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.
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.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...
To put this statement into perspective, see this graph "Global primary energy consumption by source"
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
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.
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.
I don't think that is "very perfect being the enemy of the good" at all. Any new energy source (like fusion) would be a very real threat to mankind, see also https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
He very early assumes/disregards we remain confined to earth. In the face of exponentially growing energy resources, this is a terrible assumption.
Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun?
The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same.
See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
Isn’t this why solar is good. We already have the heat sink (earth) we just aren’t using the energy.
Not exactly because the Earth naturally reflects a large amount of solar energy back into space.
A lot of that is from clouds that are above the panels
The problem with all biomass-based solution is the low efficiency of photosynthesis. This is why producing liquid fuels from biomass cannot be a general drop-in replacement for petroleum.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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
Direct CO2 capture is thermodynamically unviable, and literally every plan and attempt involving it was highly expensive in energy.
> But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon!
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?
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.
A flawed doomsday weapon but a good mechanism for building a fictional world where the biosphere develops underground.
> All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide.
Love it. I'm firmly in the Yes And camp.
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.
Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from these piles would likely be rather high, potentially negating any carbon sequestration benefits
This is definitely true.
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?
Methane would be extremeley high. The core of the pile might be frozen, but the unfrozen region would be anoxic and decomposing.
>we avoid most capital expenditures... since no provision must be made for moisture management or geotechnical engineering
I see no math for heat transfer due to rainwater percolation through the pile. "Assuming all voids are filled with water" is great and all, but (with apologies to Jurassic Park) water... uh... finds a way. Meltwater will even tunnel its way through compacted glacial ice.
Plus the "dry" insulation layer won't stay dry for long.
Good catch :)
I thought about this for awhile and the gap between harvest time for many crops and first frost isn’t enough to get more than a few inches of rainfall in most agricultural regions with favorable economics.
I think the wetness will wreck the insulation of the first meter or so, but won’t lead to much convective heat transfer if the outside never gets saturated. A big if, to be sure.
As an aside, it’s common practice to leave large piles of grain outside overwinter in the central USA and it’s not optimal, but they certainly don’t saturate the whole way through with water.
Beyond that gap time period, I was thinking more about longer-term storage and heat transfer. What happens over the second summer?
Grain piles have free drainage so we don't expect saturation, but if water freely drains through this system it seems problematic.
The spring-summer timeframe is the biggest issue to deal with here. I think that this design would have to have a sacrificial layer with decomposing, anoxic material which degrades during the warmer months. Perhaps it could be mitigated with various expedients to decrease the ambient temperature like flooding the surrounding landscape or putting a shade over the pile.
This scheme only makes sense if the amount of biomass added every year is much larger than the amount which is present in this external layer.
Anecdotally, my father has told me about soaked hay bales out in the pasture which still had a frozen interior core by late May.
With intentionally wet hay (or similar) I would start worrying about spontaneous combustion.
https://news.okstate.edu/articles/agriculture/2020/stotts_br...
https://www.beefmagazine.com/livestock-management/-what-are-...
Perhaps worthwhile to annually top with a cover membrane (possibly bioplastic) to control moisture? Maybe even two layers (bottom airtight and top vapor permeable), sandwiching the dry "insulation" to avoid moisture ingress from both sides. If the area-to-volume ratio is so favorable the cost might be managed.
Thank you, very interesting proposal and discussion. I'm all for it!
Nice idea, but the climate crisis is not solved with technology (we already know and have everything we need) but by politics and changing our consumption habits.
Yes, if we just banned ads I suspect that would already greatly affect our consumption.
People don’t want to change consumption habits and they aren’t going to vote for politicians who want to change consumption habits, so technology is the only hope.
That's a bleak point of view and simply untrue. People have been shown to shift their view on consumption habits.
Social technology is the only tech that matters, as it's not just the carbon, it's also the plastic pollution, biosphere destruction, ocean acidification etc.
If we don't change the poeples want's, we can never have a stablish society.
I was hoping that this proposal would be a uniquely unilateral one. If a single state or province in the USA or Canada committed to this plan (and if it worked as well as I optimistically propose, and provided enough nutrients) then they could singlehandedly put away enough carbon to actually solve the problem.
The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization
No need for fertilizer ships.
The delivery of material to the center of Ocean vertices is essentially free. Any floating body winds up there eventually
I wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...
One downside: you have to ship all the carbon to the coast. Transport is a non-negligible consideration for all of this. Ideally, you just grow a ton of switchgrass in northern US / Canada / Siberia and store it nearby.
Unfortunately the plan is very dangerous as tectonic activity has a tendency to release it plus any hurricane or monsoon or thaiphoon or such has a tendency to destroy the installation or worse, move it somewhere where it will do damage to the ecosystem.
Also, use solar and wind ships instead. We don't need to sink more nuclear material...
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.
A structural question comes to mind, if the pipes are arrayed horizontally, how important is it to keep the pipes straight while they're being compressed by metric tons of biomass? Are they at risk of being squished closed? It's too late at night for me to ball park the pressures involved, but it'll be something like an extra atmosphere of pressure every 20 to 30 meters? This thing is over a hundred meters tall?
Great point. I handwave this away by saying that most of the biomass will be frozen most of the time, providing the necessary structural support.
nice glad its solved now. great headline
Are the going prices for carbon credits sufficiently high that this approach could be commercialized?
I'm reminded of Pykrete:
> 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.
Is there some plugin I'm missing for the LaTeX to render, or did they miss a step when publishing?
I had an issue with an out-of-date mathjax configuration, sorry! I've updated it.
Is it still not rendering? It looks fine in my browser.
no one understands uncertainty
Or just burn the huge piles to charcoal (pyrolysis), then you're only storing carbon, and it certainly won't decay. Even use it as a soil enhancer.
Let's say that we have a hollowed-out zone in the middle of the biomass pile where we tolerate limited oxidization so we can run a fire. If the rest of it is wet, maybe the heat from that combustion could pyrolyze a large radius of surrounding material since O2 flow into the system should be small.
Why doesn't the obvious thing, i.e., making charcoal, work? You can call it "biochar" if you want. A big pile runs the risk of catching fire, but if it's mixed with soil I'd think it won't burn. Is there some slow oxidation process to worry about? I'd think that charcoal briquettes, pencil leads, and soot would all last essentially forever.
Plus, you can harness the pretty-high-grade heat energy extracted during the charcoal-making, to run heat engines or for other uses. So it's basically a way to use biology to get some solar power, and to sequester carbon at the same time.
If you're talking about only the charcoal-making, then this is prehistoric technology, and if you throw heat engines into the mix then you're at maybe an 1880s tech level. Seems easy?
I guess the "giant pile of frozen vegetables" method is even simpler in some ways (pipes being the only tech), but it also seems less stable, and it doesn't return the non-carbon nutrients to the soil.
What am I missing?
Simple math unfortunately.
To offset global human CO2 production you'd need to biochar all plant matter several times a year.
This feels like a "yes, and" thing, where the most important use of effort is to reduce production (and we're nowhere close yet), but at some point we'll need to also do capture to deal with production that is truly unavoidable, and, if we're dreaming, to achieve net negative production, for the purpose of returning to preindustrial levels.
But yeah, if you're burning coal with one hand and making charcoal with the other, it's all pretty pointless.
Reducing production is simply impossible.
There's billions of people on earth who are desperately poor compared to even the poorest American.
There is absolutely no chance those people just accept their position as ultra poor.
If individuals want to reduce their CO2 output the only viable strategy is to buy and permanently store fossil fuels.
much better option than stratospheric aerosol injection, it’s easily reversible
wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way.
Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
Maybe horizontal surfaces too? Like roads and pavements? Let's become industrial elves.
Didn't there used to be a "Pave the Earth" meme ? Maybe update it for log roads.
I’d wager the furniture industry is currently responsible for a significant % of anual deforestation, which as far as I know isn’t regrowing fast enough.
An approach like this could benefit from crops which are not productive for humanity otherwise, but which grows much faster and eats CO2 cheaper than trees.
Does that mean “stop replanting forests?” Absolutely not.
2/3 of the CO2 stored in forest is in the ground, not the trees, it's accumulated when the forest grows and is getting generations of trees.
Cut those trees to do furniture and you'll release all this CO2, do a culture of tree decades after decades and you'll never store it back.