Carbon Removal Technologies • Hacker News Board

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#341

Post by adamsea » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:09 PM UTC

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…

Is your app eventually meant to turn a profit, and if so how? Or, are you doing this on a nonprofit basis and planning to keep it as such?

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#342

Post by intended » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #148

nostromo wrote: post #124

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.

Just because you've taken the foot off the accelerator, doesn't mean that we're going to stop before we drive off a cliff. I've yet to see a plan for a transition to a carbon-neutral economy, even on a 30-year timeline.

There isn’t. There won’t be. Fair warning, this is a cynical, but honest comment, and it’s not defeatist, but acceptance of our collective nature.

I’ve roughly gauged most of our species moves on climate accurately so far.

I bet that We are going to go full bore on geo engineering. It’s the perfect eco-poli-socio fix, and is a perfect storm to fill a lot of our mental blind spots.

Geo engineering is jobs, and economic spending. It’s great PR, and it’s a BIG moonshot style project, so the optics are stupendous. Which politician wouldn’t like to say “we secured billions in funding for jobs protecting our environment, by creating factories that absorb carbon from the air”

It doesn’t even have to work, for people to sell it.

Create a military industrial complex style system with geo engineering at its root, and soon humanity will be performing biospheric surgery.

There’s a specific vein of cynical realism, that acknowledges both humanities ingenuity and it’s emtrapment to its darker natures.

We will stick to a carbon positive economy, because no one can turn around and tell the world “its over, the good days are gone, and now when we price environmental costs to everything, the markets will tank.”

Too many goods are cheap because externalities aren’t priced in. A price rise in plastic costs will end product lines and packaging.

This will push people to alternatives which are worse (paper takes more water than plastic, and decays causing eventual spoilage and replacement.)

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#343

Post by ed_balls » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #263

francisofascii wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?

Land isn't that cheap compared to the (not that large) effect, especially if we want that effect to be meaningful in the short term. Buying land and planting trees there will cost something like $2000 per acre and retain something like one ton of CO2 per acre per year (an order of magnitude estimate - depending on details both the cost and CO2 effect can be very different). Industrial carbon capture at power plants c…

Why do you want to buy the land? Raise the money for seedling, get volunteers/robots to plant them. Pay people to maintain trees on land (which should require 0 effort). You can come up with some clever designs to make it a tourist attraction and make some extra cash. Plenty of room for improvements.

Let say you can have 100 000 trees per square km. If 40 trees gives you 1 ton of carbon per year then spending $25 000 gives you $10/ton.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#344

Post by philipkglass » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #179

philipkglass wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To stay below 2 degrees of warming via CO2 curtailment alone, serious curtailment would have had to start a generation ago. I wish that we had acted with urgency then, but we didn't. Now we need curtailment and active interventions.

Indeed, The problem is that, given we're failing the straightforward task of curtailment even now, what are the chances that we can successfully achieve curtailment and sequestering in the required time-frame? Curtailment is a large task but we know what to do. Sequestering would also be a large task but what to do is uncertain. Curtailment so far has been a corrupt circus with "pledges" and other indirect inducement…

Coal consumption has already peaked in the USA, France, UK, Canada, (probably) China, and a number of other countries. Emissions intensity and absolute emissions from the electricity sector has already peaked in multiple countries. The cost of electrifying automobiles and generating low-emissions renewable electricity is much lower than a generation ago.

On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet. Many countries have worse cost-and-schedule problems with attempted deployments of nuclear reactors than they did 40 years ago. We are barely reaching "maybe starting to flatten out emissions" -- actually trending down toward zero is just a mirage in the distance at present. The opportunity to stabilize the climate just by cutting emissions is now in the past.

I feel like humanity is moving toward making the changes it needs, and has a better toolset for those changes than before, but is changing much slower and later than it should have. We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options. I can understand the perspective of people who feel like we're acting too late and there is no chance of industrial civilization surviving into the 22nd century, even though I don't share that perspective.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#345

Post by philipkglass » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #328

philipkglass wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was afraid that the new administration would follow through on its promise to increase American coal use and extraction. Fortunately, it has not. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php https://www.utilitydive.com/news/westmoreland-chapter-11-mar... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-coal-bankruptcy-marks-5...

Wait, are you saying Trump lied to them?

It's not a lie if you believe your own bluster.

Pro-coal government action in other countries has managed to delay and diminish coal retirements there, so I wouldn't consider it impossible that it could happen in the USA too. I'm grateful that the economics are so steeply tilted against coal in the USA and that few politicians appear to have the stomach for large direct subsidies to keep coal plants profitable here.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#346

Post by tempestn » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

aoner wrote: post #202

gustaf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology

Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons? I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.

Also other greenhouse gasses, like methane capture from landfills.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#347

Post by kpennell » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

lchengify wrote: post #115

gustaf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love those podcasts. You should all listen to them. They are right that we have all the technologies we need to reach 1.5 degrees C. However we need massive acceleration of implementation of those technologies. Like a 10x improvement. We're not on track right now. The reason we need Carbon removal is because most IPCC forecast still assume a large % carbon removal. And it's going to be important for us to get back…

Right, and thank you for calling out that CCS is only going to be part of the solution. Taking a wider lens, my honest opinion is I think it's going to have to be a combination of a "Cuban Missile Crisis" moment for our society, and some sort of Moore's law effect on PV or battery storage. Taking the analogy that Climate Change is the "Nuclear Arms Race" crisis of our generation, we haven't really had an event that h…

Agreed. We still need a massive holy shit moment (millions displaced?) vs. bigger CA fires or more heatwaves (which Europe mostly enjoyed this summer) or a few strong hurricanes.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#348

Post by philipkglass » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

singingboyo wrote: post #307

philipkglass wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on how high in the atmosphere the aerosols are added, they remain aloft for a few weeks to a few years. It's not a long-term commitment to altering the atmosphere's composition like burning fossils has been. This is in fact one of the arguments raised against solar radiation management: that the temperature rebound could be terrifyingly rapid if SRM is stopped. But that danger applies to space sunshades too.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#349

Post by akie » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

csense wrote: post #320

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 s…

Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Biological systems are huge

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#350

Post by theothermkn » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

drankula3 wrote: post #289

matznerd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 olivin…

> Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof?

> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively.

I ask too much, I know, but first-semester freshman macroeconomic comments drive me nuts. As demand increases, and as production rises to meet it, the entire economics of the production chain changes. Purchases amortize more quickly. Processes improve. Infrastructure gets more fully utilized. The effects of mass production are felt all the way down the supply chain. I mean, as far as I know. I'm no economist.

But anyone who implies that increased demand automatically means increased prices probably knows even less than me.