The state of carbon dioxide removal
stateofcdr.org
stateofcdr.org
It depends. The evidence is that Earth obviously reversed global warming in the past several times with vegetation alone. But it probably isn't helpful for the timeline that we humans need it on, e.g. in the next 20 years (and in the next century, if we're being very generous)
Actually decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the work of many generations. There's a lot of things to do, but planting trees then tossing their carbon into deep holes and starting over won't hurt.
For reference, https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-ca...
How much Coal China is using is a major one and they are adding renewables at a crazy fast pace. Even at China’s fairly abysmal capacity factors, when we are talking about 217 GW of solar in 2023 and their on pace to increase that by 35% in 2024, it adds up quickly.
If you combine that with looking at progress in the last decades or so, it allows for some optimism.
Right now, we just need to stop the bleeding and get to global net ~zero emissions with the tools we have (renewables, nuclear, carbon capture, etc.). It seems like we're on track to accomplish that at least some time this century.
By the time we've gotten there, direct air capture should be a relatively mature technology, and energy should be much more abundant between continued advancement on renewables and early iterations of commercial fusion. With any luck, we'll even have highly automated and scalable AI-driven manufacturing and infrastructure deployment capabilities to make a mass rollout of DAC relatively cheap. As long as we survive long enough with no major societal upheaval, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to restore the planet to preindustrial CO2 levels by some time next century, or (very optimistically) around the turn of this century.
It's not going to solve itself overnight, and climate change will get worse before it gets better, but I think we're basically doing the right things. Maybe in the meantime someone will figure out how to process landfills into fuel and mass produce microorganisms that feed on microplastics.
Carbon removal is a combination of several different scams on the public.
That is actually a good thing. Cut trees that turn into lumber sequester carbon dioxide in the form of building frames.
No one claimed this but you.
>Lots of carbon storage happens between them, not to mention how important they are for biodiversity.
Yes we know, it's almost like this subject deserves its own field of study [0][1].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Forest_manageme...
Total CO2, from 1850 to 2019: 2400 gigatons (2.4×10^12 tons, ≈ 2.2 × total living biomass on Earth, ≈ 69 × total dry biomass on Earth (wolframalpha))
How many building frames are you planning to build?
A lot, lumber has all kinds of uses beyond framing as well.
"At this point, it's tempting to dismiss lumber as completely irrelevant to concerns about carbon emissions. But the authors show there are exceptions. In Canada, where timber is a major contributor to the economy, wood products end up sequestering 2.4% of its annual emissions, or over 30% of its industrial emissions. In Sweden, those numbers are 9% of the total emissions and over 70% of industrial emissions. So, when it comes to setting national emissions targets, there are countries where harvesting forests really matters." [0]
Thanks for making my point for me: this is a good thing.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/how-much-carbon-does...
>Even upping the total to 400 megatonnes, however, is not especially comforting given that our annual carbon emissions are well over 350 gigatonnes. "Even under a best-case scenario and when accounting for this gap," Johnston and Radeloff write, "the global potential of [wood products] as a carbon sink is minor and always less than 1 percent of emissions."
Less than 1 percent of yearly emissions. It's good there are countries where that percent is higher, but sadly when it comes to CO2 emissions, it's the global result that matters. We not only have to get to zero our current emissions, but we also have to bury back the historic CO2.
Yes, I know, I am the one who linked the article...
>Less than 1 percent of yearly emissions.
Indeed globally it's a small amount, but it's still a good thing as I originally stated QED. There are too many countries that strip mine their forests out and don't follow sustainable forestry.
Perhaps it's getting overlooked because it's too obvious or sounds too easy to work?
But chemically binding is of course the cleaner solution.
It remains to be seen if this can actually be scaled up.
https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021...
Please, we know that's a lie because there are thousands of unplugged drill site holes when it comes to natural gas. This is what methane flaring is about. They're constantly burning or otherwise leaking methane into the air. This is the best that human drilling has to offer, and it's piss poor. We can expect no better in terms of quality or depth for CO2 storage.
Nobody is seriously suggesting to pump CO2 underground and then not plug up all the holes connected to that gas. Unplugged holes thousands of miles away obviously remain irrelevant.
PS: Flaring is there when active extraction and processing going on. A tank on the surface getting several degrees hotter in the day is going to build up pressure, while even 20 feet underground the temperatures is constant year round and even across geologic timescales. Similarly, if you’re extracting oil then you might not care about small packets of gas reaching the surface beyond the safety hazard, thus flaring.
Also, when there is the slightest earthquake, the reservoir could erupt, even killing everyone in the area due to a flood of CO2.
Again, this isn’t the kind of thing where you slap a metal end cap on a long tube and call it a day. It’s seriously disingenuous to assume people are going to be as stupid as you are implying.
Actually getting a meaningfully large stream of CO2 is by far a more difficult problem than storing it across geologic timescales.
It’s really 3rd parties like Climeworks who are mostly likely to try and make use of this technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climeworks
And without massive government subsidies it’s going to operate at such a tiny scale as to be irrelevant.
Solar and wind is for people who hate nuclear plants, but love natural gas.
I'm fresh out of pedantic soliloquies and engaging talking points today, it's just come down to this. Cheating the children.
Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona
Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul aircraft).
That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's already too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct.
> Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
That's not what the graphs show: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
• Coal: down since 2012
• Gas: close enough to steady since 2012
• Nuclear: down since early 2000s
• Wind and solar: up
Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
The graphs you provided show that coal and usage are still growing in absolute numbers. They're only going down in perentages. So, aside from oil (which is mostly still there), nothing was displaced.
The only significant thing we learn is that we've doubled our electricity usage since 2000. The share of low carbon electricity generation barely moved since 1985. Renewables just helped avoid it crumble due to hydro not being scalable.
EDIT: and those electronics also degrade - a lifespan of 20 years would be reasonable at scale.
You can't run "bare" LiFePO4: you're either forming a grid, or you're connecting to one. Both involve BMSes and inverters.
I'd bet a dollar that, in 50 years time, nearly all energy usage is going to be primitive biofuels or solar-PV-origin.
If building a solar installation is cheaper per kW then building a gas generator, that literally doesn't matter if the only times the solar installation generates power is when power prices are negative.
I also did the analysis for new nuclear under a relaxed regulatory regime (i.e. substantially cheaper and faster than now) and there's no way it wins. For the price of a gigawatt of nuclear, you can get 5 gigawatts of solar that's online next year, plus half a gigawatt of battery.
I could be wrong, I'm just an armchair economist on this stuff, but I just don't see how it makes any economic sense to build anything but solar unless you're located somewhere remote and arctic (i.e. Åland or something)
On top of that the solar plant capacity factor is somewhere between 10% - 30% in most locales, so the sticker plate capacity of 5 GW is going to be under 2.5 GW at best (and that would be a 50% capacity factor).
I've never been able to find a way to square an actual "no fossil fuels grid" with the supposed cheapness of solar or wind - it always feels like people are quoting selectively useful $/GW values and then not giving a full accounting of the assumptions behind them - i.e. GW type quotes originate with thermal powerplants which have capacity factors which are essentially "whatever you want if you pay us".
The LCOE values I've seen place batteries+PV at ~ nuclear… but nuclear is more expensive than almost anything else.
I anticipate further reductions in the price of batteries from the learning curve and demand driven by electric cars where they're already cheap enough to replace ICEs, such that the cost of batteries for electricity time-shifting will be OK fairly soon (as in: 5-10 years)but that's a forecast and not a guarantee.
There's also the possibility of a global power grid — the maths works out just fine, few hundred billion USD and a year or two of global aluminium production, we have to spend more than that on upgrading the last (hundred) miles even if we never build the global interconnects — but basically only China has both the interest and the capabilities to attempt something like that as part of a future belt-and-road initiative, everyone else will definitely not get past the "talking about it" stage.
Nation-states would likely still retain strategic reserves of thermal powerplants, but they wouldn't be run, and the budgeting for them would be under national defense and interpreted through that lens (i.e. you can buy it down with strategic alliances and diplomacy).
> I've never been able to find a way to square an actual "no fossil fuels grid" with the supposed cheapness of solar or wind - it always feels like people are quoting selectively useful $/GW values and then not giving a full accounting of the assumptions behind them - i.e. GW type quotes originate with thermal powerplants which have capacity factors which are essentially "whatever you want if you pay us".
I'm telling you right now that LCoE for replacing natural gas is here. Coal has been dead for a while, new hydroelectric plants have massive siting concerns, wind is already too expensive compared to solar + battery, oil has been dead this entire century for electricity. What else is left? Only marginal things like geothermal which are entirely location-based.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424#
The grid will be solar. Very soon, in fact. Within 20 years, which is lightning fast in grid terms.
But that's a utility being injected into a grid which already has widespread stored-fuel powerplants. I'm not contesting batteries work under some circumstances, I'm contesting whether they actually work when they are doing more then displacing load-handling at the edge. The grid runs 24/7: there's a massive difference between running batteries for 2 hours, and then recharging because you can buy power any time of the day you want, versus their being near zero dispatchable generation on the grid.
Because a gas generator is more then happy to sell you power and run a little longer to do so at any time of day. If that gas generator doesn't exist though, then once your battery is empty it's empty until the renewables pick back up. And that's the answer I'm still not seeing - the question isn't "can you optimize the grid" the question is "can you eliminate stored-fuel power plants entirely". It's fairly obvious that batteries can help in some circumstances given that gas plants have start up times in the tens of minutes, and power prices going negative is bad for them.
EDIT: Basically, are we actually displacing any fossil fuels off the grid, or just optimizing it's expansion - given that an infrequently used peaker plant can become a frequently used peaker plant quite easily, but a solar farm can't do the same.
A solar panel produces energy. A battery only stores it (and loses, round trip about 8% in the process) - which is to say, batteries are solely arbitrage instruments.
Batteries are extremely functional in many installations, and even if you’re not using, only selling, arbitrage can work well. This is especially true if you get paid to accept the commodity in one time window and can get others to pay you to take it later.
"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW·year = 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes) than the world used in one year."
I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
Nobody ever provides an honest answer to those questions.
This isn't a binary versus issue. If you have to ramp up coal burning and natural habitat destruction to produce the needed PV cells then you also need to stop endless-growth profit seeking manufacturing wholesale.
The mining of quartz typically involves several methods depending on the nature and location of the deposit. Here are the common methods used:
- Open Pit Mining: This is the most common method for mining quartz. It involves the removal of large amounts of soil and rock to access the quartz deposits. This method is used when the quartz is found close to the surface. Heavy machinery such as excavators and bulldozers are used to remove the overburden (the soil and rock overlaying the quartz).
- Hard Rock Mining: In cases where quartz is found in veins within rock formations, hard rock mining methods are employed. This involves drilling and blasting to break up the rock and access the quartz veins. The material is then transported to the surface for processing.
- Underground Mining: If the quartz deposits are located deep underground, underground mining techniques are used. Miners create tunnels and shafts to reach the deposits. This method is more labor-intensive and expensive than open pit mining but is necessary for accessing deep deposits.
- Placer Mining: This method is less common for quartz but can be used in riverbeds and stream deposits where quartz particles have been eroded and deposited. It involves washing and sifting through gravel and sediment to extract the quartz.
Open pit mining and hard rock mining can cause significant land disturbance and environmental degradation, including deforestation, habitat destruction, and soil erosion. Proper environmental management practices and reclamation efforts are essential to mitigate these impacts.
We aren't talking about sand.
The production of the current global output of solar cells require from somewhere between 8-10 million metric tons of coal annually.
Totally disingenuous comparison. You don't get to use the existing energy source's coal requirements to criticize the energy usage of the replacement energy source.
"We can't replace coal power! Think how much coal we'll burn building the replacement for coal power!"
Moreover, there's nothing about it that requires particularly pure quartz, since impurities are removed when trichlorosilane is distilled.
Zero.
PV pays back it's own energy cost in a matter of months to single-digit years, even in the worst cases that's still enough to support the current exponential.
And the raw material are not found only in mountains, the main component by mass being — famously — what sand is made from.
Today, coal generates over 60% of the electricity used for global solar PV manufacturing, [...].
This is largely because PV production is concentrated in China – mainly in the provinces of Xinjiang and Jiangsu where coal accounts for more than 75% of the annual power supply and benefits from favourable government tariffs.
Continuous innovation led by China has halved the emissions intensity of solar PV manufacturing since 2011.
This is the result of more efficient use of materials and energy – and greater low-carbon electricity production.
Despite these improvements, absolute carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from solar PV manufacturing have almost quadrupled worldwide since 2011 as production in China has expanded.
Based on manufacturing capacity under construction, China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot and wafer production will soon reach almost 95%.
Today, China’s Xinjiang province accounts for 40% global polysilicon manufacturing. Moreover, one out of every seven panels produced worldwide is manufactured by a single facility.
This level of concentration in any global supply chain would represent a considerable vulnerability; solar PV is no exception.
Solar PV’s demand for critical minerals will increase rapidly in a pathway to net zero emissions.
The production of many key minerals used in PV is highly concentrated, with China playing a dominant role.
Despite improvements in using materials more efficiently, the PV industry’s demand for minerals is set to expand significantly.
In the IEA’s Roadmap to Net Zero Emissions by 2050, for instance, demand for silver for solar PV manufacturing in 2030 could exceed 30% of total global silver production in 2020 – up from about 10% today.
This rapid growth, combined with long lead times for mining projects, increases the risk of supply and demand mismatches, which can lead to cost increases and supply shortages.
That's a choice, not a need.
The need is right by that:
> solar panels only need to operate for 4-8 months to offset their manufacturing emissions.
> We're talking billions of tonnes of raw materials here to meet decadal global demands, and it simply isn't just sand (and remember that really good sand is a resource in demand also):
1) Doing nothing leads to burning around 8 billion tons of coal per year just by itself.
PV, even when made from coal power, reduces that by a factor of 40-90.
And, as you do make and connect it, the fraction of power coming from coal constantly decreases anyway.
2) I said "main component by mass", not "just". My point stands.
3) You don't need "good quality" sand for PV. Crush some rocks if you like, silicates are everywhere.
Who's advocating doing nothing, is that something I said?
2) I said "main component by mass", not "just". My point stands.
You clearly stated "Zero". That's incorrect. The energy demands of mining are not insignificant by any means.
There are large amounts of material being mined, both sand, and silver, and others to support PV
3) You don't need "good quality" sand for PV. Crush some rocks if you like, silicates are everywhere.
You've not ever mined anything or worked in geology, have you?
I mixed you up with the other poster, but your comment and theirs together very much pattern-matches to such a position, yes.
> You clearly stated "Zero". That's incorrect. The energy demands of mining are not insignificant by any means.
I said zero in the context of "how much coal and how many mountain tops are needed".
This remains correct.
Zero mountains need to be levelled, zero coal needs to be used.
And what do you mean by "insignificant"? Your own citation is saying 4-8 months to repay their own energy cost, for devices which last 25-30 years. I think 1.1-2.6% of their lifetime output counts as "insignificant" in proportional terms, even though that's a big number when you multiply 2 TW by 30 years to find out what it takes to scale to the current global electricity demand.
> You've not ever mined anything or worked in geology, have you?
Have you?
Silicon is the second most abundant element in earth's crust after oxygen.
The doping agents are less common, but also you need far less of them.
Again, no mountains need apply — even for the single most important element, the scale needed is a big hill, not even a small mountain.
SiO2 + 2C --> Si + 2 CO
is best done with charcoal, not coal, due to the porous microstructure of charcoal more effectively interacting with silicon monoxide vapor. So not only is coal not needed, it's not even the best feedstock for this process.
That would be bad except:
a) production has increased by more than 10x in the same time period.
b) solar panels added to the energy mix pull down the average carbon and quickly pay back their manufacture
which means it's just a sensible investment in an incredibly low carbon and cheap energy source which has gotten even more incredibly low carbon and cheap over time.
By 2045, the earth will be covered by solar panels so we will start tiling Mars.
According to projections, the Dyson Sphere should be completed by 2117. Exponential curves are a hell of a drug.
> I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
The thing is that predicting the cap is as important as predicting the inflection point. 100% solar (or renewables) isn't possible without other technologies which are much less developed, consumer pattern changes which have yet to emerge and grid investments which are not priced in current PV deployment.
Sure, but the factories to make batteries are also being rolled out pretty quickly.
> and grid investments which are not priced in current PV deployment.
Which are necessary even without renewables, because of their age in the west and increased demand everywhere else.
If you think I'm being silly, well... I'm not the one using the word "never"
Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed to fusion.
Tidal is derived from gravitational energy.
This is related to the historical question of the age of the Earth. Before the discovery of fusion, it was thought the Sun was powered by gravity, which put an upper limit on the age of the Sun of some tens of millions of years. This was close to Lord Kelvin's limit on the age of the Earth as modeled as a solid sphere cooling by conduction, which led him to believe both estimates were correct. As it turns out, both estimates were flawed, but for different reasons, and it was only coincidence they were similar.
2023 is the year we burned the most coal, the most gas, the most oil, etc... So far.
Here’s hoping!
Nuclear is also cheap and doesn't have this limitation.
And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV.
The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.
Why would you store electricity produced by Nuclear energy? You can adjust the production to match the needs.
Depends where you are. If, for example, you're in the most-occupied bits of Canada, your grid connects to the south side of the USA, which gets rather more hours of sun than you do.
> We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.
If you're far enough south to get as many as "a couple of hours" of sun each day in midwinter, this isn't a serious issue in most cases. Why? Because adding more PV is much cheaper than adding more batteries — when you've got 2.4 hours of sun, build a 24*n hour battery and enough PV to charge that battery in 2.4 hours, where n is some factor for "in my location, there are often n-day cloudy streaks".
But also, most places already have a decent grid (exceptions exist, Hawaii is excusable, Texas is not), the grids are not fundamentally so lossy as to break the economics here, and much better grids can be made if there's sufficient political will behind it (yes, even one that worked for Hawaii).
This does not mean the field is just composed of scams. The opposite could be true with the same results we see.
>We should not expect statistically significant contributions to the fight, until the most promising technologies have been scaled up massively.
Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously.
No, right not we should be researching and laying the groundwork for a future (post-combustion) scale-up, but environmentally we should not be scaling up just yet. Scaling up right now would actually generate more pollution, not less.
> Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously.
That is true in the abstract but there is yet more nuance that is important to consider.
Capturing co2 doesn't have to consume as much energy as is released when it's emitted. Although, many methods, like everything revolving around trees and biomass do have this negative net energy property. There are chemical ones that don't if I'm not mistaken[1].
There is also the unreliability of most renewable energy sources. While we haven't solved all the energy storage problems. There might still be periods where it would be somewhat sensible to use surplus renewable energy to capture carbon, while a low-wind, low-sun place is powered by fossil fuels.
We do of course want to shut all of them down ASAP, but the optimal ordering might not be as strict as you imply. I agree with your broader point though. There is a lot of potential for energy waste if carbon capture is prematurely applied aggressively.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/how-ic...
This not carbon capture vs net zero, the goal is net zero AND carbon capture.
All of our governments are owned by these corporations that are trying to either continue making money via the status quo or make money with these fly-by-night tech-will-save-us-all get rich quick schemes. Nobody is bribing the politicians to enact policy that cuts global manufacturing output.
But politically they can have a minor delaying impact, like birds killed by windmills (1/1000th the effect of skyscrapers), vids of collapsing/exploding windmills in the middle of nowhere (compared to oil transit and storagw explosions)
I have no idea what the funny numbers alleged cost per ton for carbon removal in this report, but even if it is down to 20$/ton (100$ per ton was more realistic a few years ago) ...
Then do the math. We have a sunk cost of something like 50 trillion dollars using removal using the most optimistic of methods and assuming we stopped carbon emissions today, and it's probably more like 200 trillion in reality.
The petroleum industry would really like us to pay them to clean up their problem to the the of that amount I'm sure.
Unfortunately, IPCC reports from 2018 and 2023 confirm that carbon removal is necessary to stabilize temperatures. Decarbonization alone is no longer enough. We need to get better at carbon removal...fast.
It is also possible (nay, probable) that this dilemma will get resolved by just... humanity not getting the thing we "need."