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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

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Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#301

Post by gustaf »

bskinny129 wrote: post #290
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

I'm working on a way to bring dollars to carbon removal, whether as simple as planting trees or investing in these more advanced upcoming technologies. It is an app with a personal pledge to balance the negative impact of your own driving and flying with a small payment. Cheap at just a couple dollars a week, with the potential to reach a significant scale through companies. In fact, I look forward to hearing back fr…

This is great. We need a verified system where know exactly where each dollar is spend and how many CO2 tons are saved per dollar spent

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#303

Post by mchannon »

cheapsteak wrote: post #262
tgb wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling. [1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html

Was the carbon not already sequestered when it was in the form of a tree?

No, it wasn’t.

Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store.

Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#304

Post by gustaf »

adamsea wrote: post #223
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

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…

I agree that political action is incredibly important. Carbon tax, carbon incentives etc. I don't believe we need to change our political system in order to stop climate change. And if we had to that would make it far more difficult to do.

Even if countries implemented carbon tax and carbon incentives like many have it doesn't change that we innovation. Modern cheap verification systems, Marketplace's like Nori.com

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#305

Post by cryoshon »

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…

read the report. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_SPM_...

the data does not say we will be cooked to death. the data says our planet's ecospheres will continue to be increasingly violent and unstable if the warming continues. the warming is caused by atmospheric cO2.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#306

Post by aoner »

samstave wrote: post #281
ISL wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, my idea would be the following: 1. Automate tree/crop planting 2. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain" regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners. 3. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around all that is planted 4. In conjunction…

RE: 1. Automate tree/crop planting:

https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/ These guys use drones to shoot tree seeds in the ground.

Also regarding terraforming a dessert, I think one of the biggest problems with is the number of water needed in the area, but I do think that this will be a really interesting part of the solution. Maybe the increase of land prices due to the decrease of arable land might make such ventures more profitable. There's a great ted talk about reversing desertification: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#307

Post by singingboyo »

philipkglass wrote: post #105
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, and most importantly, you've just decreased the amount of energy coming to earth. You've not solved the problem, you've changed it. Probably the most important advantage sunshades have over other kinds of geoengineering megaprojects is that they can be trivially (compared to their construction costs, that is...) turned off. If they turn out to be very harmful in some previously unforeseen way, we can choose…

As others have noted, solar radiation management doesn't do anything to counteract ocean acidification. I still think that SRM of some sort may be necessary to stop runaway feedback loops like loss of soil carbon from thawing permafrost. The sunshade approach to SRM looks like it may have been devised like other big speculative space projects: "start by assuming that big projects in space are the solution, then find…

On the other hand, we've got a pretty bad track history with adding gases to the atmosphere.

And, as mentioned, it's pretty easy to 'turn off' (fold or destroy) a sunshade. Not so easy to remove a bunch of aerosol in the stratosphere. I'd prefer more expensive but reversible action, personally.

On the other hand, a slow approach may negate that aspect, and just about anything is better than the nothing we've got now.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#308

Post by angel_j »

tcpekin wrote: post #253
angel_j wrote: post #149

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 wh…

A biscuit! Breakfast 4 carbon credits...

I saw a nanofilter that could remove salt from water.

If you can puncture a material with ultra-violet lasers, the holes might be the right size to filter carbon; that is my guess, based on these results https://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-molecules-carbon-dioxid...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#309

Post by User23 »

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…

> wipe out all shellfish species worldwide

Look you raise good points but this is nonsense. The Earth has had far higher CO2 concentrations for geological periods and there’s no fossil record suggesting shellfish all died. This kind of Trumpian rhetoric just hands ammo to the skeptics.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#310

Post by ed_balls »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #288
jbattle wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fracked gas is about as bad as or dirtier than coal.

Source? That sound very unlikely, unless we are talking about CO2 only. But then keep in mind the total CO2 emissions. Coal needs more workers, more machines and more transportation.
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