Carbon Removal Technologies • Hacker News Board

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#311

Post by bskinny129 » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

gustaf wrote: post #301

bskinny129 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For now money will be passed along to the best-in-class organizations doing hands-on carbon removal projects - I believe there are several excellent non-profits with the right efficiency and transparency. Yet even though these great organizations exist and plenty of people care about the environment, hardly any money ends up on their hands. I think there is great grass-roots potential to change this and it is equally as important as marginally improving the efficiency of carbon removal tech.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#312

Post by aoner » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

kalonis wrote: post #294

mdorazio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is covered in the "Where We Are Now" section at the bottom that explains BECCS. The issue is really cost - to remove carbon semi-permanently with trees you have to grow a lot of them, and then bury them deep enough that natural decay processes don't just put the carbon back into the environment. Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century.

Could we sink the trees in the ocean? The water would prevent them both from rotting and burning.

This doesn't make sense, the trees themselves are valuable. Why flood the market with cheep tree's and make useful stuff out of them. As suggested earlier, we can use way more trees in our building materials ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18286855 )

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#313

Post by kpennell » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

aoner wrote: post #279

all_usernames wrote: post #137

Anyone thinking about or considering working on these technologies owes it to themselves to read Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. Whatever you may think of the author's various statements on Peak Oil etc., the book is a worthwhile meditation on two very different approaches to our current crises. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...

Thanks for the recommendation. Could you explain a bit more in detail why you recommend reading it? I've read a lot of online resources (IPCC, wikipedia, different lectures on advanced weathering, pyrolysis/biochar etc) and have been looking to read a book related to the carbon dioxide problem.

It's not about CO2. It explains where two major environmentalism schools of thought came from and how they approach the same problems differently.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#314

Post by hannasanarion » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

lowdest wrote: post #29

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.

Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work. Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.

Not if they're treated with preservatives and built into houses. Every wood-frame house and piece of wooden furniture is carbon sequestration.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#315

Post by ilove_banh_mi » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

Note that phytoplankton accounts for 50% of photosynthesis on the planet, already capturing 50 GtC/year.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#316

Post by angel_j » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

aoner wrote: post #261

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…

What if we would make such an advanced filter, and then make it mandatory in cars. That way cars would 'clean' the air. You'd need to find a process that scales though, so that the 'dirty' filters are processed in a way to get out the carbon and use it somewhere.

Make sugar with the pure carbon, a la photosynthesis?

Use electrolysis to split water, get the Hydrogen and Oxygen, insert Carbon, excrete glucose...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#317

Post by Tossrock » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #189

romed wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 manuf…

I see what you're saying, but that doesn't actually strike me as too crazy of a goal. 0.8 is 16% of 5, and 6x-ing an industry seems within reach, given sufficient incentives.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#318

Post by rootusrootus » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #182

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.

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.

That's not exactly how it works, of course. The people did not lower their quality of life to support the cause, per se, they did it to vanquish Those People. An actual enemy to focus on. And a pretty short timeline. Now you'd ask people to declare war on their own quality of life to fight a consequence which is necessarily vague over a timeline that likely exceeds the remaining lifespan of half of everyone alive today.

Good luck.

In the meantime I sure would like to try some mitigation techniques.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#319

Post by aoner » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:47 PM UTC

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…

Curious, how does desert flooding fit into this? It's basically energy creation using hydro or am I missing the point here?

Edit: Never mind, missed the YC dessert flooding article:

>> This system of oases would be used to grow phytoplankton. With additional desalinated water, it could irrigate the surrounding area to propagate vegetation as well as provide fresh water to nearby communities. These oases would operate similarly to the ocean phytoplankton cultivation concept but executed in a relatively controlled and, thereby, safer environment than in the ocean. Unlike BECCS, the oases would absorb CO2 via phytoplankton growth - phytoplankton produce biomass faster than agriculture, reducing the necessary surface area by almost 4x - which would be periodically harvested to extend the length of sequestration and set up downstream use as fertilizer or other higher value products. This would be the largest infrastructure project undertaken, making its scale the main challenge.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#320

Post by csense » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

The ocean phytoplankton technology sounds like it has the potential to screw the planet up worse than the climate change issues it's trying to solve.

Massive, self-replicating system of genetically engineered bacteria? I'm certainly no marine biologist, but I'm pretty sure phytoplankton are a super important part of the world's ecosystem. Suddenly massively increasing the number of them that exist in the open ocean seems like it would wreak havoc on the world's ecological balance.