> Over a year, the equipment can capture 4,000 tons of CO2
Not to be glib, and I'm no agronomy expert, but a quick google tells me that's about equivalent to a square mile of hay field. Seems like if you were serious about this problem and wanted an economical solution, buying a farm and burying the output would be more effective than throwing money at startups like this.
Articles like this are always written from a tone of "If ONLY there was some way to economically extract and concentrate carbon from the atmosphere", by journalists who then go home and tend the heirloom snap peas in their raised beds without a sense of irony. Plants do this. It's literally what makes them plants.
Now... maybe there's a stronger economic argument for technologies like this, but if there is it's not filtering into the press hits. I remain suspicious.
The elephant in the room with these prototype systems is that they currently leverage the excess capacity of existing industrial infrastructure. The chemistry involved has unavoidably high power generation requirements because you are fighting a very steep thermodynamic gradient. At anything beyond prototype scales, the industrial infrastructure to provide the raw materials for these prototypes would need to be purpose-built at astronomical scales, including countless terawatts of power generation capacity that does not exist today.
The only scalable sequestration technology is biomass for the sole reason that it is the only method that does not require creating new power generation facilities to feed industrial chemistry plants at an unprecedented scale. Sequestering CO2 requires application of energy and mass on the same scale as the energy that was released by putting it into the atmosphere in the first place.
Missing a point here. GHG _over_time_ drastically adds more net energy to the earth system than is is used to create or capture them. This because they are opaque to infrared radiation that would otherwise be escaping from the earth system.
So, GHG net heating effect is proportional to the amount of heat escape they block for as long as they remain in the atmosphere.
The only place where those technologies could make sense would be on the industry generating a lot of CO2 in a concentrated manner. Or if you are creating a Mars colony, where it could be used to control your system.
A square mile is a huge chunk of land. It's nearly 640 acres. For comparison a large suburban plot is usually only 1/8th of an acre. That is to say nothing for cost of keeping the land irrigated, free of pests and running tractors and other ag equipment to harvest the hay during growing season.
We then don't take into account the most expensive part, buying the land. In Texas a 500 acre ranch already prepped for hay or other crops costs about 1-2 million dollars to buy.
Furthermore, plants aren't perfect. Many plants also respirate co2 as well as oxygen. It's not a perfect equation like in grade school.
Doesn't really matter how efficient the process is biochemically. Buried carbon is buried carbon, and the production cost of biomass is dirt cheap.
A more focused criticism would be: it's not enough for that fancy plant to work, it needs to be cheaper than a hayfield at scale to be worth it. And I'd want to see numbers showing that. Farms are not, in fact, particularly expensive relative to venture backed startups.
You'd need to also prevent the hay from decaying. I learned the other day that bogs are highly efficient at sequestering carbon, because they prevent decay.
Has anyone done the calculation about how much landmass with trees it would take to reverse the CO2 pollution in a reasonable time frame (<100 yrs? <50 yrs?)? It seems like the square mileage would probably be quite large and possibly encroach on land that we need to devote farming to feed the growing population. This is entirely baseless speculation, I haven't done much research into this.
It looks like we're nearing peak global emissions. The growth rate seems to have slowed dramatically the last couple of years.
IFF that's the case, we've added 375 billion tones of carbon to the atmosphere. Some estimates say that 50% of carbon is removed from the atmosphere every 20 years. So if our emissions stop growing, we'll eventually reach an equilibrium not far from what it is now. Plus, don't most estimates have carbon emissions rapidly decreasing as renewables become more cost effective? I've seen some estimates as high as 70% by 2050.
Anyway, a tree over the course of 40 years, can sequester 1 ton of carbon. The Amazon Rain Forest has ~390 Billion trees. So, if we could plant another Amazon Rain Forest and keep our emissions where they are (or hopefully reduce them) couldn't we avoid any further warming?
I've had this idea forever, but I'm just doing the math now. If we lined every street and highway in the US with trees, that might be enough to sequester the carbon we've added (and will add before equilibrium) to the atmosphere.
There's 5.3 million miles of road in the U.S. If you spaced the trees 10 feet apart, you could plant 528 trees per side per mile, or ~1000 per mile. That means, we could plant 5.3 billion trees, or 1/75th of an Amazon Rain Forest. If you added in every country in the world (there's 64.25 million miles of paved road and probably well over 150 million miles of paved and unpaved roads), we could plant like 1/6 to 1/2 of an Amazon.
I feel like if you added in shrubs and flowers and combined the insect biomass increase, this could actually be a thing... I mean, you could also potentially bio-engineer trees for maximum sequestration & particulate absorption. And probably there's trees you could plant 3 feet apart instead of 10 that could sequester the same amount of carbon.
We could probably capture a lot of particulates from the roads as well, naturally cool cities with added shade (and make them prettier), and increase insect biomass (which has shrank like 75% in the last 27 years).
At least in the US -- Oaks, Chestnuts, and Walnuts sequester a lot of carbon per square foot. Chestnuts are native to the northeast, and Oaks are native in the west (California oaks are one of the prettiest trees IMO), and Walnuts are native in the South.
Pin Oaks don't take up much space, they grow really fast (70 feet in 28 years), and weigh literally tons. They thrive basically everywhere in the U.S. beside Arizona, Florida, and Coastal California. It also has shallow roots, which would keep it from destroying sidewalks / roads. Pair them with Hemlocks, Gold and Red Euonymus, & Climbing Hydrangea -- and our roads would be beautiful!
I dunno. It sounds crazy. But it also seems obtainable.
I'm not sure how this impacts methane, though. Unfortunately, global beef & pork production is growing quickly.
I'm not sure what your argument is. That since the technology isn't fully developed we shouldn't fund development?
This is akin to saying (in the early 1900's) "Planes can only fly short distances, are very expensive, and can't carry any serious loads. It would just be better to put this money into trucking."
The core of the argument is the cost of reversing thermodynamics at extremely large scales. We need a way to scale the application of energy to the sequestration process which is intrinsically energy intensive. Biomass sequesters CO2 from the atmosphere with almost perfect scalability because it has a built-in energy source and the sequestration "factory" largely builds itself.
The industrial chemistry infrastructure required to drive this sequestration at the same scale literally doesn't exist by several orders of magnitude. Even worse, the tremendous power generation capacity to support that industrial chemistry infrastructure also doesn't exist. We're talking global GDP levels of CapEx just to build the infrastructure that would make it possible to build sequestration infrastructure that could remove CO2 on a reasonable time frame. Biomass requires none of this investment to operate at the same scales.
These prototypes of industrial sequestration are only pricing in the OpEx and the CapEx of the facility itself. At scale, you also have to pay for the creation of the entire supply chain from scratch -- the factories, power plants, mines, logistics, etc that allow these sequestration facilities to exist at the required scale. The only way the fully burdened cost remotely makes sense is in applications where none of this infrastructure needs to be built i.e. small scale applications. For global atmospheric CO2 reduction, the fully burdened cost of sequestering CO2 via industrial processes is never going to be viable due to industrial chemistry economics.
Industrial chemistry is not embarrassingly parallelizable.
It's more "Planes are new and unproven and if you want to ship cargo on them I'm going to want to see numbers". In fact this did eventually work, but not until FedEx came along half a century later using surplus early generation jets that no one was imagining in the early part of the century.
Someone who threw a ton of venture cash at "Air Freight Ltd." in 1913 or whatever would have lost their shirt.
Back to the point: I'm not saying this won't work. I'm saying that there are firm limits to how well it MUST work just to be better than technology that was proven out five millenia ago. That's a really high bar, and it needs numbers and not press hits.
I looked into this two days ago and decided to get a subscription with https://climeworks.com for a part of my CO2. It's the only thing I can do until the bus that I drive to work with becomes electric, planes for business trip start to fly electrically, there is 100% renewable power, etc. I'm making all the right choices available to me today (such as renewable power at home, recycling, etc.), but even so, many tonnes of CO2 are produced for me every year. I can't just shrug and do nothing.
It's quite expensive, and all of those CO2 sequestration companies (including Climeworks) sound pretty prototype-y. Climeworks is the one with a consumer product and clearly states that they already remove CO2 from the atmosphere today. This is what I got back from sales when I asked if my money will be for R&D that might, one day, remove the CO2, or if it would support operational costs of a machine running today:
> you will receive we state the amount of carbon dioxide that has been removed in your name. No one else can put a claim to that amount. [...] we run the machines most of the time anyway [but] proving that there is a market for our services (such as CDR for individuals) makes it easier for us to broaden the application of our technology.
So that gives me a reasonable confidence, but I'll still spread out my CO2 compensation a little in case part of it turns out to be badly spent. And trees have more advantages than just producing rock, even if we'd need much more surface area and water to maintain those trees than to sequester CO2 into rock.
Does anyone know if there is anyone researching on CH4 (Methane) sequestration? While it's concentration is vastly lower than CO2 (around 1.6ppm vs >400 ppm CO2) it still has roughly a quarter of the impact of the atmospheric CO2. It has a rather short half-life (8-12 years) in the atmosphere yet the concentration is still is rising, even at an increased rate recently with no definite explanation (might be wetlands emitting it at a higher rate, might be melting permafrost soil in the arctic, might be a result of fracking). I don't think it is commercially viable to do it but it might become a sheer necessity if we run into some positive feedback loops so having at least some basic research going on in that field might not hurt.
I don't understand how climate researchers can seriously have concerns about sequestration technologies distracting us from the efforts to limit emissions. It seems an argument that is easily dispensed with, with a bit of simple math. Right now it seems like even if we max out both efforts, we'd still have to be lucky to get there.
I have a question about these various carbon-buying efforts. Whether it's climeworks, or buying carbon offsets, or signing up for a service with your power company... do these things scale?
I mean, here in Portland I think you can sign up with PGE for having 100% of your electricity come from renewable sources, but I think that only 40% of their power comes from renewable. So really probably only 40% of their customers can sign up. As it is, not enough people have signed up, so they can still say so, but big picture, you're still really only getting 40%. And that's just the electrical part of our carbon footprint, which isn't the whole picture.
Same with the carbon-offset buying sites. I mean, they don't really work past a point, right? Like if every citizen in the world signs up, it implies we'd have the entire problem solved. But we wouldn't really, don't they all have upper limits? So how much do they actually scale? 50%, 10%, 1%?
> I don't understand how climate researchers can seriously have concerns about sequestration technologies distracting us from the efforts to limit emissions. It seems an argument that is easily dispensed with, with a bit of simple math.
The people who need convincing aren’t there due to math: it’s become a political loyalty test for Republicans in the U.S. and some other groups internationally, for many people accepting that climate change is real means major changes in their lifestyle and business, and there’s a huge industry supporting fake experts, think tanks, etc. pitching the message that you don’t need to do anything.
In that light, it’s not unreasonable to worry that people will use it to push the “no need to sacrifice now, new technology will fix everything” message, not unlike the people hoping we can avoid making simple infrastructure fixes because self-driving cars will solve everything real soon now.
Trying to convert these abstract $ per ton numbers into something more concrete... 1 gallon of gasoline produces 20lbs of CO2. 1 Ton of CO2 sequestration costs $150 (there’s a range in the article but that’s a good target). If we had to pay a tax on each gallon of gas for this sequestration, it would be $1.50/gallon. That’s a little steep, and would have a serious impact to the short term economy. $0.50/gallon is likely more palatable.
Another way to look at it: burning a gallon of gasoline does damage which costs $1.50 to fix, but we allow gasoline buyers to pass that cost on to the rest of the world rather than making them pay for their own mess.
According to Wikipedia [0]. fuel taxes on the order of $6/gallon exist in some countries.
I don't feel like working through all the countries to normalize the units; but the US tax is comically low by comparison. In many countries, your estimated cost is far below what they already pas in gas-specific taxes (although some of that tax might be for non CO2 issues)
We should probably just tax at $1.5 a gallon right now just to get the demand down ;-). There’s a reason why cars consume less in continental Europe and that’s not just because people there are smarter.
> If we had to pay a tax on each gallon of gas for this sequestration, it would be $1.50/gallon. That’s a little steep, and would have a serious impact to the short term economy.
The simple answer for preventing the economic damage is to return the money to everyone as a dividend. Then the average person pays $1000/year in carbon tax and receives a $1000/year dividend, which cancels out. On average. But if you reduce your carbon footprint to below average then you get more than you pay.
(This also helps the poor because they already burn less carbon on average but would receive the same dividend.)
The carbon tax would be applied to the fuel used by the tanker truck that moves the fuel from the refinery to the gas station, too.
To estimate how much that would increase the price at the pump, I would rely on estimates of how much fuel a tanker truck can carry, how many miles per gallon the truck gets, and the average distance from refinery to gas station -- which I am too lazy to try to look up.
I had an idea once to create a credit card where a configurable percentage of spending went towards carbon offsetting. The goal would be reduction in personal carbon footprint and eventually going negative. This would require both measurement of carbon-producing activities based on spending (eg. gasoline), but also a cost-effective means of carbon sequestration. Not my field of expertise, but taking advantage of people's desire to do good w/o expending energy seems like it would be the way to go.
I think the lowest friction way to do it is to just spend the interchange (the roughly 2% of purchases that credit card companies get from merchants that usually funds cashback/rewards) on carbon capture. With your blessing, I can talk to some credit card company execs about this idea. Credit cards are powerful signalling tools, I can easily see a "Green Card" catching on, especially if people don't see any additional fees on their bill.
I think there are two hard parts: determining the carbon footprint of most activities/expenditures, and finding the most effective means of carbon sequestration. But, I think it aligns incentives in many good ways.
About 11 years ago one of my first credit cards was almost exactly this. It was a VISA, the company behind the credit card was called "Brighter Planet". Projects funded included wind farms and methane recapture on cow farms. On their website you could estimate your carbon footprint based on things like car usage, air travel, electricity bill, housing square-footage, and like this.
For whatever reason the company fell apart but the VISA credit card is still in action.
People should instead channel their desire to do good into political action to advocate policy to confront the climate crisis. Any voluntary system is susceptible to freeloaders who would be receive the benefit of reduced greenhouse gasses without the cost which would be self imposed on the ethical people.
There are already lots of services that do this, and some that can be tied to specific purchases like airline flights (just Google "purchase carbon offsets"), but that said I really like the parent's idea of automatically tying it to a credit card. Don't know if this exists already.
That was the thought, yeah. I was thinking of something like Mint for the environment, paired with an optional credit card so you can contribute as you go vs. get a 'bill' afterwards
> Pumping CO2 into the ground sounds like it works great on paper, but I think we're fooling ourselves that it won't reenter the atmosphere.
Sequestration alone shouldn't be the solution, but if we can find a thermodynamically feasible way to store CO2 for at least thousands of years while getting away from new CO2 emission, it won't matter that the solution isn't fully permanent. Some proposed solutions are expected to be stable on long enough timescales that the CO2 can (under proper geologic conditions) turn into rock. Other solutions rely on keeping it in oxygen-poor environments where it won't oxidize (which is what happened with carbon that became fossil fuels in the first place; clearly that carbon was not permanently sequestered, since we're burning it now!).
As long as it's thermodynamically feasible to store carbon (read: our net carbon emission goes down and it doesn't cost too much in alternative energy sources), a relatively short (on geological timescales at least) storage solution is more than sufficient (again, as long as it's coupled with critically necessary reductions in new CO2 emission).
[edit] There are, to be clear, many geological formations that are more than stable enough to store volatile materials on longer timescales than are necessary (look at how effectively salt domes trap oil through a combination of buoyancy and impermeability of certain types of rock). The deep, possibly inescapable problem is the thermodynamic difficulty of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (where its concentration is low, and hence extraction is inefficient) vs. the relative ease of releasing energy from highly-concentrated carbon stores like fossil fuels. It's like trying to unmix your cream from your coffee; it's just much much easier to avoid pouring the cream in in the first place. As others have mentioned, we can rely on the fact that nature already gives us cheap distributed solar farms with built in sequestration abilities (also known as "plants"); non-biological methods don't come with the built in solar energy converter, and so we need to consider the harrowing reality of thermodynamics when trying to make them scalable.
Hell, if we can turn it back into oil or some other liquid carbon form, that can be more reliably sequestered. Just pour it back into the places we took it from.
EV/Solar/Wind should pass the economics of (centuries-long-engineered-and-ingrained!) ICE and petroleum soon. We're basically waiting on solid state batteries and some economies of scale for EVs, and solar/wind to just incrementally pass natural gas.
Then excess load can go to some synthesis of sequesterable or load-evening fuel, or some other scheme such as algae.
Or we could focus on emitting less CO2. Those articles make CO2 séquestration seem like a saver bu themselves, but they won’t be useful if we don’t get our actual emissions to close-to-zero.
Its not an either or proposition anymore, that ship has sailed, we need quickly to lower the CO2 emissions, yes, but we should also think about sequestration in all forms, trees etc.
That ship sailed long ago. India, China, and Africa are going to blow out the remaining carbon budget regardless of what America and Europe do to reduce emissions.
Agreed. I also don't like this article mixing gigatons and millions of tons. Feels like preying on people who don't get SI units...
"136 million tons of capacity by 2040" is 0.136 gigatons, 1/400th of our current emissions.
This technology will help us handle the very last, most difficult to decarbonize parts of our industrial civilization. It's nowhere near effective enough to do anything more than that.
We need to get our emissions to zero. But we can't control other countries (though we need to put pressure). The us isn't even a third of global emissions. So while making the US carbon neutral, we aren't even close to solving the problem. We HAVE to be negative.
There's another big reason to be negative as well. Even if total global emissions went to 0 (ZERO!) the planet would still warm. There's a feedback loop. We've warmed enough that we are melting a lot of ice that contains carbon, which gets released into the ocean and atmosphere. We have no choice but to go negative, and we need to encourage as many other countries to do so as well.
Reaching zero emissions is just a start. We need to reach strong negative emissions in the next 2-3 decades.
Consider the following points:
1) Climate lag. There is a 40 year delay between emissions and effects on the climate so the effects we are now seeing are from the emissions from the late 70s early 80s. We have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than between 1850 and 1980. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today we have a huge climatic bill ahead of us in the next 40 years.
2) Self sustaining climatic systems commonly called feedbacks. These systems once triggered will keep affecting the climate even if we reach zero emissions. Eg: melting of Arctic ice, permafrost methane, etc.
3) There are currently 405ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere which will remain there for centuries and will keep having an effect on the climate unless we remove it.
From the last IPCC report:
> There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere.
4) It is usually stated that we are at about 1ºC of warming right now, but until recently the cooling effects of aerosols in the atmosphere were not well understood. A recent paper from 2019 showed that it's likely there is a lot more cooling going on and we could already be at about 2ºC of warming. This would mean we are in a much more difficult position than commonly believed.
Readit News
Not to be glib, and I'm no agronomy expert, but a quick google tells me that's about equivalent to a square mile of hay field. Seems like if you were serious about this problem and wanted an economical solution, buying a farm and burying the output would be more effective than throwing money at startups like this.
Articles like this are always written from a tone of "If ONLY there was some way to economically extract and concentrate carbon from the atmosphere", by journalists who then go home and tend the heirloom snap peas in their raised beds without a sense of irony. Plants do this. It's literally what makes them plants.
Now... maybe there's a stronger economic argument for technologies like this, but if there is it's not filtering into the press hits. I remain suspicious.
The only scalable sequestration technology is biomass for the sole reason that it is the only method that does not require creating new power generation facilities to feed industrial chemistry plants at an unprecedented scale. Sequestering CO2 requires application of energy and mass on the same scale as the energy that was released by putting it into the atmosphere in the first place.
You can't cheat the laws of thermodynamics.
So, GHG net heating effect is proportional to the amount of heat escape they block for as long as they remain in the atmosphere.
The only place where those technologies could make sense would be on the industry generating a lot of CO2 in a concentrated manner. Or if you are creating a Mars colony, where it could be used to control your system.
We then don't take into account the most expensive part, buying the land. In Texas a 500 acre ranch already prepped for hay or other crops costs about 1-2 million dollars to buy.
Furthermore, plants aren't perfect. Many plants also respirate co2 as well as oxygen. It's not a perfect equation like in grade school.
A more focused criticism would be: it's not enough for that fancy plant to work, it needs to be cheaper than a hayfield at scale to be worth it. And I'd want to see numbers showing that. Farms are not, in fact, particularly expensive relative to venture backed startups.
By the way, a square mile is exactly 640 acres.
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/land-use/afforestation
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76
and in many similar research papers.
[edit: formatting]
IFF that's the case, we've added 375 billion tones of carbon to the atmosphere. Some estimates say that 50% of carbon is removed from the atmosphere every 20 years. So if our emissions stop growing, we'll eventually reach an equilibrium not far from what it is now. Plus, don't most estimates have carbon emissions rapidly decreasing as renewables become more cost effective? I've seen some estimates as high as 70% by 2050.
Anyway, a tree over the course of 40 years, can sequester 1 ton of carbon. The Amazon Rain Forest has ~390 Billion trees. So, if we could plant another Amazon Rain Forest and keep our emissions where they are (or hopefully reduce them) couldn't we avoid any further warming?
I've had this idea forever, but I'm just doing the math now. If we lined every street and highway in the US with trees, that might be enough to sequester the carbon we've added (and will add before equilibrium) to the atmosphere.
There's 5.3 million miles of road in the U.S. If you spaced the trees 10 feet apart, you could plant 528 trees per side per mile, or ~1000 per mile. That means, we could plant 5.3 billion trees, or 1/75th of an Amazon Rain Forest. If you added in every country in the world (there's 64.25 million miles of paved road and probably well over 150 million miles of paved and unpaved roads), we could plant like 1/6 to 1/2 of an Amazon.
I feel like if you added in shrubs and flowers and combined the insect biomass increase, this could actually be a thing... I mean, you could also potentially bio-engineer trees for maximum sequestration & particulate absorption. And probably there's trees you could plant 3 feet apart instead of 10 that could sequester the same amount of carbon.
We could probably capture a lot of particulates from the roads as well, naturally cool cities with added shade (and make them prettier), and increase insect biomass (which has shrank like 75% in the last 27 years).
At least in the US -- Oaks, Chestnuts, and Walnuts sequester a lot of carbon per square foot. Chestnuts are native to the northeast, and Oaks are native in the west (California oaks are one of the prettiest trees IMO), and Walnuts are native in the South.
Pin Oaks don't take up much space, they grow really fast (70 feet in 28 years), and weigh literally tons. They thrive basically everywhere in the U.S. beside Arizona, Florida, and Coastal California. It also has shallow roots, which would keep it from destroying sidewalks / roads. Pair them with Hemlocks, Gold and Red Euonymus, & Climbing Hydrangea -- and our roads would be beautiful!
I dunno. It sounds crazy. But it also seems obtainable.
I'm not sure how this impacts methane, though. Unfortunately, global beef & pork production is growing quickly.
This is akin to saying (in the early 1900's) "Planes can only fly short distances, are very expensive, and can't carry any serious loads. It would just be better to put this money into trucking."
The industrial chemistry infrastructure required to drive this sequestration at the same scale literally doesn't exist by several orders of magnitude. Even worse, the tremendous power generation capacity to support that industrial chemistry infrastructure also doesn't exist. We're talking global GDP levels of CapEx just to build the infrastructure that would make it possible to build sequestration infrastructure that could remove CO2 on a reasonable time frame. Biomass requires none of this investment to operate at the same scales.
These prototypes of industrial sequestration are only pricing in the OpEx and the CapEx of the facility itself. At scale, you also have to pay for the creation of the entire supply chain from scratch -- the factories, power plants, mines, logistics, etc that allow these sequestration facilities to exist at the required scale. The only way the fully burdened cost remotely makes sense is in applications where none of this infrastructure needs to be built i.e. small scale applications. For global atmospheric CO2 reduction, the fully burdened cost of sequestering CO2 via industrial processes is never going to be viable due to industrial chemistry economics.
Industrial chemistry is not embarrassingly parallelizable.
Someone who threw a ton of venture cash at "Air Freight Ltd." in 1913 or whatever would have lost their shirt.
Back to the point: I'm not saying this won't work. I'm saying that there are firm limits to how well it MUST work just to be better than technology that was proven out five millenia ago. That's a really high bar, and it needs numbers and not press hits.
It's quite expensive, and all of those CO2 sequestration companies (including Climeworks) sound pretty prototype-y. Climeworks is the one with a consumer product and clearly states that they already remove CO2 from the atmosphere today. This is what I got back from sales when I asked if my money will be for R&D that might, one day, remove the CO2, or if it would support operational costs of a machine running today:
> you will receive we state the amount of carbon dioxide that has been removed in your name. No one else can put a claim to that amount. [...] we run the machines most of the time anyway [but] proving that there is a market for our services (such as CDR for individuals) makes it easier for us to broaden the application of our technology.
So that gives me a reasonable confidence, but I'll still spread out my CO2 compensation a little in case part of it turns out to be badly spent. And trees have more advantages than just producing rock, even if we'd need much more surface area and water to maintain those trees than to sequester CO2 into rock.
Deleted Comment
has at least some more information about it, thanks for the hint :-)
I have a question about these various carbon-buying efforts. Whether it's climeworks, or buying carbon offsets, or signing up for a service with your power company... do these things scale?
I mean, here in Portland I think you can sign up with PGE for having 100% of your electricity come from renewable sources, but I think that only 40% of their power comes from renewable. So really probably only 40% of their customers can sign up. As it is, not enough people have signed up, so they can still say so, but big picture, you're still really only getting 40%. And that's just the electrical part of our carbon footprint, which isn't the whole picture.
Same with the carbon-offset buying sites. I mean, they don't really work past a point, right? Like if every citizen in the world signs up, it implies we'd have the entire problem solved. But we wouldn't really, don't they all have upper limits? So how much do they actually scale? 50%, 10%, 1%?
The people who need convincing aren’t there due to math: it’s become a political loyalty test for Republicans in the U.S. and some other groups internationally, for many people accepting that climate change is real means major changes in their lifestyle and business, and there’s a huge industry supporting fake experts, think tanks, etc. pitching the message that you don’t need to do anything.
In that light, it’s not unreasonable to worry that people will use it to push the “no need to sacrifice now, new technology will fix everything” message, not unlike the people hoping we can avoid making simple infrastructure fixes because self-driving cars will solve everything real soon now.
I don't feel like working through all the countries to normalize the units; but the US tax is comically low by comparison. In many countries, your estimated cost is far below what they already pas in gas-specific taxes (although some of that tax might be for non CO2 issues)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#Tax_rates
That translates to 0.35€/L, which wouldn't even be half of the taxes already levied on gasoline in many european countries.
If it were phased in over time it would hopefully be another incentive for the uptake of electric cars.
The simple answer for preventing the economic damage is to return the money to everyone as a dividend. Then the average person pays $1000/year in carbon tax and receives a $1000/year dividend, which cancels out. On average. But if you reduce your carbon footprint to below average then you get more than you pay.
(This also helps the poor because they already burn less carbon on average but would receive the same dividend.)
To estimate how much that would increase the price at the pump, I would rely on estimates of how much fuel a tanker truck can carry, how many miles per gallon the truck gets, and the average distance from refinery to gas station -- which I am too lazy to try to look up.
For whatever reason the company fell apart but the VISA credit card is still in action.
The only thing I last heard that was economical/promising was olivine, is that turning into a dead end?
Pumping CO2 into the ground sounds like it works great on paper, but I think we're fooling ourselves that it won't reenter the atmosphere.
Iron fertilization in the ocean might help acidification, but not atmospheric.
Tree planting might help but the trees die and decay eventually, and we need to sacrifice grazing land for that.
Sequestration alone shouldn't be the solution, but if we can find a thermodynamically feasible way to store CO2 for at least thousands of years while getting away from new CO2 emission, it won't matter that the solution isn't fully permanent. Some proposed solutions are expected to be stable on long enough timescales that the CO2 can (under proper geologic conditions) turn into rock. Other solutions rely on keeping it in oxygen-poor environments where it won't oxidize (which is what happened with carbon that became fossil fuels in the first place; clearly that carbon was not permanently sequestered, since we're burning it now!).
As long as it's thermodynamically feasible to store carbon (read: our net carbon emission goes down and it doesn't cost too much in alternative energy sources), a relatively short (on geological timescales at least) storage solution is more than sufficient (again, as long as it's coupled with critically necessary reductions in new CO2 emission).
[edit] There are, to be clear, many geological formations that are more than stable enough to store volatile materials on longer timescales than are necessary (look at how effectively salt domes trap oil through a combination of buoyancy and impermeability of certain types of rock). The deep, possibly inescapable problem is the thermodynamic difficulty of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (where its concentration is low, and hence extraction is inefficient) vs. the relative ease of releasing energy from highly-concentrated carbon stores like fossil fuels. It's like trying to unmix your cream from your coffee; it's just much much easier to avoid pouring the cream in in the first place. As others have mentioned, we can rely on the fact that nature already gives us cheap distributed solar farms with built in sequestration abilities (also known as "plants"); non-biological methods don't come with the built in solar energy converter, and so we need to consider the harrowing reality of thermodynamics when trying to make them scalable.
EV/Solar/Wind should pass the economics of (centuries-long-engineered-and-ingrained!) ICE and petroleum soon. We're basically waiting on solid state batteries and some economies of scale for EVs, and solar/wind to just incrementally pass natural gas.
Then excess load can go to some synthesis of sequesterable or load-evening fuel, or some other scheme such as algae.
"136 million tons of capacity by 2040" is 0.136 gigatons, 1/400th of our current emissions.
This technology will help us handle the very last, most difficult to decarbonize parts of our industrial civilization. It's nowhere near effective enough to do anything more than that.
edit: still can't find evidence for >50. Latest numbers I see are 37.1 from 2018. Can you link a source?
There's another big reason to be negative as well. Even if total global emissions went to 0 (ZERO!) the planet would still warm. There's a feedback loop. We've warmed enough that we are melting a lot of ice that contains carbon, which gets released into the ocean and atmosphere. We have no choice but to go negative, and we need to encourage as many other countries to do so as well.
Consider the following points:
1) Climate lag. There is a 40 year delay between emissions and effects on the climate so the effects we are now seeing are from the emissions from the late 70s early 80s. We have emitted more GHG in the last 40 years than between 1850 and 1980. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today we have a huge climatic bill ahead of us in the next 40 years.
https://skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Dela...
2) Self sustaining climatic systems commonly called feedbacks. These systems once triggered will keep affecting the climate even if we reach zero emissions. Eg: melting of Arctic ice, permafrost methane, etc.
https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba...
3) There are currently 405ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere which will remain there for centuries and will keep having an effect on the climate unless we remove it.
From the last IPCC report:
> There is sufficient uptake capacity in the ocean to incorporate 70 to 80% of foreseeable anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, this process takes centuries due to the rate of ocean mixing. As a result, even several centuries after emissions occurred, about a quarter of the increase in concentration caused by these emissions is still present in the atmosphere.
4) It is usually stated that we are at about 1ºC of warming right now, but until recently the cooling effects of aerosols in the atmosphere were not well understood. A recent paper from 2019 showed that it's likely there is a lot more cooling going on and we could already be at about 2ºC of warming. This would mean we are in a much more difficult position than commonly believed.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190122104611.h...
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