they're bad unless your heuristic is "we should never stray outside the overton window, ever".
I have no issue with radical ideas "outside the window" personally, but often find that EA groups tend to go right for barely workable "grand plans" and often don't listen to the people with boots on the ground, actually doing the work.
I'd give specific examples, but it would be doxing myself as many of them are extremely specific.
Yep, scientists already suggest it would disrupt rainfall in the 3rd world. Ironically the same nations that will be the worst hit from global warming regardless. What will India's reaction be when their monsoon rains fail because of the unilateral actions of another country? It's not a good idea to destabilize a nuclear armed nation.
This is just silliness.
Of course, if the goal is to profit from moving people around you get perverse rent-seeking and $15 cling wrap turkey sandwiches in a CIBO kiosk. I would argue moving people around easily and efficiently is intrinsically good the same way building a well-utilized library is.
The US has an incredibly successful geography that it has strategically not fully tapped. I'm just spitballing here but sending 70% of domestic freight via trucks is excremental. Having transit routes that run slower today than they did in the 20th century is unacceptable. Complete and utter lack of imagination or political willpower
New York City and Boston are roughly 200 miles apart and it takes four hours by car and four hours by transit. Tokyo and Osaka are 365 miles apart by car and an seven hour drive, but you can get between the two cities in three hours by using transit.
That would be a good step to take.
> It's easy to take away other peoples needs and wants.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but what we're seeing now is just consequences of 50 years of global inaction. You want to blame someone, blame the people who have been in charge for the past two generations, not people today.
Fortunately, it's possible for civilization to do more than one thing at a time.
In this case doing "more than one thing at a time" amounts to trying to have one's cake while feeling good about baking it with coal-generated electricity.
And since no technologies exist that can do permanent recapture to undo that at a useful scale (and probably never will because its a conservation of energy problem), its a debt we'll never be able to pay back.
Sure it's all (hard) science fiction but I feel like we're giving up on realistic near term solutions anyway.
But we have this gravitationally contained fusion reactor in the neighbourhood literally radiating energy at us. (I'm talking about the sun, if it is not clear.)
That is the thing which powered the previous capture. How would it be impossible to do it again? (I'm not talking about "practical" or "fast" those are questions after we established that it is possible, which it seems we disagree on.)
Ok, but that means the question is not the energy balance. That is my whole point.
> How much space do you need for plants to capture a gigaton of carbon?
Plants are only one of the possibilities. All I am arguing is that it is not impossible on account of the principle of energy conservation. Not arguing how easy or hard it is.
> Does earth even have that much suitable surface?
Of course. It happened once.
You probably don't.
> human technology is energy intensive, wasteful
I agree.
> and won't save us
In that case we better lay down in the sun and die peacefully. Because human technology is the only thing which can save us. What else there is?
We do technology, and we obviously can't.
> What else there is?
Plants.
And of course when we do want to turn CO2 into hydrocarbons we can use solar and nuclear energy sources, in which case the hydrocarbons play the role of a battery rather than primary energy source. We can also use non-fossil energy to concentrate CO2 from the air; in theory at least that takes quite a bit less energy than hydrocarbons release when burned.
If we want to stay under 3 we’d better get some real effort behind ending coal as soon as possible.
While it is possible to do more than one thing at a time, our politicians are trying to plug a leak while ignoring a giant gaping hole just around the corner. It’s like they’re incompetent morons or something.
I'm still optimistic we can stay below 2 degrees of warming.
Also, there are some applications, like long-haul jets, that will be very difficult to electrify, and DAC gives us a way to make liquid hydrocarbons for them without any net emissions. Biofuel is another way in theory, but not always in practice, and it takes a lot more land area.
I'm fairly bearish on direct capture solving much though. It requires so much capital and energy just to replicate the carbon capture that we can already do just by growing plants. I hope that companies like Charm will also get significant funding to pursue using plants for the capture part.
There’s no logic in this.
I agree with you we’ll need to remove co2 eventually. But before we worry about that let’s focus editing on stopping making it worse. The payoff there is much higher!
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/atomic-angst-over-germa...
Capture elsewhere is a service. Possibly a public service.
The financial math is different.
e.g. burn gas to generate electricity and capture CO2, or just use renewables.
burn gas to heat things, or just use renewables and heat pumps
Still good to capture unavoidable ones like methane from pre-existing coal mines, wells and landfills.
Given those constraints, centralized capture is at least a plausible option that doesn't involve starting big fights with entrenched interests in coal-reliant states. Is it more efficient or more likely to work than direct capture? No. It is, however, politically possible and worth exploring.
Go ahead and try to make a law that makes coal less profitable without Manchin's support.
If you have a problem with that, welcome to the club. Unfortunately, if you want to change the game to make it such that it's easier to do the right thing, you ALSO have to get Manchin's support. In fact, to do some things would require the other party's support as well, and their SOP is to kill anything you push for, and has been since 2012.
The cellulose structure of plants is very carbon-heavy. This carbon comes primarily from the air.
Wood used in construction lasts at least decades longer than the time it took to grow the tree. Timber framed construction can stand for centuries.
Any organic matter can also pyrolyze: the release of volatile, flammable organic compounds when exposed to heat. If pyrolysis occurs in the absence of oxygen, the carbon does not burn. The gases can be burned very cleanly. The carbon is very stable and also forms the basis of excellent soil amendments (think fertilizer). When used as a soil amendment, it is often called biochar, but it is the same thing as charcoal. It is stable for centuries to small millenia in the soil.
When used as a soil amendment, the carbon is not pulled into the growing plant life. Remember, plants get their carbon from the air.
1. Plant fast-growing stuff. Some trees are ridiculously fast, but bamboo probably wins for growth speed. 2. Create biochar (use the heat for something useful) 3. Bury biochar (actually mix with compost or some other carrier, don't just plant lumps of charcoal) 4. Plants grow faster
Changes in temperature affect the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture
It would be interesting to see the global lifecycle analysis though; I'm interested to know if it even breaks even
Things like growing trees and soil can augment the output of existing industries. For example, plant tree > tree captures carbon > cut down tree and use wood for durable goods and structures. It captures carbon in a profitable way. Likewise, growing the soil can improve farm yields and reduce reliance on chemical inputs.
Another potentially useful product besides the two you already mentioned is plastic.
in this case, CO2 -> gas would be most useful.
That gas will turn to CO2 again, but the benefit is we don't have to drill for it, which will introduce more carbon into the atmosphere.
You've got that right, but the solution isn't to dump money into DAC. It's to convince people in Texas that they need to be living more like people in China, India, and Africa. But it's not politically feasible to tell people they have to make sacrifices.
What would you propose? Your choices are essentially a massive, global reduction in consumption, or having many fewer people on the Earth.
You might think there's a third choice ("massive increases in energy efficiency"), but you have to show me that we can do those things in time, based on current technology, in order to convince me it's a viable option.
This is absolutely not a fact. We can't consume carbon at the per-capita rate we do now.
Many times when I've had a difficult problem and haven't been able to gain much ground against it, the point when I started to see success was when I started to attack it from every angle I could think of. Not one after another, but all at once. Part of that is about figuring out what works, but it's also about the combined effect of everything. (And I'm sure part of it was that it was the same moment when I decided to get serious.)
If this is that, then I support it. If this is an excuse not to do the other things, then obviously I don't.
While we wait for the public to become more rational and for politicians to focus less on themselves and more on serving, we might as well throw a little money at stuff like carbon capture.
Our best chance to do the massive changes needed requires national gov level buy-in by all the world's biggest nations. Which requires a sane party to be dominant in each of them, controlling the levers. And that means we need to ensure enough voter buy-in to put them in those seats.
As much as one would love to avoid politics its become impossible now to remain on the sidelines if you truly want to save our future. Our lives, and those of all our children and grandchildren are clearly at stake.
Even if you turn the entire SW region into solar panels to power a gigantic DAC factory, the opportunity cost of not wiring that same titanic generation into the grid vastly, vastly outscales the gains you get from burying carbon.
L1 orbital mirrors, that's the ticket. Reversible, adjustable, no sloppy gas exchange problems like with the particulates.
Like we can use geothermal in places were no human civilization exists, or solar in otherwise barren desserts. Yes it is still going to be expensive, but DAC can be done anywhere on the globe, so why not take advantage of this and seek places with very cheap energy sources?
- Regulate away the ability for utilities to implement policies that discourage solar. Legislate maximum PTO approvals.
- Standardize the payback for Solar so that net credits at the end of the year are compensated in a manner that is predictable. Predictability will bring way more investment.
But no, let's build magic air capture BS
So either climate change is not real, or it is not causing sea levels to rise.
1. Climate change is genuinely real. Some of it is probably human caused. That isn't likely to be a problem though as the climate has always changed, including in relatively recent history; i.e. it's not the case that the climate is stable if not for fossil fuels, and the evidence that this change is serious is of garbage quality. It's not serious and could easily go into reverse in the coming years even without any changes in human behavior. Additionally the assumption that change will continue in one direction forever is wrong, as is the assumption of exponential feedback loops.
2. Sea levels are genuinely rising. However they are rising very slowly, by tiny amounts, and this rise is so small it can be easily be offset by other factors like the land rising. This is why the Pacific islands have been growing over time instead of sinking, as we were assured for decades was a 100% dead cert outcome of climate change.
The key theme here is that whilst underlying changes may be real, the size, extent, confidence and expected duration are all exaggerated to the level that the conclusions become merely fashionable doomerism. And deep down people know it, hence why all the most vocal doomers act like they don't believe it: Al Gore buys ocean front property, climatologists fly around the world to international conferences at a greater rate than many other fields, the Pacific islanders build tourist resorts on the beaches, Greta Thunberg takes a boat across the Atlantic but the crew takes flights, etc.
You should stop smelling it once the facility is online.
By the way, let’s talk payment plans…