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$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

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Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#251

Post by jazzyjackson »

thinkcontext wrote: post #239
thereisnospork wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 50$/BBl that's 2 million barrels, or one quarter of one day's worth of oil production for Saudi Arabia alone [0]. A new technology could do far more than just 'disappearing' 100 million dollars worth of oil. [0] https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

You wouldn't pay the market price. Its costs money to extract oil, less than $10 per barrel in Saudi Arabia, in the $20s in the US. http://graphics.wsj.com/oil-barrel-breakdown/

OK but if I can sell 10 million barrels of oil for $750M why would I accept $100M to keep it in the ground?

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#252

Post by lovemenot »

geogra4 wrote: post #203
cowvin wrote: post #192

What we need is a cryptocurrency that is somehow mined by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

I'm laughing but honest to god I think this could work...somehow.

Yes, this seems to have potential.

The beauty of proof of work is the hashing algo is both 1) very hard to solve and 2) very easy to verify by anyone anywhere.

Furthermore, 3) miners have a financial incentive to solve the algo and 4) They may do so in anyway they see fit.

At a minimum a crypto-like solution should have these four properties.

Now we already have a lot of unpaid CO2 miners (plants) doing it inefficiently, ad hoc and short-term. The first stage should be to allow these to opt in to get rewarded. Like you could mine bitcoin with spare CPU back in the day.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#254

Post by m12k »

otterley wrote: post #196
BitwiseFool wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Why cant we just plant more trees?" We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cyc…

Dead trees lie on the ground, with all their sequestered carbon sitting there. It's not like the carbon is going back into the atmosphere, at least not without some process like combustion. Coal is basically dead trees. Before we started extracting coal and burning it, it was harmless to the atmosphere.

Doesn't rotting, or being eaten by microbes or termites that eventually get eaten or die and rot eventually lead to the release of the stored carbon?

AFAIK coal is composed mostly of trees that fell back before microbes evolved that could eat through their cellulose walls, and have had millennia of underground compression to further increase their stability - basically that process isn't available naturally to trees that fall today.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#255

Post by PeterisP »

wedn3sday wrote: post #4

Here's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the ground.

Reducing oil consumption by $100m worth of oil saves less than 1 million tons of CO2. We need - and the x-prize requests - solutions that can approach 10 Gt CO2 reduction per year. A one time reduction of 0.001 Gt CO2 is simply insignificant.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#256

Post by detritus »

Soil. It's soil.

Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it.

Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta.

I sort of made this post elsewhere here, I just wanted to repeat and focus on the soil angle.

We have huge swathes of the globe that due to poor historical environmental conditions have poor soil, so not much can grow. Some have become desertified, perhaps some of which is our fault (eg. Mediterranean deforestation). If we add soil to these places, at least hardier plants can grow and we can expand the reach of our efforts.

Strikes me that the most important thing is that plants can grow, and for that we need soil.

Soil.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#257

Post by jazzyjackson »

andyxor wrote: post #36

with this money you can terraform Sahara desert by planting a billion trees

I knew this was already in progress but didn't realize how little funding it received. I think you're right, 100M could go a long way.

> Seven countries of the Sahel region, an area located just south of the Sahara, therefore initiated a project that will see billions of trees planted across 11 countries by 2030

> A total of 20 countries pledged support to the Sahel countries for the mammoth project. The European Commission has already invested more than €7 million ( $7.5 million).

> But according to the United Nations, the initiative has only reached 15% of its targets after just over a decade. "Progress is slow, but we have learned a lot along the way," said climate consultant Vivekananda.

https://www.dw.com/en/what-happened-to-africas-ambitious-gre...

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#258

Post by ncallaway »

Aerroon wrote: post #237
Nydhal wrote: post #216

There's a few "Plants and trees won't do" comments here, which really misses the entire point of regenerative methods. Earth is an entire complex living system. Thinking of it as a simple chemical matter of CO2 is a very reductionist take. The point is to sequester carbon but ALSO trigger other cooling dynamics and reducing certain industrial practices that themselves release CO2. Too many engineers need to study com…

Nevertheless, plants and trees won't do it. They grow pretty much everywhere already where they can. Nature is better at reclaiming those areas than we are - there are an estimated three trillion trees in the world. Then there's the problem that there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan. The reason it's important to keep saying this is that lots of peo…

> They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem.

Does the evidence support that people's goodwill get "used up"?

It seems as plausible a theory to me that, when people get involved and take direct action, it ends up driving them to take further actions. Being personally invested in the result may drive more action rather than using up the goodwill.

(To be clear, I agree that we should always encourage action with the highest impact, and if tree planting actually does nothing to help solve the problem, then we should direct people to other activities. I'm not really jumping in to defend tree-planting initiatives, but more to question the assumption that people have a fixed amount of effort that they're willing to put into a given problem)

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#259

Post by burgessaccount »

kisamoto wrote: post #56

There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…

A few other problems - 1) trees take a lot of water to grow, and 2) all the carbon they sequester can go right back into the atmosphere in a forest fire. Some very scrupulous carbon-offset companies (like YC co terraformation!) are careful to plant diverse, native species in a way that rebuilds habitat and fits local water supplies. But there are a huge number of irresponsible tree-planting orgs that plant monoculture trees in places they don’t belong. For instance, eucalyptus trees in California - an invasive species that sucks water out of the ground, then burns up like an oil rag

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#260

Post by foota »

elevaet wrote: post #211
kisamoto wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that trees should not be part of a solution. Trees (and other nature based methods) should definitely not be neglected. I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.

This kind of civil discourse is what makes HN such a gem on the internet.

You're sure it's not comments like these? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277

I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)

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