Every Gigaton of carbon is roughly equivalent to covering the entirety of Texas in ~1 millimeter of carbon.
Globally, we emit about ~13x that per year.
That's about equivalent to covering the state of Massachusetts in a foot of carbon.
Per year.
The entire planet is either the ocean, in use, desert, or already covered in forests.
~33% of the earth is desert. We'd need a decent chunk of that to get ~0% fossil fuel energy. But let's pretend we don't. We'd still need to cover all of that in several feet of carbon to capture all of our emissions.
It is not going to happen.
That would only account for ~10% of global emissions.
It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%. Honestly, hope seems like a better strategy and less a waste of time than that.
If you really want to discuss it - you should preface very discussion with - "This isn't going to make the slightest difference at all in the grand scheme of things, but hear me out anyway..."
Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend like there is any viable alternative from phasing out fossil fuels almost entirely.
The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could - much to the younger generations detriment.
Economics alone should phase out ~60% of fossil fuel usage by 2050. There is nothing they can do to change that at this point.
Unfortunately, depending on the curve - the planet could get way hotter by then.
But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
Here's what the IPCC said [0]:
> “The technical geological CO2 storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 gigatonnes of CO2, which is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor.” – SPM, p. 37
IEA said similar [1].
[0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say...
[1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-has-vast-capacity...
We wouldn't ... ?
Billions of gallons of crude oil are removed from the earth every year, millions upon millions of tons of stone are mined from the earth every year.
I'm misunderstanding how "covering Texas" is a meaningful measure in terms of carbon capture.
> It's not really worth considering solutions that are going to maybe move the needle by 0.001%
I'm unsure how you've come to this metric or conclusion honestly.
> Carbon capture is propaganda from the fossil fuel industry to pretend....
The oil industry seems to be interested in pivoting to CCS because it is dependent on pipelines and drilling infrastructure, which is comfortably inside their position at global-scale. The fact that they caused a large portion of the problem is tangential - practically speaking. Blame who you will, we have a problem and there is an army of geological engineers and pipeline experts, etc etc with decades of experience to draw from.
> The fossil fuel industry has already won as much as they could
This is myopic and honestly childish
> But, I'm also optimistic that a hotter planet is not going to spell disaster like most people think.
......
That's not a complete argument.
Do you have a critique of the IPCC's stance that CCS is part of the solution and necessary to decarbonize hard to abate sectors like steel/cement? [0]
[0] https://www.catf.us/2022/04/what-does-latest-ipcc-report-say...
In the short term - CC is not a solution - there's too much carbon being emitted and there isn't an economical, scalable solution anyway.
We are going to emit what we're going to emit - and no amount of realistic CC is ever going to dent what we've already done by the time the technology is ready.
While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though).
The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon.
If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.
AFAIK, we don't have Canada and Russia sized 1000 foot-deep spaces readily available to store carbon.
Technology isn't a problem as far as I'm concerned. Space is.
Would love to be proved wrong and have yet another reason to be optimistic about the future.
Then what?
And by the way - to eliminate maybe one year's worth of emissions, it'd take a forest ~30 years to grow...
And what're we supposed to eat?
If we're all just going to starve to death - we don't have to worry about cutting emissions...
And it doesn't need to be 1000 feet deep, just a few meters worth since we only need to collect an equivalent of a fraction of the CO2 that's stored in peatlands - which cover only about 3% of the Earth's land surface to begin with*. The trick is to sink it in just the right way to keep it from reentering the carbon cycle.
We actually do have a lot of space that's already capturing far more carbon than we ever possibly could ourselves, the organisms filling that space just evolved to maximize survival, not maximize carbon capture to save humanity.
* Edit: actually that's just cold climate peatlands, I haven't seen estimates for tropical peatlands
659663 * 1000 * 1000 * 2.6 = 1,715,123,800,000 tons (1.7 trillion tons)
of carbon. One billion tons of carbon would make a Texas-covering graphite layer about 0.58 millimeters thick.
That seems high. I get a lot smaller number, but maybe I've messed up some unit conversions. I'm using:
1 ton = 10^3 kg
1 g CO2 = 12/44 g of C (C == carbon, not Celsius)
Density of C is 2.2 g/cm^3
1 Texas = 6.95x10^5 km^2
10^9 tons CO2 x 10^3 kg/ton x 10^3 g/kg = 10^15 g CO2
10^15 g CO2 x 12/44 g C/g CO2 = 2.7x10^14 g C
2.7x10^14 g C x 1 cm^3 C/2.2 g C = 1.2x10^14 cm^3 C
6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas x 10^10 cm^2/km^2 = 6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas
1.2x10^14 cm^3 C / (6.9x10^15 cm^2/Texas) = 1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C
1.7x10^-2 Texas cm C x 1 km / 10^5 cm = 1.7x10^-7 Texas km C
1.7x10^-7 Texas km C x 6.9x10^5 km^2/Texas = 1.2x10^-1 km^3 C
1.17x10^-1 km^3 C x 10^15 cm^3/km^3 x 2.2 gm C/cm^3 C = 2.57x10^14 gm C
2.57 gm C x 44 gm CO2/12 gm c x 1 ton/10^6 gm = 9.4 x 10^8 ton CO2 = 0.9 gigaton CO2
PPS: If we took all of the CO2 out of the atmosphere, the amount of carbon would be enough to cover to Texas to about 53 cm.
Not as ridiculous - but still not a solution.
One nice thing about carbon capture is it doesn't matter much where you do it. The atmosphere does a great job of spreading CO2 nearly uniformly. You just need places with sufficient available energy and somewhere to put the carbon.
One possibility would be subtropical deserts. They have plenty of sunlight for energy and plenty of land that could be used without displacing many people.
Imagine carbon capture facilities that consist of a solar farm for power with the panels mounted a few meters off the ground, and we dump the captured carbon under the panels.
As calculated earlier, 1 gigaton of captured CO2 would give enough carbon to cover Texas to a depth of 0.017 cm. There are about 3000 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, so if we captured all of it, that would cover Texas to a depth of 51 cm.
The 5 largest subtropical deserts have a combined area 22 times as big as Texas. If we covered just 10% of that area in solar farms to power carbon capture with a meter of room under the solar panels we'd have plenty of storage space.
At the efficiency of current solar farms and current carbon capture, they would be capturing about 10% more carbon per year than we are currently emitting. Cover 90% of those 5 deserts with such plants and in under a decade we could get back to preindustrial CO2 levels.
The big limit that I see on doing this is production of solar panels. At current production rates, covering 10% of the 5 largest subtropical deserts would use about 180 years worth of solar panels.
I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
Yes, that is the problem. It is pie in the sky to believe that's happening any time soon. It would take >20 years before it's making any meaningful dent in emissions.
We're going to keep emitting CO2 at current rates for close to a decade before they really start to drop. You're looking at ~1/3rd of the earth being covered in solar panels and ~15 feet of carbon. Maybe I'm naive. I just can't imagine it.
You think we're going to do that and we can't even build nuclear power plants? That would've mostly solved the problem before it even happened.
And I imagine that would have cost 10,000x less.
> I have no idea if there are enough raw materials available to let us to increase that enough to make it worth considering.
I don't know enough about the materials used for CC, but for solar panels - raw elements is not a problem if you're planning to use 90% of subtropical deserts...
When I try to imagine that, I can't help it. I see leaves mounted on top of a tree. Using solar power to bind carbon into a dense trunk package below. Ready to be carted off and hidden below grounds.
Also, given that we can't find anyone willing to pay for carbon capturing right where it is most dense, at the source, how are we going to find the will to pay for capturing it from thin air at much higher cost...
https://bg.copernicus.org/articles/19/4431/2022/ is a great summary of some of the more recent work in the area. It's astonishing how poorly we understand this system in the macro.