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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

251–260 of 682 posts

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#251
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

Is that really the biggest reason for forest being removed? Are there issues with raising cattle on land with a trees spaced maybe every 10 feet or so? Does it have to do with herding the cattle? Feeding the cattle? Those I feel can be solved with technology, specifically IoT/Drones/Autonomous Bots. It seems to me, if every livestock pasture in the world has trees every 10 feet, maybe less, it could have a pretty big…

Combining trees and livestock has been done for centuries and is called Silvopasture:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#252
I've been watching waay too many youtube videos about reforestation, agriculture and land management recently and I think I've learned a little from it (links at the end).

We no longer have the number of massive herds of animals that used to roam the plains/savannahs grazing, pooing and to a lesser extent escaping from predators.

This has meant that the grasslands are no longer trampled on and "fertilised". This has caused the grasses to die back, the soil to degrade, to not hold water and to turn to desert. (see the sahara, the outback, parts of china and the usa).

Subsequently we've tried to be really careful with the land and not over graze it etc. which tends to have the opposite effect than what is desired.

Now I also looked into reforestation because I thought trees were the answer. Grow trees sequester carbon etc. But it turns out the cost of doing this £/$ and water (desalination) would actually be outweighed by both the albido effect (green trees absorb more sunlight than deserts that reflect it back) and that trees don't really grow fast enough to have the impact required.

Getting back to the grasslands, it turns out that when you intensively drive a herd over grasslands the grass initially dies back but the root system expands, the plant grows quickly and sequesters carbon into the ground. It actually builds soil and traps carbon and it does it faster than previously thought. The ground is also more permeable to water so when big storms come it actually soaks up the water for later use rather than it running off and causing floods, erosion etc. Also grass is lighter (colour) than trees so the albido effect is not so bad.

This is just my understanding of one part of the problem. This is what I think may be a solution to that:

We need to change the way we manage livestock. Probably change legislation so they can't be kept indoors or feed grains (I think that is a big methane contributor as well). We should have grazing plans for entire countries that manage existing land well and restore broken land. We should stop eating them because we need a big herd to restore the land and we probably need to employ a lot of people to drive the herds (yeeha).

Grazing plans are simple, illiterate people seem to cope fine with them. We've got the technology to scale this and in the west we probably have the maps/surveys etc. to make this relative straight forward.

Whatever ends up being the solution to these problems we need to make government act. Historically the best way to do that has been non violent direct action. As we are at crisis point now (5yrs until the arctic has melted based on current melt) it is really our final option. You may be interested in joining the Extinction Rebellion to make this happen.

My interest grew from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI But this video has a lot more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI Why growing trees in the sahara won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ And this is long but has a lot of detail about holistically managing livestock and the effect on soil structure etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk Finally the Extinction Rebellion - https://extinctionrebellion.org

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#253

Energy is needed to separate CO2 into carbon and oxygen. At the individual molecular scale, this can't be much. How many can I separate at once with my hands? If we invent a device that helps us to physically separate oxygen from carbon, humans and farm animals could do it. It would be like milling grain, or washing clothes. Idea: create filters which are big enough for carbon to pass through, but not oxygen. Then "s…

Fun idea - very back of the envelope math is if you could convert energy into strictly breaking CO2 bonds, the amount of energy it takes is 805 kJ/mol (from Google). WolframAlpha says this is roughly the caloric content of a biscuit, or 30 min of sports [1]. This would then separate 22.4 L or one mole of pure CO2.

There are approximately 1E20 moles of CO2 in the atmosphere (very rough math)[2,3]. This could take a while, especially considering efficiency would probably be 10% of this idealized system. However, this filtering idea isn't bad, I don't know of any filter like this for splitting CO2, but something is almost certainly being worked on for just general sequestration of CO2 from other atmospheric gasses.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=805+kJ

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.148E18+kg)%2Fmolar+m...

[3] https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#254
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earth is a closed system, so the shade cloth on Earth would simply warm up and reradiate the absorbed energy as infrared. Reflective mylar would see a portion of the reflected sunlight (which would have warmed the atmosphere upon entry) trapped by the greenhouse effect.

Earth is is not even close to a closed system. There's a giant thermonuclear explosion factory in space that pumps insane amounts of energy into our system. If earth was a closed system it could not harbor life as entropy increased.

[deleted]

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is perhaps that we know we're driving off a cliff. Is this going to slow us down or not? If you look at the proposals, what does setting up half the land mass of the Sahara as algae lagoons do? How does that affect local weather patterns, wildlife, Etc. The argument that the action may be dangerous is not as compelling when the prognosis for inaction is bleak.

But that's missing the point. You're saying that we have to then sell these two messages - one of which is being supported by actors that are not acting in good faith. Message 1: yes, this could have unpredictable and devastating consequences in new and exciting ways, and you are directly responsible for it. Message 2: (current message) we shouldn't do that and you're already doing enough because you have a more fuel…

Fair enough, it wouldn't be the first time I missed the point. But lets talk about how we talk about it (which is kind of meta but hopefully it will help)

The message in that CFS was pretty clear to me, it was "We aren't doing enough, and not doing anything will doom us to yet another mass extinction event." (they aren't as explicit as that but nearly all of the literature on "Phase 3" of this stuff has nearly everything dying off.

So the first thing to check is this, is that the message you heard in the linked CFS? Or did you hear a different message than what I heard?

Assuming you heard the same message, we can talk about the next place in the conversation where things may go off the rails, a comment of the form "We already know how enhance algae blooms by fertilizing the ocean." Which related to previous work on dumping ferrous material into the ocean to create an algae bloom that would capture carbon and sequester it.

And the response to that comment, the message I heard/read was (paraphrased) "How do we know what that will do in the long term? We should not make such a move without knowing the consequences of making it."

In my reading, that has been a common response to large consequential ideas such as the fertilize the ocean. So is that something you've heard as well or is the first you have heard it?

So the messages in that exchange that I've heard are

1) We understand the mechanism of phytoplankton blooms and we know how to create them, we should try that.

2) We should not try that because we don't know if creating such a bloom would generate a net positive result, and we don't know what intermediate results it might generate as well.

I combine the RFS message of "We're doomed, none of the current things people are doing to ameliorate CO2 gain in the atmosphere are working." with "We shouldn't try things if we can't predict the outcome." and come up with, "Inaction is worse than not fully understood action if inaction is leading to destruction of the world."

Now I often lose the climate deniers on that last bit. In their belief system as I understand it, it is not something we are doing that affects climate so there is no compelling call for action on human's part.

So, what part of the point did I miss?

As for "selling it" I am not sure who is being sold here.

In my response, I was making the argument against inaction, against the environmental argument of 'do no harm.' I recognize that doctor's admit that you have to poison your patient (which does great harm) using chemotherapy when they are suffering from cancer because the alternative is just watching them die. What the doctor knows is that once the risk of cancer is gone the normal processes of the body will recover the patient to a better state of health. The argument for iron fertilization is similar, which is that while it may do short term damage, by pulling the CO2 out of the air the Earth will be in a better place after its own restoration mechanisms have undone the damage.

Sadly, unlike cancer patients we can't do clinical trials on planets, we've just got the one.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I was under the impression that we've "done well" because natural gas generation has come online like crazy and proves more economical than coal and INCIDENTALLY cleaner to burn.

I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.

I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#257
Good. More and more, reducing GHG gas emissions politically or through any sort of international agreement looks like a pipe dream.

I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990 levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011 in order to avoid paying billions in fines.

It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop global warming.

IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this -- carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things get really bad.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#258
post #108
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.

Right. And that charity is https://www.coolearth.org/. They don't buy land but they protect trees.
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