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$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

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Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#381

Post by fouc »

burgessaccount wrote: post #327
rcpt wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thanks. Why disasterous?

Particulate matter in the air causes precipitation. Spraying large amounts of particulate matter into the sky is likely to drastically change global rainfall patterns - so you might get a ton of rain in the Sahara, where it’s useless, and none at all in the American Midwest. The result could be drastic food shortages and famines. Major volcanic eruptions have been associated with droughts and famines. I think geoengi…

When you say rain in the Sahara would be useless, are you saying it's already a carbon sink or something? After all it seems that rain in the Sahara would eventually cause forests to grow, given a few years.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#382

Post by robbedpeter »

rootusrootus wrote: post #376
burgessaccount wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particulate matter in the air causes precipitation. Spraying large amounts of particulate matter into the sky is likely to drastically change global rainfall patterns - so you might get a ton of rain in the Sahara, where it’s useless, and none at all in the American Midwest. The result could be drastic food shortages and famines. Major volcanic eruptions have been associated with droughts and famines. I think geoengi…

Isn't the upside of this kind of geoengineering the reversibility? If we inject SO2, and we don't like the effect, we stop. IIRC it doesn't hang around that long.

There's likely a decade+ tail after the end of active particulate injection. If there is too much to begin with, you piss off all the electorates with years of chaotic weather, threatening food production, financial markets, and ecologies all over the world. Get it just right, you wreak less havoc, piss off fewer electorates, and lower global average temperatures. Get too small an effect, you risk overcorrection or the project failing before it has a chance to really work.

There's also the fact that you're altering a chaotic system, with fundamentally unpredictable side effects, some of which could last longer than a human lifespan. Wanna make California get monthly hurricanes? How about weekly tornados in Colorado? Bury New York city in ice?

It's not that any of those things are probable just that they're possible, and chaotic systems can drastically, catastrophically, and exponentially change configuration, and no matter how good your supercomputer simulations are, you fundamentally cannot predict the consequences.

All of human civilization teeters on the current climate configuration - geoengineering has terrifying potential. Humans have a horrible track record in attempts to predictably alter chaotic systems and ecologies. We damn well better know what we're doing before we use globally acting tools.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#383

Post by hedora »

mrfusion wrote: post #157
tekstar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, planting trees sequesters co2 into the biosphere. That is not good enough, we need to be sequestering co2 into the geosphere if we want to remove it from the equation

Has anyone checked if earths total biomass has increased as co2 increases?

We’ve pumped a lot of nitrogen into the biosphere. I wonder how much that’s increased the total biomass.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#384

Post by hedora »

fouc wrote: post #381
burgessaccount wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particulate matter in the air causes precipitation. Spraying large amounts of particulate matter into the sky is likely to drastically change global rainfall patterns - so you might get a ton of rain in the Sahara, where it’s useless, and none at all in the American Midwest. The result could be drastic food shortages and famines. Major volcanic eruptions have been associated with droughts and famines. I think geoengi…

When you say rain in the Sahara would be useless, are you saying it's already a carbon sink or something? After all it seems that rain in the Sahara would eventually cause forests to grow, given a few years.

Top soil takes a long time to form. I imagine most of the water would go into the aquifer.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#385

Post by pizza »

Kungfuturtle wrote: post #360
detritus wrote: post #256

Soil. It's soil. Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it. Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta. I sort of made this post elsewhere he…

I highly recommend checking out https://twitter.com/BuildSoil if you're interested in learning more about this approach.

Great account, and if there were one takeaway, chestnut trees are more interesting than I imagined

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#386

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

i think the easiest way to win this price is to capture the exhaust gasses of coal power plants - this way you would have to process the least amount of input, as the stuff comes out in very concentrated form. Now the question would be where to take the electricity for the cleaning.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#387

Post by phire »

bgroat wrote: post #357
kisamoto wrote: post #56

There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…

I'm working on agri-forestry and biochar reactors on a hobby farm. Hybrid poplars mature within a decade, and a biochar reactor is a net-energy producing reaction that produces soil improving char as a byproduct. It won't save the world on it's own, but trees can be leveraged in powerful ways.

Hang on. That sounds carbon-neutral at best.

Great for replacing fossil fuels, but not a carbon sequestration technique.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#388

Post by dqpb »

kisamoto wrote: post #56

There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…

A lot can happen in decades.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#389

Post by yurisagalov »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #149
filleokus wrote: post #45

I wonder how YC backed Prometheus Fuels will stack up. They claimed that they are able to sequester Co2 directly from the air for around 36 USD / ton [0]. If they truly can scale it at that price point, it seems very competitive. [0]: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/happy-earth-day-...

There may be a pattern here of YC funding carbon removal techniques that perhaps cannot work at all. Here's another one: Remora https://www.remoracarbon.com/ As far as I know there is no research paper on the topic ... nothing to indicate it actually is a viable solution. They also don't want to talk to anyone about hard questions. It's like the Theranos of carbon removal, using Silicon-valley style secrecy. I can't…

> “ As far as I know there is no research paper on the topic ... nothing to indicate it actually is a viable solution.”

Come on.

Remora is literally founded from their CTO’s PhD thesis.

From their website: “ Christina pioneered Remora’s technology during her engineering PhD at the University of Michigan, becoming one of the world’s leading experts on mobile carbon capture. She went on to test a mobile carbon capture prototype in the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Lab”

If you Google “Christina Reynolds Carbon Capture” you will get, as a first result, a link to her PhD thesis:

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1515...

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#390

Post by _huayra_ »

pcmaffey wrote: post #378
burgessaccount wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few other problems - 1) trees take a lot of water to grow, and 2) all the carbon they sequester can go right back into the atmosphere in a forest fire. Some very scrupulous carbon-offset companies (like YC co terraformation!) are careful to plant diverse, native species in a way that rebuilds habitat and fits local water supplies. But there are a huge number of irresponsible tree-planting orgs that plant monocultur…

Trees rarely burn to the ground in a wildfire. Their foliage burns quickly and the bark chars, but it takes years for even trees in the hottest spots to finally fall and then, many more years to decompose back into the soil.

This depends on the health of the tree. The bark beetle has decimated many pine trees in the sierra nevadas, leaving many trees standing but actually sick or dead, and unable to resist a forest fire.
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