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.
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...
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.
The only thing we need to implement from your list is the carbon tax. But it has to be sufficiently high.
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.
It’s probably too late for a tax-only solution. Either the tax is too low to have the necessary effect, or people will overthrow the government who instated it. The change we need has become quite drastic.
Of course sudden imposing of sufficiently high tax will cause massive shockwaves going through markets and people's lifes.
Therefore tax should be increased gradually, year by year, spread out for ~10 years.
That would have been a great strategy about thirty years ago. Now we can’t really afford a measure that only really starts working a couple of years in the future. We already know pretty well what needs to be done, we don’t need the market to figure it out for us.
The best moment to starting it was 30 years ago. The next best moment is now.
Don't cry over spilled milk. It is spilled. But don't throw the rest just because the glass is now half empty.
As otherwise, in 30 years, we'll be in the same exact spot.
Best is the enemy of good.
That's a false dichotomy as there are a ton of measures other than a tax that we can take (even in parallel to a tax).
Imagine the money collected being awarded on a per tonne basis for each tonne of carbon you can extract and reliably sequester.
Yes, this is a one of the steps of the way how it should work from my point of view.
What is your point?
But only a very miniscule fraction of carbon ends up as oil.
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...
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.
especially since modern farming heavily uses oil based pesticides
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.
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.
And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.
I am a fan of a carbon tax, but one issue I’ve never seen addressed by proponents is the regressive structure of the tax. Oftentimes the poorest areas are using the most carbon-intensive energy sources and thus stand to be hurt the most by a carbon tax. There is little the average poor person can do to avoid this Similar logic applies for, e.g. EV subsidies - the people most capable of dishing out the cash to secure a subsidy are those in the financially best positions.
Within a given area rich people tend to use more carbon. Poor people are less likely to be taking international flights, etc.
Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.
Rich people can afford electric cars while poor people won’t be able to, even if the car is used, through the next decade. If anything, SUV prices will drop like a rock…
Also, rich people can decide to pay for expensive upgrades to their homes (switching to heatpumps, upgrading electrical wiring for efficient solar/wind usage, solar panels, high voltage chargers for electrical vehicles), while poorer home owners (many of whom are on fixed income), aren’t able to do those things.
We agree, this is why I am not a huge fan of subsidies for EV's. Among other things, we should be encouraging fewer cars of all sorts. I do like ebike subsidies though, and better public transport.
Similarly, it can make sense to help people improve their home's efficiency, and in some places grants are available for this (insulation, etc.). Though in many cases you're using renters' taxes to make the homeowner wealthier, which isn't really fair.
In Canada we get a carbon tax rebate, fixed per-head. A family of four will get up to $1800 in 2024-25, and rural areas get more than everyone else. High income households consume more of everything than low income households overall, so they still pay more carbon tax in absolute terms. Meanwhile the tax rebate is not income based. It balances out some of the regressiveness of the carbon tax.
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/02/can...
EV subsidies can help build demand for the vehicles. As adoption grows, charging becomes more widely available and manufacturing costs come down with volume.
The issue is that they do not work. If your constituents made bad investments and are stuck with oil heating because they heard that solar is woke on Fox, you cannot actually have them face the consequences of their actions. You will either not be elected or the media response will be so bad that you won't be able to govern. You will have to bail them out or add exemptions
This is easily solved. Particularly as industry is such a large contributor to GHG emissions, imposing a carbon tax on industry and possibly even allowing grandfathering allows the costs to be baked in to (only) future considerations, and makes cleaner companies more competitive compared to dirtier ones.
Baking them into future decisions will not be enough. Sorry, if people made bad investments it will teach them to be smarter. Accomodations can only go so far to be effective.
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.
The problem is not how much solar we add, but that it is not corresponded with a reduction of demand of fossil fuels. Not sure about 2024, but at least for the years of the ourworldindata info it was still on its way up. And the solution is not just maintaining the same levels of the previous year, but dropping to zero far before there is no way out anymore.
Ah no it is we are not eating fossil fuel it is used to produce energy if an alternative cheaper source of energy comes up world will start replacing fossil fuels. You will see the effect of this in the next 3-4 years as solar and battery price out fossil fuels for electricity first and 10+ years when they start pricing out fossil fuels for other energy use. Where as global warming I am pessimistic about it I think we have already crossed the point of no return for me solar and cheap electricity would allow humans to survive easier in a warming world.
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...
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)
Our car can run our all-electric house for days. We have more than one car.
It’s not clear to me how much the power grid will matter in ten years. I can imagine cities using substations to route N solar installations to M bidirectional EV chargers, I guess. For places as or less dense than suburbs, it’s not obvious that it makes sense to bother.
The power grid will always be absolutely essential. I have no idea why you'd think otherwise.
Our home battery has had ~ 10 minutes of scheduled downtime in three years, and the solar array we put in (which was limited in size by our power company) would be enough for 90+% of days. The grid has had 30+ days of downtime in that time.
If we had it fill the south half of our roof, that’d jump to 99-100%. For the remaining one percent, we could just drive to a fast charger to pick up enough electricity to run the house for 2-3 days in complete darkness.
The power grid keeps burning cities down, and then they pass the cost on to consumers.
Off grid is already more reliable than the grid, and the price of it keeps halving. At the same time, extreme weather events keep increasing the cost of the grid and lowering its reliability.
If the power company would bury their lines, then all of these issues would go away, but that will never happen with our current political system.
This argument is undermined by survivorship bias. I also don't believe the power grid keeps "burning cities down", this seems very specific to the area you live and the competency of the local government.
Do these figures include heat and hot water? In my climate these are the big energy consumers.
It would still speed up behind-the-meter installations for existing grid connections. Rooftop solar, commercial and industrial customers adding battery energy storage, etc.
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
Please also see this article, which includes useful extrapolations: https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...
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.
The growth looks exponential (and technically probably is, just not in the normal sense of that phrase).
Like any physical process, it’s likely to be limited and follow something more like a Logistic function, which looks exponential at the start but ceases to follow that curve forever (which matters for making multi-decade projections).
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.
>Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century
Sure, it's finite, but we will run out of oil and natural gas much faster than of coal. There are centuries worth of known economically viable coal reserves. Even more, if we count low-quality lignite and peat reserves.
Do those 'centuries' include the large increases in power demands across the world, ( as the wider world develops ) and the requirement to replace the missing oil and gas when they run out?
People would choke to death before we could use that much coal, so I doubt that will matter. It’s effectively infinite: We have access to more than we will ever want to use.
> 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.
I mean that new energy sources came in addition to existing ones. We consume as much wood as we ever did. Coal didn't reduce wood usage. Oil didn't reduce coal and so on...
Nuclear did remove almost completely fossil fuels from the French electricity grid. Only example I know of of a grid that succeeded in getting rid of almost all fossil fuels. (transport and heating keep using a lot of fossils however)
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.
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.
That's more of the solution than the problem. Most of the light is absorbed rather than reflected, but causing more to be reflected isn't that hard, e.g. cover a large surface area of low value land or ocean with cheap reflective material.
A lot of that is from clouds that are above the panels
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
> Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun?
The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight:
* https://www.sri.com/fcd_technology/self-cooling-paint-a-pass...
* https://hackaday.com/2023/07/03/cooling-paint-you-can-actual...
Yes, and those are really cool and I want some.
We might be able to somehow collect heat (with superconductors? I don't know) and beam it into space, but that still doesn't solve the problem.
Please watch the Bartlett lecture, please?
The point is that you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet. Which is hardly irrelevant to the people still there, e.g. if you find your data centers are using too much power, put them in space. The computation may take a megawatt-hour but transmitting the result back to the surface is only a few watt-seconds for a radio link.
Likewise, the humans who live on other planets can be consuming local energy without heating Earth, and the people still on Earth would still get the value of their inventions, discoveries and writings.
> e.g. if you find your data centers are using too much power, put them in space.
…put them in space how far away from Earth exactly? If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again. If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
> If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again.
So put a mirror on the Earth side of it?
> If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
There are many compute tasks where latency is irrelevant. To take a recent example, AI model training. It does not matter if the compute farm is a few light minutes away when the computation itself is going to take days to months.
Maintenance is performed locally. It's not as if you're going to have Earth and then a single solitary server farm on the far side of the Sun. By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.
> Maintenance is performed locally. […] By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.
It seems whether or not you can keep maintenance staff close-by would depend on the temperatures of those server farms. Yes, the regime in which this could work might be fairly large but remember that we're talking about exponential growth of energy production here and the whole reason behind moving the power plants (and server farms) to deep space was that they were emitting enough heat to affect planet-level thermodynamics.
But that still doesn't affect energy density. If you want twice as many server farms then you build twice as many space stations in twice the volume of space and the energy density remains constant.
> But that still doesn't affect energy density.
But it does? I think you're confusing energy density with power density. The former is an integral over time and would be monotically increasing with time since nuclear fusion would allow us to basically pull energy out of of thin (ok, maybe not so thin) air.
> you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet
No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?
In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
- - - -
The point is that anyone who good enough at physics to invent a free energy generator also understands why it must be kept secret. Some secrets keep themselves. That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them. Like the Philosophers' Stone the point of the technology is the internal transformation it engenders when you actually confront the thing itself.
> It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?
Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local energy use per-capita if local population is declining, e.g. because the number of people leaving to explore other planets is higher than the population growth rate.
> Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
The universe is a lot bigger than the solar system.
> That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them.
Uh, nope. That's not why you can't buy one.
At this point we're just trading sci-fi story ideas. If we can learn to manage our population growth and/or energy consumption growth, then that's awesome!
Watch the Bartlett lecture.
The original claim was essentially that energy use can't increase past a certain point because it would result in too much energy density. The obvious flaw in the claim is that it assumes no ability to increase the volume of space in which the energy use takes place, which is an invalid premise. Space is really big.
No, dude, even if you postulate FTL spaceships, the size of the Universe doesn't matter, you always eventually become an explosion. All exponential growth curves are S-shaped.
At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.
We don't even know for sure that the universe is finite. You're going to run out of hydrogen before you run out of somewhere to put the heat.
Yeah, Ehrlich will be right any day now. Just you watch . . .
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.
It is crazy to me that there are any tariffs anywhere on solar panels. You can make them more efficiently? Great.
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.
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.
I wasn't satisfied with his idea because it assumed that the biomass had to stay dry indefinitely, despite being locked behind an impermeable barrier. It's also not very convenient geographically, because raising crops (at least for low-value types like switchgrass) is not economically viable in the driest areas where they would be stored.
I'd burn the wood, catch CO2 with oxides, store it as carbonates. The rest would go back to the environment.
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.
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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.
What does thermodynamically unviable means? There's no thermodynamic laws specifically on carbon.
I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but CO2 air capture is incredibly inefficient, and it consumes energy which itself releases heat. So if the amount of CO2 you capture reduces heat by X degrees but you release Y degrees in energy consumption to achieve that where Y > X, that would be one interpretation of "thermodynamically unviable". It seems implausible to me but not impossible.
The effect of the heat released in the air is negligible compared to the greenhouse effect.
CO2 capture might be economically unviable but nothing physically prevents it from working.
> The effect of the heat released in the air is negligible compared to the greenhouse effect.
And the amount of CO2 gathered by direct air capture is also negligible, so you can't just hand wave a position that one negligible amount is obviously greater than another.
Are you familiar with Terraform Industries works?
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.
> 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?
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).
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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.
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.
> All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide.
Why not make the silicon Carbide into bricks, and build stuff out of it?
I’d like to have one delivered to my neighbour on Venus please, curious what would happen.
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.
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.
>>> raise crops for biomass (sequestering CO2) and freeze them in huge aboveground piles during winter by running pipes through the middle
Isn't this what the arctic tundra is, without the pipes?
Pretty much. The only pipes in the arctic tundra are oil pipes actively trying to stop this freezing process.
Exactly.
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.
Indeed if you insulate the pile as the OP suggests, the entire pile should reach pyrolisis temperatures.
That does seem like a much better approach than freezing it, then.
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.
This is a downside, but big flat boats floating down river don't seem like big carbon releasers, bonus points if they use solar/wind to get back up river.
Wouldn’t the bonus points be better allocated to making the boats from the carbon you’re wanting to sequester, so they don’t have to go back up-river?
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...
>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!
Any idea is enlivened by the possibility of criticality and runaway thermal energy production as the melting hay produces heat, thus melting more hay and so on.
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.
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.
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.
I have seen efficiency figures vary from as low as 0.1% upwards of 10% but it seems difficult to quantify.
My shoot from the hip intuitive thought is that the massive amount of plant matter it took to make petroleum demonstrates how inefficient it is to get energy in that chemical state. A fools errand to try and do it over.
It has been said that Coal/Gas/Oil is a half billion years of stored solar energy. That is wildly inaccurate for many reasons, but even if we are using a few thousand years of stored energy, that is still a wide gap to cover.
The 10% is for algae, I think. And that requires juicing the liquid with enough CO2 so they can continue to photosynthesize. If you're DACing that much CO2, you might as well just sequester it.
""I hope other companies follow Gitpod's lead and support the high achievers that our digital society is built upon by enabling them to become independent artists that build truly open ecosystems""
This a great idea.
It forgets that most artist starve.
The meme of the "Starving Artist" working as a barista, is not in our cultural zeitgeist for nothing.
On the one hand: Nice formulas.
On the other hand: Glaciers are melting, even in Iceland. Keeping stuff frozen seems pretty difficult in practice.
Also, one of the formulas for air flow through the pile seems to assume 90 straight days of constantly freezing temperatures. I doubt there is prime agricultural land where you get that.
Oddly related to today's video from Half as Interesting about covering up snow on ski slopes during the summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB3rYfJjcMk
Instead of freezing plants we can more simply drop them in oxygen deprived seas, like the bottom of the black sea.
The problem is the scale that is required, we generate so much CO2 that capturing it would require to build the biggest industry on earth dedicated to this (several time that of concrete)
Are the going prices for carbon credits sufficiently high that this approach could be commercialized?
Or. And I’m just spit balling here. Plant super long lived trees. Redwoods live for >200 years. Eucalyptus grow very quickly and might be a good option too.
I can do you one better. Plant those trees and when their growth (in terms of sequestered C02/year) start to plateau you cut them and either use them for construction or bury them in places where the conditions are right for coal formation. Since we understood the "coalification" process we can also manufacture such sites close to where said trees are planted.
In the latter case you bury the trees and forget them because accelerating coal synthesis is energy intensive, and so you can't really reuse that coal as it would be a net negative in our energy budget.
So you either are sequestering C02 and using it to create houses that will be around at least few decades (and in the process maybe also decrease the material cost of such constructions) or permanently sequester it in a way that only a few % of the sequestered C02 gets back into the atmosphere.
I can't find anymore the article that explains what I mentioned, but the issue is that is not economically profitable (is costs $$$ without generating a return with the current laws). However, I believe that if you account the damage climate change is doing around the world it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If this is our solution then it's going to actually be solved when a good chunk of humanity gets wiped out. Because I don't see this happening when our dominant economic system demands growth and consumption. Disappointing our science fiction missed the mark on this one assuming humanity would be wiped out by super-weapons and not by inadvertently changing our world to be uninhabitable faster than we can adapt to it.
Here's to hopefully dying before it gets too bad!
Yes, if we just banned ads I suspect that would already greatly affect our consumption.
And how's that going?
"Microsoft .NET C# (fsharp is completely open and does not have these issues)"
There you go. Everyone should use F#
nice glad its solved now. great headline
Capitalism will live yet another day, whew. We can keep on with the destruction of the environment with this just one little trick.
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.
The best option is a global deadly disease. #thanosWasRight
we created the problem by abusing technology so I doubt more technology will solve it. We need to change our consumerism culture from throw away to keep forever.
Given that it is proving near impossible to get everyone to "do the right thing", technology is the only realistic way out of this.
much better option than stratospheric aerosol injection, it’s easily reversible
no one understands uncertainty
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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.
Just for scale how tons of carbon are in an acre or hectare of corn, wheat, or other crop. Being able to say how many farms would need to do this to counter act our release could provide an interesting sanity check.
The average house weighs 40-80 tons, so 2.8 tons per capita per year is a house every 14-28 years, which seems reasonable, plus infrastructure.
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.