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$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

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Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#391

Post by jbay808 »

burgessaccount wrote: post #330
blurbleblurble wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trees take a lot of water to grow but they also hold water and share it through the air and ground with other plants and with other creatures in the form of transpired water vapor.

Definitely true! I am a huge fan of trees. But the wrong tree in the wrong place is a bad thing. I try to advocate for responsible and thoughtful reforestation - which is, unfortunately, a lot more expensive than people want it to be.

Where can I learn more about the costs and challenges of thoughtful reforestation, and the key differences between the responsible and irresponsible sort? (Just popping in to ask because it seems like you might know). I'm interested in doing some work in this space but don't have any background.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#392

Post by oezi »

PeterisP wrote: post #267
oezi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about just buying the oil and putting it into storage somewhere (maybe just buy oil ships with oil in them). This will drive up price of oil for everyone which is the most effective way to accelerate the adoption of renewables. The world spends 6-9bn USD per day on oil (100m barrels at 60-90 USD), maybe we start with spending 1bn per day. Edit: Fixed calculation.

If you want to drive up the price of oil for everyone, then instead of buying some oil and putting it into storage, you can just tax it, gaining revenue (that can be used for subsidizing renewables) instead of spending money to buy oil. The problem is that driving up the price of oil for everyone significantly (so much that there would be a meaningful reduction in usage, not just a slight decrease) is politically una…

You are certainly right from a national perspective, but the climate crisis is a global issue. By reducing supply for everyone, this wouldn't give way to loopholes and cheating (as we see for instance with carbon credits).

You are also right that raising prices was very unpopular in the past. But some things need to be done to curb fossil fuel use and support alternatives. High oil prices are the most effective way.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#393

Post by oconnore »

apendleton wrote: post #212
abeppu wrote: post #96

This sounds cool from a tech-nerd perspective, but of course it all is pretty futile if we don't get emissions under control. The video says 10 gigatons/yr by 2050. Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons. I.e. even if capture is successful, it needs to be accompanied by aggressive emissions reductions for us to even get to neutral, let alone reversing damage. I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expect…

I think the general consensus is that where it's possible to eliminate emissions, that's much better than emitting and then capturing later, but there are huge disparities across emitters as to how easy that is to do, and there's a likely outcome where getting to net zero (or even net negative) emissions involves eliminating emissions in most industries and then using capture to deal with the laggards. Getting less a…

Carbon neutral jet fuel exists (synthetic fuels from electrolysis, and/or biofuels), and could be scaled up. The issue is not “can we do this”, it’s “can we justify doing this economically”.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#394

Post by wgolsen »

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…

> there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan.

There is of course lumber, which can sequester CO2 for decades or hundreds of years. Lumber sequestration currently only amounts to ~1% of global annual carbon emissions, but regionally it can be big (9% in Sweden) [1]. Lumber might have a bigger impact if purposefully employed for sequestration and prioritized over other carbon positive building materials.

1 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/29/14526

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#395

Post by jaggederest »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #293
abathur wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. @knodi123 is joking about fraud. I am talking about fraud.

And I'm saying that kind of fraud shouldn't be a worry, because there shouldn't be any money at all for reducing/preventing production.

It's easy to provide proof of capture. 2266 kilo one-cubic-meter cubes of carbon, by the billions. Preferably stacked into interesting and eye-pleasing shapes.

Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it.

They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#396

Post by sellyme »

foobarian wrote: post #231
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…

Do trees actually help? AFAIK once a forest reaches equilibrium it puts out as much CO2 as it takes in through various decomposition processes.

Yep, but reaching equilibrium once we've removed enough from the atmosphere is fine.

Of course this strategy does have to go hand-in-hand with drastic emission reductions to prevent use getting back to the same point and having nowhere else to put trees.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#397

Post by _ph_ »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #31
re-al wrote: post #28

Why cant we just plant more trees? Or let the trees we have grow bigger, to soak up all that extra carbon?

>"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…

Long term the dead trees might release the carbon again to the atmosphere, but we are currently facing problems over the next decades. Even if trees would only move some amount of carbon "into the future", they could buy us precious time while we deploy other solutions for the problem. And of course, one can try to permanentely capture the carbon bound by trees by not letting them burn/rot after their life.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#398

Post by napier »

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…

It’s not just about carbon equations. Appropriately selected, well planted trees reduce local environment temperatures, regulate rainfall and soak up excess water in a positive feedback loop. The urban heat island effect will make lived experience even more challenging than it already does as the planet warms; turning cities into agro-forestry reserves would counteract this.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#399

Post by daddylonglegs »

gpt5 wrote: post #268
daddylonglegs wrote: post #236

Most types of carbon capture technology [1] being touted are credit cards for climate change: You burn enough fuel to generate 4MJ worth of heat... Your internal combustion engine generates 1MJ worth of mechanical effort from this... You use this to propel a 2 ton vehicle... Carrying 1 person... To take part in the rat race or indulge in some consumerism. [2] The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years whe…

Genuine question - if CO2 half life in the atmosphere is less than 50 years, why are we so concerned about it? Wouldn’t the problem solve itself given that we are both reaching peak consumption of fossil fuels and that they are expected to deplete with the next century? In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?

50 years was my (over optimistic) estimate of how long the CO2 would be left in the atmosphere before being sequestered by one of the carbon removal technologies being touted. In reality it's going to take centuries for our descendants to stabilise the climate - and I'm still being optimistic.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#400

Post by adrianN »

napier wrote: post #398
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…

It’s not just about carbon equations. Appropriately selected, well planted trees reduce local environment temperatures, regulate rainfall and soak up excess water in a positive feedback loop. The urban heat island effect will make lived experience even more challenging than it already does as the planet warms; turning cities into agro-forestry reserves would counteract this.

Planting more trees in cities makes a lot of sense, but it doesn't do much for CO2 levels in the air.
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