U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
1–10 of 347 posts
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#2> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade
At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero.
Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary 5% pay cut, but that figure (if it's correct) does make it harder to argue that "we can't afford" to do anything about CO2 levels, or that tackling climate change requires us all to stop flying or heating our homes.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#3I do worry about the oversight and auditing of such metrics. The article does refer to the problem of "I planted X trees therefore I removed Y carbon", when that is true only under particular conditions.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#4I do worry about the oversight and auditing of such metrics. The article does refer to the problem of "I planted X trees therefore I removed Y carbon", when that is true only under particular conditions.
I guess you need to plant X trees, wait Y years for them to accumulate Z carbon and then bury all the trees M meters underground to stay there forever.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#5At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical. It's about innovation, and is positive, I.e. doing something instead of telling people not to do something. For once this seems like something a government should be doing. I'm almost suspicious I missed something.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#6You can remove CO2 extremely cheaply using olivine today, this is a completely fake problem.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#7> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…
5% is still much higher than the costs of climate change for at least a century (at least if you believe the IPCC projections).
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#8> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…
More importantly, having an actual price tag on removing carbon from the atmosphere would allow carbon markets to finally work. Assuming there is enough political will to properly monitor and tax CO2 emissions worldwide, which is a huge ask. A lot of companies and countries will be tempted to lie because it will make their products more competitive.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#9> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…
It's highly likely that carbon removal follows similar economies of scale as solar too, so the costs are likely to continue a rapid decline.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#10You can remove CO2 extremely cheaply using olivine today, this is a completely fake problem.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505...
Relevant:
Qualitative proposals to control atmospheric CO2 concentrations by spreading crushed olivine rock along the Earth's coastlines, thereby accelerating weathering reactions, are presently attracting considerable attention. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the concept, demonstrating quantitatively whether or not it can contribute significantly to CO2 sequestration. The feasibility of the concept depends on the rate of olivine dissolution, the sequestration capacity of the dominant reaction, and its CO2 footprint. Kinetics calculations show that offsetting 30% of worldwide 1990 CO2 emissions by beach weathering means distributing of 5.0 Gt of olivine per year. For mean seawater temperatures of 15–25 °C, olivine sand (300 μm grain size) takes 700–2100 years to reach the necessary steady state sequestration rate and is therefore of little practical value. To obtain useful, steady state CO2 uptake rates within 15–20 years requires grain sizes P.S. Counterpoint:
This is from a preofessor in the Netherlands, 2016 He's giving lots of strategies, other than "Olivine all the things": http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2016/07/olivine-weathering-t... This is a whitepaper from that professor 2017: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
His own summarized blogpost, where he is representing the "Olivine Foundation": https://smartstones.nl/the-rate-of-olivine-weathering-an-exp...
So I'm thinking this is probably a good foundation to start from. How long before someone can convince the US, much less China to olivine their fields?
This is not a fake problem. It's a series of problems, but I concede that olivine is a good way to go.