Georgia Tech, Meta create open dataset to advance solutions for carbon capture
news.gatech.edu
news.gatech.edu
Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...
While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun), fossil fuels rely on an inexhaustible source of money for them: subsidies. Fossil fuel companies can't survive without the hundreds of billions of subsidies every year[1]. They can capture more subsides for 'carbon capture', using the captured carbon to extract more oil.
Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...
[1]Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
If we could make carbon capture cheaper and more efficient (and that's a big if - it may not be possible, which is why research is needed), carbon could be permanently sequestered.
I don't see a reason to subsidize fossil fuels, release all this carbon, and then subsidize fossil fuels companies even more to capture something thats measured in parts per million.
And all this to waste 67% to 75% of energy. See Rejected energy: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...
We'd be better off not burning fossil fuels, we have the technology today. People are ok spending billions on carbon capture. But are against subsidizing EVs, ICE cars emit 1 ton of CO2 for every 2500 miles, every car emits 5 tons CO2/year. For a lifetime of 20 years, thats 100 tons of CO2. Why not fund EVs as carbon capture? Or is the only path forward to give money to fossil fuel companies?
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year[1]. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
[1]https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation...
Naturally, personal transports should be electrical, but even more important is to get people on trains.
The numbers don’t lie
If Google developed an AI model for cancer detection in MRI scans, you wouldn’t claim that “AI is not for what people think it is for” because Google also uses AI models for advertising.
It's easier to meet emission standards for a "light truck" (actual category of a SUV) so car manufacturers are pumping out vehicles with a similar size / front grill angle / etc so that the vehicle is under that category. You might argue that people have a preference for SUVs over Sedans but also note how similar all the SUVs appear; the appearance is part of the light truck designation so even if consumer preference drove a larger car design, the regulation has driven its appearance.
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That said, I think an additional gas tax that rose annually with the proceeds rebated on your tax return is one of the easy + effective solutions I've heard about. Doesn't apply repressively because at the end of the year they get the higher costs rebated but at the time of sale pushes people to buy non-petroleum alternatives as it's cheaper. Probably easier to just rebated it equally amoungst tax filers as opposed to a rebate and industrial use is going to dwarf consumer use so you'll personally still end out ahead.
What would $1.5tn PER YEAR subsidies in renewables and a reduction of $1.5tn PER YEAR subisdies in O&G at the same time look like?
Think of these subsidies like compound interest, $1.5 trillion here, $15 trillion there.... it starts to add up.
I mean, this is a crazy line of thinking. Without fossil fuels, what's considered valuable would still be "work life balance is slightly less time manually working on the farm" and "goods are the best stuff we can buy from people crafting the stuff within a 3 mile radius" and "education is what we can learn from the smartest person in the village".
If you want now but without fossil fuels, you have to use fossil fuels hard enough to invent the thing that replaces them.
Laser-focusing down to only the "main" reason and ignoring all else will (as expected) miss the forest for the trees.
Subsidies still do cause people to consume more fossil fuels than they would otherwise, so the policy is encouraging pollution (AKA health injuries and deaths that industry shirks accountability for) rather than disincentivizing it.
This is a very strange presentation of this concept. You think that the "forest" is the ancilliary reasons? I would say that with zero subsidies people would still be driving cars and consuming fossil fuels. The only reasons not to are: pollution, and city space. They are unreasonably effective and useful compared to all other options. That's why people like them.
One big problem with using fossil fuel exhaust as the input stream for productive chemistry is that there are lots of fuel contaminants - sulfur, etc. - that poison further chemical reactions on the CO2 stream, and stripping out the contaminants is just too expensive. While atmospheric CO2 has a big concentration step, it has the great benefit of not having that issue.
Fortunately that solar panels require no resources to create, require no maintenance, and take no subsidies to maintain as an industry!
Why? Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing?
So in my mind carbon capture is something that we should work on if we are capable of the realization that the role it will play in fixing the problem is utterly insignificant. If you think it is the solution, carbon capture sells a false hope and prolongs the struggle — and at least where I am from proponents of carbon capture are the people who definitely don't want to reduce their CO2 output.
Pointing at some future technology instead of doing something now is actively harmful. And I am not sure the actual positive effect of such technology would outweigh the negative effect it has as an excuse to justify not doing what is necessary now.
What you’re overlooking is that we will keep doing whatever we’re doing, for the same reason telling people to diet and exercise isn’t doing jack shit for the obesity crisis. We need Ozempic for the climate. Because the only alternative is 4C of warming.
It's unfortunate that the ecosystem has to suffer.
Fortunately natural selection will remove this mindset eventually.
It's unfortunate that the species has to suffer it in the meantime.
It may just be that this group of people isn't up to the challenge and, like you said, natural selection is necessary to produce a group that is up to the challenge.
Unfortunately that selection may come too late and much of the ecosystem may suffer for it.
Sounds a lot like giving up to me.
Wishing for human extinction makes you an enemy of all mankind btw
I'm saying that objectively maybe we should all die.
From a subjective perspective I'm going to keep fighting to the detriment of all the others around to the very bitter end and take down as many of them as I can, just like the real enemy of life that I am.
So either we change our way or we deive ourself into climate extinction. Since profits and geostrategic advantage seem to be more important than the survival of the human race it will be the latter. And someone somewhere in 2050 will start the alibi-CO2-capture machine, that was built by a tiny fraction of the oil money from this year.
If this comes across as cynical that might be, because it is. Trusting on carbon capture technology despite the presence of evidence¹ that it won't do shit is something we cannot afford. Don't get me wrong, we should still research and fund it. But you don't want to be that politician that wants to keep no speed limits on highways "because future carbon capture technology will solve this".
No, future carbon capture technology won't solve this, it will solve a tiny fraction of this. Pretending that it will do more creates false hope and a distorted perception.
¹ see IPCC report: : "Even if realized at its full potential, CCS will only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030"
> you do see how that doesn't fix the problem
It literally does fix the problem.
Unless we talk unicorn-pie-in-the-sky-fantasy-technology that can suck all carbon out off the air on the snip of a finger, any technology has to be measured within the bounds of its possibilities and not in fantasyland.
Bloomberg says global investment in carbon capture in 2022 was like $6.4 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/carbon-capture-investment-hits-r...).
Bloomberg also says that global renewable investment in the first 6 months of 2023 was $358 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits...)
Conversion of all carbon capture investment into more solar or wind capacity would not significantly move the needle on rate of renewable growth.
Effectively all carbon capture investment right now is basically in the pilot phase. Governments are sinking money into carbon capture for a broad range of reasons, including cynical (as a smokescreen to protect fossil fuel industries) to optimistic (we can start investing in the next step of net-zero since renewable trajectories look good) to being realistic hedges (they see the challenges in achieving net zero in certain fields like aviation, shipping, construction, and believe that carbon capture is what is necessary to achieve net-zero).
I'd argue for every million dollars towards reaching net zero emissions, we should maybe spend 1 dollar towards carbon capture, where we scale that investment up as we approach net zero emissions.
Extraction operates on supply and demand. When people stop demanding it, they'll stop digging it out of the ground.
There are two ways to achieve this: 1) You make burning it more expensive (carbon tax). 2) You make alternatives to burning it cheaper.
You can do both at once. In fact you want to, because the first one gives the second one economies of scale and the second one reduces the economic impact of the first one.
Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one except that instead of the money being collected as a tax that could be refunded to the population as a tax credit, it goes to the people who are still doing the remaining extraction. We could, however, stop subsidizing extraction.
Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Unless OPEC just compensates by increasing production. IMHO carbon tax indeed better tool for EU/US, given that most of oil production out of "our" control
that statement upon examination does not pass scrutiny for weaslewords
Which major countries could already do through tariffs on any country not collecting it, without giving the money to OPEC.
A market that relies solely on prices as an incentive is unlikely to be the right tool for what's at stake. What would be the price of the natural habitat of the last wild elephants? A billion dollars? Let's hope Elon doesn't feel like building a gigafactory right there.
We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.
That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons).
But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
But then you could also use it as a renewable fuel and we'd be calling it biofuels instead of carbon capture.
This is obviously utterly false, given how much CO2 has been absorbed each year by current gen CO2 absorption technology.
>But carbon is completely worthless.
Current Gen carbon absorbers turn CO2 into some of the most useful materials on earth, like food, building materials and raw materials for oils and plastics. Much of the current world logistics is already dedicated to transporting their products.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-indu...
We need a balance between the two, as they are both important
But we shouldn't be "mere techno-optimists", we should also get behind true political, social and economical solutions to lowering our emissions, and fast
The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible.
In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.
There is a reason why every country which has reduced nuclear power has increased its green house gas emissions.
But please, tell me why the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to renewables.
We would be powered 100% by solar but our laws here allow the utility to limit the size of our system.
At the same time Solar is always going to produce some power and the more excess generation you have to charge batteries and curtail hydro etc the higher that minimum worst case generation becomes.
Net result is you don’t need to build some huge battery bank to store energy from sunny days in the summer, you just ‘over build’ cheap generation and eventually you have no need for seasonal storage.
Are you talking about the typical nuclear plant which is often bespoke, or also considering modular reactor units which have (finally!) seen recent development?
> lithium ion batteries... makes the most financial sense
Correct me if I'm wrong but li-ion is still cost prohibitive for large scale energy storage on the grid. Things like V2G etc can help but those are owned by the drivers/consumers and not the state/electricity corps.
Modular units are firmly in the "I'll believe it when I see it, meanwhile keep the renewables building as fast as possible" category.
(also, everyone has forgotten about proliferation. The fighting around Zhaprozhia did remind a few people about the security risks, though)
Part of this is because of how absolutely f-ed up research in fission has been over the decades.
There is this graph if you can find it showing how much money was estimated to be spent on R&D, vs how much was actually spent. Basically by the 1980s or 90s, if investments were made, nuclear would've been much cheaper today. There's a bunch of things more, but it's not that nuclear is inherently expensive more than the fact that you need to spend money first to save it.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-...
People play on the words ‘reactor’ but modular reactors themselves don’t actually solve any pressing issues and at least currently just cost more.
But yeah, the people who are trying to claim that nuclear is the only viable renewable energy solution to climate change haven't been paying attention to renewable energy advances in the past 10-15 years, and/or have been ignoring the massive budget and time overruns pretty much all nuclear plants have had in the past couple of decades, especially in developed nations that are trying to make sure they're built in a safe way.
Wind and solar have significantly reduced carbon emissions across most western countries. Nuclear doesn’t scale well due to capacity factor falling with daily and seasonal changes in demand. France sitting next to non nuclear Germany can have lots of nuclear but that’s little different that some US states having more nuclear while connected to other states with less. What matters is the overall grid not arbitrary map locations.
Storing or curtailing wind/solar simply costs less than nuclear at 50% capacity factor, so that’s the only way to make real progress.
Every country is different, but wind and solar have scaled from practically nothing ("proving viability") 20 years ago to a majority of new installs 10 years ago to a significant chunk of all generation now.
Wiping out already-built nuclear power is like junking your car two months into a 96-month loan because you don't like the gas bill. Just... why? Sunk costs have generated nearly-free returns. You're still going to pay those costs, in dollars and in CO2, whether you run a nuclear reaction or not. The worst-plausible-case-scenario meltdown has been substantially mitigated with the extant designs, and some of the new designs that are probably never getting built would be difficult to melt down even if you attempted it.
Shutting down existing plants as Germany did is a very different proposition than scaling up a nuclear buildout in 2024. Renewables and various grid improvements are just way cheaper and more justifiable in the short term, and have none of the baggage attached, and have none of the need for state support attached. It would take a gargantuan effort right now to mass-produce reactors cheaply enough that they could even begin to compete with renewables.
Somehow natural gas flares and pulp mills are okay set against a scenic mountain valley, but a wind turbine is a blight.
These people are broken in the head.
(I live in Ontario these days, but right now in a hotel in Jasper after a day of spring skiing... it's painful to come back to this province sometimes.)
Yeah it’s sad, and that’s an amazing point you make. It’s funny when i hear people complain about carbon tax, particularly from Alberta. You know what cuts the tax? Remove the carbon from the price of a kWh. But no, let’s burn coal and gas and have one of the highest carbon per kWh in the country and just complain instead.
Alberta: 778g / kWh BC: 38.1g MB: 25.7g ON: 49.9
SK is just as bad as Alberta, and the territories but that’s mostly because of where they source their energy due to their remote location, not some political decision.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
Even if we were to not use a single drop of oil tomorrow and start putting nuclear powered fans to capture CO2 everywhere, the biodiversity would still be collapsing. Climate change is only a portion the problem of the destabilisation of our environment as a whole.
When need to reduce our energy consumption and our footprint on the environment. That means roughly less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and the very low-tech "more trees". "AI for Y" is just a distraction...
Same argument, but perhaps you now imagine a slightly different outcome.
The piece that "gives way" is (of course, as any historian or anthropologist will attest) that the population size...... fluctuates. Generally the process isn't too too fun for people who find themselves in those populations.
Everyone wants to talk about reducing other people’s consumption.
Out of all the countless times you've surely seen this particular argument play out on the internet, have you ever seen it go somewhere productive?
"Yet you participate in society, curious!" is not a productive response to the suggestion "We should improve society somewhat"
Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
And the Chinese eat many times more meat than they used to.
It is fair to point those things out because it is evidence that living on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" really sucks and that it is possible for us to overdo our response to climate change and ocean acidification.
It's always the same rhetoric with your kind, you pretend to fight for the poor, when all you really want is freedom to keep on grabbing as much as possible for yourselves.
What does matter is that we make our best effort to mitigate the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
Instead trying to keep the third world poor why don't we just nuke them?
This has the triple benefit of:
1). Reducing the total population.
2). Reducing CO2 production of the survivors.
3). Starting a nuclear winter.
It's just unethical to do anything else when faced with the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
The debate on degrowth isn't whether a Somalian family should have access to a decent home, healthcare, clothing, enough food etc. The answer is a very obvious yes.
The debate is whether a middle class American family really should own 2 trucks, live in a 200sqm house and eat that much meat. But you always make it about the poor.
I think it's a pretty natural reaction against the relentless push of this false choice by people who cannot imagine a third way that actually makes life better.
Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness that there are other options besides enforced poverty.
Or we use the fact we can still run an industrial society to build CO2 scrubbers using nuclear energy to power them, keeping our improving our living standards while fixing our mistakes.
It's quite likely to be a far better use of those resources to invest them in tree planting initiatives if your goal is to sequester carbon.
But if you want to satiate your techno-lust a technological solution to some of our climate problems may lie in the form of space based optical systems that reduce the amount of sunlight from falling on glaciers and the poles.
The only solution is to green deserts, which you need nuclear power for water desalination to do.
This simply opens a "hole" for new trees to grow up around them. It's not that any one tree holds carbon forever, it's that an acre of forest in dynamic equilibrium holds a lot more stored carbon.
When people suggest planting trees, the process isn't one-and-done. It's actually re-afforestation, where the land is permanently forested. Otherwise yes, if you cut down all the trees and then also prevent anything from growing back in its place, then of course you're undoing future benefits.
There is also 'mild' re-afforestation, where you simply increase the equilibrium amount of stored biomass in a landscape. You can plant 20-40 trees per acre in agricultural landscapes (this actually improves crop yield if you choose the right species, search for "farmer's trees"), or re-green suburbs that have lost their vegetation cover over time.
These projects are less stark than Atacama-desert-to-Amazon-rainforest, so many folks will neglect the possibility entirely and therefore conclude that "the only solution is to green deserts." :-\
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It's also probably related to cultural biases that view deserts as useless, worthless, and most important uninhabitable spaces. However if you actually try to green a desert, you'll suddenly find lots of terribly inconvenient "desert people" actually do live there, and oppose you destroying their home and displacing them. See the real reason behind building "The Line" in Saudi Arabia.
Yes, if you are the only person in the house, prioritize the tap, but if someone else is working the leak, grab a mop right away!
Not if the spilled water is running down the drain.
If we stopped our CO2 emissions and nothing else changed CO2 levels in the atmosphere would start falling immediately as photosynthesis would capture carbon faster than natural sources emit it.
Go the tab for the subsection on transportation and you'll see they're working on ways to reduce emissions, too. They also provide the dashboard and tracker app for the Drawdown Georgia initiative, which was co-drafted by Georgia Tech and aims to eventually get to net zero emissions in the state.
Carbon capture is the only way to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels!
Even if/when we emit zero CO2, the elevated levels would remain for many centuries!
CO2 isn't some poison in the atmosphere, it needs to be there. The one thing under control of humans is what percentage of Carbon is in the atmosphere or bound in different forms.
The problem isn't too much CO2 in the atmosphere, it is that the amount of CO2 there can't be reabsorbed at a self regulating rate.
People that want others to do things like avoid plastic straws but themselves have 2.5 unadopted kids per household are obviously being somewhat hypocritical
Since the emissions per person can be zero, any level of emissions reduction can be achieved with any number of people, you just need more emissions reductions per person when you have more people. "We should have both more emissions reductions and more people" is thereby an entirely consistent position.
More than that, emissions reductions generally require R&D and have some economic cost, but an aging population is economically weaker and has fewer resources to spare. Meanwhile older people who aren't going to live much longer and have no descendants have less incentive to care about what happens in the future and spend those scarce resources on things like emissions reductions. People having more kids avoids that death spiral.
Also, I mean, who are we trying to save the world for?
You're left with things like concrete that emit CO2 from something other than burning fossil fuels. But none of those things are strictly required. There are alternatives to them with various trade offs. Some that are essentially a drop-in replacement, basically different kinds of cement that don't emit CO2, others that operate differently but get you the same result, like using entirely different building materials. The main reason these aren't already used is cost, but that doesn't mean you can't pay the cost, it just means nobody is going to do it voluntarily. It also doesn't mean that no one could come up with some new alternative with a lower cost going forward -- that sort of thing happens all the time.
I personally take the view that policing individual consumption is meaningless, but I still notice the doublethink required for those that have that view to rationalize their choices to not adopt.
> who are we saving the world for?
The future, regardless of whether those people are genetically derived from our selves. Having your own children is often viewed as a selfless act, which is weird, because if you do that when you could adopt an orphan, and if we’re being honest, then it’s one of the most selfish things you can do.
This argument is absurd and naive. Mass murder and your suicide would also reduce consumers. Clearly there are other factors to consider over and above the raw numbers, many of which are cultural and subjective.
Do no harm also means, if you think consumption is harmful then you do need to avoid opting into creating maybe 50-100 Years of extra consumption per child just for the satisfaction of knowing your genes will be doing the consumption.
Are there ever acceptable cultural or subjective reasons to excuse “rules for thee but not for me”?
It could be achieved either way. If you want to e.g. replace gasoline cars with electric cars, you could have some kind of government incentives, or you as an individual could just choose to buy an electric car and put solar panels on your roof to charge it.
> people who do argue for reducing consumption must consider the fact that consumption hinges on consumers
But it doesn't. The rate of consumption is number of consumers times consumption per consumer. You can increase number of consumers while reducing consumption per consumer and end up with a net reduction, as long as the latter is larger. Since consumption per person can get arbitrarily close to zero, it's entirely consistent to want to get there that way than by reducing the population, which has all kinds of terrible consequences.
> Having your own children is often viewed as a selfless act, which is weird
It costs a significant amount of money and primarily benefits someone else (the child). You have to forego a lot of luxury vacations and early retirement to pay for books and food and college.
> if you do that when you could adopt an orphan
The fertility rate is below the population-replacement rate. That includes the orphans. If the fertility rate was only the orphans, it would be far lower than it even is already and we would be completely screwed. Not only that, by your logic the orphans' parents are selfish too, but then who is it that you think should be having kids if the human race is not to go extinct?
Of course using a plastic straw isn't what got us into this mess and small individual choices like that won't save us.
Raising a child costs hundreds of thousands or millions. Preventing an accidental pregnancy can cost under a dollar.
OP: “preventing unwanted pregnancies is good for environment” (because humans have big carbon footprint)
You: “having fewer children is bad: see these economies”
This reads as criticism of birth control and the viability of population reduction as an environmental strategy. But:
1. Do unwanted children typically contribute positively to GDP? Isn’t reducing that terrible situation just a win on all fronts?
2. How is collapsing population in developed countries related to the OP’s suggestion of widespread birth control? Are they really that related?
3. How is having fewer kids bad for environment? Afaict it is unambiguously good for that.
Also why would I want to fix an economy using unwanted children?
Preserving the planet is valuable insofar as there are people to enjoy it. Without people to experience it, it wouldn't matter much. Without any sentient being to experience it, it would matter (in my view) zero.
Thus, creating new people to experience it is necessary, if preserving the planet is going to be worth it at all.
Of course, one can argue that there are too many people and we need to make less, but I think there are lots of lifestyle changes that need to be made before something so radical even makes sense. I.e., don't think people should make less kids so that the ones that do get made can live in a suburb and drive a car everyday. That's getting the priorities totally wrong.
I find this whole line of thought fraught. Some assumption somewhere went wrong.
Making this work is all about minimizing the energy (and thus economic) cost of this first step. Then you need to reduce (add hydrogen and remove oxygen) the CO2 and start building other products - methanol, long-chain hydrocarbons, etc. (that's shipping and jet/rocket fuel, respectively). But why stop there? If you want long-term stable materials, converting the CO2 into carbon fiber is a good option - more sci-fi is a diamond endpoint, which takes a lot of energy, but has many uses.
This will have minimal effect on atmospheric CO2 unless fossil fuel extraction and combustion is eliminated from the energy mix - but it does point to how human civilization can do material and fuel production without having to mine carbon from the earth or cut down forests. In the long run, this is the only plausible option.
[1] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATAS...
[2] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODEL...
Did somebody even look at this stuff before writing their press release? It's not like it's much link following to click "The project, named OpenDAC" and then find out it's all a bunch of dead links.
- https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/datasets/od...
- https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/models.html...
We'll update the links in the release ASAP. -AS
Not sure bragging about high energy consumption helps their argument as much as they think.
https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-lear...
The only carbon capture which will ever scale as well as we need it to scale, is carbon capture which creates carbon-based products cheaper than current fossil-fuel methods.
There is a company working on that, there should be a dozen.
Terraform Industries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006
Interviews with CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611
Mass tree planting is like doing a massive, massive migration. You can't just stick seedlings in the ground arbitrarily and expect a stand of trees to sustain itself 'cause "nature"... the successful processes like the Miyawaki method require planning, community investment, sustained work for ~5 years, etc.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...
After the trees have grown, you need to harvest them and - somehow - make sure they don't rot and return the CO2 to the atmosphere.
Finding space for that is what I mean by "take up space at scale".
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
Growing tissues with vasculature is vastly different from cell cultures
For steaks, the timeline is definitely longer than 5 years.
I'm happy to put my real name and money in an escrow account to the first person who wants to take the bet against me.
> in the supermarket for cheaper than cow steak
OK, but only if we agree to include subsidies and externalized costs in the price.