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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

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Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#181

Post by francisofascii »

ISL wrote: post #108
gustaf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS. Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too

If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees. Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too. The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#182

Post by astrodust »

thereisnospork wrote: post #118
astrodust wrote: post #90

At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing. Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era. Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just…

Sure we could curtail CO2 emissions, but that means lowering people's quality of life which is a hard sell.

A 4°C increase in temperature will lower people's quality of life a whole lot more than any minor inconvenience you'll have to endure in the short term.

If the government had any backbone at all they'd rally people around the idea of committing to it and getting it done. In World War II people lowered their "quality of life" to support the cause. It can be done.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#183

Post by gregcrv »

Jun8 wrote: post #3

This is awesome! Some people don't like having a Plan B along these lines because they think it distracts with the standard approach of emission reduction. In reality, for something this important (i.e. Keter level destruction event) we should pursue all threads simultaneously. "If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work." In fact, let's at least start brainst…

Desert flooding even happened before by mistake in the US:

It was not long before the Colorado River began to wreak havoc with its erratic flows. In autumn, the river would drop below the level of the canal inlet, and temporary brush diversion dams had to be constructed. In early 1905, heavy floods destroyed the headworks of the canal, and water began to flow uncontrolled down the canal towards the Salton Sink. On August 9, the entire flow of the Colorado swerved into the canal and began to flood the bottom of the Imperial Valley. In a desperate gamble to close the breach, crews of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose tracks ran through the valley, attempted to dam the Colorado above the canal, only to see their work demolished by a flash flood.[197] It took seven attempts, more than $3 million, and two years for the railroad, the CDC, and the federal government to permanently block the breach and send the Colorado on its natural course to the gulf – but not before part of the Imperial Valley was flooded under a 45-mile-long (72 km) lake, today's Salton Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#184

Post by aoner »

sandworm101 wrote: post #74
btilly wrote: post #59

I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2 sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is already available. Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into t…

>> I understand the qualms of environmentalists As one of those environmentalists, my qualm isn't so much that this may be dangerous but that carbon capture tech (and associated "carbon capture and storage") is often championed by people looking to delay implementation of technology and laws that limit carbon emissions. It is far more energy-efficient to curtail carbon emissions than try to capture it once emitted. T…

We're going to need carbon removal tech AND a decrease in emissions. From year 1750 to 2007, we've added around 820 000 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. We've already got way too much CO2 in the air, and we're still adding around 35 Gt per year extra.

We need to find ways of getting this carbon out of the air.

Best would be if we could create actual products out of it, such as aggregates using advanced weathering like Blue Planet ( http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com/ ) or creating carbon based building materials like stones, insulation or others. If we combine this with bio-energy we might find systems that are already profitable without carbon credits.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#185

Post by astrodust »

wallace_f wrote: post #152
thereisnospork wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure we could curtail CO2 emissions, but that means lowering people's quality of life which is a hard sell.

Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption. In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods. This is also demonstrated in the South Park episode Smug, which criticizes hybrids. From a p…

You can cut emissions even more by eliminating the need for cars, but as that would put a huge dent in the automotive-central industrial complex that is the United State, nothing short of apocalyptic conditions are going to make that happen.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#186

Post by danielharan »

steve19 wrote: post #176
danielharan wrote: post #154

I'd like to propose a different scale removal, for anyone that may have the means to do it: home and office CO2 scrubbers. CO2 concentrations are higher indoors, and they're affecting our cognitive ability. Atmospheric concentrations are going to be high for human cognition, especially in dense urban areas. Better indoor ventilation will help, but if outdoor air already has higher than optimal CO2 concentrations, scr…

C02 in the atmosphere is going to need to increase by 2x-4x before cognition becomes a problem. Meanwhile indoors co2 jumps to these levels within hours of poor ventalation. I minuter the co2 in my office and vent when required.

We're passed 400 ppm globally, and urban areas are much higher. Indoor air is often 1000 ppm - how many air changes do you need to get that down to a reasonable amount if your intake is around 450? 500?

And do we know for sure that 500-1000 is fine for cognition?

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#187

Post by nanomonkey »

All Power Labs, a company that makes biomass gasifiers, has estimates for the amount of carbon their technology can sequester (http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon). This appears to be the most viable process forward, as not only can one create a ton of electricity, hot water and air, but also biochar which sequesters carbon in the soil in a beneficial way for an estimated 10k years. (full disclosure, I'm an ex employee).

Equally exciting are the biomass gasifiers that utilize Stirling engines, such as those made by Microgen (http://www.microgen-engine.com/) as they are external combustion engines which are quieter and have better runtimes and maintenance cycles.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#188

Post by astrodust »

nostromo wrote: post #124
astrodust wrote: post #90

At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing. Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era. Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just…

> let's just curtail CO2 emissions We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2 emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per GDP, and absolute terms.

The United States fully intends to reverse course on that and fire up coal plants in order to something something jobs.

The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#189

Post by philipkglass »

romed wrote: post #147
atupis wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not build houses from trees that will take carbon out 100-200 years from cycle.

Not just houses but any kind of building. There is an architectural movement called Mass Timber where the buildings are not just framed in wood but are virtually solid wood. It actually solves a lot of problems around building cavity thermodynamics, by eliminating the cavities. A large scale mass timber building sequesters a huge amount of carbon.

Carbon sequestration is a nice side benefit, but wood-into-durable-products can absorb only a small fraction of present anthropogenic CO2 emissions. We're emitting about 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year at present (10 billion tonnes of carbon) and wood is about 50% carbon. To offset a quarter of human CO2 emissions, we'd need to turn about 5 billion tonnes of wood per year into long-lasting buildings and other manufactured objects. As of 2014, the world was producing about 0.8 billion tonnes of wood products that could be used in long lasting applications (sawnwood and wood paneling).

https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions

https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurge...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#190

Post by pdonis »

I know this is going to get downvoted but I have to say it: the problem is not CO2, the problem is CO2 alarmism. The models on which the IPCC predictions of doom are based do not match the data. Even the IPCC admits that in the AR5. The actual data says that CO2-driven warming is not enough to worry about. (Not to mention that the prediction of doom also depends on economic models which are even worse at matching data than the climate ones are.)

We should not be spending the valuable resource of startup founders on this problem. We should be spending it on creating enough wealth to bring everyone in the world out of poverty and giving them the tools to adapt to whatever happens in the future, including changes in climate.

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