Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas.
Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change.
You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it.
I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation.
The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.
The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example:
- Taxes on emissions.
- Incentives on sustainable actions.
- Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling.
- Electric transportation.
- Large scale battery storage.
- Renewable energy sources.
- Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning.
- large scale (industrial) carbon capture.
- Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture).
- High speed rail to offset flights.
- Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations.
- Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables).
- Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market.
For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.
I agree that implementing 10 ideas that tackle 5% of the problem is valuable. Maybe 100 ideas that tackle 0.5% of the problem each.
But ideas that tackle 0.00001% of the problem are more useful as a counterexample of what doesn't work.
I haven't looked into large scale technical solutions to climate change, but they seem quite unlikely to scale in relation to the consumption of fossil fuels.
Sure, coal-burning plants could add carbon capture at the source. But as we decarbonize, we will be left with the use cases like aviation and off-grid mobility where carbon capture at source isn't feasible technically or economically.
The only thing that will really work (has the right magnitude of effect) is to stop digging carbon out of the ground and burning it without capturing the carbon at the source, or block the sun's rays so that more energy is reflected to space.
What I like about the author's idea is it is a technical solution to a technical problem. Taxes, incentives, or for that matter anything that requires large-scale public behavior change is:
a) not likely to work
b) equally unlikely to cause a change on the scale needed.
c) will likely come with unpredictable and unwanted side effects caused by trying to force society to change (which is most often requires threats of violence and the loss of civil rights)
> The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.
That's an assumption.
I'm usually in favour of fixing the original problem, as so much of what is wrong with society would be simpler to fix by focusing on the source, but we prefer technological solutions rather than be confronted with changing our behaviour.
The problem with global warming is the source of the issue is extremely large, complex to reverse, and extremely difficult behaviour to change because it underpins economy. It is also one that is guided by economy on a global scale of supply and demand, making a single country green tends to just displace emmission to a poorer country (see what happened with coal).
For GHG I think the human forces at play are way too strong. This one needs a solution that will unfortunately allow for GHG, because the weaning off on a global scale is way longer than you think, and reversing it is going to takel even longer.
It's too late, we need climate engineering, i.e controlling the temperate with other mechanisms.
We saw this in action during the transition to cleaner shipping fuels a couple of years ago. I'm not suggesting we polute more, but controlling temperate with particulates clearly works.
I think plants convert 120 GtC from the atmosphere into biomass every year (ref https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20p...) - obviously this is very roughly balanced by how much CO2 is naturally returned to the atmosphere. The additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions are 37 GtC.
So there is theoretically enough biomass for us to sequester - if we could do all that work without dramatically increasing our CO2 emissions...
Note this is an issue with averages. The conditions that produce oil deposits are rare, and last for geologically short periods. If you average out all oil ever produced by all time over which oil has been forming, the number is quite low, but during those periods of time the rate is orders of magnitude higher.
Further, the commonly touted claim that it takes millions of years for oil to form is only relevant if your goal is to naturally produce extractable oil. The carbon sequestration is practically instantaneous, it just takes millions of years of deposition for the sequestered carbon to get deep enough to turn into oil. Renewable oil is never going to be a thing, but sequestering carbon through biomass is at least possible.
And note that any realistic solution to climate change demands a reduction in fossil fuel consumption, but with sequestration less reduction is necessary, and the very large amount of carbon already emitted can be removed.
I think it's more like 3-4 orders of magnitude (i.e. 1000 or 10000 of these sites), but yes, it would take quite a few to completely offset CO2 emissions.
This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially energy free which will decrease carbon production as well as allow to use the energy to capture carbon. Maybe we can get some nuclear fission or fusion breakthrough in the future but adding solar, wind and batteries as fast as possible should be the main focus for now.
So far we are still increasing the rate at which we extract fossil fuels, even with all the investment in renewables and alternate power sources in the last decades (https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels). The Jevon paradox seem to still be valid in this, even with a few countries that managed to have most of their energy matrix on clean sources.
And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not enough to just extract a bit less, thing that still may take years to be achieved, all that was managed to be captured by some expensive carbon capture technology is probably orders below of how much we increased emissions. Absolute global numbers matters here.
And yes, it is not possible to just stop extracting fossil fuels and try to solve our energy needs with what we have built so far. But time is running out (if it is not over already). Severe drop in consumption should be in the map too, there was a shortlived dent in the trends around 2020.
Any timelines we impose are artificial. Setting deadlines hasn't really helped accomplish as much as simply changing the economics has in recent years. The reason solar power is popular is simply that it saves people money on their electricity bills. That wasn't always true. But now that it is, we see huge growth at both grid level and domestic level of its deployment.
You are right we are still expanding the use of fossil fuels. But we do seem to be on a path where the peak usage is happening in the reasonably near future. The faster than expected adoption of renewables is bringing that moment forward.
They are calling for short term policy changes to accelerate things. Most of those policies are simply about incentivizing people doing the right things.
The past decade does not matter as till this year consumption growth was more than renewables additions that has changed in 2023 and will accelerate from 2024. So the tipping point has just been reached add electrification of transport and heating and fossil fuel use will come down a lot faster than people owning fossil fuel reserves would like for the world to realize. In 2024 we will add almost more solar than all the solar installs in the world till 2020.
In the US, the rate at which we install utility scale solar and wind is currently limited by how quickly we can upgrade the grid to support it, with interconnect wait lists taking over 5 years in some areas[1]. Lifting tariffs wouldn't speed things up without fixing that first.
The government also sets up regulations that protect incumbent electricity generators.
Delaying a renewable facility from earning money for years when it has to borrow everything up front to start is extra deadly. I want proper environmental review though, to the extent it's possible to have that without it being weaponized by NIMBYs to simply run out the clock on a project's viability.
Interconnect is going to be old news once batteries and balance-of-system costs get low enough. Local microgrids at the substation level are going to be the way to go, with only a minority of current traveling long distances (except for certain natural features, i.e. hydroelectric)
It would still speed up behind-the-meter installations for existing grid connections. Rooftop solar, commercial and industrial customers adding battery energy storage, etc.
Citing "primary" energy is a great way to be off by several factors on any estimate.
Electrification results in 2x-5x less energy use for nearly every large energy application. Take, for example, heat humps. Fossil fuels are only something like 95% efficient, whereas heat pumps product 200%-500% efficient. Same goes for EVs over fuel engines, etc.
Old sources of energy get replaced all the time. Not sure why you think that's not the case...
Primary energy usage is an awful metric. When replacing ICE cars with EVs we do not need to replace the energy used with a 1:1 ratio. The ICE is 20-35% efficient, and this is spread across the supply chain for both the fuel and the car itself.
See this amazing flow chart on useful vs. rejected energy:
Sure, look at that chart. According to that chart, we'll burn coal forever. Now, consult reality for a moment, or take a look around. Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century. So your "always" is at best temporarily true, and thus worthless, it can't actually have predictive power.
Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.
In 2014 there was more "traditional biomass" (ie people burn stuff) than today. Since this practice is extremely inefficient it makes sense to see it phased out, cooking food over a literal log fire is simple but that's the only upside.
Also Solar looks like about 2.5% to me. How is that "negligible" ? Is the population of Bangladesh "negligible"? That's about 2.5% of the world's population.
there was a quote, and I can't remember exactly so I paraphrase: "the person who creates a new form of energy for the world, without creating an equivalent heatsink, would be history's greatest monster", although I suppose that is very perfect being the enemy of the good.
This should reduce carbon emissions, but the dow.stream consequences seem complex and difficult to anticipate. For instance, what happens to human consumption of other resources when energy becomes essentially free? How much cheaper does it become, say, to exploit, extract, refine, and manufacture? And if extraction becomes cheaper, maintaining oil infrastructure becomes arguably a simple matter of industrial convenience: why bother to change when it's only becoming cheaper?
Focusing on reducing emissions is important, but it's only the first step of the plan. If we want to be anywhere near the 2°C scenario, starting from 2050, we need to be sequestering carbon directly from the atmosphere.
So I'm okay with people spending a little effort on step 2 of the plan now, especially given that we don't have yet proven technology to realise it.
> Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).
> Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen.
> Since World War II, pykrete has remained a scientific curiosity, unexploited by research or construction of any significance.
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
I wonder the same. This proposal sounds like it is leeching nutrients from the ground and storing it for a long time (on a scale of centuries in the proposal). How do these nutrients cycle back for growing the food that we need? Or, for that matter, for the next round of biomass to freeze?
On a tiny scale I store them via humification in the top soil. In agriculture they manage the humus content of their soil anyway, for example in greenhouses they might have 20% instead of 2% in the surrounding fields.
Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.
I had a very short back and forth with someone here. One thing makes you wonder about another.
You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant.
But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why do that. The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight.
Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
You can pyrolize the wood by cooking it in an oxygen-free environment, cooking off almost all of the nitrogen and other nutrients and leaving nearly pure carbon in the form of charcoal.
Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself.
Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer.
You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.
Sadly, I don't think so. Many of these carbon burial/sequestration proposals all advocate just taking all of the plant matter and tucking it away, including the N and P.
Eli Yablonovitch has been working on this for a while. I thought it was assumed that only the lignin would stay sequestered but I'm not finding those details.
Serious question (I'm not a biologist): How did the nitrogen, etc. get released when the plant material (that became oil) first died and got buried? Is this fundamentally different?
It gets consumed and released by detrivores, i.e. fungus. This takes a long time, and wouldn’t work nearly as well these days because the fungus would eat the cellulose as well.
I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2.
Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process:
Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges.
As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon!
Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans.
But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible.
Not all life is connected to earths atmosphere. That that doomsday weapon is missing caves which contain multicellular life across geologic timescales. The ecosystems dependent on chemical synthesis at deep ocean vents would similarly be unaffected.
You might kill off plants though frozen seeds are viable for an extended period, but the incoming ice age is going to preserve aglee until atmospheric CO2 returns to normal even if we’re talking millions of years.
The incoming ice age could be averted by simultaneously adding carbon-free greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide to the atmosphere, but I suppose that kills the "solving global warming" part of the pitch.
Not all life is connected to earths atmosphere. That doomsday weapon is missing caves which contain multicellular life across geologic timescales. The ecosystems dependent on chemical synthesis at deep ocean vents would similarly be unaffected.
That's a good point and I don't see a way around it.
Could you also produce for the sizeable and growing SiC market? It'd be cool if your source was competitive (assuming green H2 level subsidies).
--
As you know, once we achieve net-zero (2050), we'll have to accellerate into net-negative. From the hip, maintaining current growth of renewables (17% YoY), we'll cover expected demand 2045-2050. Then what?
Methinks each and every carbon sequestion idea and strategy should be attempted. Like starting with obscene funding amounts for yearly DARPA style x-prizes. Winners advance to the next round.
And hopefully some of the strategies are scaling in time to soak up the excess production.
Hmm. Assuming I’m on board with apocalypse, this kinda seems like a hat on a hat. Couldn’t we destroy the magnetosphere and vent the atmosphere with less energy than it would take to get all that carbon out? Or, hell, deorbit the moon one more time? I guess it’s harder to ramp up that tech in secret/with a benign excuse.
Plus a lot of it’s in living beings — you’d either have to find and harvest/burn all of them manually (or wait for the decomposition cycle to get it in the air I suppose?). At that point, you might as well go with a classic Skynet-style small-arms-based doomsday!
Couldn’t we destroy the magnetosphere and vent the atmosphere with less energy than it would take to get all that carbon out? Or, hell, deorbit the moon one more time?
I think that both of these require far more energy than keeping carbon locked out of terrestrial circulation (and hence out of living things). Don't you have to destroy the Earth's iron core to destroy the magnetosphere? You barely have to scratch the Earth's crust in my scheme. Of course my scheme requires much more time to work, so it's not very flashy.
This idea came to me while considering that most science fictional planet-sterilizing weapons use imaginary physics (The Three Body Problem, Revelation Space, the Xeelee Sequence, The Forge of God...) or, at the very least, a stellar-scale expenditure of energy (The Killing Star). What's the most energy-efficient approach that is compatible with known physics?
Total carbon sequestration doesn't work against a prepared adversary with near-peer technology, but it works great as an alien device for quietly exterminating life from selected planets. The thing is like an invasive species made of silicon that no carbon-based life can compete or coexist with.
My hope would be that the thawed region would be a very thin shell overall, so the overall emissions as a fraction of total stored mass would be relatively low. Can you think of any ways to minimize anoxic activity in the thermally active area?
I’m skimming through this and it feels like a well thought out research proposal with concrete next steps. My thermodynamics is too bad to comment on the approach but it looks cool. As long as setting up experiments for it is reasonable in cost, wouldn’t take too long to show results (before it’s too late for the planet), and can show that enough CO2 can be captured and long term costs make sense, then it sounds great! I hope some of the proposed next steps get funding.
Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.
The idea proposed is so incredibly cheap, the only real cost is land and unskilled labor. This screams "government experiment" but we are doing less and less of that.
If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.
Readit News
Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change.
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...
I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation.
The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.
The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example:
- Taxes on emissions.
- Incentives on sustainable actions.
- Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling.
- Electric transportation.
- Large scale battery storage.
- Renewable energy sources.
- Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning.
- large scale (industrial) carbon capture.
- Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture).
- High speed rail to offset flights.
- Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations.
- Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables).
- Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market.
For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.
But ideas that tackle 0.00001% of the problem are more useful as a counterexample of what doesn't work.
I haven't looked into large scale technical solutions to climate change, but they seem quite unlikely to scale in relation to the consumption of fossil fuels.
Sure, coal-burning plants could add carbon capture at the source. But as we decarbonize, we will be left with the use cases like aviation and off-grid mobility where carbon capture at source isn't feasible technically or economically.
The only thing that will really work (has the right magnitude of effect) is to stop digging carbon out of the ground and burning it without capturing the carbon at the source, or block the sun's rays so that more energy is reflected to space.
a) not likely to work
b) equally unlikely to cause a change on the scale needed.
c) will likely come with unpredictable and unwanted side effects caused by trying to force society to change (which is most often requires threats of violence and the loss of civil rights)
That's an assumption.
I'm usually in favour of fixing the original problem, as so much of what is wrong with society would be simpler to fix by focusing on the source, but we prefer technological solutions rather than be confronted with changing our behaviour.
The problem with global warming is the source of the issue is extremely large, complex to reverse, and extremely difficult behaviour to change because it underpins economy. It is also one that is guided by economy on a global scale of supply and demand, making a single country green tends to just displace emmission to a poorer country (see what happened with coal).
For GHG I think the human forces at play are way too strong. This one needs a solution that will unfortunately allow for GHG, because the weaning off on a global scale is way longer than you think, and reversing it is going to takel even longer.
It's too late, we need climate engineering, i.e controlling the temperate with other mechanisms.
We saw this in action during the transition to cleaner shipping fuels a couple of years ago. I'm not suggesting we polute more, but controlling temperate with particulates clearly works.
The rest will happen without extra nudging just because doing it "the wrong way" will be too expensive.
By feeding carbon tax money into carbon extraction we can eventually start reducing amount of carbon in atmosphere.
This paper made an attempt at a comparison of fossil fuel use versus agricultural biomass production: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production...
I think plants convert 120 GtC from the atmosphere into biomass every year (ref https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20p...) - obviously this is very roughly balanced by how much CO2 is naturally returned to the atmosphere. The additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions are 37 GtC.
So there is theoretically enough biomass for us to sequester - if we could do all that work without dramatically increasing our CO2 emissions...
Further, the commonly touted claim that it takes millions of years for oil to form is only relevant if your goal is to naturally produce extractable oil. The carbon sequestration is practically instantaneous, it just takes millions of years of deposition for the sequestered carbon to get deep enough to turn into oil. Renewable oil is never going to be a thing, but sequestering carbon through biomass is at least possible.
And note that any realistic solution to climate change demands a reduction in fossil fuel consumption, but with sequestration less reduction is necessary, and the very large amount of carbon already emitted can be removed.
And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not enough to just extract a bit less, thing that still may take years to be achieved, all that was managed to be captured by some expensive carbon capture technology is probably orders below of how much we increased emissions. Absolute global numbers matters here.
And yes, it is not possible to just stop extracting fossil fuels and try to solve our energy needs with what we have built so far. But time is running out (if it is not over already). Severe drop in consumption should be in the map too, there was a shortlived dent in the trends around 2020.
You are right we are still expanding the use of fossil fuels. But we do seem to be on a path where the peak usage is happening in the reasonably near future. The faster than expected adoption of renewables is bringing that moment forward.
I regularly read what Bloomberg NEF publishes on this topic. They published an interesting article recently: https://about.bnef.com/blog/designing-and-delivering-net-zer...
They are calling for short term policy changes to accelerate things. Most of those policies are simply about incentivizing people doing the right things.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...
Delaying a renewable facility from earning money for years when it has to borrow everything up front to start is extra deadly. I want proper environmental review though, to the extent it's possible to have that without it being weaponized by NIMBYs to simply run out the clock on a project's viability.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years
1. Share of solar is negligible 2. New sources of energy have always come on top of existing sources, never replaced them
Also, please notice that between 2021 (the date of your link) and today the amount of global solar power quadrupled and the growth is exponential.
Electrification results in 2x-5x less energy use for nearly every large energy application. Take, for example, heat humps. Fossil fuels are only something like 95% efficient, whereas heat pumps product 200%-500% efficient. Same goes for EVs over fuel engines, etc.
Old sources of energy get replaced all the time. Not sure why you think that's not the case...
See this amazing flow chart on useful vs. rejected energy:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.
In 2014 there was more "traditional biomass" (ie people burn stuff) than today. Since this practice is extremely inefficient it makes sense to see it phased out, cooking food over a literal log fire is simple but that's the only upside.
Also Solar looks like about 2.5% to me. How is that "negligible" ? Is the population of Bangladesh "negligible"? That's about 2.5% of the world's population.
So I'm okay with people spending a little effort on step 2 of the plan now, especially given that we don't have yet proven technology to realise it.
Deleted Comment
> Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).
> Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen.
> Since World War II, pykrete has remained a scientific curiosity, unexploited by research or construction of any significance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.
You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant.
But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why do that. The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight.
Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself.
Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer.
You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217695120
Dead Comment
Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process
Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges.
As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon!
Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans.
But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
You might kill off plants though frozen seeds are viable for an extended period, but the incoming ice age is going to preserve aglee until atmospheric CO2 returns to normal even if we’re talking millions of years.
Not all life is connected to earths atmosphere. That doomsday weapon is missing caves which contain multicellular life across geologic timescales. The ecosystems dependent on chemical synthesis at deep ocean vents would similarly be unaffected.
That's a good point and I don't see a way around it.
1) Can the other side just nuke most of it?
2) Isn't it cheaper to build a few thousand nukes instead of a Sahara-sized solar farm?
Could you also produce for the sizeable and growing SiC market? It'd be cool if your source was competitive (assuming green H2 level subsidies).
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As you know, once we achieve net-zero (2050), we'll have to accellerate into net-negative. From the hip, maintaining current growth of renewables (17% YoY), we'll cover expected demand 2045-2050. Then what?
Methinks each and every carbon sequestion idea and strategy should be attempted. Like starting with obscene funding amounts for yearly DARPA style x-prizes. Winners advance to the next round.
And hopefully some of the strategies are scaling in time to soak up the excess production.
Plus a lot of it’s in living beings — you’d either have to find and harvest/burn all of them manually (or wait for the decomposition cycle to get it in the air I suppose?). At that point, you might as well go with a classic Skynet-style small-arms-based doomsday!
I think that both of these require far more energy than keeping carbon locked out of terrestrial circulation (and hence out of living things). Don't you have to destroy the Earth's iron core to destroy the magnetosphere? You barely have to scratch the Earth's crust in my scheme. Of course my scheme requires much more time to work, so it's not very flashy.
This idea came to me while considering that most science fictional planet-sterilizing weapons use imaginary physics (The Three Body Problem, Revelation Space, the Xeelee Sequence, The Forge of God...) or, at the very least, a stellar-scale expenditure of energy (The Killing Star). What's the most energy-efficient approach that is compatible with known physics?
Total carbon sequestration doesn't work against a prepared adversary with near-peer technology, but it works great as an alien device for quietly exterminating life from selected planets. The thing is like an invasive species made of silicon that no carbon-based life can compete or coexist with.
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My hope would be that the thawed region would be a very thin shell overall, so the overall emissions as a fraction of total stored mass would be relatively low. Can you think of any ways to minimize anoxic activity in the thermally active area?
Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.
If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.
Isn't this what the arctic tundra is, without the pipes?