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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

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Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#221

Post by nanomonkey »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #198

The post mentions the significant logistical challenges associated with moving large quantities of biomass and biochar. What about a mobile biochar production system? ie a device that could be delivered to a farm and towed through the field to convert waste biomass in-situ into biochar and till it directly into soil?

Tilling the soil actually releases quite a bit of CO2, some of the best practices are "no till" methods. But to your point, biochar retorts can and should be used at the source of the biomass, instead of burning fossil fuels to transport the biomass to a dedicated facility.

Many small scale gasifier generators are designed to do just that. The problem with all solid fuels is that material handling is difficult (you need to chip wood to the correct size and shape to have it feed through a machine effectively, this gets more complicated when you're trying to process corn cobs, sugar cane bagasse, and fruit pits also), not to mention that the fuel needs to be the proper dryness to burn without producing excessive tar.

Then there is the problem with the PAH (Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons) that are produced, and their carcinogenic on any of your workers...not to mention any other toxic chemicals that may be produced out of your smoke stack when using mixed fuels.

All this boils down to details that have to be worked out in a mobile unit.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#222

Post by shoo »

guelo wrote: post #58

An elephant in the room not being discussed here are the propaganda networks that are persuading voters and preventing any kind of government action on climate. Disrupting these propaganda businesses is another necessary angle of attack for preventing climate change catastrophe.

I recommend the book "Collision Course" by Kerryn Higgs for anyone interested in reading the history of this kind of propaganda. It won't immediately provide a path forward, but it will help explain how we've arrived at where we are today in terms of inaction regarding global warming.

> The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that “growth” is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The public has been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems—poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. In Collision Course, Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom.

> Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizing of “free enterprise,” the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers, the celebration of “the magic of the market,” and the ever-widening influence of corporate-funded think tanks—a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects of tobacco to global warming.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collision-course

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#223

Post by adamsea »

gustaf wrote: post #72
GreeniFi wrote: post #2

We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees. [Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.

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

Gustaf, without being too facetious, I think a startup to incentivize landowners to use forest land for carbon removal instead of beef would be called "donating to a politician's election campaign." : ). The reason I make the joke is to ask, is looking at technical/business solutions without directly addressing the social and political reasons why global warming has gone on basically unchecked like missing the forest for the trees?

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#224

Post by random023987 »

astrodust wrote: post #178
Dylan16807 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 The iron particles aren't going to breed and make more iron particles. > let's just curtail CO2 emissions So we shouldn't aim for zero (or even less)? Because 'curtail' will never reach zero.

Fucking around with the ocean on a scale that's going to move the needle on CO2 in the atmosphere has a very high probability of serious unintended consequences. Iron particles won't replicate, but the chemistry of the ocean could change dramatically. We don't know what happens at scale, and we probably don't want to find out. Find another solution.

> Iron particles [...] Find another solution.

Technically, seeding the ocean with iron particles is a suspension, not a solution. Luckily, the common technique is to use Iron(II) sulfate, which mixed with water does create a solution!

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#225

Post by mrec »

T-A wrote: post #166
mrec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you keep a sunshade over one pole? Keeping anything over a single spot requires a geostationary orbit, which by definition is only possible on the equator. I suppose you could have a bunch of shades in a geosynchronous polar orbit, but I suspect they'd still be more effective over the equator, just because it gets more sunlight.

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

Interesting; I'd seen this before but forgotten about it.

Don't think it works here though - if the pressure of reflected sunlight is counteracting gravity, then I don't see how the statite can be acting as a sunshade. If it were in position for that, the sunlight would be pushing it toward the Earth, no?

If anything this sounds more like the reflectors often proposed for Martian terraforming, which are designed to heat the planet rather than cool it.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#226

Post by pdonis »

egd wrote: post #192
pdonis wrote: post #190

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 dat…

Sources?

For the IPCC AR5, the Summary for Policymakers of the WG1 report is linked here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

The key items are on p. 16: first, that the "likely" range of equilibrium climate sensitivity is 1.5 - 4.5 C (which is the same as the first report in 1990--we have learned nothing in 28 years), and second, the footnote at the bottom of the page: "No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies".

First, this raises the question: if there is lack of agreement, how did they even come up with the "likely" range? How can they say anything at all? And second, since the climate sensitivity is a key input to the models, how can the models possibly be valid?

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#227

Post by beat »

BeefySwain wrote: post #123
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.

For first world countries? Sure. For developing countries, we are talking mass starvation and death. I guess that could be considered "lowering people's quality of life" though.

The global rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 29% 20 years ago to less than 9% today. You need a solid argument for how these actions would reverse the incredible drop in poverty and start us in the other direction, not just the usual factually wrong conventional wisdom.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#228

Post by intrasight »

Symmetry wrote: post #53
Retric wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the earth is effectively a black body it cools down at T in kelvin^4. This means you need to block a huge amount of energy ~2% of the sun to get around global warming. Sticking something at L1 looks elegant, but you cant just toss junk there it needs serious station keeping making it far more expensive than many assume. PS: Unfortunately, as a side effect you reduce the energy of all plant life by ~2% solar p…

The launch volume looks infeasibly large in the foreseeable future, but I don't think the station keeping problem is that bad. Any sun shade is basically going to be a solar sail already and steering via LCD panels like IKAROS did should be sufficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS

My proposal is to send up a robot, capture a smallish asteroid, and have it use the material to weave/spin out a shield. The robot sits at the edge and spins and weaves away. More robots would be employed as the shield grows. Honestly, I've not worked out all the details. I'd love to hear what others think. Is this just pie(sheet) in the sky? Or is this the salvation of humankind.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#229

Post by aoner »

akshatrathi wrote: post #213

I wrote a series on carbon capture technologies: https://qz.com/re/the-race-to-zero-emissions/ What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed from power plants to cem…

Yes according to the latest IPCC report ( http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ ) in the 1.5 degree scenario we need to deploy bio-energy combined with carbon capture storage on large scale. Carbon removal tech will become indispensable and is definitely part of "Plan A".

Some scenerios rely more on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, while others rely more on afforestation, which are the two carbon-removal methods most often included in the IPCC reports. Trade-offs with other sustainability objectives occur mostly through increased land, energy, water and investment demand.

There is another scenario were we might not need a lot of bioenergy with carbon capture storage and that would be if we would decorbonise at an incredible fast rate (starting now) and planted a lot of trees. I'm not seeing that happening anytime soon though.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#230

Post by matznerd »

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 am working on a non-profit that is utilizing Schuiling's research and is actually getting this project done. We are scouting beaches right now for a "wiggle" tank, which is a sort of see-saw like device where we can gather data to affirm the real world dissolution rate. The chemistry, however, is sound that each 1 ton of olivine will sequester 1.25 tons of carbon.

By the end of 2019 we hope to have our first olivine on the beach. The project will be funded by donations, but we will also be selling olivine/peridot jewelry that's price equates to actual tons of olivine we will dump on the beach. Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. The next closest technology for sequestering carbon is well over $150/per ton.

For more info and access to the full text studies, visit https://Climitigation.org and Project Vesta https://ProjectVesta.org

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