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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

ckrapu.github.io

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Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#81

Post by epistasis »

yodsanklai wrote: post #67
xbmcuser wrote: post #19

This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially ener…

To put this statement into perspective, see this graph "Global primary energy consumption by source" https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years 1. Share of solar is negligible 2. New sources of energy have always come on top of existing sources, never replaced them

Citing "primary" energy is a great way to be off by several factors on any estimate.

Electrification results in 2x-5x less energy use for nearly every large energy application. Take, for example, heat humps. Fossil fuels are only something like 95% efficient, whereas heat pumps product 200%-500% efficient. Same goes for EVs over fuel engines, etc.

Old sources of energy get replaced all the time. Not sure why you think that's not the case...

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#82

Post by baking »

ckrapu wrote: post #37
pxeger1 wrote: post #2

What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?

Sadly, I don't think so. Many of these carbon burial/sequestration proposals all advocate just taking all of the plant matter and tucking it away, including the N and P.

Eli Yablonovitch has been working on this for a while. I thought it was assumed that only the lignin would stay sequestered but I'm not finding those details.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217695120

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#83

Post by sqeaky »

laserbeam wrote: post #15

I’m skimming through this and it feels like a well thought out research proposal with concrete next steps. My thermodynamics is too bad to comment on the approach but it looks cool. As long as setting up experiments for it is reasonable in cost, wouldn’t take too long to show results (before it’s too late for the planet), and can show that enough CO2 can be captured and long term costs make sense, then it sounds grea…

The idea proposed is so incredibly cheap, the only real cost is land and unskilled labor. This screams "government experiment" but we are doing less and less of that.

If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#84

Post by jaggederest »

pavon wrote: post #65
xbmcuser wrote: post #19

This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially ener…

In the US, the rate at which we install utility scale solar and wind is currently limited by how quickly we can upgrade the grid to support it, with interconnect wait lists taking over 5 years in some areas[1]. Lifting tariffs wouldn't speed things up without fixing that first. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...

Interconnect is going to be old news once batteries and balance-of-system costs get low enough. Local microgrids at the substation level are going to be the way to go, with only a minority of current traveling long distances (except for certain natural features, i.e. hydroelectric)

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#85

Post by sqeaky »

ckrapu wrote: post #41
ospray wrote: post #9

The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization

One downside: you have to ship all the carbon to the coast. Transport is a non-negligible consideration for all of this. Ideally, you just grow a ton of switchgrass in northern US / Canada / Siberia and store it nearby.

This is a downside, but big flat boats floating down river don't seem like big carbon releasers, bonus points if they use solar/wind to get back up river.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#86

Post by sqeaky »

philipkglass wrote: post #6
8474_s wrote: post #4

wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?

There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.

Just for scale how tons of carbon are in an acre or hectare of corn, wheat, or other crop. Being able to say how many farms would need to do this to counter act our release could provide an interesting sanity check.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#87

Post by standeven »

pavon wrote: post #65
xbmcuser wrote: post #19

This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially ener…

In the US, the rate at which we install utility scale solar and wind is currently limited by how quickly we can upgrade the grid to support it, with interconnect wait lists taking over 5 years in some areas[1]. Lifting tariffs wouldn't speed things up without fixing that first. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...

It would still speed up behind-the-meter installations for existing grid connections. Rooftop solar, commercial and industrial customers adding battery energy storage, etc.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#88

Post by standeven »

gmuslera wrote: post #34
xbmcuser wrote: post #19

This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially ener…

So far we are still increasing the rate at which we extract fossil fuels, even with all the investment in renewables and alternate power sources in the last decades ( https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels ). The Jevon paradox seem to still be valid in this, even with a few countries that managed to have most of their energy matrix on clean sources. And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not…

And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#89

Post by newpavlov »

tialaramex wrote: post #76
yodsanklai wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this statement into perspective, see this graph "Global primary energy consumption by source" https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years 1. Share of solar is negligible 2. New sources of energy have always come on top of existing sources, never replaced them

Sure, look at that chart. According to that chart, we'll burn coal forever. Now, consult reality for a moment, or take a look around. Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century. So your "always" is at best temporarily true, and thus worthless, it can't actually have predictive power. Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're ei…

>Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century

Sure, it's finite, but we will run out of oil and natural gas much faster than of coal. There are centuries worth of known economically viable coal reserves. Even more, if we count low-quality lignite and peat reserves.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#90

Post by pfdietz »

DaoVeles wrote: post #73
pfdietz wrote: post #63

The problem with all biomass-based solution is the low efficiency of photosynthesis. This is why producing liquid fuels from biomass cannot be a general drop-in replacement for petroleum.

I have seen efficiency figures vary from as low as 0.1% upwards of 10% but it seems difficult to quantify. My shoot from the hip intuitive thought is that the massive amount of plant matter it took to make petroleum demonstrates how inefficient it is to get energy in that chemical state. A fools errand to try and do it over. It has been said that Coal/Gas/Oil is a half billion years of stored solar energy. That is wi…

The 10% is for algae, I think. And that requires juicing the liquid with enough CO2 so they can continue to photosynthesize. If you're DACing that much CO2, you might as well just sequester it.
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