181–189 of 189 posts
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Couldn't the bio-oil generated by the process be used to power the transport and supply lines? Or don't the maths work out? I don't know any of the numbers here...
You have to drive the 'stuff' to 'somewhere' to turn it into 'whatever'. The stuff costs more in CO2 to drive to the place than you get from turning it into 'whatever'.
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How does removing the biomass improve soil health?
Biochar helps avoid soil compaction and dramatically improves productivity of the soil.
For quite a few years I looked into similar processes based fundamentally on biological photosynthesis, for example algal pool farms and similar approaches to generating hydrocarbons from biomass. At present, I think direct air capture of CO2 followed by reduction to methane and longer hydrocarbons using water-sourced H2 (all without going through the biological photosynthesis) is going to be the long-term winning te…
I’ve thought a good target would be polluted lakes with algae problems or diverting part of rivers with agricultural runoff. Pump oxygen and whatever bottleneck nutrient in and harvest algae. You’ll clean the excess nutrients out of the water and sink carbon at same time. Do this in the Mississippi River delta for maximum effect, do a pilot in a Minnesota lake first.
Wolffia is the fastest growing plant on the planet and can double in size in a day. It's small, so it would work well as fuel for biomass reactors, the carbon char would be mostly derived from atmospheric carbon, resulting in a net negative, you can grow fish in the water underneath it, and it itself is edible and eaten already in many parts of the world where it grows naturally.
Further, it likes the slightly acidic water that bubbling CO2 into the water would create and it specifically oxygenates the water it floats in by stripping oxygen from CO2 during photosynthesis.
The downside is that no one has figured out the full process for continuously farming Wolffia yet, but if you solve that you can solve many other problems and create a multiple stream of income business out of taking carbon out of the air. (Biomass reactor fuel, plant food source for humans and animals, fish food source & selling carbon credits)
I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated process of converting it to oil and burying it.
That and it would do nothing to remove CO2 or Methane from the atmosphere, so even the process of getting the oil to bury would be carbon positive in the first place.
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You have to drive the 'stuff' to 'somewhere' to turn it into 'whatever'. The stuff costs more in CO2 to drive to the place than you get from turning it into 'whatever'.
But is this a general and inescapable rule?
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There was an Oxygen and Nitrogen (I think) injection project here in BC which was attempting to burn out phosphorous from silt during seasonal turnover of the water columns. I recall that it never showed a positive effect on the body of water, though occasionally it was negative. Lots of fish died at one point. After several years the measurements of P in the silt were hardly any lower, but still too high. I guess th…
A good way to get rid of excess nutrients is to pick a water plant with ridiculous growth rates (for example, duckweed), harvest and compost it for use in agriculture. Compost will certainly remain in agricultural fields longer than chemical fertilizers do.
The trouble is that distributing compost is extremely expensive and it doesn’t release into the soil quickly.
You can truck out tons of dry fertilizer and irrigate with it, getting immediate results through a system you already have on farms. Your nutrient to dollar ratio is far better (in the short term).
You might know this already. My main intent of mentioning that is that I suspect that way of thinking is actually totally misguided. The externalities seem to be far too severe, and damage to soils seems unsustainable as well. I have a feeling if we sucked up the cost of distribution and application of natural fertilizers, in the not-so-long term we might actually see major turn around on several issues related to crops and fertilizer run off.
There is plenty of evidence for it, but the scale of fertilizer needed is insane. No idea how we’d make that shift. Dry fertilizers are incredibly dense forms of nutrients, and they’re so easy to get from factory to plant.
US universities have published a lot of research showing natural fertilizers do yield good crops with better disease resistance, but any farm using them would need to put more money and time into fertilizing and could expect smaller yields. If everyone plays that game, okay… But if a farmer independently decides to, they need to find a market willing to pay more. That’s exceedingly rare.
We need to collectively value this investment, otherwise it’s very hard for farmers to afford the shift. At least, this is based on my limited hobby gardening/researching understanding. Someone in agriculture would know better.
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Somehow you never quite get the real raw material when you ask for samples, no matter how careful you are. I worked on a system once upon a time that fed steel balls into a ball mill. We tested it thoroughly in the workshop with the same steel balls used on the customer's site, but when we went to commission it, it jammed non-stop. Turns out a hundred randomly selected balls won't contain most of the outliers that yo…
I found your comment fascinating (and frustrating). Dealing with bad inputs on a web form can be tricky. Dealing with bad inputs made of steel seems like a lot more work =]. What comes out of a steel ball mill? And why is steel made into (misshapen) balls before this process?
A ball mill is used to grind things into paste, usually for further processing. In this specific case it was a SAG mill (https://www.mogroup.com/portfolio/sag-mills/) and it was frikkin' huge, powered by a 10MW electric motor. It ground up ore-containing rocks from a mine which were then processed to produce lead and zinc. The balls roll around in the mill and help to grind up the ore, which I guess works better if they're round, which they will be before long due to wear and tear no matter what shape they go in. They come out as tiny ball bearings. It was quite an interesting project!
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The point is to take carbon out of the cycle. Not mining petroleum would of course have the same effect but good luck getting people to do that.
In both cases you're burying a product of photosynthesis that would have been converted back to carbon dioxide through combustion or respiration. You're taking carbon out of the cycle. It doesn't matter whether the carbon was fixed millions of years ago or a couple of months ago. Carbon is carbon.