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The quest to trap carbon in stone

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Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#41

Post by betwixthewires »

mynegation wrote: post #33
betwixthewires wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So follow up question, wasn't the carbon in oil itself sequestered from the carbon cycle? If so, this would be a reversal of that sequestration and not introduction, right? Maybe if you want to remove the carbon permanently, creation of synthetic polymers like plastics and things similar in composition to oil might be the trick.

Don’t know much about oil, but carbon in the coal was sequestered because plants got outside of water and evolved to have lignin about 50 million years before fungi and bacteria learned how to process dead plant mass. During that time (known as Carboniferous Period) burned and dead wood just turned into brown and black coal.

That's interesting. So all that coal was made in 50 million years? Imagine if nothing had evolved to metabolize lignin, how much less biomass there would be by now, how much colder the earth would be. Just a little more dead, in a slow death spiral. Evolution is cool.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#42

Post by downWidOutaFite »

gtsop wrote: post #25

When I was a kid my teacher told me trees convert co2 to oxygen. If I had to suck co2 out of the atmosphere I would plant more trees and stop choping/burning down existing ones. It is cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, but I guess this isn't tecky enough for today's world. Maybe if we add a wifi module on trees it would fix it.

From a kid's level of understanding you could also deduce that the carbon must end up in the plant matter, and that a forest's plant matter density doesn't increase forever. Old forests reach a carbon-neutral equilibrium (decaying plants release carbon). New forests suck up carbon until they reach that equilibrium.

Another idea you could deduce from this is that if we remove plant matter from the forest, and lock that carbon up so it doesn't go back into the atmosphere, it could become a long term carbon-sink. Even better if the plant matter can be useful. So vast lumber farms with the fastest growing trees you can get could be a good carbon capture technology.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#43

Post by MauranKilom »

gtsop wrote: post #25

When I was a kid my teacher told me trees convert co2 to oxygen. If I had to suck co2 out of the atmosphere I would plant more trees and stop choping/burning down existing ones. It is cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, but I guess this isn't tecky enough for today's world. Maybe if we add a wifi module on trees it would fix it.

Trees do that, but what happens when they die? Planting trees to fix CO2 emissions is like fixing the leak in your roof by putting more buckets below. Sure, it helps a bit, but it only buffers the water - you still need to dump it. Similarly, we need to get carbon out of the cycle.

For reference, some googled numbers:

- The amazon rainforest holds about 123 billion tons of carbon in total.

- For the past decade, we've emitted about 35 billion tons of CO2 (around 10 billion tons of carbon) annually.

You'd need to plant a whole new amazon forest every 10-20 years to balance out our emissions. And that's assuming our emissions don't keep growing exponentially like they've done in the past - otherwise you'll run out of land to plant forests on in a couple of decades.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#44

Post by macanchex »

kornhole wrote: post #5
jeffrallen wrote: post #3

Climeworks' technology is the real deal, and needs to thrive. The only good CCS is 100% carbon negative and sequesters the carbon in chemically stable forms. This is it, and we need more. Petroleum industry CCS is a scam, but Climeworks is not that. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.

We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1...

Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. Over the past few years, the idea has attracted significant attention among academics and social movements, but for people new to the idea it raises a number of questions. Here I set out to clarify three specific issues: (1) I specify what degrowth means, and argue that the framing of degrowth is an asset, not a liability; (2) I explain how degrowth differs fundamentally from a recession; and (3) I affirm that degrowth is primarily focused on high-income nations, and explore the implications of degrowth for the global South.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#45

Post by beaconstudios »

kiba wrote: post #30
beaconstudios wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the s…

I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the s…

Well, economic growth is based on increased consumption, not increased wellbeing - so in my mind, degrowth is focused on decreasing consumption. If we can get to our carbon goals by decreasing consumption while maintaining or even improving happiness (I think America's socioeconomic model is near perfectly designed to neglect happiness while maximising consumption for example) then that's ideal. If we take all the low hanging fruit and the world is still setting on fire then we'll have to start cutting things we like, because I'd rather be an unhappy vegan than a drowned carnivore (and I love meat!)

Focusing on decreased happiness on the assumption that it'll also decrease co2 is just 21st century puritanism.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#46

Post by sjdksndksn »

mynegation wrote: post #36
Ratalala wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watts are not energy.

Megawatts per year are.

No, a Megawatt-year (MWyr) is a measure of energy. A Megawatt per year (MW/yr) is not. It's the difference between multiplication and division.

From Wikipedia:

"Misuse of watts per hour

Many compound units for various kinds of rates explicitly mention units of time to indicate a change over time. For example: miles per hour, kilometres per hour, dollars per hour. Power units, such as kW, already measure the rate of energy per unit time (kW=kJ/s). Kilowatt-hours are a product of power and time, not a rate of change of power with time.

Watts per hour (W/h) is a unit of a change of power per hour, i.e. an acceleration in the delivery of energy. It is used to measure the daily variation of demand (e.g. the slope of the duck curve), or ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h.

Other uses of terms such as watts per hour are likely to be errors."

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#47

Post by macanchex »

Dig1t wrote: post #23
macanchex wrote: post #4

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2021/11/03/Tech-Will-Not-Save-Us...

>"An economic contraction, or what Gaia theorist James Lovelock calls a “sustainable retreat,” Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist".. To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse. It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive tha…

The relevant parts about CCS:

For more than two decades politicians, academics and industrialists have promised great things from carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But after years of trial and error and multiple project cancellations due to prohibitive costs, this highly expensive technology stores less than one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions a year. Even JP Morgan in its 2021 annual energy report sarcastically notes that the “highest ratio in the history of science appears to be the number of academic papers written about CCS compared to its real life implementation.”

The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil considers CCS a ridiculous endeavour because it will never scale up fast enough to make a dent in global emissions. The global economy now produces about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Tackling 10 per cent of that problem (roughly four billion tonnes) would require the same infrastructure that now supports the entire global oil industry, which produces four billion tonnes of oil a year.

Like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture doesn’t scale up very well. Researchers recently calculated that if the world deployed direct air capture using a chemical reaction that relies on caustic soda to break down CO2 emissions to water and sodium carbonate, it would require a new mining industry.

Just to capture 25 per cent of global emissions, it would need a system of extracting caustic soda that is 20 to 40 times greater than current global production. And this system would consume 15 to 24 per cent of the world’s primary energy spending to get the job done.

The technology also has a big footprint. An industrial factory, powered by natural gas and capable of removing just one billion tonnes of carbon out of the 37 billion tonnes emitted per year, would occupy an area five times greater than Los Angeles. If powered by solar energy such a factory would require a landmass 10 times greater than Delaware.

In other words don’t expect a direct air capture unit in your backyard soon. One group of researchers concluded that the technology “is unfortunately an energetically and financially costly distraction in effective mitigation of climate changes at a meaningful scale.” Another recent study concluded that carbon capture and storage and direct air capture projects emit more carbon than they remove or store.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#48

Post by vegetablepotpie »

kornhole wrote: post #5
jeffrallen wrote: post #3

Climeworks' technology is the real deal, and needs to thrive. The only good CCS is 100% carbon negative and sequesters the carbon in chemically stable forms. This is it, and we need more. Petroleum industry CCS is a scam, but Climeworks is not that. Disclaimer: I'm biased because I'm Swiss and so is this technology.

We hackers like to believe there is a technological solution for everything. These projects feed that delusion. Massive reductions and degrowth are hard for us to accept. This article somewhat fairly explains how extremely impractical and unlikely carbon capture technologies will be. The investments in the technology and the PR around them serve more to feed the delusion and keep us burning as usual.

Reducing growth will reduce emissions; however Carbon pricing, reducing methane, and carbon removal will have the most impact on reducing future warming according to the En-ROADS model by MIT [1].

Although the political influence and PR of incumbent extractive industries is overwhelming, how we talk about climate change in the face of manipulation vs choosing strategies that will have the most significant impacts are different things. We shouldn't let the presence of PR prevent the promotion of effective solutions, especially when current political realities makes the ability to make changes to society very tenuous.

Based on this model, my opinion is that technology is part of the solution to climate change. Degrowth can be part of the solution, but it doesn't necessarily need to be. Perhaps MIT is wrong or has made invalid assumptions, this may be the case, but we can only make decisions based on models, and we have to choose the models we think are valid and use them to focus on what we can promote. I think carbon pricing and carbon removal are possible for society to undertake, I think degrowth will be a hard sell.

[1] https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#49

Post by lovecg »

brightstep wrote: post #31
eikenberry wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can forgive people for wanting to look for solutions that don't require millions/billions of deaths, as that's the only way you'll see the level of change necessary. It will happen naturally over time as economic levels rise and reproduction rates drop below sustaining. But that will take centuries and lots of resources, so I'm doubtful that is what you are proposing.

The solution you describe has already been found: stop burning and leave fossil fuels in the ground. Technological solutions are the opposite. They're an attempt to avoid the what everyone already knows is the answer.

There are millions of people who are not in poverty right now because these fuels are being used. What you’re suggesting will immediately put them back into poverty. A lot of them will probably die of starvation and disease. I don’t think they’ll go down without a fight.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#50

Post by lstodd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
wombatmobile wrote: post #6

> to grab a million tons of carbon, a direct air capture plant could devour on the order of 300 to 500 megawatts of energy per year—enough to power some 30,000 American homes.

Great insight as to why we shouldn’t stop ramping renewables deployments. You need not only cover current electrical demand, but demand growth over time, transportation, HVAC, and all of the energy needed to sequester excess atmospheric CO2 emitted during human industrialization (>1000 gigatonnes based on 280ppm atmospheric CO2 pre industrialization and 420ppm current state). Burning ancient sunlight is expensive.

Maybe it's a better idea to release massive amounts of N2 and O2 rather than chasing a 100ppm of CO2 here and there.

In, like, setting up petawatts of nuclear electrolysing plants that will split seawater into H2 and O2, where the gases will dilute the atmosphere enough that CO2 levels drop.

This harebrained idea is on par with those CCS projects, but has the nice side effect that the nukes can sometime later be repurposed to more useful things.

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