I've observed that environmentalists never get their panties in a knot over natural underwater oil seeps, of which there are many.The natural underwater oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico crank out between 1 and 5 million barrels every single year. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill was about half a million barrels.
There are a bunch of underwater oil seeps on the Alaskan North Slope as well, dumping straight into the Beaufort Sea.
It would be remarkable indeed if humans can invent a technology that sequesters carbon faster than self-replicating, adaptive, distributed independent biological machines that have been around for billions of years, also known as "life", which use CO2 in the atmosphere for most of their body mass. Whatever the technology, it would require something (currently science fiction) like industrial scale fusion power generators, or a miracle improvement in solar cells.
Not necessary. The critical thing that limits CO2 capture by plants through photosynthesis is water, how they manage that gets you to the difference between C3 and C4 plants. A system based on PV might not need much water at all.
Plants not only capture CO2 from the air (pump out entropy) but they also reverse the chemistry to bind C to something like a carbohydrate molecule, whereas in carbon capture they usually compress the CO2 to 1500 psi or so and inject it underground. If you do want to do something useful with the CO2 you might have an e-Fuel factory that turns CO2 into CO and, together with H2, builds up gasoline and diesel molecules via Fischer-Tropsch chemistry which directly competes with (say) making ethanol from biomass. You don’t need so much energy to separate CO2 from N2 and compress it.
> The critical thing that limits CO2 capture by plants through photosynthesis is water
In the ocean, where most photosynthesis occurs, it's definitely not water.
I believe it's iron. I think there have been a few small-scale experiments involving "fertilizing" the ocean by spraying iron compounds on the surface.
Yep. Geoengineering like seeding clouds or atmospheric aerosols (albedo modification) and fertilizing the ocean could absolutely have an impact on global temperature and CO2 levels respectively, but also would almost certainly cause environmental impacts at least on the scale of climate change, and possibly worse.
So GP is mistaken: if we threw environmental caution to the wind, and given sufficient funding, we absolutely could produce tangible reductions in AGW using today's technology.
> but also would almost certainly cause environmental impacts at least on the scale of climate change, and possibly worse.
Or, possibly better. The deep oceans don't have a lot of marine life because there's not much plankton, because all the nutrients have sunk to the bottom. Regions where there are natural upwellings that bring bottom nutrients to the surface tend to have massive plankton populations, leading to massive fish populations (Grand Banks, the west coast of South America, others).
That's why it would be important to do experiments to see what happens when it begins to get scaled up.
"We don't know what would happen" is not a reason to avoid experimentation (indeed, "we don't know what would happen" is pretty much the reason why you do experiments).
I definitely agree, but in the meantime we cannot depend on these strategies when making long-term plans to combat climate change because we don't know whether their side effects will prove to be tolerable.
How do you know that the "long-term plans to combat climate change" won't prove harmful in their own right? They would produce massive economic effects at a minimum. Then there are the unknown effects of (e.g.) removing a lot of energy from the desert and transporting it to other regions. I'd be very surprised if that didn't have some effect. Same thing with extracting energy from the winds on any large scale. Wind energy turned into electricity is energy that's not available to (e.g.) move rain clouds from one region to another.
In general the incoming power from the sun is so many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of power we usefully extract that it's hard to imagine it having any material impact on the biosphere.
The physical presence of solar cells and wind turbines is a different matter, but it's largely a local effect.
Iron is an interesting one. We use a huge amount of iron to produce steel, but that production process releases a massive amount of carbon into the atmosphere. The scale is such that steel is much more a byproduct of releasing that carbon rather than the other way around.
One concern is that if it’s not one thing it’s another: a particular spot in the ocean might be iron limited but if you supply iron you might burn up all the calcium (or something else.) so you are just bringing the carbon capture earlier in time.
The water limit is important when you are considering agriculture and biomass projects that so far we are doing on land.
Note there are biomass energy schemes where you capture CO2 from fermentation or combustion known as
> The critical thing that limits CO2 capture by plants through photosynthesis is water
It's not really true. The critical limit is the inefficiency of photosynthesis, it's around 3-5%. The RuBisCo enzyme just sucks, compared to many other enzymes. So you can't improve the productivity of plants by adding more water.
But if you do have a lot of fresh water, you can cultivate lands that are right now empty.
It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems and adapting our behavior accordingly and instead waste huge amounts of money, brainpower and energy for magical and unlikely to ever work techno fixes.
In this case: if we all agreed to drastically reduce our consumption of animal-based products, we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants. Then harvest them and either process them as biochar, where roughly 50% of the carbon remains captured and use the generated heat for energy/heat generation - or maybe even bury the harvested biomass in a way which ensures no methane or carbon will be emitted.
The plants would do all the hard work, we "just" need to reap its result.
> It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems
Plants a significantly extremely inefficient at capturing carbon compared to industrial technology like carbon capture using Calcium Hydroxide.
> we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants
You severely underestimate the problem and overestimate the ability of trees to fix it. Planting trees doesn't scale to the levels required to make any difference even if we used all land on Earth. It would take around ~2 trillion trees planted per year just to offset the 40-50 gigatons of CO2 being pumped out per year. That is around ~2 billion acres of land - is more than the entire land area of the contiguous US - every year, just to break even.
What do we fertilize those plants with once we dramatically reduced animal product consumption? And how do we handle the health issues of removing almost all animal products from our diets?
Nature gave us eyes. We invented telescopes and microscopes.
Natural selection “only” does the bare minimum that beats the competition. It didn’t design plants to be maximally efficient at removing CO2. Plants do so while also having to deal with respiration, water conservation, heat management, reproduction, nutrient intake, disease prevention, etc.
I’m sure we can do better when we don’t concern ourselves with all that other stuff.
Building boats and navigating them would require colonies of large brain specimens; this approach would carry a big energy cost. Not to mention boat propulsion, especially if you wanted to sail without depending on weather.
Instead of boats it seems more efficient to replace hands/legs with fins/tails.
Tongue in cheek, but only half - natural selection works on a different scale and with different goals, and in that it seems pretty good.
Nah industrial direct capture is a proven technology. Energy isn't the problem, plenty of sun in the southwest. The chemistry isn't a problem, we have sorbents that work great, it's just cost. We don't want to spend 1/3rd of global GDP on carbon sequestration for the next decade.
Not really. Living things absorb CO2 with the intent to live. The CO2 isn't the important part, the living (replicating) is. It's entirely plausible that one could improve efficiency by removing the requirement of living.
It'd be a lot more simple, and faster, for us to just stop releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere if we really cared.
The idea that we can invent our way into a scenario where we can have our cake and eat it too is just a lie that kicks the can down the road. How likely does it really seem that we will find a solution in which we can continue to use more and more natural resources but magically make all the negative externalities suddenly disappear? And is that likelihood more realistic or reasonable than just stopping creating the damage as much as possible?
We could of course use more willingness to sacrifice luxuries but "just stop releasing so much carbon" isn't the solution because emissions is just one part of the optimization problem. The entire global economy is the engine that will produce alternatives to fossil fuels despite it running on fossil fuels. There are obvious cases where carbon is worth emitting e.g. Concrete for a nuclear power plant, Diesel trucks to deliver solar panels, smelting steel for train tracks.
Barring turning everything off tomorrow at astronomical human cost, there is some optimal amount of emissions and if used effectively Carbon Capture/Storage (primarily point source) could shift the Pareto front in the right direction.
I agree with Terraform's founder on at least one thing: atmospheric carbon capture needs to be cheaper than ground extraction. Market forces will decide the rest.
This is not a CO2 cop-out, we need to both stop introducing CO2 into the atmosphere, and also extract gigatons from it. Terraform Industries is addressing both sides.
I'd like to see a massive CO2 -> limestone operation set up with the explicit purpose of creating artificial reefs. That would help offset overfishing in addition to removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Glad that the article discussed lots of the challenges/issues with carbon capture in re: accounting/offsets etc.
I hadn’t heard of this idea yet. It’s quite interesting compared to other CCS tech (eg DAC or post combustion capture followed by sequestering geologically, converting to value added products like ethylene, or <puke> enhanced oil recovery) in as much as it fits into other supply chains/processes which we will likely still be using after we (hopefully) have more or less fully decarbonized the energy industry. At the same time, if we get to that point, the energy requirements of DAC are less problematic because that energy is carbon-free at the source wherever you are in the world.
I’m also glad that the article mentioned the fact that even if we fully decarbonized the grid today, we would still be well served to pursue CCS intensely to hopefully mitigate the effects of the already substantial warming we currently seem more or less locked in for. It’s easy to hate on CCS because of how it can be deployed as crutch to sustain the fossil fuel industry, but the reality is at some point we will need it I think.
At the end of the day CCS is a bit like treating a gunshot victim for heart disease when they are bleeding out at the table - but at the same time, if you do manage to save the patient, it’s a good idea to get that cholesterol under control!
Harvest Coccoliths that have been around for millions of years and are believed of being responsible for the majority of carbon sequestration. Plus, they are pretty!
Layman question: is there a way to figure out how much carbon levels would drop for a given area of new trees/forest? How much would we need to plant to reduce carbon to preindustrial levels?
(I understand that trees don't permanently sequester carbon, but they do keep carbon for at least a century. Which would give us time to figure out other solutions)
It isn't; they take decades to grow to their full size and gather / sequester CO2 (about 15-25 kilos per year? Some sources say as much anyway; I don't know how that compares to emissions), but they will release most of that again if they die and are left to rot. Burying them is an option, but it would have to be in an anaerobic and/or sealed environment so it doesn't break down.
For the opposite effect, the permafrost is melting, allowing thousands of years of sequestered and frozen plant material to defrost and finally start rotting. That's adding a lot of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere, and it adds to the cascading global warming. Just that makes me think we've past the point of no return a while ago.
It seems immediately obvious to me from basic physical principles that carbon capture is very unlikely to be the solution.
"There was an old woman that swallowed a fly" comes to mind.
Okay, so let's say it's possible, you build out a shit ton of solar power to provide the energy required to sequester all of the carbon dioxide emitted so far.
This is a properly huge undertaking. Now you've paved over some appreciable fraction of the Earth and done a load of pollution and damage mining stuff to make the panels.
If I ransack your house and throw stuff everywhere it will take you a hell of a lot more work to undo the damage than it took me to cause it. Entropy is a bitch.
Compared to what? Seems like the externalities and entropy associated with our current path are at least as chaotic and difficult to reverse.
But we’ll only be able to consider an alternative once the 150-year petrochemical free ride is decisively over, and what-if arguments are no longer scary enough to cause doubts.
> Critics of carbon removal have long feared that it will offer polluters an easy way out, by giving them an excuse to continue their emissions.
A great illustration of the moral valence of the issue. If the problem were considered as an engineering problem, then of course it wouldn't be a problem that firms can continue to use carbon-rich manufacturing processes as long as the carbon is removed from the atmosphere shortly after it is produced.
But it's not treated as an engineering problem by activists, it's more akin to sin. There's no offsetting your blasphemy by doing good works. The act itself is unacceptable no matter the circumstance.
Whenever you see a public policy issue that seems to be based on totally ignoring logic consider immediately jumping to the word “trust” and analyzing things that way.
People refuse to take a medicine despite the fact that science says it’s clearly the right move? They don’t trust the scientists.
Environmentalists refuse to see this as an engineering and accounting problem? They don’t trust the people who will be responsible for keeping the numbers in balance.
And so on.
It’s usually much less complicated when you look at things this way. And while I share the desire for the world to head in a more pragmatic direction that coldly analyzes the costs and benefits of policies, at some point we might have to confront the problem of “experts” being fundamentally full of shit across many aspects of public life.
I don't think it's fair to take that tone against climate activists without considering the larger context of the issues here. We have been lied to for decades by the industry and it's lobbyists. They knew damn well what greenhouse gasses were going to do to our world back in the fucking 70's, just like tobacco companies knew what their products would do to people's lungs, just like they knew what lead would do to people and still put it in gas, pipes, and fucking paint. Even now many are still clinging to the bullshit "check your energy impact" garbage, shaming individual consumers for the fact that they knowingly are setting the planet on a course to large-scale ecological disaster and have been since before most of us were born.
It's also worth considering that carbon capture is not a bulletproof solution without costs. The machines themselves are quite large if you want to capture at a scale sufficient to actually offset climate change, and if people hate the look of windmills, oh just wait till they get a look at carbon capture hardware. I've also not yet seen a carbon capture application for motor vehicles, industrial or otherwise (though I would love that). And, carbon capture does not assist us at all in getting off of oil in general, which is a finite resource that we only have so much of and so we really need to figure out different things for that. Not burning oil and it's byproducts saves a hell of a lot of oil for plastics, which we also need.
It is mostly an engineering problem. It's also a lying bastard corporation problem. It's also a complete failure on the part of regulatory structures to take on the problem, and political meekness from every standing government on the face of the earth. It's a problem that ties directly into many systemic failures of our society; the over-centering of profit above any and all other considerations, including our survival. It's a loaded issue.
That's definitely an issue; they are encouraged to sequester emissions, instead of reduce / eliminate them. Same with CO2 emissions rights; for some reason every company gets these for free, AND gets to sell them to other companies if they're under. They should be buying them from the government in the first place, and the price needs to go up sharply every year.
Too many of these ideas end up defeating the purpose.
Another example: NL and energy companies are investing heavily in offshore wind parks. What happens? Instead of existing power plants shutting down, a newly built Microsoft or Google datacenter buys the majority of the capacity of the new wind farm for the next decade or so. Instead of replacing power production with renewables, renewables are added and consumption increases alongside.
Makes sense in a capitalist system too, more supply means cost goes down means demand goes up means cost goes back up.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadI've observed that environmentalists never get their panties in a knot over natural underwater oil seeps, of which there are many.The natural underwater oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico crank out between 1 and 5 million barrels every single year. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill was about half a million barrels.
There are a bunch of underwater oil seeps on the Alaskan North Slope as well, dumping straight into the Beaufort Sea.
Plants not only capture CO2 from the air (pump out entropy) but they also reverse the chemistry to bind C to something like a carbohydrate molecule, whereas in carbon capture they usually compress the CO2 to 1500 psi or so and inject it underground. If you do want to do something useful with the CO2 you might have an e-Fuel factory that turns CO2 into CO and, together with H2, builds up gasoline and diesel molecules via Fischer-Tropsch chemistry which directly competes with (say) making ethanol from biomass. You don’t need so much energy to separate CO2 from N2 and compress it.
In the ocean, where most photosynthesis occurs, it's definitely not water.
I believe it's iron. I think there have been a few small-scale experiments involving "fertilizing" the ocean by spraying iron compounds on the surface.
So GP is mistaken: if we threw environmental caution to the wind, and given sufficient funding, we absolutely could produce tangible reductions in AGW using today's technology.
Or, possibly better. The deep oceans don't have a lot of marine life because there's not much plankton, because all the nutrients have sunk to the bottom. Regions where there are natural upwellings that bring bottom nutrients to the surface tend to have massive plankton populations, leading to massive fish populations (Grand Banks, the west coast of South America, others).
That's why it would be important to do experiments to see what happens when it begins to get scaled up.
"We don't know what would happen" is not a reason to avoid experimentation (indeed, "we don't know what would happen" is pretty much the reason why you do experiments).
And so on.
The physical presence of solar cells and wind turbines is a different matter, but it's largely a local effect.
The water limit is important when you are considering agriculture and biomass projects that so far we are doing on land.
Note there are biomass energy schemes where you capture CO2 from fermentation or combustion known as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
and these do compete directly with direct air capture.
It's not really true. The critical limit is the inefficiency of photosynthesis, it's around 3-5%. The RuBisCo enzyme just sucks, compared to many other enzymes. So you can't improve the productivity of plants by adding more water.
But if you do have a lot of fresh water, you can cultivate lands that are right now empty.
In this case: if we all agreed to drastically reduce our consumption of animal-based products, we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants. Then harvest them and either process them as biochar, where roughly 50% of the carbon remains captured and use the generated heat for energy/heat generation - or maybe even bury the harvested biomass in a way which ensures no methane or carbon will be emitted.
The plants would do all the hard work, we "just" need to reap its result.
Plants a significantly extremely inefficient at capturing carbon compared to industrial technology like carbon capture using Calcium Hydroxide.
> we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants
You severely underestimate the problem and overestimate the ability of trees to fix it. Planting trees doesn't scale to the levels required to make any difference even if we used all land on Earth. It would take around ~2 trillion trees planted per year just to offset the 40-50 gigatons of CO2 being pumped out per year. That is around ~2 billion acres of land - is more than the entire land area of the contiguous US - every year, just to break even.
Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38187573
Nature gave us eyes. We invented telescopes and microscopes.
Natural selection “only” does the bare minimum that beats the competition. It didn’t design plants to be maximally efficient at removing CO2. Plants do so while also having to deal with respiration, water conservation, heat management, reproduction, nutrient intake, disease prevention, etc.
I’m sure we can do better when we don’t concern ourselves with all that other stuff.
Instead of boats it seems more efficient to replace hands/legs with fins/tails.
Tongue in cheek, but only half - natural selection works on a different scale and with different goals, and in that it seems pretty good.
The idea that we can invent our way into a scenario where we can have our cake and eat it too is just a lie that kicks the can down the road. How likely does it really seem that we will find a solution in which we can continue to use more and more natural resources but magically make all the negative externalities suddenly disappear? And is that likelihood more realistic or reasonable than just stopping creating the damage as much as possible?
Barring turning everything off tomorrow at astronomical human cost, there is some optimal amount of emissions and if used effectively Carbon Capture/Storage (primarily point source) could shift the Pareto front in the right direction.
"Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006
Excellent S3 piece on Terraform [20min]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g
I agree with Terraform's founder on at least one thing: atmospheric carbon capture needs to be cheaper than ground extraction. Market forces will decide the rest.
This is not a CO2 cop-out, we need to both stop introducing CO2 into the atmosphere, and also extract gigatons from it. Terraform Industries is addressing both sides.
I hadn’t heard of this idea yet. It’s quite interesting compared to other CCS tech (eg DAC or post combustion capture followed by sequestering geologically, converting to value added products like ethylene, or <puke> enhanced oil recovery) in as much as it fits into other supply chains/processes which we will likely still be using after we (hopefully) have more or less fully decarbonized the energy industry. At the same time, if we get to that point, the energy requirements of DAC are less problematic because that energy is carbon-free at the source wherever you are in the world.
I’m also glad that the article mentioned the fact that even if we fully decarbonized the grid today, we would still be well served to pursue CCS intensely to hopefully mitigate the effects of the already substantial warming we currently seem more or less locked in for. It’s easy to hate on CCS because of how it can be deployed as crutch to sustain the fossil fuel industry, but the reality is at some point we will need it I think.
At the end of the day CCS is a bit like treating a gunshot victim for heart disease when they are bleeding out at the table - but at the same time, if you do manage to save the patient, it’s a good idea to get that cholesterol under control!
Layman question: is there a way to figure out how much carbon levels would drop for a given area of new trees/forest? How much would we need to plant to reduce carbon to preindustrial levels?
(I understand that trees don't permanently sequester carbon, but they do keep carbon for at least a century. Which would give us time to figure out other solutions)
For the opposite effect, the permafrost is melting, allowing thousands of years of sequestered and frozen plant material to defrost and finally start rotting. That's adding a lot of CO2 and methane to the atmosphere, and it adds to the cascading global warming. Just that makes me think we've past the point of no return a while ago.
About 2 trillion trees per year, just to break even on current rates of CO2 emissions. More to reduce it further.
For reference, there's currently an estimated 3 trillion trees on Earth.
"There was an old woman that swallowed a fly" comes to mind.
Okay, so let's say it's possible, you build out a shit ton of solar power to provide the energy required to sequester all of the carbon dioxide emitted so far.
This is a properly huge undertaking. Now you've paved over some appreciable fraction of the Earth and done a load of pollution and damage mining stuff to make the panels.
If I ransack your house and throw stuff everywhere it will take you a hell of a lot more work to undo the damage than it took me to cause it. Entropy is a bitch.
But we’ll only be able to consider an alternative once the 150-year petrochemical free ride is decisively over, and what-if arguments are no longer scary enough to cause doubts.
A great illustration of the moral valence of the issue. If the problem were considered as an engineering problem, then of course it wouldn't be a problem that firms can continue to use carbon-rich manufacturing processes as long as the carbon is removed from the atmosphere shortly after it is produced.
But it's not treated as an engineering problem by activists, it's more akin to sin. There's no offsetting your blasphemy by doing good works. The act itself is unacceptable no matter the circumstance.
People refuse to take a medicine despite the fact that science says it’s clearly the right move? They don’t trust the scientists.
Environmentalists refuse to see this as an engineering and accounting problem? They don’t trust the people who will be responsible for keeping the numbers in balance.
And so on.
It’s usually much less complicated when you look at things this way. And while I share the desire for the world to head in a more pragmatic direction that coldly analyzes the costs and benefits of policies, at some point we might have to confront the problem of “experts” being fundamentally full of shit across many aspects of public life.
It's also worth considering that carbon capture is not a bulletproof solution without costs. The machines themselves are quite large if you want to capture at a scale sufficient to actually offset climate change, and if people hate the look of windmills, oh just wait till they get a look at carbon capture hardware. I've also not yet seen a carbon capture application for motor vehicles, industrial or otherwise (though I would love that). And, carbon capture does not assist us at all in getting off of oil in general, which is a finite resource that we only have so much of and so we really need to figure out different things for that. Not burning oil and it's byproducts saves a hell of a lot of oil for plastics, which we also need.
It is mostly an engineering problem. It's also a lying bastard corporation problem. It's also a complete failure on the part of regulatory structures to take on the problem, and political meekness from every standing government on the face of the earth. It's a problem that ties directly into many systemic failures of our society; the over-centering of profit above any and all other considerations, including our survival. It's a loaded issue.
Too many of these ideas end up defeating the purpose.
Another example: NL and energy companies are investing heavily in offshore wind parks. What happens? Instead of existing power plants shutting down, a newly built Microsoft or Google datacenter buys the majority of the capacity of the new wind farm for the next decade or so. Instead of replacing power production with renewables, renewables are added and consumption increases alongside.
Makes sense in a capitalist system too, more supply means cost goes down means demand goes up means cost goes back up.