5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity.
30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.
60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.
40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.
12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.
You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.
50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.
6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.
Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.
Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.
Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?
The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.
Don't forget that the permafrost is thawing and it's starting to release massive amounts of CO2, much more than previously thought. The thawing is releasing massive amounts of Methane, and Nitrous Oxide which are far more impactful than CO2.
Due to warming temperatures more ice is melting and it's raising the temperature of the oceans and it's causing them to be more acidic, both of which is bad for phytoplankton populations, which have already declined steeply. Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine ecosystem.
Like most collapses, a declines happen gradually then suddenly it crashes, my fear is that the phytoplankton population will crash soon, and when it does we're in deep trouble. 20% of the atmosphere's oxygen comes from phytoplankton, more than all the world's rain forests combined.
The ocean is responsible for somewhere between 50-80% of the atmosphere's oxygen, there is no telling what happens when the phytoplankton population crashes. We could see a huge drop in oxygen levels in the atmosphere very quickly.
30% of the world's population relies on the oceans for their primary source of protein, and about the same number of people rely on the marine ecosystem for their livelihood, when the phytoplankton population crashes, those people will be in serious, serious trouble.
Reducing our carbon output isn't enough, slowing an increase still means we are increasing concentration levels, we need to be removing more than we are releasing, and I don't see any possible way to achieve that with any known technology.
I don't think we can stop, or even slow what we've started. The earth is now seeking it's new equilibrium state, it's hard to say if we are part of that equilibrium state.
Great article, and glad you brought this up.
Just want to expand on the "decay/death" since it's referred to in 2 different ways in the article:
1) The decay/death of photosynthesizing organisms feed carbon to non-photosynthesizing organisms (ex: humans) and essentially neutralizes any net gain in atmospheric O2. Therefore the typical lifecycle of trees/phytoplankton doesn't add more O2 to the atmosphere than the current level.
2) In the rare instance that the decay/death of phytoplankton is quickly buried underground (ex: deep-sea mud), there is a net gain in atmospheric O2. Over the course of millions years, this process has led to ~21% atmospheric O2.
So, everyday decay/death of life doesn't "produce" O2 in the way photosynthesis does, but it does when photosynthesizing organisms get buried underground.
Correct, it's not currently widely accepted. In many ways, science is more 'conservative' than so-called 'conservative' political parties, which is probably a good thing.
However, there's a lot of emerging that supports the concept that there will be a large amount of methane release from the arctic over the next few decades. Very large.
If this happens, and I truly hope it does not, then the impact will be enormous and devastating.
While such a release isn't sure, the combination of possibility and impact is more than enough for us to deeply consider it during policy considerations.
Is there a difference between a drop in oxygen levels and a rise in CO2 levels?
My understanding of the oxygen cycle is that O2 gets removed from the atmosphere by being bound to carbon in CO2. Further, since most of the oxygen is O2, while most of the carbon is currently biomass; any notable drop in O2 levels would be a disasterous rise in CO2 levels.
Specifically, O2 is about 200,000 ppm, while CO2 is about 400ppm.
As I understand it, a 1% drop in O2 levels would put us at about 2,400 ppm of CO2; at which point we are looking at significant cognitive decline; and I don't even know how to speculate on the grean house effect.
On the other hand, climbing to the top of the eifel tower (1000 ft) corresponds to a drop of about 4% in the partial pressure of oxygen.
> Is there a difference between a drop in oxygen levels and a rise in CO2 levels?
Yes.
These are two independent gases in the atmosphere. A drop in one does not equate automatically to an increase in the other.
There's a process involved in converting carbon to CO2. To make CO2 levels rise by 6x, the process of converting would need to be running at 6x too. The entire of human industry over ~100 years has contributed to increasing CO2 levels by 1x (so doubling them). So we're not in any imminent danger of 6x.
Oxygen is also removed by reaction with other reducing species, like sulfide and ferrous iron. And of course in reaction with organic matter water is produced also, not just CO2.
Oceanic clathrate release is not projected under even the worst warming estimates. The timeline for oceanic clathrate release is measured in thousands of years.
>In the past these things have been slow gadual processes taking hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
How is that actually true, but at the same time the melting of the permafrost will result in very large releases of CO2, NO and Methane? One of these must be false.
Phytoplankton also live for very short periods of time, no more than a few days, they would likely adapt more readily to change than longer lived organisms.
The point is that if there is a trigger that releases them that will cause devastating knock on global warming, that will have also occurred in the past, and it's not a slow gradual process that life has millions of years to adapt to.
From your article:
>The last time CO2 levels were this high was during the Pliocene Epoch, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, when the Earth was several degrees warmer, sea levels were an estimated 50 feet higher than they are today, and forests grew as far north as the Arctic.
Doesn't really point to phytoplankton populations crashing as being a likely scenario.
Like I said.
The phytoplankton of that time, is not the same phytoplancton we have today.
There are evolutionary drivers that push lifeforms towards efficiency.
A thick, protein rich, acid resistant shell is much more expensive, than a thin, calcium rich one.
Well... until the day a new outlier species comes along and turns back the clock by 3 million years, in 100.
To put that into perspective, it's like asking you on vacation to the bahamas giving 7 days to pack your stuff, and when the time to leave arrives I yell: "Surprise! We're actually going to siberia, time to pack your winter coat, the plane leaves in 20 SECONDS!"
There are still countries around the world which subsidise fossil fuels. Not indirect subsidies like exporation writeoffs for corporations, but actual incentives for consumers to consume in the form of below-market pricing.
While this is true, there is a reason why so many poor countries have to subsidize fossil fuels.
In those countries, if you are middle class or below, without those subsidies, you might not be able to heat your house, go to work, or fuel your tractor.
So unless you want revolts, it's not going to be possible to remove those subsidies unless massive investment at a world-wide scale in nuclear, hydro, and other types of renewables, as well as a serious ramp up of cheap (3000-9000$) EV production, actually makes it possible for the average Joe there to survive without fossil fuel subsidies.
There are also other countries that are richer in which this doesn't apply, for which there is no excuse.
That is the political justification but several studies have found that the benefits flow mostly to the wealthy. If you are poor in a 3rd world country, you cannot afford a car.
This study from 2012 shows the top 20% get 43% of the benefit, the bottom 20% only 7%:
It's not true that if you are poor in a third world country, you cannot afford a vehucle. A lot of poor people in third world countries instead use and indeed share incredibly old cars from the 60s-70s, or motorcycles. It is often literally a matter of life and death - if you get stung by a scorpion in the Atlas mountains, unless your family or village have a car and fuel for it, you're just not getting medical care, which is why you'll see many such very old cars there. This is a real issue - the micro-village in the mountains where part of my family lives had one of my aunts die as a baby because a scorpion bit her and she couldn't be brought to a hospital due to a lack of transportation. They bought a Citroën 2CV after, and it's still used up to this day.
Now, of course, like all non-progressive subsidies, they benefit the wealthy disproportionately, because they make disproportionate amounts of money. But for the bottom 20%, those 7% of the subsidies are a lot, because they often make less than 7% of the income.
So a workable solution would be to make these subsidies progressive, tied to income and consumption, but unless you've lived there it's difficult to understand just how bad removing them altogether would be. It could literally lead to revolts.
Also, that study is hugely problematic because it takes the entirety of the world together, instead of operating at national scales. I already agreed that for richer countries this should be phased out, and subsidies are likely to be much higher in richer, often non-producing countries, than in poor countries.
Also, before they got solar panels and batteries around 8 years ago, they were still reliant on kerosene for lighting.
Forget the third world altogether, it has already led to revolts in France, the entire movement of the yellow vests is based on rural low middle class people revolting against the state for an increase in fuel taxes along several older other sticking points
But, if you want to sell this idea to the people, give it the nationalist spin, say that the country is suffering as a consequence of dollars escaping from the country per the subsidies, and subsidies have to be changed/reformatted to help the nation itself, etc, etc
Anyhow you are completely right when it comes to the vehicles bit, saying it as someone from a third world country
> Forget the third world altogether, it has already led to revolts in France, the entire movement of the yellow vests is based on rural low middle class people revolting against the state for an increase in fuel taxes along several older other sticking points
It's also that they aren't offered any alternative to using fuel (good luck finding public transit in these rural regions; the population density simply makes it impossible).
And where's the money from the fuel tax going? Financing alternatives for these people or is it funneled into some civil servant's retirement funds?
It wouldn't be. Governments in such poor countries often buy fossil fuels below international market prices as they produce them, and directly giving money is problematic because a lot of people do not have bank accounts, and that fraud and embezzlement is a huge issue.
I agree that they should be made progressive and thus reduced immediately and phased out as soon as possible, but it's just not feasible the remove them completely immediately.
In theory, yes, but it's often more complicated than that. Often those agreements don't allow the governments to actually sell them internationally at below market prices.
Also, you completely glossed over the rest of the comment, which complicates things even more.
These agreements sound curious as they're tantamount to foregoing fuel sales income to the counterparty. Are you really free favours that the governments are getting?
Re bank accounts and embezzling, these are no worse problems, subsidized fuel is also vulnerable to smuggling abroad and other kinds of corruption and systems of exchange other than gasoline are well known technology in history of human societies, however attractive the mad max model is...
Governments of oil-producing poorer nations often ask of companies producing fossil fuels that they give some part of their production at a profitable, but under market prices, in order to be allowed to operate.
My point wasn't just embezzling, it was just distribution. A large section of your population might just not have a bank account.
Also, it's way harder to embezzled fuel that money, and I'm baffled that you'd think some kind of government official could steal an appreciably high volume of fuel to be worth enough for the risk without involving a large number of accomplices and thus exponentially more risk. It's really incomparable.
> a serious ramp up of cheap (3000-9000$) EV production
I really can't wait to see electric trickle down to the budget market. I get Tesla's approach of making EV's sexy with self driving/ludicrous mode/etc and I know the cost of batteries is a limiting factor right now, but I'd love to see how cheaply you could build an electric car.
It seems like with virtually no moving parts, and battery production getting better, you aught to be able to build an EV for a good deal less than an equivalent ICE vehicle.
Kandi was already planning to sell an $8000 electric car in California. I believe that includes subsidies and the car only gets 59 miles of range, but it's a start.
What you described can be the path to fast action on climate change. Only a few more steps are required:
* Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines. Take all the excess power and instead of building expensive batteries, use it to power this CO2 -> synthetic liquid fuel process.
* Carbon tax on any "fossil" fuel sources (anything from the ground). Make it expensive so the synthetic fuel is competitive. There's other ways too (like requiring X% mix of carbon neutral synthetic fuel, just like they do now with ethanol). Slowly increase the percent over time.
* All the old infrastructure (existing cars, gas power plants, ships, trains, buses, airplanes, etc.) becomes more and more carbon neutral as the fuel becomes more synthetic.
Even with the most optimistic EV car adoption projections, there will still be millions of gas cars out there. Other old carbon fuel based infrastructure (such as power plants) are hard to replace because solar/wind are not steady sources of power.
This path addressees the weaknesses of solar/wind (how to store excess energy) and how to quickly transition existing infrastructure to carbon neutral.
> Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines
You'd extract quite a significant amount of energy from the weather system, assuming we'd globally and optimally achieve this. What could be the consequences? Winds could locally diminish, thermal convection could be reduced, lots of effects could happen we don't understand yet.
In which way would this interact with local climate? Would this cause local temperatures to rise?
Just pointing out potential unintended consequences this could have without offering a solution. My takeaway from past good ideas (automobile, chemistry, electricity, globalization, ...) is that there is at least one _big_ unintended consequence of action.
I'd rather try to reduce our environmental and thermal footprint altogether by reducing our energy consumption, trying to keep up the standard of living people are used to. Just my opinion, but the uprising of populist parties suggests we should not overdo good intentions.
Also, if a radical approach like the proposed one would fail, populist parties would exploit that failure to the fullest amount possible.
I think in the big picture the effects you are talking about are really small in the same way that the heat dissipation of all our energy use (from whatever energy sources) is negligible relative to daily incoming/outgoing solar radiation. Greenhouse gases affect these much larger energy flows (which is our problem right now), but the energy "produced" or "used" (i.e. transformed into entropy) by civilization barely even registers on that scale, and that's what you're talking about when you say "energy extracted from the weather system".
Of course if we keep doubling the size of our economy (and thus energy use) every 25 years, then we will start having to worry about the heat dissipated by it all in a couple of hundred years even if all of it comes from perfectly green fusion reactors!
This is pretty much what Al Gore et al. proposed 20+ years ago. The historical lessons are more interesting than the technical ones, and everyone should be aware of those so they understand the fight they are fighting.
>Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines. Take all the excess power and instead of building expensive batteries, use it to power this CO2 -> synthetic liquid fuel process.
This makes our current infrastructure carbon-neutral, yes. But that doesn't solve global warming? Atmospheric CO2 levels are already too high. We're at 413ppm, and we need to go back to 350ppm. Doing that requires carbon sequestration, which by definition makes no useful product.
The scale of the problem is thus: every kilogram of coal that has ever been dug up needs to be unburnt and buried, and every barrel of oil ever pumped out of the ground needs to be put back. That's the only way you can get to 350 ppm.
Adding to your points, CO2 is also consumed by biological and geological processes (plants, algae, absorption in water etc.).
Expanding on this, we could support the natural CO2 reducing mechanisms by for example stopping deforestation and supporting local tree planting initiatives.
I'm not sure it is helpful to support the narrative we're all lost already - we won't ever put all our produced CO2 back into earth. We should give a positive spin on the potential ways out from my point of view. At least I didn't ever hear someone object against planting trees :)
I know this wouldn't be enough to keep up with CO2 emissions, but it definitely wouldn't hurt and it could give momentum to environmental protection initiatives.
Everything currently requires fossil fuel sourced energy to create it. So the question is, over the expected lifespan of the object, will it create more energy than was required to produce it? Solar panels expected lifespan is about 30 years. Installation, transport, etc. are all a fixed initial carbon cost. Studies and analysis have already been done (google search for studies from NREL) and the initial carbon cost payback is about 3-4 years of a typical 30 year solar panel lifespan. So 27 years of effectively carbon negative power generation.
But also consider the downstream effects. Once you have a carbon negative power source like solar in place, the carbon cost to create other things drops as well (since they use less and less power from fossil fuel sourced power).
Meaning that one possible avenue to reduced impact would be an extended-life PV (or other solar) array. It's a ccomplex prtoblem, and one for which present financial methods (NPV, future vaalie discounting) work strongly against.
That's why OP is talking of decarbonificating the oil production itself, so as things start to decarbinify they will continue accelerating on that road as other processes become more decarbonized
The entire aluminum production on Iceland for example is already decarbonized
Instead of destroying all of our deserts and creating a transmission problem, we could probably just swap in a few dozens nukes to backstop renewables. That addresses the shortcomings of wind and solar and provides plenty of overprovisioning for carbon capture without the poor land use.
Why not do both, just to be safe? We can get solar and wind going immediately so let's get started on that stat, while we work on permitting and design for new nuclear. It doesn't have to be either or.
'renewables' are not a viable option for the energy requirements of large scale carbon capture. It's a massive rollout of nuclear (ideally fusion but fission is good enough), or nothing. The political unwillingness of western nations to roll out nuclear power is one of the biggest obstacles to realistically tackling climate change on timelines where it matters.
People will buy sequestered carbon if there is a market for it. Some kind of cap-and-trade system for emissions would make it profitable to do carbon capture once cheaper methods of reducing emissions have been exhausted.
>climate doesn't have buying power
though I agree with the conclusion thats a bad argument, people do have buying power and they do care IF theymake the connection. that said even if it does not makes financial sense we should still do it because 1) survival of biosphere should trump survival of economic system. 2) people are ignoring the potential to create new market here and the possibility of creating an entirely new industry is quite enticing.
our climate situation fits pretty much perfectly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons. given that, i see no way forward other than a coordinated policy change world-wide (otherwise everybody who can count money will move their polluting assets to places which don't accept the policy).
the one way we could sort of proceed is to make being climate-friendly have financial sense. this is the job of taxes and incentives, i.e. regulations. people with money hate changing regulations that got them money and they have money to prevent changing these regulations. countries without money look at countries with money and ask why they have to suffer if those guys could pollute how much they wanted and got rich in the process. the challenge to get a compromise here is unprecedented and the clock is merciless.
yes there is no simple solution around tragedy of the commons.. so much so that at times I have felt that it might be our great filter. essentially the kind of survivalist, individualistic thinking that leads to one to innovate out a solution also becomes THE problem when you come close to exhausting the resource limit. Is there a distributed/decentralized solution out of this? I am not sure, basically any attempt at adjusting the underlying pricing structure to reflect carbon prices again has to be global and have some sense of fairness built in for newcomers & guess what they dont hold the power to force rich countries to adapt. so we are back to TotC just at the national level. and even if they do or there is a sudden moment of clarity for the rich & powerful countries any voluntary adjustments will only last till there is a real recession then another DJT will be there to spin an 'alternate fact'.
this is why I feel creating another parallel industry of carbon capture may be the only way out of this mess. that too imho will work when fear starts to take hold. the big question is how much time we as a species will have to react before it becomes SHTF.
The free market doesn't apply in that sense, but it is clearly the way forward in the sense that Carbon Taxation/Pricing and other schemes are clearly going to be more effectively than government intervention.
oh i think we are in agreement - carbon tax and/or carbon dividends are political decisions, after all. the market will adapt to regulations, hopefully with benefit for the climate. it's just not easy to get there, apparently politicians are too afraid and/or have too much money from kickbacks from fossil industry.
I think research still needs to be poured into carbon sequestration, but I agree with your overall analysis.
Carbon sequestration is like ocean desalination. Sure, it can be done, but it's a lot easier and a lot more efficient to start with a non-salty body of water.
Stopping carbon emissions is a lot more important in the short term.
Long term, I can see carbon capture being used as an alternative to push for a carbon neutral or negative economy. We'll likely need captured carbon for shipping, airplane travel, and plastics.
A positive of carbon capture is that you can pretty much set it up anywhere. You may be able to setup a capture facility at major fuel hubs to cut down on transport costs.
So, in eons past, carbon was sequestered naturally via calcium carbonate (CaCO3) if I'm following your math we'd need 4B tons of Ca / yr to sequester that yes? Of course, that's vastly more than we produce a year, but it is the 5th most abundant element. Could we scale up CaCO3 production to sequester carbon?
You also have to consider that as the oceans absorb more co2, they become more acidic, making it harder for plankton to form shells and sequester carbon.
And... spinning up that trillion dollar market would likely be worth every penny if it prevents continued warming, prevents further significant sea level rise, prevents migration crises due to flooding/droughts/etc, and prevents further ocean acidification.
A better rule of thumb is 1 gallon of gasoline is ~20 lbs of C02. That puts things on a more personal level.
Another one is 1 lb of C02 per kwh of electricity. That one is subject to obfuscation or confusion because it is dependent on the source of electricity.
I did some napkin math at one point and I believe the limiting factor is energy. You need more energy than can be generated using contemporary sources.
Sounds like a good scheme for global redistribution of wealth. Get the richest countries to put an annual trillion dollar budget together for buying carbon, divided up by country based on their GDP. Obviously, no one with the power to do so will really want that redistribution to happen though.
Humans are selfish and just don't care. Once mother nature kills off most of our population, carbon will slow sequester itself and the earth will heal but it will take centuries. The earth just can't sustain food and energy for 8B people. My guess it is more like 2B max.
That is exactly my point. Humans are selfish. We have a history of destruction even at our own expense. I wish it were otherwise but wishing it doesn't make it so. I was merely saying at 2B the earth is okay despite us not caring or working together.
> 25 year old forest: 1,760 lbs of CO2 per acre per year
> Northeast, white and red pine forests
> 25 year old forest: 9,826 lbs of CO2 per acre per year [1]
With global CO2 emissions [2]:
35 billion t / (2000 lbs / acre)
1.561×10^8 km^2 (square kilometers)
≈ land area on the earth ( 1.4912×10^8 km^2 ) [3]
maple–beech–birch forests would not cut.
35 billion t / (10000 lbs / acre)
3.123×10^7 km^2 (square kilometers)
≈ 0.46 × total area of crop land on Earth (2012 estimate) ( ≈ 2.62×10^7 mi^2 ) [4]
pine if used on half of crop land. That's managed forest, no wild forests allowed.
There are challenges with tree planting as well. Tree plantations tend to be monocultures which crowd out native species. Also the carbon stored in trees is typically only stable for 40-50 years due to fire, tree death and decomposition.
Do they have to be? I remember that a lot of people in the last 50 years or so have been trying to apply permaculture principles on forestry (like the Fukuoka food forest).
As for the carbon stability, the forest renews itself, so if you plant trees in an area where there were none before, the carbon captured the forest itself is pretty permanent. If you want to further capture carbon, you can always cut the trees and use them for timber, and eventually pyrolyse the wood to prevent decomposition and put it in the ground (which can increase soil quality).
I think combining peat bogs with plantation forests might provide a workable solution. Trees sequester best early in their lives when they're growing fastest iirc then cut them down and place them in a bog where they don't decompose.
> There are challenges with tree planting as well. Tree plantations tend to be monocultures which crowd out native species. Also the carbon stored in trees is typically only stable for 40-50 years due to fire, tree death and decomposition.
That's a very limited view on a system that is regenerative by design. You're right that most are planted as mono-cultures which present some issues, and their individual life cycle spans that much time on average. But the idea is that a living ecosystem/forest that is not only able to sequester carbon via tress but also allow for other life to thrive (moss, grass, flowers etc...) throughout its entire existence is a net positive, and has much more efficacy than creating some rigged Market as seen with carbon credits that obscure the scam through layers of obfuscation. We've seen how quickly Nature can correct itself when Human activity is significantly curtailed, it stands to reason that with some adjustments to commerce and the labour market we can enhance this with such undertakings with efficient C3/C4 or CAM plants to accommodate the environment its planted in. Graham Handcock in his book 'America Before' argues that the Amazon was the planned undertaking of Ancient people that not only provided them with sustenance and medicine, but as a result of it and unbeknownst to them would serve as the lungs of the Earth for millennia after their collapse.
I've come to the conclusion that while Market based solutions are favourable means where ever possible, the reality is when it comes to Climate Change and Environmental factors Humans are just to myopic to have it as the sole basis for solutions.
Everyone involved just ends up colluding with one another for personal gain and only a fraction of the progress is made while still being touted as a monumental success when in reality if Nation-State actually fulfilled their supposed purpose they'd see it as a matter of National Security and allot a significant portion as a deterrent to unsustainable population influxes.
Humanitarian crises from environmental disasters and the displacement that follows takes a massive toll on its infrastructure and economy, not to mention the resentment from the local populace that has to deal with the increase in poverty and crime to the their community that often follows from these hapless people's plight. The mass migration to the EU from Africa was devastating to see first hand, so many people lived in the parks and other public spaces because the country that would take them in could not accommodate them in a humane manner in time or at all and they slipped through the cracks and tried to make due however possible. Many just ended up succumbing to substance abuse and crime after the trauma and stress of their lives being in shambles, often through no fault of their own as a victim of war and environmental damage (Syria, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, Bangladesh).
I'm totally for open borders, as we should view ourselves as Human beings before anything else; but the nation-state model has proven itself to be entirely inadequate at handling COIVD, why should it be in charge of regulating something like this without succumbing to the same corruption we've seen in stock market, banking sectors?
At this point we should see this as an opportunity to give many young students and young adults afflicted by ever diminishing opportunities in the traditional labor market some much valuable and applicable work experience and the opportunity to get involved in massive environmental undertakings that will be necessary and commonplace in their lifetime to help combat the affects of Climate Change from previous generations. Investing as much as needed to that end will play dividends for the entire Earth that will outlive most nation-states (~200 years for the most prosperous ones and much less for the rest), and the truth is you can do a lot with limited resources with the right motivation, these movements really lacked effective Human Capital just as much, if not more, than monetary Capital.
I did it in my 20s, and it really helped me learn a great deal and it refined my skill set which allowed me to be able to move into several Industries that I took interest in but couldn't break into because of a specialized university education.
I was at a food drive where the goal went from feeding 10,000 families to 20,000 in a matter of days, it was a logistical nightmare and was not really planned very well with not much structure to it besides some COVID screening, and a time to show up. So I thought I'd put some of my previous experience as a manager in large scale events like this and in logistics in the automotive Industry to the test while applying some of the theoretical six sigma/lean methods I learned from my Supply Chain courses this year and all it took was a ~3 hours into my time on the assembly line before we 5x our output when I arrived. We went from 20 something people running at an unsustainable pace being burned out to make 1/5 of the output due to inefficient assembly lines and methods to about 35 strategically placed people on that line and just streamlining the process and clearing up the workflow area to yield a 5x increase.
It was hard, and it took a toll on my body as I could feel all the injuries and the experience earned from years before, but I could tell it was worth it when we not only met the goal but had actually exceeded the target and had enough excess to donate more than expected due to a reduction of loss according to the event organizers.
It’s a question of scale, if you want to actually make a difference you need to cut them down and store the wood underground, then grow new trees and repeat. Doing that takes real effort which then needs to be paid for.
Investing in solar and wind essentially pays for itself. Programs like Energy Star leverage market forces to make enormous changes essentially for free.
Directly taxing carbon and adding it to general revenue would make a huge difference without spending that money on climate. Directing that revenue to carbon sequestration however requires continuously paying 100’s of thousands of people and building infrastructure etc. The benefit is definitely there, but the cost benefit ratio is vastly harder to justify.
After a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions sequestering the last 10% of CO2 might be more economically viable. But, for now better options exist.
Energy star doesn't necessarily reduce emissions - it improves efficiency, but that makes people less worried about wasting electricity and so they use it more often.
Jevon's Paradox was basically this but applied to coal.
Jevon’s Paradox would suggest an increase in the US electrical energy use over time, but that stalled out.
Take a step back and consider what using electricity means. Home heating for example doesn’t benefit from increasing indoor temperatures to 100f. 100” TV’s use more energy than 40” TV’s, but they also cost a lot more to buy. Essentially people only have so much money and significant improvements in efficiency mean other costs become more important. They might be able to heat a larger house, but they can’t afford the house to be heated.
Or topple the trees and cover them with something that blocks air but which the next layer can be planted atop of? Seems like an extremely difficult problem.
We don’t have nearly enough land area for that, and even if we did, we’d need to cut and bury these trees underground, if we want the sequestration to be more than temporary. Seems silly to do that while digging up coal at the same time.
That's true, but you don't need to bury the whole tree. You can fell the tree, gassify it, and get a steady stream of fuel and pure carbon. The process is exothermic and produces enough energy to be self sustaining and produce excess fuel.
Bury the carbon and use the gas to produce energy and you have a forest that is a net reducer of carbon and a net positive energy producer.
I don't even know why this is a question. So, people burn hydrocarbons for energy. How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy? Please draw this chemical reaction out, along with energy balances and how endothermic it is.
The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried -encouraging that rather than building some preposterous contraption involving mineshafts seems a little more sensible.
The point of carbon capture isn’t to be energy neutral. The point is to be able to take clean energy (say nuclear energy in the United States) and capture carbon from dirty uses (say construction in India).
Carbon capture will have to work because there will be no way to address climate change otherwise. Countries like India and everyone on the continent of Africa will industrialize, they will build vast structures out of concrete and they’ll use cheaper gas power cars and whatever energy they can get their hands on. My home country of Bangladesh will add a 80-100 million people and it’s GDP will increase by a factor of 5 by 2050. The idea that Bangladesh will jeopardize a single percentage point of GDP growth to make that growth carbon neutral as it rushes to bring middle income standards of living to its people is utterly absurd. The country’s CO2 emissions per capita has increased by a factor of five since I was born and it can increase by another factor of 10 before getting to the level of an efficient developed country like France. To compensate for massive CO2 output in those countries, developed countries will have to go carbon negative and capture that CO2.
It’s so obvious I’m not sure how so many people overlook it.
Surely the people of Africa or Bangladesh are not so stupid as to not learn lessons from the US. We have better technology now, so they will use that in a lot of cases.
Don't get me wrong, there are cases where the old way is better because it is cheaper and so they will use that. However they won't use gas cars since we are developing battery cars, solar panels, and the like. Within a few years electric cars will be better for them as well.
It’s not a matter of “stupidity,” but the desire for a better life. A “do nothing” climate change scenario will be bad for Bangladesh, but not as bad as hampering economic growth. By 2060, it will cost Bangladesh a third of its GDP. But put differently, losing a single percentage point of annual GDP growth over that period will be just as bad as the impact from climate change.
New technology will be adopted, but not fast enough. Bangladesh is currently at 4% renewables. But half the country doesn’t even have electricity. It’s building 10 GW of coal capacity by 2030 which will double per capita CO2 output. Gas is still the major energy source with some nuclear being built. There is nowhere to build solar or windmills, though off shore wind is a possibility in the long term. It will be many decades before Bangladesh uses primarily electric vehicles and vast numbers of ICE vehicles will be purchased in the meantime. The number of registered motor vehicles has tripled in the last decade—those are nearly all gas vehicles, and half are used vehicles imported from elsewhere. 80% are motorcycles, with very inefficient gas engines. And there are no alternatives to CO2-production for many construction and industrial processes.
Bangladesh will certainly take some measures to be greener. It has no economic incentive to use more fossil fuels than it needs to: it imports gas and coal and has no domestic industry or jobs in that area to protect. But it also can’t afford to subsidize renewables. It will deploy technologies based on true cost, and right now the cost of renewables + storage isn’t there, neither is the domestic infrastructure to go fully electric.
>A “do nothing” climate change scenario will be bad for Bangladesh, but not as bad as hampering economic growth.
Citation very much needed. Everything I've read about global warming tells me the eventual GDP impact of 'business as usual' warming will dwarf everything else. It's not just the flooding. It's the rise in wet bulb temps, the droughts, the forest fires, etc. This does not magically end at 2100 just because our projections end there. This goes on for millenia.
I cannot fathom, how one could look at the facts and science and come to your conclusion.
To you this is an eventuality, to them the problems are right now, it is right now that they need electricity for the X million people without access to it, it is right now that they have to use huge amounts of concrete to build infrastructure, it is right now that they have to expand their transport/truck fleets to transport food to themselves or the million/several hundred thousands of Roinhya which arrived to the country in the last 2 years
The mainstream “facts and science” does not support the conclusion that climate change will eventually “dwarf everything else” in the economy, not even for hard-hit countries like Bangladesh. The 1/3 number for Bangladesh by 2060 is one of the higher estimates I’ve seen, from Asian Development Bank. Others show less than 10%.
10% is a lot! It’s trillions of dollars, and it would be worthwhile to spend a significant amount of money to avoid it. But we need to pay attention to the science.
I'm not sure what the argument is here, because no matter how persuasively you write the message board post, the empirical evidence seems to support Rayiner's argument, which isn't that carbon is good, but that the developing world is carbonizing far more rapidly than the developed world is decarbonizing.
Visiting Central America, I noticed all the "hand me downs" from North America. This will be the challenge- new electric cars which are 10% cheaper than new gas cars won't be deployed there, because old gas cars are 90% cheaper than new electric cars.
The good news is the problem will eventually take care of itself when North America doesn't want its old Nissan Leafs anymore. The bad news is the delay.
Yes, but do the patent holders or companies making that better technology see their side of the task: they need to give the developing countries that technology. The problem is that would mean giving a country that can manufacture more cheaply than they can the only thing left as a differentiator.
It's not up for them to try and learn from us, it's up to us to teach them.
Patents are only for about 15 years. Most of the important ones have expired already, the rest will in the future. (unlikely copyright).
Developing countries get their cars from developed countries. In 30 they will not have a choice about buying gas cars. 30 years is not that long on a global scale.
But 30 years is a long time on the climate change scale. To meet IPCC 1.5C and 2C targets we need to dramatically reduce emissions by 2030. Instead, they will continue to grow rapidly due to development in places like Bangladesh.
> they will continue to grow rapidly due to development in places like Bangladesh.
Your average Australian consumes many times over the co2 budget than a Bangladeshi, Sudanese or Nigerian combined
To reduce these emissions of the developed world is a far more important objective than Bangladeshis building a couple coal plants so they can give electricity to more than just 40% of their population
That widely misses the mark. There are sixteen times as many Bangladeshis, Sudanese, and Nigerians as there are Australians. And while Australia’s CO2 emissions are declining even as its economy keeps growing, emissions in Bangladesh are growing exponentially. Australia is a mature economy, while Bangladesh’s is currently doubling every decade, and it has many doublings to go before it reaches middle income status. That will come with huge increases in CO2 emissions.
Europe and North America now account for well under 40% of CO2 emissions and their emissions are shrinking: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re.... Emissions in the rest of the world, by contrast, are increasing exponentially. Within a decade or so, India alone will emit more CO2 than the EU.
The current CO2 budget for sticking to 1.5C is about 400 gigatons: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... North America and Europe could cut their emissions to zero tomorrow, and the rest of the world will easily blow through that within the next 20 years. China by itself will use up that whole budget by 2050 if not earlier.
Electric cars will certainly be adopted eventually, because electric cars have an order of magnitude fewer parts , but in the short term ICE cars have a far more mature production line (a century of mass production) whereas EVs have been in proper mass production for maybe a decade, and their manufacturing processes are rather immature and changing/improving quickly as a result, but we need to deal with climate change now not once EV chains stabilize.
If it is absurd to think that Bangladesh would jeopardize their growth in interest of lowering emissions, how is it not absurd to think that developed countries should neglect their own economic interests in favor of going carbon negative to compensate for countries such as Bangladesh?
The pain of climate change will be harder for developed countries to stomach and so they should be more willing to pay to avoid and mitigate it. Consider the forest fires on the west coast of the US this year. They occupied the news cycle for a week. But they killed just 30-40 people. Floods in Bangladesh regularly kill hundreds of thousands of people every year and people for the most part go on with their lives.
Because it really makes more sense to plan for the eventuality where anything we do makes a difference than the far more likely one where this entire trainwreck just keeps going straight toward a wall. Sure you get some real points for cynicism before rock meets hard place, but it doesn't count for much outside of that.
I of course agree we should do something. I just disagree with the logic that the entire burden falls on developed countries. As well as the magnitude of that burden. Going carbon negative as the parent comment said developed countries "will have to" do, is an incredibly challenging and costly feat.
I didn't say they would jeopardize their growth. I said they would learn. They might use coal, but it will be a 60% efficient not 1% efficient system like what we used for the first steam engines.
I agree with almost everything you say. But, if any developing country might sacrifice in the name of carbon neutrality, maybe it could be Bangladesh? Bangladesh & neighboring Myanmar are the 4th and 1st non-island nations most vulnerable to climate change.
That doesn't mean it's by any means guaranteed. But facing climate change is in their interest.
But how? They need what little money they have to set up their industries in the first place, it’s not a reasonable request especially in light of how currently developed countries didn’t have to deal with any of that when they first industrialized in addition to ruthlessly exploiting the subcontinent for their benefit. It’s an affirmative action of sorts that will benefit everyone until they’re up to par. China is getting there and I presume the other countries will get there eventually.
Hopefully somewhere along the line we figure out that it's cheaper to help Bangladesh pay for carbon neutral development than to sequester their carbon for them.
I wonder if a private investor could swoop in on a coal plant project, bankroll an upgrade to something better, and sell offsets on the carbon market in California?
Carbon offsets have been repeatedly shot down in the past - both as an accounting sleight of hand (for instance, what if it bankrolls a solar plant that was going to be built anyway?), and as a decadent excuse to not actually change anything, equivalent to medieval christians buying Indulgences.
> The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried
Coal: about 350m years ago we didn't have trees because lignin had not evolved. Then we got lignin, and trees, and when trees died and fell they just stayed there because we didn't have fungus that could decompose them. Then (about 50m years later) fungus evolved that could decompose trees. All coal exists in that 300m to 350m old seam.
Life takes CO2, turns it into carbon, which is then released when those plants die and decompose.
It's a small, shallow sink, making it effectively still a buffer. It isn't going to help much in addressing an exponentially growing flow. Especially that we won't be able to fully regrow forests anyway - there are more humans now, who need space to live and space for farming.
I agree with your general comment, but since forests can be used for construction materials they come out a little better than merely being a buffer since the wood gets used in housing or manufacturing in places where steel or concrete would need to step in, both of which are much worse for the environment. If built with longevity in mind, wood framed houses can last around five hundred years, which is more than enough time for technological advancement to allow us to deal with excess carbon by then. Even if they're only designed as typical buildings are, it's still a good fifty years of buffer as wood in a house in addition to the buffer as they were growing as trees.
I don't know how people are eliding "forests" from my statement about soil. Soil is important and poorly understood[0], which is ironic because it's where most carbon capture is happening now. Forests are nice, and everyone likes forests, but soil is pushing the needle in ways that a shitload of 500 year old houses ain't gonna[1].
To be fair, you can never discuss forests in any sort of scientific manner without discussing soils. The two are fundamentally linked.
That said, regenerative agriculture is probably the single best carbon sequestration technology that we have given the raw amount of land we have depleted of its organic matter.
Yes, absolutely. I should have been more clear. It's really important that we plant trees, and that we pay attention to the type of tree we're planting and where we plant them.
If I was a fiction writer, I'd be writing a book about how humanity used gene drives to wipe out the ability to decompose lignin. Perhaps the original plan was to release the gene into the wild again after CO2 levels normalized, but somehow the gene was lost, and atmospheric CO2 is reaching dangerously low levels...
With current CCS you're taking high concentration stream of CO2 from combustion and injecting it into deep subsurface waters that you know will remain isolated. (I'm a geologist - we're good at identifying those.) It's highly soluble in water at those conditions. Ideally it reacts with there and precipitates into other minerals, but it doesn't have to. It's safe in solution as well.
There are multiple mechanisms. One of the most common is membrane separation, where C02 is selectively allowed to pass through in a relatively high-pressure, C02-rich source such as a literal smokestack. Others are vaguely analogous to the chemical C02 scrubbers you might find in a submarine or in spacecraft.
At present, it's mostly from high density sources that are producing C02. Membrane separation has been around for quite awhile, and works well for that case. It's largely impractical for capturing C02 directly from the air, though.
Direct air capture is the hard part. The "chemical scrubber" approach is being widely tested, but it's hard to make the whole thing carbon negative. It's a tractable problem, but not an easy one.
An interesting theoretical calculation is the rate of entropy production due simply to mixing of smokestack gasses (high partial pressure of CO2) with atmosphere (low partial pressure of CO2). In principle this is wasted exergy -- lots of it. One could imagine some combination of semipermeable membranes and turbines to extract power from the mixing process (your mention of membrane separation reminded me of this). To be clear this is sci-fi though at this point.
(I do believe, however, that there exist methods to extract energy from the mixing of salt and fresh water.)
Likewise, this same idea is a strong argument for capturing CO2 from smokestacks instead of from atmosphere: Fundamentally, it takes energy to undo mixing. And if you want to capture the CO2 eventually anyway, then better to just do that than invent a theoretical "heat engine" driven by the difference in CO2 partial pressure, to get energy that you'll just need to spend somewhere else later (and then some) to get the CO2 back out of atmosphere...
...Actually this phrase "heat engine" now makes me think that maybe this isn't even that hard (in theory) using cold temperatures and phase changes to make dry ice. If it's possible to efficiently cycle the gas through these large temperature swings at all, it must require some kind of heat exchangers and regeneration between stages... (Surely if this were realistic people would have figured out how to do it by now, but it's an interesting thought/design experiment in thermodynamics...)
> How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy?
This is a bit of a strawman. No one is claiming that it will be somehow energy neutral or break thermodynamics. It will obviously require significantly more energy input, not to mention the money. But that doesn't make it impossible or even a bad idea, if the energy fueling the process is nuclear or renewable.
Well, you almost need to be claiming that. If you claim otherwise the energy requirements are truly stupendous. That doesn't event mention that the energy must be green by necessity.
Another commenters on this site (can't find the link) put it like this:
You'd have to drive every mile ever ridden on fossil fuels in reverse. Every single ICE in boats and planes too. All gas, coal and oil plants too. The energy requirements are incomprehensible, truly. We're having trouble going carbon neutral already, but this scheme requires we go neutral and _then some_.
The climate models clearly show that carbon capture is needed to meet the 1.5-2 degree C target. Without carbon capture of some sort we will very likely have >2 degree C.
Once you come to that understanding, the question is not how do we pay for carbon capture. Rather, it is why wouldn't we pay for carbon capture now so that we avoid the massive costs and negative consequences associated with a >2 degree C rise in global temperatures (droughts, more intense storms, massive human migration, sea level rise, etc.).
You can't just criticize the cost of carbon capture without acknowledging the costs associated with not doing carbon capture.
We probably don’t need to capture all of the CO2 though ?
We can combine carbon capture with other solutions for example reforestation ?
I actually wonder if a time might come where global cooling (too quickly) could become an issue. I know that sounds crazy today but suppose we get very good at reducing emissions and CO2, maybe things will require time to adapt too a cooler world.
Eh, you can worry about global cooling as a hypothetical outcome -- for instance, there is a "snowball Earth" feedback loop with the albedo of ice sheets -- but from a geoengineering perspective releasing CO2 into the atmosphere isn't that hard, and we've still got more than half of the known oil in the world left.
You're completely missing the point that you put CO2 into the ground, not unoxidized carbon. So you're ahead by the enthalphy content of those carbon-oxygen bonds. Obviously you need some energy to concentrate the CO2 out of a waste stream and pump it miles below, but that's comparatively trivial.
The reaction between carbon dioxide and alkaline earth silicates is thermodynamically spontaneous in the presence of water, but kinetically hindered. It's a reaction with slow diffusion of reactants through the product layer, limited by surface area. So crush rocks rich in alkaline earth silicates and distribute them in near-shore environments. It's an artificially accelerated version of the geological carbon cycle. It still requires vast-in-absolute-terms amounts of energy to crush billions of tons of rock, but it's not running uphill against thermodynamics.
We already have catalytic convertors on cars, can we add co2 capture to them as well? Add a little box with powdered olivine and some extra chemical bits to capture a higher % of co2 than absolute 0?
Catalytic convertors already use finely coated incredibly expensive platinum to break down complex molecules, and it is certainly easier to capture co2 near the source than when dissipated in the atmosphere
No. The reaction happens in water, it’s fairly slow, the mixture needs to be agitated, and it would require similar quantities of silicates to the among of hydrocarbons being burned. Better to ignore capture at the source and instead prioritize mass-capture in places that are energy efficient. Shallow coastal areas near major deposits.
I think the misconception stems from thinking that we could be net-positive energywise. We cannot.
We can (and currently sort of have to) extract energy from fossil sources because our economy runs on hydrocarbons but we will need to expend more energy later to put the extra carbon back where it belongs. The energy we will expend for this in the future has to be renewable.
We are basically borrowing from our future selves and will have to pay back the debt one day.
This is a good summary - and it might just work out. There is a trend in our energy sources being more powerful and more efficient over time. More efficient solar panels, biger and more flexible wind turbines, bigger and safer nuclear reactors. So paying the "energy dept" in the future might be much easier than going without the fosil energy sources right now.
Loss of biodiversity is one big thing. The species that went extinct due to us industrializing the planet, and the species that will go extinct due to climate change (even if brief and ultimately mitigated) will not come back.
Sure, evolution keeps running its RNG and eventually new and interesting species will start showing up. But that doesn't replace the causal link that is lost. Today, the variety of organisms on our planet gives biologists a chance to understand how crucial mechanisms of life evolved. As we erase that history, we make biological sciences that much harder, and by extension, slow the progress of everything from medicine through biotech to chemistry and material sciences.
From a purely thermodynamic standpoint, you actually _can_ be net-energy-positive.
You're gaining a lot of energy going from CH4/etc + O2 to H2O + CO2.
You're then directly sequestering CO2 (usually in solution in a deep brine), rather than C. You need to expend energy to concentrate the CO2, but it's less than you gain from combustion.
In practice, it's more difficult to come out energy positive overall if we're capturing CO2 at atmospheric concentrations rather than from flue gases/etc at the time of combustion. Regardless, though, "driving roads in reverse" is not a good analogy. We don't need to expend anywhere remotely as much energy as was generated from the original combustion.
> but we will need to expend more energy later to put the extra carbon back where it belongs
Is this actually a given? I mean trying to make gasoline from the atmosphere would certainly require more energy than you get by burning it, a lot more.
But I thought sensible capture proposals ran on different chemistry, possibly relying on a wet/dry cycle under which the affinity for carbon is different in the two halves. And letting evaporation (i.e. solar energy) move you from wet to dry. It's not obvious that these must use more energy than you got by burning the coal in the first place.
Sure, I agree. The part I question is "more energy later". Or at least, this is not obvious from a first-principles no-perpetual-motion argument. It's a technology question.
> So, people burn hydrocarbons for energy. How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy? Please draw this chemical reaction out, along with energy balances and how endothermic it is.
If you read the article, you'd see:
> Nowadays, Industrial production accounts for one-quarter of CO2 emissions from energy and industrial processes. With the demand for cement, steel and chemicals remaining strong to support a growing and increasingly urbanised global population, the future production of these materials will have to be more efficient and emit much less CO2 if governments want to meet their climate goals.
In other words, this technology is not targeted at capturing carbon that is burned for energy.
Well the images of power plants as well as statements like
> Carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) refers to a chain of different technologies aimed at capturing waste carbon dioxide (CO2), usually from large point sources of pollution like power plants
or
> Another drawback of carbon capture, usage and storage, is the considerable amount of extra power it requires, which would increase the cost of electricity
Do give the distinct impression that they're talking about the production of energy (since 'increasing the cost of electricity' would be a weird way to phrase a pure increase in demand). If it was purely talking about processes that also happen to release CO2 then it doesn't make sense to solely talk about carbon capture vs. renewable energy like this article does as that's not an alternative.
Now carbon capture might still be necessary in a fossil fuel free world, but the article puts no real arguments forward why that would be the case.
Having it increase the cost of electricity only makes sense if you see it as part of the electricity production process.
Otherwise it just increases the energy demand of the process, this makes the process more expensive, not energy. Perhaps it could drive up energy prices if it ended up being an immensely profitable use of energy, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
gspr's answer is the primary answer, but a secondary answer is that carbon capture can use a clean cheap power like solar to clean up after power that isn't clean but has other attributes that solar doesn't, like being portable and/or not bursty.
There are predictions that within a decade the price of solar will have dropped so much that it's going to be cheaper to create hydrocarbons by synthesizing them using atmospheric CO2 than it will be to pull them from the ground.
And this is from an agency that is notoriously pessimistic and wrong about solar, vastly overestimating costs of solar and underestimating future deployments. So when the IEA has declared solar cheap, one can be sure that there is zero data to support otherwise.
Similarly, the IEA has been unreasonably bullish about the cost of nuclear, but still places it as one of the most expensive sources of energy.
The data is not on your side, and I have to wonder why you came to believe the things that you are saying.
Perhaps even more importantly, the price of solar has been steadily declining at a faster rate than all other types, and it's been doing it for decades.
One could argue that it will suddenly stop declining in price, but that seems as silly as betting against Moore's law in the 80's. Solar has reached price cutover, and installations are exploding so the manufacturing learning curve should really start to bite.
Where will that continued cost reduction come from? I think there's still a bit of room left, but not a whole lot. The panels themselves are commodities now where many of them are close to materials cost. There's probably a bit of room to cut in racking and in figuring out ways to make installation easier.
Not that any of that is really a problem. Solar is plenty cheap enough, but I don't see a mechanism for it to keep up its precipitous decline in price going forward for many years to come.
Same place all the previous cost reductions came from: a few percent heee, a few percent there.
We are not close to really any sort of physical limitations. We can continue to use less and less material, and come up with designs that require less and less labor per watt.
And there are entire directions we haven't really explored yet to reduce costs even further. For example, panel lifetime. If we can extend panel lifetime by 5 years, that's a 20%-25% reduction in costs. Yet lifetime has stayed fairly constant and unoptimized up until now. 10 years from now we will have a ton of new lifetime data from existing panels that can help us guide the next generation of panels.
I'd argue against that. I was in the solar industry (as an intern) 2008-2009. The amazing decline of the cost of crystalline silicon shortly thereafter was overwhelmingly the driver of panel cost reductions. The basic recipe of tempered glass, encapsulant, cells, soldered stringing, encapsulant, backsheet for the panels has been mildly optimized but has not seen major revolution in quite some time.
The cells themselves also very much are up against physical limits. Last I checked, the theoretical maximum efficiency of a silicon cell in sunlight at the surface of the Earth was something like 29%. The best cells made aren't far from that, and the cells you can actually buy and put into panels en masse are 20-24%. We can talk about multijunction III-V cells, but those are exotic and are unlikely to ever become cheap.
Given the upper bound of efficiency with commodity materials and construction, the only "squishy" places for further cost reductions are improvements in manufacturing efficiency, installation efficiency, and regulatory overhead. On my own home - where I'm installing a 14 kilowatt array - the regulatory overhead is close to 30% of the total cost. That's large, yes, but even if we snapped our fingers and zeroed it, we're still not talking anything close to the gains we've had in the past.
I completely agree that further improvements are going to be "a couple percent here and there" but I don't think that there's a whole lot of total room to cut. We're just not going to see another 10x reduction like we've seen a couple of times since PV became a thing.
Assuming that we WILL expend more energy to capture the carbon, the path to make carbon capture viable is clear: A source of energy that does not add more carbon to the atmosphere.
And existing technologies such as nuclear fission already offers us abundance of energy to do this. The problem is one of scale (how widespread?), acceptability (where can we do this?), cost (who pays?) and time (how soon?).
The process need not be as efficient as nature; if it ‘only’ is both a net win and deployable at a scale that’s larger than we can do by planting trees/stopping cutting down trees, it could be a good idea, even if we get the energy needed for capturing CO2 from burning even more oil.
And no, it need not belie the laws of thermodynamics. The idea isn’t to convert CO2 back to oil or do so without putting in more energy than burning oil gave us. In fact, some capture approaches keep the CO2 as CO2, for example by pumping it into empty oil fields (that makes me think “what could possibly go wrong?”, but hey, what do I know?)
(I have trouble envisioning carbon capture to be a net win and feasible at scale, but I’m not an expert; it might work, just as burning forests to prevent forest fires from spreading has its uses)
This argument basically relies on the assumption that it is at least as energy intensive to convert CO2 into something more solid than the energy you get from burning hydrocarbons to produce that CO2, but I think that assumption isn’t true.
I can’t recall where I saw it and I’m not a chemistry expert but conservation of energy is a thing and there is more potential energy in hydrocarbons than in some simple inert solid molecules containing carbon (which have slightly more potential energy than the CO2 and water produced by combustion). If you can be reasonably efficient then it is possible to extract energy from hydrocarbons without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. That said, I don’t think there are any sufficiently efficient industrial scale processes to do this.
You're worrying about the wrong part of the equation, the main problem is going to be what you're going to do with the oxygen. There's a reason why so many things tend to react violently with pure oxygen, to the point that we have an entire vocabulary dedicated just to that one class of reactions.
I’m replying to a commenter who claims that it is thermodynamically impossible to extract energy from fossil fuels while capturing the carbon (ie not releasing CO2 into the environment). Obviously some chemistry needs to happen but I claim it is possible to still get net energy out while somehow capturing the CO2.
I've been thinking lately a bit about the scale of the problem we face. We essentially need to create enough carbon sinks that balance out all the oil and coal burned since the industrial revolution. Hopefully we do something with it all like build a giant coal brick pyramid.
It's really handy the sun shines light on us for free. I sort of have this crazy idea of turning large parts of the center of Australia into rain forest by using solar power desalinization plants to pump fresh sea water inland. But alas. Australia has carry over credits from Kyoto. She'll be right.
I'm going to reread all the Dune books in the holidays.
The problem with plastics is that (from hazy memory) producing 1kg of plastic might involve the release of 7kg of gaseous CO2. For plastics that are already produced, yes, that carbon's not going anywhere. Producing more plastic to sequester it would somewhat miss the point.
Although a LEGO pyramid would be an amazing archaeological find to leave for future generations.
Yes, it will take a lot more energy. Burning carbon today is effectively civilizational credit card debt. We are prosperous but have a big compounding headache on the horizon.
It may well be impossible to extract excess co2 from the atmosphere at scale. But if it is we are in very very serious trouble.
> The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics.
This was many people's reaction to hearing about carbon capture. And one that TFA does nothing to dispel. But I'm not sure that's the final word, it sounds like there may be reversible chemical reactions which can actually capture carbon in an energy-efficient way. One source:
Since overproduction is a good way of dealing with variability of solar + wind and because carbon capture uses quite a lot of energy this might be a good use of over produced energy (those periods when energy prices go negative).
Hear hear. Right now, sadly - crypto is the only thing that allows you to directly convert excess energy into money, without a surrounding infrastructure.
I've been trying to figure out what the best way to become a "net zero carbon human". Although there's a clear consensus that reducing emissions is great, but what's next?
What do you do with the emissions you inevitably produce? As an amateur, it's super confusing:
- offsetting is criticised as "paying of your guilt without fixing the problem"
- carbon capture is next to impossible as an individual because there are so few projects to sponsor, besides planting trees which has questionable returns in the long run since who can guarantee these trees will not be burned 50 years from now?
A short list of things which are fairly easy to do. Don't have children. Switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet. Use public transport or bikes / walking rather than petrol cars. Use solar panels to offset your electricity consumption. Improve the thermal efficiency of your home to reduce energy usage. Switch to "green" energy suppliers. Lobby the companies you use to become more environmentally friendly. Ask your pension provider whether they have a low/no carbon plan - if so, switch your investments to it. Plant a small garden that you can take care of. Encourage others to do the same.
Those are all things I've done. Some may be easier or not depending where in the world you are, and your financial means.
I don't know why you are downvoted, those are exactly the main steps to reduce one's emissions.
I have heard somewhere that emissions can be divided roughly in 4 categories:
- Transport. To reduce this category, you need to travel less and if you need to travel, go by foot, bike or public transports.
- Food. To reduce this category you need to reduce you meat consumption, 2 or 3 times a week is enough, buy less transformed goods, ie cook more, and buy local grown food.
- Consumption. To reduce this category, follow the 5 R: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle.
- Public emissions. This one is tied to all the public services we get. It can only be reduced by reaching agreements as a society.
As for the children, obviously if we all stop having children, this is all of no use. In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.
> In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.
This presupposes that the current population density in developed countries is sustainable, with the foreseeable level of consumption per capita. Is it?
Sustainability is a factor of the population times its emission. So the answer would depend on how much we can decrease our emissions.
If I had to guess, I don't think we will be able to reduce our emissions enough to sustain the population density of developed countries. But I am pretty sure that it could be doable if we took all the measures we could take.
Reducing personal emissions is a red herring. The vast majority of emissions are not coming from individuals, but from industry. And contrary to popular beliefs, there is no way to dismantle an industry by changing your personal behavior - we need massive political and economic overhauls to have any measurable impact.
And telling people that a sustainable world requires them to be vegetarian or vegan is wrong and counter-productive. We do need to significantly reduce consumption of animal products, but there is no need to eliminate them from our diets completely.
I live in a small country (~5.5M people) that is near the top of the list for CO2 emissions per capita. The usual argument around here for not spending any effort in reducing CO2 emissions is that it won't matter: as a nation, we're so small compared to China and the US that we'll make no difference. Therefore, we should sit on our hands and tell the rest of the world to fix the situation while we watch.
By your logic (edit: unnecessarily harsh. "by the logic you present here"), everyone else but the absolute largest single CO2 emitting entity shouldn't do anything (because there's someone who's even worse), and that largest one can point back to the others blaming them for not doing anything either.
Isn't it an optimization problem though? Focusing on anything but your bottleneck (or largest carbon producer) has minuscule effects.
If the largest carbon producer did do enough work to become tied with the 2nd largest producer, there's now an argument for why the 2 largest must do something while the rest watch.
Granted, yeah, it'd be better for everyone to do what they can and let's all kumbaya, but it doesn't look like the incentives will ever line up for that.
Optimization isn't about focusing on the largest resource consumer, but on the most reducible. (Note that this makes your statement basically tautological)
And given that China's main problem is its population (which is basically impossible to reduce much more right now and they're still dealing with negative side-effects from their effective but not-very-nice One Child policy), not it's emissions per person, China doesn't have as much to reduce. Whereas if the US lived at China's level of emissions per capita, then the world's total greenhouse emissions would drop by over 10%.
The problem with this individualistic agenda is two-fold: some people who understand how dire the problem is believe that individual action is the way to go, and don't pay enough attention to the politics of climate change because 'everyone should just offset their own carbon footprint like I do, and then we wouldn't need big government to come in and take our rights'. Then, there are other people who think 'these damn hippies want me to become a vegan and stop using a car, this is obviously not tenable as a way to save the world, let's look at carbon sequestration so we can continue living like today'.
I'm not claiming that these are the only two ways people react, but I do believe they are two common ways. I also believe many companies and political parties encourage those two ways of thinking, because they allow them to maintain the current status quo.
Granted sweeping political legislation will have larger effects but a lot of industry is fundamentally driven by consumers.
Like voting a single individual can feel helpless but on mass changes that reduce ones own footprint and focus more on net-zero and sustainable produce will ripple through industry who will react to customer demand.
I think consumption behavior is much more controlled by industry through pricing and advertising than the other way around. There are very few examples of successful campaigns to change behavior on aarge scale, much more so if we are talking about industries with high investments, like animal stocks, or for industries that are far away from the consumer, like power generation, plastics etc.
Reducing personal emissions can help increase political will to take on the industry. Voters who don't eat hamburgers can't be swayed by "Hamburgers will cost $50 if we have carbon taxes" campaigns.
I think you are being too conservative here. Just kill yourself, thus sparing the rest of humanity from the CO2 you will inevitably produce over the course of your life.
You can also sell your organs and donate revenue and your whole estate to some reputable organization that fights with global warming.
Although nice, a single person won’t make a difference. We need to change as a whole of society, and that means legislation. 2020 showed society can shift when faced with dire consequences.
The idea that individual action even can is so utopian. When I'm emperor there will be no crime because everyone will recognize that crime is bad, even if doing crime benefits them.
Individual action isn't bad or anything, but we can't just wish away our problems by saying that everyone will get along.
A lot of things need critical mass. Being able to fly now and then increases my quality of life. Quitting flying won't lead us into a future of carbon free air travel, but legislation might.
Legislation can't really make air travel carbon neutral, there is no technology on the horizon that will allow crossing the Atlantic without emitting a ton of carbon.
The first few are little better than buying carbon offsets, IMHO.
> don't have children
This still leaves the rest of humanity! We need to change the system so that human existence is more sustainable. While having fewer humans on earth might seem to make the challenge slightly smaller, if we have a huge generation of people in retirement and a tiny fraction of working age folks who are both supporting the older generation and rebuilding all our industry, that actually makes the problem harder!
> vegetarian diet
Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions. And we need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink.
We must instead look at soil, and using soil as a carbon sink. Modern industrial farming causes huge amounts of carbon release from soil, and that includes organic farming on the industrial scale, like what one could buy in Whole Foods. We instead need to shift agriculture to modes (e.g. no-till) that regenerate soil rather than depleting it. And that will include some animals. Preventing a burn of a gallon of gas has clear and definable implications, and if we stopped all gas burning tomorrow, that would be fantastic. However cutting out all beef tomorrow would leave us in a tough spot for our food system, everything is far far more complex when it comes to out agricultural web. We must come up with a food system that is carbon neutral, and preferably carbon negative. That means composting, no landfills, and some degree of animals. Fixing the food system requires systems change, just like fixing industrial processes does, and personal action can not cross that gap.
As far as personal things one can do, I would add a few more:
1. Replace natural gas furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps. These are a carbon win even if tour grid is burning a lot of natural gas, because heat pumps move 3+ units of heat doe every unit of energy consumed. If you can't do that now insulate the hell out of your home (a good idea anyway)
2. Get involved in local politics, to force local policies to encourage systemic change. A local government with a policy of only financing construction with carbon-neutral steel and cement has a chance of forcing market change, where personal action has no chance.
I do a lot of your list, because I want to do something, but I think we need to realize that it's not really close to enough. We need to change all of society, and personal responsibility will not get us there.
> Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions
Oh, c'mon. 1. No they don't. 2. Cows' methaney burps aren't the only greenhouse gas issue w/ animal agriculture. Those animals definitionally eat more food than they produce (in in the case of cows, it's by a large factor). Meat is inherently an inefficient form of food. 3. Don't throw your food scraps in the trash—it's easy to compost.
> need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink
No. No you don't. Composting works just fine. But furthermore, the number of cattle we have today is laughably excessive for talking about fertilizer production. It's not even worth mentioning at this point in time.
If you don't have children, why should you care for the future generations? There could be some abstract argument about the unborn being as human as currently living people, but it cuts both ways.
This is just so human centric surely you can see how caring for all of Earth's biome is important.
Personally, I care about Earth's biome in its current state, and do not want to cause unnecessary suffering to animals or plant ecosystems because people trashed the joint especially since we had the ability not to.
It is human-centric, yes. However, the argument "don't have children for the only reason that they will trash the planet" is broken in its very core. First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence, and second, because if they don't have children, the chances are that their values will die with them and the Earth shall be inherited by the wasteful.
> First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence
Maybe to you. I derive a great enjoyment from just being alive myself and living my own potential. Considering a life meaningless without procreation is a very unintellectual perspective in my opinion.
You miss the part where the very existence of the person brings suffering through the consumption of all kinds of nature destroying goods. Obviously such person values their enjoyment over the suffering of others. This is one of the main issues of utilitarian philosophy where the attempt of applying universal measures of cost-benefit analysis returns unpleasant results.
How do you know nature will survive? Records of previous climate changes indicate the change occurred more gradually in tens of thousands of years, not within 200 years. So nature may not have time to adapt.
Also the living earth may have just been lucky the last time drastic climate change occurred; it's not that we have thousands of earths to exclude survivorship bias.
BS. You had a fucking meteorite wiping out the dinosaurs in a year or so. Everyone who has a tiny bit of education has heard about this. Everyone who has a bit more education knows that sterilizing Earth will take much more concerted effort than a nuclear war.
Venus is like Earth the same way both a table and a cow have four legs.
From the announcement you read only the parts how Venus and Earth are similar, but not how they differ. The runaway effect was possible because Venus had less water, is closer to the Sun, and has no magnetic shield. The runaway effect you imagine on Earth needs significant changes in its chemical composition, in its mass, or its physical attributes like magnetic field and thermal input. Humanity is still far from doing something like that. Weight until we start building a cosmic mirror, have self-sustained nuclear reaction on a global scale, or build an earth spanning superconductor network with massive energy volume that would counter the magnetosphere.
I mean that not having children is denying unborn people from the lives that they might have for no better reason that this might be easier for someone else unborn. This line of thinking leads to a suicide as a logical step which is rather bad extreme.
I agree. My point is that having children or not is the wrong argument. Decreasing population growth is much more ethically achievable by decreasing child mortality in developing countries, providing women there with the education to be self-reliant on their own, and providing them with birth control so that they can plan their parenthood.
The argument itself is reductionist in nature. No man, no problem. I'm not sure if you are arguing because of love for formal proofs or because you want the full treatise why it sucks, but if the latter, just say so.
I'm not sure what "it" is any more, but I think having modest amount of children is a good idea, and people from rich countries don't get to recuse themselves - we have such big carbon footprints. And appeals on behalf of unborn people sounds suspiciously like some of the dramatic appeals to emotion favoured by christian fundamentalists in the context of birth control.
I definitely do not ask people to have children for any reason be it moral, ethical, religious, or any other. I'm not asking them to abstain either. Vice versa, my argument is that having children is not analogous to using plastics and should not be considered in one's carbon footprint.
Go to school and become an engineer. Help develop a battery that's 1% better. Get a job and invest the money you make from it in a company that produces a solar cell that's 1% more efficient.
You're in a position to help on the credit side of the ledger way more then you'll ever be able to do on the debit side.
The Carbon Majors Report of 2017 (summarized by Guardian [1], original PDF here [2]) found 71% of greenhouse emissions caused by 100 companies, the top dozen(s) being fossil fuel producers. I think there's much more needed to be done than a single individual, hermit-style approach.
I think there's much more needed to be done than a single individual, hermit-style approach
You don't have to become a hermit to lower your emissions. It is entirely possible to have a good social life whilst lowering your emissions. In fact I would argue that many of the changes you can make will improve your quality of life.
Unless you're in the tropics, where soil has a hard time hanging on to nutrients, you can probably skip the biochar step. Just bury the wood in hugelkultur.
Zoom out. You are a tree. You need to see the forest. If you can get you & twenty of your friends to cut emissions 10%, that's far better than becoming a net zero human, and if you can get a thousand to cut 5% that's better still.
This is a collective action problem. You need to do better to lead by example, but spend most of your brain cycles on influencing others.
>In the IEA's "Clean Technology Scenario", more than 28 GtCO2 could be captured from industrial facilities between now and 2060.
We emit about 35-40 GtCO2 per year. So in 40 years, we might expect carbon capture to remove less than one year of emissions.
Not useless, but close, considering the investment which could be used instead to more rapidly reduce emissions by installing/improving solar, wind, geothermal, etc.
We do need to remove emissions, but we're likely past the point where that will be enough. We've already triggered too many feedback loops. We have to do all the above and more.
TBH I'm starting to come around more to the climate adaptation arguments and drifting away from talks around mitigation and reversal which I'm starting to suspect will remain behind the curve past the timeframe where they could make an appreciable impact.
Which is not to say I'm fatalistic to the point of leaning into continued emissions and taking no action on a personal level - I think all the information needed to make individual change is already known but we're facing the seven stages of grief with regards to the lifestyle sacrifices necessary to make them.
Would the increase in investment have a better chance to facilitate research and development? As with more research comes the possibility of a better capture rate down the road
No order of magnitude estimation and no time-scale. Carbon capture is irrelevant. This problem has to be solved at the root -- the energy demand. https://withouthotair.com/
This book is great, but now more than a decade old and the author is sadly deceased. It would be great to get an updated version which includes advances in renewable and battery technology. It is also focussed almost exclusively on the UK. Would be nice to have a version to cover feasibilities for all countries.
Edit: if memory serves, it also doesn't really cover carbon capture?
Virtually nothing's changed, save PV is now at or below fossil-fueled or nuclear thermal generation costs, and will continue to fall at a predictable rate for the foreseeable future, likely several decades.
MacCay's principle unit of analysis is energy per unit area, available or used. This is fundamentally insensitive to cost (which annoys economists) and only moderately responsive to technology --- efficiency limits are real (which annoys technologists), meaning the real questions become what new sources can be deployed (as they become economical --- economists are not entirely useless), and how much can demand-side be reduced (ditto technologists).
The sources are solar and wind (MacCay is addressing the UK). There is little untapped or available hydro or geothermal potential (exceptions exist elsewhere), tide and wave are effectively negligible and extraordinarily capital intensive, and biofuels are impractical (the UK cannot even feed itself, as it shall soon rediscover post-Brexit, let alone its automobiles, furnaces, and ovens).
Nuclear is the wildcard, but is as much a problem child as ever. (MacCay was a quiet proponent.)
MacKay assumed that PV modules used in large solar farms would be only 10% efficient, on the grounds that "solar panels would be mass-produced on such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it’s the lower-efficiency panels that will get cheap first":
A lot of solar startups foundered on this same mistaken assumption that low efficiency thin film panels would be cheaper than crystalline silicon. Considering costs for cover glass, backsheets, frames, cabling, and racking, that wasn't actually true. Crystalline silicon wins both the "premium" rooftop module market and the low cost ground mounted market. Several manufacturers now offer panels for the utility market with efficiencies reaching 20%, like this one from LONGi Solar:
He palmed an even more significant card at the beginning of the book. Instead of starting with actual per-capita energy consumption in the UK, he estimated consumption for "a typical moderately affluent person" living in the UK:
Making the whole population "moderately affluent" yields per-capita energy demand 56 percent greater than the actual value at the time the book was written (195 vs 125):
I thought that MacKay was a clever but not very quiet proponent for nuclear power. His assumptions effectively nudge the reader toward the nuclear solution. Even though some of his assumptions were dubious from the first, and others have been invalidated by subsequent developments, I still love the book for its transparent analysis.
Underestimating supply and overestimating demand is good engineering esstimation practice. Surprises tend to occur in the other direction.
With the shift from fossil fuels, additional electrical demand from heating, cooking, and transport demands can be expected. I'd have to re-read the book to see if MacKay accounts for these otherwise.
Starting with a value for a "moderately affluent" household also builds in the prospect for a general wealth increase, and forestalls opposition based on assertions he is locking in an austere lifestyle, a commmon tactic of opponents to renewable / decarbonised energy.
I haven't tracked PV efficiency trends lately, but recall generally that high teens is fairly typical. A vendor page supports this:
The highest efficiency solar panels on the market today can reach almost 23 percent efficiency. The average efficiency of solar panels falls between the 17 to 19 percent efficiency range.
For single-layer panels, the maximum theoretical efficiency (never practically obtained) is 37%. Far more expensive multi-layer panels peak at ~85%, and in practice, results are well below 50%. Dual-mode (PV-thermal) systems offer greater net capabilities, though the thermal output is limited to low-grade heat, e.g. hot-water pre-heat or seasonal thermal storage as with Passivhaus. Not inconsequential, but not makjickal pykxsie duste either.
An effective 10% efficiency net of shading, spacing factors, degradation, dirt, inverter losses, and other factors is quite reasonable.
MacKay's nuclear advocacy is remarkably sober and low-key in a world where proponents freqquently tend to be strident and shrill. I am not a fan of the technology (and take it you aren't either), but his portrayal is a realistic and respectful one.
Apologies for misspelling MacKay's name repeatedly above. HN's limited edit window is annoying.
I don't think that he was just lumping parameters together to get an "effective" 10% for ground mount PV. He allows a full 20% for rooftop PV. He just didn't realize that both would converge toward similar technology and efficiency.
Nuclear is fine as far as the physics goes. It's the inability to hold to projected budgets and schedules that has sidelined it. Betting big on nuclear was much more reasonable in 2007 when the book came out. At the time I certainly thought that the UK would add more TWh from nuclear than from renewables by 2020.
Very interesting link, as discussions on energy are meaningless without data. My understanding is that simple back-of-the-envelope calculations show that energy demand is the fundamental issue.
That being said, I've read that "without hot air" is a bit outdated and should be updated to reflect recent progress on renewable energy and battery technologies.
They key metric here is how much it costs ($/TON of CO2 Captured and Sequestered). There are a range of methods and approaches to do this. The average cost for Air Capture across modern approaches is $250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered.
There are other approaches besides Atmospheric Capture and Sequestration which hold more promise
1. High concentration C02 Emission Capture at source
2. Ocean surface capture and de-acidification
I expect this will follow a similar journey to how solar panel adoption went... once things tipped over the critical ($/KWH) where it made sense over grid electrical, people started to adopt. I imagine once one of the techniques reaches a critical $/TON Captured & Sequestered, governments or institutions will pay to build whatever machines to start. Right now things are too expensive using any method (i.e. using the best method, it would cost ~$12 Trillion dollars to capture and sequester ~49 Gigatons - the estimated carbon emitted in 1 year by humans in 2020)
The question is, what is that magical tipping point price? Unlike your solar vs grid example, isn't the alternative to capturing just doing nothing, which has essentially zero cost in our current economy?
This is the crux of the problem. There are no economic incentives for this, even if it became very cheap. We would simply have to agree, as a global society, to invest in carbon capture because it's the right thing to do.
Given our track record with this kind of thing, this does not look very likely. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large and I don't think anyone has a sane answer to it, or we would have done it already.
Even in the US there is consensus for doing something. Thankfully by the time that something happens it will be too late thanks to lobbying by people history will not look kindly upon.
Ignoring the scientific fraud behind the alternative answers, only 14% percent of "Conservative" republicans believe in man-made climate change - conserving what then?
I think extreme capitalism has driven greed to a point where people no-longer consider the ethical or social issues as they do not contribute to the bottom line.
However i do have faith that more emphasis is being put on the climate and people are gradually changing behaviour to prioritise industries helping transition to a net-zero society.
Thank you for running those numbers. I hope you don't mind if I quibble with them a little.
Firstly, I tried to fact check your "~49 Gigatons" figure and came up with this quote: "Emissions are currently expected to reach 42.4 gigatons annually in 2020, rise to an estimated 49.4 gigatons per year in 2030" from [0].
Your figure of "$250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered" is probably correct, but it's worth comparing that to this statement: "Table 1 summarizes the projected energy and dollar costs of air capture processes that have appeared in recently published technical analyses. The projected dollar costs are in the range of $100–$200∕tCO2" from a research paper [1] which may not include sequestration costs.
To present an optimistic scenario then, suppose that by 2030 we managed to reduce annual CO2 emissions to 40 gigatons and could capture and sequester CO2 at $100 per ton. That would make the cost $4 trillion per year. For comparison, the IMF projected Gross World Product to be $90 trillion in 2020, according to [2]. We would expect GWP to grow over the course of this decade, so the annual investment starting in 2030 should be less than 4.4%, although I wouldn't like to say what sort of effect that would have on the global economy, even if there were somehow a global agreement to spend that kind of money.
In conclusion, I agree with your assessment, and only ask that you take extra care to use the letter "O" in "CO2" and not the digit "0". It's not so important on a discussion site, but your linked article looks much less convincing due to that typo appearing eight times. (For extra presentational value, you could use a subscript character, i.e. "CO₂").
The article fails to answer the question, and the whole site appears to just be a clickbait ad farm. They have an article on hyperloop which fails to denounce it, calls it "one of the greatest leaps in transportation for generations" which tells us these articles are not reflections of critical thought.
I was about to post that the article seems to consist of snippets gathered from elsewhere. The bit about using captured carbon to grow plants and carbonate fizzy drinks was the original pitch ClimeWorks AG had before they pivoted to seeking direct donations from the public. These are also uses of captured carbon that do not result in its long term sequestration and so are orthogonal to discussions about mitigating climate change. It'd be nice to have seen that noted in the article, and to see some sources cited.
One critical point that article does touch on is that CCS at the point of emission is regarded by some as an unproductive distraction and that money would be better spent elsewhere (I.e. switching away from the emitting activity). That debate is a microcosm of general analysis paralysis that crops up in discussions around reducing carbon emissions - we seem to have a propensity for getting stuck searching for 'perfect' solutions at the detriment of deploying things that at least nudge the dial in the right direction (merely 'better'). We can (I'd almost argue must) do anything we can agree as merely 'better' today and then do 'perfect' if/when that becomes possible.
Then again, green washing is a real and strongly incentivised phenomenon so agreeing even on what's truly 'better' is often not straightforward. At the very least I can say with relative confidence that quite often CCS = usually better and CCUS = usually green washing. But even then the devil is in the details - CCS might not be better once the total energy cost is understood or if those energy inputs are themselves not decarbonized or fully accounted for. Carbon use might be beneficial if the usage does result in sequestration for a significant period.
A dangerous thing with this I think is that it risks cementing current unsustainable practices. It gives people and politicians, today, a sense of relief which stops them from doing the absolutely urgent actions that are needed right now (or was needed many years ago)...
I think the idea is not to replace reducing with removal but to supplement it.
There is no substitute for reducing emissions and completely transitioning to zero emissions but we already have such an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere that to get that is under control we also need to remove carbon.
Net-zero is the ultimate, sustainable goal but we'll need to even be carbon negative for a bit to undo the gigatons of carbon humanity has pumped out.
Simply put no. The cost to implement is too high and is essentially the same as what we do for Municipal Solid Waste (just bury it). I put it in a slightly less insane category than geo-engineering. The only places that I see carbon capture as potentially viable as a transition is using it to offset industrial process gases necessary. I.e. capture CO2 from coal plant for cement production - however that is niche case as siting is key and transportation is too expensive.
How do we solve climate change? Deploy, deploy, deploy. We have renewable energy that is cheap and available. Change the policy incentives at the federal away from subsidizing oil and gas and incentives green energy. De-carbonize the transportation sector with EV and HZEV. Reduce Natural Gas for home heating with the injection of Hydrogen into the fuel lines (up to 20%). Invest in research and development into further productionizing effective technologies.
Let's skip the wasted capital, debate and energy and move on. Also, let us not forget that Oil and Gas Majors have been deploying considerable money into this sector for decades to prolong their existence. I for one do not want to subsidize their behavior any more as they have been trying to scuttle the climate date since the 80s.
The problem is that even if we do everything you propose - rapidly deploy renewable energy tech, replace natural furnaces with heat pumps after the furnaces break, quickly transition to EVs, etc. - the best we can hope for is only 1.5 degrees C warming.
Perfect behavior from here on out is not enough to prevent significant warming. There is simply too much carbon in the atmosphere and too many carbon emitting machines in use today that will emit until they reach end of life. They acknowledge this in the IPCC reports and have already baked in aggressive use of carbon capture technology in order to meet the 1.5 C target.
Simply put, we need to continue to invest in carbon capture technology. This includes direct air capture, remediating soil to retain more carbon, preventing deforestation, etc. If we do not do this, we are going to blow past the 1.5 degree C mark.
Remediation of soil, preventing deforestation, reforestation are all very important options that need to be pursued. Direct capture to storage is a waste of capital (political, talent and financial) and rewards both the oil and gas historic investments and incentivizes them to continue to pursue fossil fuel production. That with it requiring specific geologic formations and on top there is a risk that there are leaks in the formations (e.g. Aliso Canyon gas leak in California).
Oil and gas companies (and many companies) are going to continue to use fossil fuels regardless of whether or not we invest in direct capture. By your logic, I could say that investing in soil remediation also incentivizes people to keep driving their ICE vehicles...
The point is that we are almost certainly going to blow past the 1.5 degree C (and likely 2 degree C) mark if we continue to decarbonize at a slow pace. To avoid this fate, we need to do rapidly electrify everything AND we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Direct air capture will never be free, but compared to the cost of future negative climate change impacts the cost of direct air capture could be totally justified. At the very least, it is worth investing in the technology to see if it can become a game changer.
I do think we need to electrify as much as possible but not everything the last 20% is ineffective and quite costly. I get that electrify everything is a great slogan but the reality is that maybe 60-80% makes sense and then after that it because a total cluster. I disagree - and i will continue to say that CCS is a red herring and waste of resources. It has been under development for a considerable amount of time and still has not proven itself. Go look at Alberta's multibillion dollar investments into CCS and how much has not materialized.
Deploy technology we already have and invest in viable R&D technology. Renewables, better agriculture, hydrogen based fuels, reforestation, changing cement processes, landfill management, capture biogas from waste water treatment plants and ag facilities, reduce high GWP refrigerant uses in countries that still allow them....
We will blow by 1.5 C if you've been watching this space since the early 2000s we've blown by every single warning that we've put up. Theres a moment in time that is happening right now - we waste our political clout and money on CCS or anything on GeoEngineering and it will be a disappointing future.
And no, investing in soil remediation would not incentivize further use of the ICE/fossil fuel burning tech because the oil majors aren't the companies standing to gain from soil remediation (i.e. they haven't spent considerable money funding R&D institutes to evangelize and deploy this tech).
With the excess CO2 we have in the atmosphere generated by humanties addition to fossil fuels, nature itself cannot act fast enough to save us. Over millenia trees, natural carbon weathering and other processes will stabalize conditions but we cannot wait that long.
We have to do everything you said and optimize technologies that convert gaseous CO2 into something that can be permanently stored.
Nature heals faster than we give it credit for, though there is considerable damage being done. Certain species can grow rapidly and remove CO2 from the air. Not saying this isn't a herculean push that requires all efforts - the only efforts I have a difficult time swallowing are CCS and geo-engineering (see other comments for reasoning). I'm all aboard for the others that have been put forward at this point.
If the coal burning power plants are already starting to lose the bid to wind power and photovoltaics, I doubt they stand a chance with the substantial added cost of CCS. Maybe it could be used to sort of pull carbon from the atmosphere if it was combined with renewable fuels. But it does not seem likely that it's going to save fossil fuel profits.
Since carbon capture is energetically expensive (by definition), industrial use of it (as opposed to some schemes like enhanced weathering or other geoengineering approaches) can only be part of a viable solution in a few manners:
a) As a way to offset carbon released by tasks that cannot be feasibility (or at least easily) de-carbonized directly. Random examples might be concrete, or maybe jet airplanes.
b) As a way to try to draw down atmospheric CO2 even faster once we are predominantly transition to de-carbonized energy sources.
Pilot plants that exist today are just that - pilots. They may be useful as ways for us to learn what to do when we get to worlds that are well described by a) or b)... but we really gotta get there first.
The way I see it, it's carbon capture or geo-engineering. Pick one.
We have been past the point of no return with climate change for a few years now, so only active measures can reverse it; going green will slow down the inevitable, which should still be done, but it doesn't fix the problem.
I think this is a reality that will only settle into the public consciousness a few decades from now. Most people still feel like solar panels and electric cars are a solution, so they don't put as much thought into the drastic active measures we will eventually be forced to take.
It's not "can we use carbon capture and geo-engineering", it's "how and when".
It's not out of the realm of plausibility we will be able to convert energy directly into food stocks via bioreactors.
Global weather/climate induced crop failure is literally the only doomsday scenario for mankind w.r.t. climate change. If we can figure out how to synthesize carbohydrates, lipids and proteins with low energy inputs, climate change won't be such a big deal.
Carbon capture is certainly a viable technology. The question is whether the politicians have the will to act.
Emerging carbon capture technologies can sequester atmospheric CO2 at low enough prices.
Last I checked, the prices were between $15-$75 per ton, which translates into $0.15-0.75 per gallon of gasoline burnt. Other carbon fuels would have similar costs per energy produced.
We need to transition to a carbon-negative economy as quickly as possible. Current atmospheric levels of CO2 are not sustainable.
Eventually, the politicians will have the will to act, because everything will be either on fire or flooding. Even conservative voters are starting to come around to that realization.
What people normally call "CCS" is mostly a short-term hack to keep the coal mines running. If you're going to burn coal, then, yes, please do CCS, but pretty soon you need to stop burning coal. I also don't trust that CO2 will stay underground forever; that also makes it "short term".
That said, we do need direct air capture (DAC) to repair the damage and to provide an alternative source for CO2 and hydrocarbons.
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To this end, I kind-of like algae as a low-tech solar-powered method:
I feel you could do this in a moderate-sized backyard.
You wouldn't want to bury the biomass directly (say as biochar) because you wouldn't want to lose the NPK nutrients -- but the above article deals with that. It describes a couple methods to extract carbon while recycling the other nutrients. None seem too difficult.
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In a completely different direction, nuclear-powered Sabatier/Bosch/electrolysis is also interesting:
Either way, you have to combine your DAC with... not mining fossil fuels out of the ground. You have to do both.
(Note: Carbon-neutral fuels (bio-, synthesized) are fine, e.g. for air travel. You just can't mine them from the earth. That's the one rule. Then the cost of recapturing CO2 has to be baked into everything else.)
I have been wondering about using this lately too.
Why not set up carbon capture units near alternative energy sources? It is certainly not going to be cheap and there are no real economic incentives for it other than hope for future generations. So, I don't know about the political viability considering this would have to be a massive project run by multiple governments.
But, if we put political viability aside for a second and just think pie in the sky here, technically, why not? As someone else pointed out, nature does this too. But those processes are simply too slow for the rate at which we are emitting. So, I think giving nature some help, at least until we have converted sufficiently to renewable is a good idea and may buy us the time we need.
Carbon capture from power plants would contain a mixture of CO2, NOx and SOx, and very few projects (see article) have ever attempted to capture this corrosive mixture, on an industrial scale, for a very long time. It is quite a complicated and energy-intensive process (collect the gases, compress/liquify/make supercritical, transport, convert P/V/T again, pump it down).
I know that the Norwegians (or perhaps various multinationals) have been doing this for decades, capturing CO2 at the source, at the Sleipner giant oil field in the North sea . But that is not a power plant.
Crazy time. I was fantasizing about a complete crazy thing lately. What if there was some small device that could turn energy into carbon capturing? Let says there was such a device, we could mount it onto every bicycle on this planet and every time people drive around it might be a bit more exhausting (good for your health!), but at the same time we would capture carbon from the air. Is this a crazy idea? I guess it is... But somehow I think it must be possible! If you know how to built it, let me know. I will sell it like crazy ;)
Environmental Carbon Capture is a terrible engineering solution.
CO2 is millions of times more concentrated when it leaves the smokestack than it is in the general atmosphere. Any sensible approach would focus on removing CO2 where it is most concentrated and easiest to remove.
I really want carbon capture to be viable, but so far it seems like a distraction.
>> The ability to generate additional power thanks to geologically stored CO2 which could be used to extract geothermal heat from the same locations in which it’s injected, producing renewable geothermal energy.
The article doesn't go into detail, but this is intriguing. Has there been a prototype anywhere?
What is the probability of an event that will compensate the effects in say next 50 years? e.g. nuclear exchange of X warheads or major volcanic activity etc ?
Carbon capture seems to me similar to plastics recycling which was invented by the oil and plastics industry. They always knew that recycling wouldn’t be economically viable at scale but kept pushing it anyway. I can’t imagine how we could capture any meaningful amount of CO2 and store it in a safe and economical way. It just seems another smokescreen like “clean coal”.
The only reason I'm tolerating the whole carbon craze is that most legislation is also helping with the real evil of pollution, that is killing here and now. And people are proposing to start whole new industries with their own pollutants just so we can keep dirty industries running longer? <insert expletive here>
No, it's a stop gap solution promoted mainly by those looking to keep on exploiting fossil fuels for a little while longer. There are lots of companies that are looking to do this because they are knee deep into legacy infrastructure that they can't shut down overnight because it would kill them.
However, continuing improvements in pricing for renewable energy (wind/solar + storage) make most such propositions increasingly less viable from both a carbon footprint point (you release more than you capture) of view and an economical perspective (spending money to make an already expensive solution less damaging).
Mostly it's a strategy pursued by companies that are protecting a sunk cost in the form of existing infrastructure to stretch its economic life a little bit longer. It's also a strategy for green-washing things that really aren't that green. Ultimately it's cheaper to not bother putting CO2 in the atmosphere thus removing the need to add cost by compensating for that elsewhere. Long term, most carbon capture schemes will end up on the wrong side of a cost equation.
The long term perspective for most gas and coal plants is basically extremely grim with or without carbon capture. Investors are actively divesting for this reason for most of the last decade already.
There are of course still a few countries building coal plants but most are in the process of actively shutting them down and on a clear path to getting rid of them completely. IMHO, most remaining ones will not make it to their current planned retirement dates for the simple reason of it ultimately becoming unsustainable economically to keep them going. To some extent that has already played out for most coal plants. Germany went against the trend here by opening a new one recently (probably for political reasons, the brown coal lobby runs strong in parts of Germany). But it's an anomaly in a market otherwise dominated by premature closures of plants.
Likewise gas plants are converting to being peaker-plants in a lot of markets that have fluctuating supply of increasing amounts of solar and wind. This vastly reduces the appeal of building new ones; but the reality is that the more renewable energy hits the market the less attractive it gets to operate gas plants. In some markets batteries form a perfectly adequate and cheaper substitute for having lots of gas peaker plants. I'd say investing in a new gas plant that supposedly will run for a few decades is at this point extremely misguided as an investment strategy.
It only makes sense if there's lots of stupid money (i.e. tax payer money) involved. Put bluntly, that's what most carbon capture schemes boil down to: stupid money. It's basically tax payers paying for the privilege of paying too much for electricity and corporations helping themselves to this cash on the basis of empty promises and a green-washing strategy.
We're decades away from having fossil free energy production world wide; but several countries are looking to get there in 10-15 years nevertheless.
Sadly not enough at this point. Need to also invest into other removal methods (while also restoring trees, mangroves and other naturally sequestering wilderness)
I question the legitimacy of a comment that tries to criticize an article for using a picture of a nuclear power plant when that picture is in fact of a coal-fired plant [1], something you'd easily see if you clicked on the picture before posting snark.
Warmer temperatures and higher CO2 levels are great for plants. The world is fully capable of growing all necessary food inside greenhouses if necessary, all it would take would be spending 25% of GDP on food rather than 10% as we do now. There will certainly be starving people in the future, but that will be a failure of capitalism not lack of capability.
all it would take would be spending 25% of GDP on food rather than 10% as we do now
I don't know, I've grown quite sceptical about what technology can achieve against this problem. I'm pretty sure increasing food spending to 25% of GDP would involve a massive societal shift. Whatever way you look at it we are in for a lot of pain.
The important point is in 'as we know it'. Industrial Capitalism is not an option for the future, but a different economic system that puts less emphasis on growth and more on sustainability can still work.
Rather than trying to save the current system with dystopian technologies, the ideal would be to give it up and start moving to a new one, preferably in an organized manner (e.g. Starting with the Green New Deal), instead of waiting for an otherwise inevitable revolution.
It did remind me of an off-topic pet peeve - it's absurd to start thinking of a colony on Mars before colonizing the Sahara and the Antarctic, both being orders of magnitude easier and more useful than a colony on Mars.
Yeah. Until we've tiled the solar system with solar panels, fusion reactors, and people, we're not done with local growth. Of course, Earth's surface would be converted first, and you might want to treat that as an externality to be taxed and regulated (as we already do with national parks etc).
Giving up on our current system will kill billions during the chaos of the transition. Green New Deal is still Industrial Capitalism, which is one of the reasons why it's a great idea.
Green New Deal is a major step in the right direction, but it will not be enough by itself to stop global warming. It is the best way I have seen to start a smooth transition to a new economic system.
Unfortunately, there is no way to still have industrial Capitalism, even under a global Green New Deal, and reduce emissions enough for the world to not go through catastrophic global warming. If we do nothing, the transition will be catastrophic as you mention. If we try to start major reforms today, we might have a somewhat smooth transition. But there is no way to avoid the transition to something new.
With increasing world population, decreasing famine, decreasing poverty, wildfires at 5% compared to 100 years ago, climate related deaths at 5% compared to 100 years ago,
there´s not even a threat in sight. Humanity and the planet is doing better than ever.
30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.
60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.
40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.
12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.
You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.
50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.
6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.
Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.
Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.
Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?
The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.