I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2 sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is already available.
Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into the same environmental complaints as the idea of seeding otherwise barren areas of the ocean with missing metals, causing algae blooms that sink to the bottom. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea... for a discussion of some of those. (And see https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-fer... for a more laudatory article about this in the general press.) If you can deal with the regulatory concerns, the existing low-tech solution is one of the cheaper ways of removing CO2 that is known.
Speaking personally, I understand the qualms of environmentalists but consider the possibility of local toxic algae blooms to be a less serious environmental disaster than the otherwise certain ocean acidification that will wipe out all shellfish species worldwide. Yeah, nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but in this case I think it is better than the alternative.
I am working on a non-profit that is utilizing Schuiling's research and is actually getting this project done. We are scouting beaches right now for a "wiggle" tank, which is a sort of see-saw like device where we can gather data to affirm the real world dissolution rate. The chemistry, however, is sound that each 1 ton of olivine will sequester 1.25 tons of carbon.
By the end of 2019 we hope to have our first olivine on the beach. The project will be funded by donations, but we will also be selling olivine/peridot jewelry that's price equates to actual tons of olivine we will dump on the beach. Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. The next closest technology for sequestering carbon is well over $150/per ton.
As fairly experienced aquarium hobbyist I'm a bit worried about the side-effects of this approach. If you add amounts of olivine that are sufficient to create a globally significant effect on CO2 how do you avoid altering the local environment parameters too quickly? Marine animals are not as adapted to quickly changing environment like freshwater or terrestrial animals, and sudden swings in CO2, pH and hardness (which are all interconnected) could just wipe out the whole local ecosystems. Cyanobacteria and algae blooms are just the tip of the iceberg here. This is something that needs to be implemented really carefully and step by step to avoid causing even worse catastrophe.
As one of those environmentalists, my qualm isn't so much that this may be dangerous but that carbon capture tech (and associated "carbon capture and storage") is often championed by people looking to delay implementation of technology and laws that limit carbon emissions. It is far more energy-efficient to curtail carbon emissions than try to capture it once emitted. The most efficient use of money is to do things like close coal power plants in favor of solar/wind. Once all the coal plants are gone, then is the time to focus on capture.
I thought that the biggest problem with the "seeding the ocean with iron" method of sequestration was not the "qualms of environmentalists" but that it turned out to sequester a lot less carbon than initially thought?
> nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but in this case I think it is better than the alternative.
I don't like this reasoning because when it comes to environmental effects we've always had individual firm expectations but we haven't known, we didn't know and we still don't know.
But I do believe the growing crisis demands urgent research and gradual early implementation of a range of projects like ocean seeding, and others which may be opposed by a most skeptical portion of the environmental movement. But when there are doubts about the details of potentially massive eco-engineering projects, please dont write them up as 'qualms of environmentalists' The movement has broadcast for decades the crisis we face today, helped in many situations and hindered very few - it was never truly characterized by sentimentality.
Large-scale geoengineering has the potential for unexpected consequences that could seriously damage the environment. This applies to olivine mining and desert flooding.
Personally, I think a good compromise lies in resorting to algal blooms in a controlled setting.
Algal blooms have another advantage: there is already hypertrophication around farming regions where water bodies are polluted with fertilizers.
So the ideia is to build artificial reservoirs as buffers for algal blooms that not only pollute the water, jam irrigation systems and decrease biodiversity, but also as a means for carbon fixation. The algae would then have to be harvested, processed and buried. A fraction of it could be used to produce biofuels, thus reducing the need for fossil fuels, and for fertilization, which would reduce the usage of artificial, carbon-releasing fertilizers.
My only doubt is whether the scalability is interesting enough.
Unfortunately ocean fertilization efforts are limited by phosphorus. And even in simulations where the entire phosphorus content of the ocean was "magically" replenished every year for the max amount of biomass possible it only slightly delayed air CO2 levels by about a decade and didn't significantly impact ocean CO2 levels.
Look you raise good points but this is nonsense. The Earth has had far higher CO2 concentrations for geological periods and there’s no fossil record suggesting shellfish all died. This kind of Trumpian rhetoric just hands ammo to the skeptics.
We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees.
[Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.
I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And it is already up and running.
Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly.
Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology
> Carbon Engineering's fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil
Seriously?! If this is actually true, sign me up. I will absolutely pay a 25% fuel tax to make the world a better place and also not have to give oil companies more money
Carbon Engineering should be focusing on capture and sequestration, not this synthesized fuel BS.
Air-To-fuel is not and will never be their moneymaker. The synthesized fuel is not in demand and probably was thought of by a board member who heard of the word "value add" for the first time.
The ONLY in-demand product of CCapture is the CO2 itself - whether it's the gov. who pays for it to be sequestered or an O&G company who pays for it to be used in enhanced recovery. Even the O&G demand is insignificant compared to the amount of money they'll get in sequestration contracts from the government, or by proxy, the FF producers who'll be required to implement them on site.
It's important to note CCS is required to meet emissions targets - so I hope CE doesn't get distracted with less important/profitable goals.
That helps with reducing emissions (modulo inefficiency) but since we're already past the point where that was sufficient, we still need to sequester additional carbon without burning it.
It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline:
> Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said.
So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?
An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline. Americans are driving ever larger and less fuel-efficient cars in part because gas prices have remained steady or fallen in real terms since the 70s. In fact, Ford announced a few months ago that they will stop selling passenger cars in the US (except the Mustang), to focus on more popular trucks and SUVs.
But this is just about the least politically palatable policy imaginable. Democrats don't like it because it's a very regressive tax—the working poor across much of the country drive to work in older, less efficient cars. And besides being opposed to any "new taxes," the rural Republican base would be hit especially hard by this as well.
If the article posted last week is to be believed [1], which I do, then transportation makes up a relatively small portion of emissions (14%).
Also, the demand for gasoline is very inelastic. Very little driving done today is for pleasure, so the cost would have to be raised so much that people are reducing driving out of necessity/looking for alternatives.
Finally, consumption taxes on necessities act regressively (ie the poor are taxed proportionally more than the rich).
All carbon taxes can be made non-regressive by giving each citizen (or resident, or taxpayer or whatever) a credit.
A form of cap-and-trade in which the carbon credits are auctioned off to emitters (and retail fuel sellers) and the profits are distributed equally to all residents would likely be progressive, since wealthy people are likely to have a higher carbon footprint.
[edit]
The biggest problem with any sort of carbon tax is that at some point it incentivizes evasion more than conservation. e.g. importing finished goods and electricity rather than raw materials and fuel just moves the emissions to another country.
Raising gas taxes are a good idea for other reasons too, primarily being the funding of infrastructure maintenance. Gas taxes are an almost perfect tax, where the more you're using the underlying public good (the road) the more you'll pay to support it.
However, if EVs become the norm, that relationship breaks down and it becomes trickier to fund roads with taxes that link very directly to usage--assuming you believe privacy is a good thing and worth protecting.
> An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline.
It seems we are past the luxury of looking for incentives to reduce CO2 emissions. It's about reducing CO2 emissions right now, no proxy allowed, no IFTTT schemes.
There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. We could monetize that but it doesn't matter. We can't go beyond that amount.
Perhaps using fees from all combustion products (gas, diesel, natural gas, heating oil, coal, etc), to directly fund prairie, forests, gardens, etc will immediately begin reducing CO2 and help increase biodiversity which we are also highly dependent on.
The problem with carbon taxes are the incentives to cheat. The US is probably being the 'most honest' by simply saying we won't implement them. In China and India they would simply misreport their emissions and not pay the tax. And of course, you can't hit the carbon targets w/out getting India & China on board.
In the absence of a world governing body with teeth (e.g. space aliens with a death ray), you can't enforce a carbon tax.
Can we discuss space sunshades? Assuming the cost of getting freight to orbit goes down substantially as companies like SpaceX ramp up launches, what's the limiting parameter on some sort of sunshade over the north and/or south pole? Is it indeed the cost of launching the sunshade, or are there other factors at play which make the space sunshade unrealistic? What materials would be reflective and resilient and cost-effective to block the sun? Would polar blockers be enough to cool the planet as a whole and stop warming, or would multiple sunshades spread around the globe be better?
Also, generally, what about increasing cloud cover in general? Wouldn't this reap a huge reward for cooling the planet? I know it doesn't remove gasses and prevent ocean acidification, however it may help with heat-related issues.
I was just talking with my uncle a few days ago who has sailed around the Caribbean. He said there are meters-thick piles of what he thought was algae piling up on beaches. From a search:
So looks like this is Sargassum (brown seaweed). I feel like any large-scale geoengineering to combat carbon will probably involve growing something like this over large areas in the middle of the ocean and then burying it.
This would only be feasible if it scales by the square or cube. I'm thinking a genetically modified plant designed to grow in single stalks or sheets hundreds of miles long so that it can be wound up by some kind of continuous process. It could use a traditional coal power plant modified to burn some small portion (say 1%) of the plant itself.
Sure there are side effects and unintended consequences from this but cut me some slack, it's only my first idea!
"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work".
I had a recent crackpot idea that falls into the "unlikely to work" category since my background is not chemistry.
Given that a modern automobile's tailpipe emissions are mostly C02 + H20, those molecules can be converted into ethylene (C2H2) using known efficient electro-catalytic processes. The conversion of ethylene gas to a polyethylene (plastic) is well known and has the added benefit of being exothermic.
The end goal is for my car to output a lump of plastic I can drop into the recycling bin instead of CO2.
But my gut tells me that:
1) There is no way to speed up the reactions to keep up with the 80 liters per second of tailpipe exhaust (~40rps * 2.0 liter engine) without this system being impractically large and/or requiring energy intensive compressors.
2) No one, including me, wants to drive around with a tank of hydrogen and a tank of ethylene gas.
But still, it might be fun to hack on something like this assuming I can do it safely. If anyone has any feedback, or has experience making polyethylene, I would be grateful for feedback even if it is negative. Thanks.
> The question then becomes, whether we can create new genetic chemistries that are not based on DNA, but some new genetic polymer?
Is this article a PR piece? I am a bit annoyed by the lack of reflection in this naive approach to develop xeno-biology and let it loose in our (only) planetary habitat.
If it were the only statement of the kind in the sub-articles, it would be fine. There is, however, a strong disregard for second/third systems effects. Radical approaches alone do not cut it, they have to 'fit'.
Not that it is easy to do in the first place, but please think about the ecosystem as a whole. It is hard to take these type of statements seriously - but this is YC here, an outlet with a lot of media impact. Please communicate a responsible call for action.
Charm Industrial [1] was recently mentioned on HN, with a novel approach to BECCS using grass to produce carbon-negative hydrogen. Grasses are the highest-yielding biomass per acre and thus the cheapest CO2 removal option. It also helps if you can make a profitable product from that biomass, like Charm is doing with hydrogen.
Not much info online, but we have a weekly climate newsletter [2], or you can ask me (cofounder)
Good. More and more, reducing GHG gas emissions politically or through any sort of international agreement looks like a pipe dream.
I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990 levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011 in order to avoid paying billions in fines.
It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop global warming.
IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this -- carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things get really bad.
Whatever the solution is to global warming and the looming ecological crisis, I don't believe it lies in more technology.
The only viable solution in my opinion is for people to realise that our planet's resources are finite and that we need to accept this fact. AS others here have stated, moving from a growth-based economy to a sustainable one is the only way forward. Sustainability and technological startups are diametrically opposed.
For anyone who is interested in the Energy Industry in general, including Carbon Capture (CCS), I would recommend "The Energy Gang" podcast as well as "The Interchange".
The guys who run the podcast are not long on CCS as a savior for 1.5 degrees C, but they are incredibly knowledgable about the space and dive into a lot of technical, policy, and economic minutiae that you wouldn't think would exist.
I never exactly knew how much mitigating something like peaker plant composition and more sophisticated demand response can affect existing CO2 emissions. Even things like the opinions of energy executives in the (very silo'd) regional utilities (Dominion Energy, Green Mountain Power, etc) can have a wide-reaching effect on the timeline of policy.
I've listened to the whole run of each of the podcast and it's definitely got me more excited about the space. I'm glad YC is getting more aggressive.
Just US $250 billion per year to offset ALL of humanity's carbon emissions. Yes I said ALL. It would cost less than the ongoing 'war on terror.' If I was rich I would be building autonomous mining robots so I could do it myself because I'm not confident governments will take action until it's too late.
The only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is leaving it in the ground.
This isn't a smart-arse answer given every additional gallon of oil dug or gas fracked makes the problem worse, the oil industry hasn't yet accepted defeat, and politics still promotes and subsidises fossil.
How then to take that problem out of the realm of political corruption (lobbying) even faster?
We know what to do. Slightly facetiously, simply copy Orkney, we know how, and the cost. Save a little oil for chemicals and plastics that cannot be replaced. Yet we don't. Lobbying and politics is the problem.
The ocean phytoplankton technology sounds like it has the potential to screw the planet up worse than the climate change issues it's trying to solve.
Massive, self-replicating system of genetically engineered bacteria? I'm certainly no marine biologist, but I'm pretty sure phytoplankton are a super important part of the world's ecosystem. Suddenly massively increasing the number of them that exist in the open ocean seems like it would wreak havoc on the world's ecological balance.
I'm quite impressed by this presentation. There is a tremendous amount of content here to excite some different audiences about opportunities for planet scale changes.
I'm super concerned about externalities for any sort of geo-engineering, but we are going to get some externalities of the present course anyway.
I'm encouraged by the full-scope approach this report takes, though I get very worried about technological fundamentalism, the idea that we might possibly engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change. Don't get me wrong, we might, but do we really want the reality it gives us on the other side?
Charles Eisenstein, a prescient thinker on this topic (and others), has advocated for our reconnection and renewed stewardship to/of the earth. That might sound a bit new-agey to some, but after reading his recent book, he made some compelling points:
- mainstream environmentalism has taken a reductionist approach by almost solely dedicating itself to emissions reduction (it has also made the movement vulnerable to climate-change deniers, who are (at least partially) correct in that emissions cannot account for ALL of our environmental issues... e.g. bees dying off has likely nothing to do with carbon emissions, yet the culprit is often vaguely referred to by many activists as "climate change" which has become synonymous with "carbon emissions")
- while reducing our emissions is unquestionably critical, we need to widen our focus to include the following, which are equally if not more important: restoring water cycles, considerate reforestation/halting deforestation, ending pesticide use (which is likely a primary driver of insect die-off, causing catastrophic disruptions in global food chains and biodiversity, both of which are critical to nature's ability to heal itself), and last but not least:
- regenerative, no-till agriculture (versus till-intensive, soil-eroding industrialized agriculture) is an effective tool for restoring these systems, and it also acts a stunningly powerful carbon-sink (by some estimates, if my memory serves me correctly, we could reduce current emissions enormously by converting only 10% of our global industrialized, mono-crop farmland to regenerative, no-till farmland, which IMO is a small endeavor when compared to the tech-intensive and potentially world-altering prospects of massive carbon-sucking machines or injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to induce artificial cooling)
For anyone interested, his recent book is "Climate: A new story." It was the most meditative and thought-provoking collection of ideas that I've read on the state of the environment and climate. It's also incredibly hopeful without being blindly optimistic. In fact, it's rooted in a deep sense of awareness, not just of the many existential ecological crises we face, but of the new mindset we must adopt if we are to truly heal our planet.
What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed from power plants to cement factories.
This is awesome! Some people don't like having a Plan B along these lines because they think it distracts with the standard approach of emission reduction. In reality, for something this important (i.e. Keter level destruction event) we should pursue all threads simultaneously.
"If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work." In fact, let's at least start brainstorming about plans to deal with Phase 3, too.
It's been interesting to watch my own thinking evolve:
20 years ago: "I'm sure technology will figure out how to reduce emissions. Sequestering tech is neat, but will only take off if the end product is itself useful in bulk"
10 years ago: "Sequestering tech will take too long and has too many potential complications to rely on, we need to get serious about reduction."
Now: "We're screwed and it's only a matter of how much people end up suffering. I'm very skeptical of sequestering tech, but we need anything that works"
Desert flooding even happened before by mistake in the US:
It was not long before the Colorado River began to wreak havoc with its erratic flows. In autumn, the river would drop below the level of the canal inlet, and temporary brush diversion dams had to be constructed. In early 1905, heavy floods destroyed the headworks of the canal, and water began to flow uncontrolled down the canal towards the Salton Sink. On August 9, the entire flow of the Colorado swerved into the canal and began to flood the bottom of the Imperial Valley. In a desperate gamble to close the breach, crews of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose tracks ran through the valley, attempted to dam the Colorado above the canal, only to see their work demolished by a flash flood.[197] It took seven attempts, more than $3 million, and two years for the railroad, the CDC, and the federal government to permanently block the breach and send the Colorado on its natural course to the gulf – but not before part of the Imperial Valley was flooded under a 45-mile-long (72 km) lake, today's Salton Sea.
Curious, how does desert flooding fit into this? It's basically energy creation using hydro or am I missing the point here?
Edit: Never mind, missed the YC dessert flooding article:
>> This system of oases would be used to grow phytoplankton. With additional desalinated water, it could irrigate the surrounding area to propagate vegetation as well as provide fresh water to nearby communities. These oases would operate similarly to the ocean phytoplankton cultivation concept but executed in a relatively controlled and, thereby, safer environment than in the ocean. Unlike BECCS, the oases would absorb CO2 via phytoplankton growth - phytoplankton produce biomass faster than agriculture, reducing the necessary surface area by almost 4x - which would be periodically harvested to extend the length of sequestration and set up downstream use as fertilizer or other higher value products. This would be the largest infrastructure project undertaken, making its scale the main challenge.
[+] [-] btilly|7 years ago|reply
Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into the same environmental complaints as the idea of seeding otherwise barren areas of the ocean with missing metals, causing algae blooms that sink to the bottom. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea... for a discussion of some of those. (And see https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-fer... for a more laudatory article about this in the general press.) If you can deal with the regulatory concerns, the existing low-tech solution is one of the cheaper ways of removing CO2 that is known.
Speaking personally, I understand the qualms of environmentalists but consider the possibility of local toxic algae blooms to be a less serious environmental disaster than the otherwise certain ocean acidification that will wipe out all shellfish species worldwide. Yeah, nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but in this case I think it is better than the alternative.
[+] [-] matznerd|7 years ago|reply
By the end of 2019 we hope to have our first olivine on the beach. The project will be funded by donations, but we will also be selling olivine/peridot jewelry that's price equates to actual tons of olivine we will dump on the beach. Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. The next closest technology for sequestering carbon is well over $150/per ton.
For more info and access to the full text studies, visit https://Climitigation.org and Project Vesta https://ProjectVesta.org
[+] [-] ivanhoe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|7 years ago|reply
As one of those environmentalists, my qualm isn't so much that this may be dangerous but that carbon capture tech (and associated "carbon capture and storage") is often championed by people looking to delay implementation of technology and laws that limit carbon emissions. It is far more energy-efficient to curtail carbon emissions than try to capture it once emitted. The most efficient use of money is to do things like close coal power plants in favor of solar/wind. Once all the coal plants are gone, then is the time to focus on capture.
[+] [-] greglindahl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strainer|7 years ago|reply
I don't like this reasoning because when it comes to environmental effects we've always had individual firm expectations but we haven't known, we didn't know and we still don't know.
But I do believe the growing crisis demands urgent research and gradual early implementation of a range of projects like ocean seeding, and others which may be opposed by a most skeptical portion of the environmental movement. But when there are doubts about the details of potentially massive eco-engineering projects, please dont write them up as 'qualms of environmentalists' The movement has broadcast for decades the crisis we face today, helped in many situations and hindered very few - it was never truly characterized by sentimentality.
[+] [-] chicob|7 years ago|reply
Personally, I think a good compromise lies in resorting to algal blooms in a controlled setting.
Algal blooms have another advantage: there is already hypertrophication around farming regions where water bodies are polluted with fertilizers.
So the ideia is to build artificial reservoirs as buffers for algal blooms that not only pollute the water, jam irrigation systems and decrease biodiversity, but also as a means for carbon fixation. The algae would then have to be harvested, processed and buried. A fraction of it could be used to produce biofuels, thus reducing the need for fossil fuels, and for fertilization, which would reduce the usage of artificial, carbon-releasing fertilizers.
My only doubt is whether the scalability is interesting enough.
[+] [-] superkuh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobthepanda|7 years ago|reply
This to me smells like it could have potential unforeseen consequences like the Deepwater Horizon cleanup.
[+] [-] User23|7 years ago|reply
Look you raise good points but this is nonsense. The Earth has had far higher CO2 concentrations for geological periods and there’s no fossil record suggesting shellfish all died. This kind of Trumpian rhetoric just hands ammo to the skeptics.
[+] [-] pokemongoaway|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GreeniFi|7 years ago|reply
[Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.
[+] [-] all_usernames|7 years ago|reply
Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-...
[+] [-] gustaf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterlk|7 years ago|reply
Seriously?! If this is actually true, sign me up. I will absolutely pay a 25% fuel tax to make the world a better place and also not have to give oil companies more money
[+] [-] carapace|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biglenny|7 years ago|reply
Air-To-fuel is not and will never be their moneymaker. The synthesized fuel is not in demand and probably was thought of by a board member who heard of the word "value add" for the first time.
The ONLY in-demand product of CCapture is the CO2 itself - whether it's the gov. who pays for it to be sequestered or an O&G company who pays for it to be used in enhanced recovery. Even the O&G demand is insignificant compared to the amount of money they'll get in sequestration contracts from the government, or by proxy, the FF producers who'll be required to implement them on site.
It's important to note CCS is required to meet emissions targets - so I hope CE doesn't get distracted with less important/profitable goals.
[+] [-] loeg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neolefty|7 years ago|reply
It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline:
> Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said.
So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] skookumchuck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gingerbread-man|7 years ago|reply
But this is just about the least politically palatable policy imaginable. Democrats don't like it because it's a very regressive tax—the working poor across much of the country drive to work in older, less efficient cars. And besides being opposed to any "new taxes," the rural Republican base would be hit especially hard by this as well.
[+] [-] nthot|7 years ago|reply
Also, the demand for gasoline is very inelastic. Very little driving done today is for pleasure, so the cost would have to be raised so much that people are reducing driving out of necessity/looking for alternatives.
Finally, consumption taxes on necessities act regressively (ie the poor are taxed proportionally more than the rich).
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
[+] [-] aidenn0|7 years ago|reply
A form of cap-and-trade in which the carbon credits are auctioned off to emitters (and retail fuel sellers) and the profits are distributed equally to all residents would likely be progressive, since wealthy people are likely to have a higher carbon footprint.
[edit]
The biggest problem with any sort of carbon tax is that at some point it incentivizes evasion more than conservation. e.g. importing finished goods and electricity rather than raw materials and fuel just moves the emissions to another country.
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|7 years ago|reply
However, if EVs become the norm, that relationship breaks down and it becomes trickier to fund roads with taxes that link very directly to usage--assuming you believe privacy is a good thing and worth protecting.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|7 years ago|reply
It seems we are past the luxury of looking for incentives to reduce CO2 emissions. It's about reducing CO2 emissions right now, no proxy allowed, no IFTTT schemes.
There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. We could monetize that but it doesn't matter. We can't go beyond that amount.
[+] [-] lymeeducator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonuser123456|7 years ago|reply
In the absence of a world governing body with teeth (e.g. space aliens with a death ray), you can't enforce a carbon tax.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|7 years ago|reply
Also, generally, what about increasing cloud cover in general? Wouldn't this reap a huge reward for cooling the planet? I know it doesn't remove gasses and prevent ocean acidification, however it may help with heat-related issues.
[+] [-] zackmorris|7 years ago|reply
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-se...
So looks like this is Sargassum (brown seaweed). I feel like any large-scale geoengineering to combat carbon will probably involve growing something like this over large areas in the middle of the ocean and then burying it.
This would only be feasible if it scales by the square or cube. I'm thinking a genetically modified plant designed to grow in single stalks or sheets hundreds of miles long so that it can be wound up by some kind of continuous process. It could use a traditional coal power plant modified to burn some small portion (say 1%) of the plant itself.
Sure there are side effects and unintended consequences from this but cut me some slack, it's only my first idea!
[+] [-] louprado|7 years ago|reply
I had a recent crackpot idea that falls into the "unlikely to work" category since my background is not chemistry.
Given that a modern automobile's tailpipe emissions are mostly C02 + H20, those molecules can be converted into ethylene (C2H2) using known efficient electro-catalytic processes. The conversion of ethylene gas to a polyethylene (plastic) is well known and has the added benefit of being exothermic.
The end goal is for my car to output a lump of plastic I can drop into the recycling bin instead of CO2.
But my gut tells me that:
1) There is no way to speed up the reactions to keep up with the 80 liters per second of tailpipe exhaust (~40rps * 2.0 liter engine) without this system being impractically large and/or requiring energy intensive compressors.
2) No one, including me, wants to drive around with a tank of hydrogen and a tank of ethylene gas.
But still, it might be fun to hack on something like this assuming I can do it safely. If anyone has any feedback, or has experience making polyethylene, I would be grateful for feedback even if it is negative. Thanks.
[+] [-] wuschel|7 years ago|reply
Is this article a PR piece? I am a bit annoyed by the lack of reflection in this naive approach to develop xeno-biology and let it loose in our (only) planetary habitat.
If it were the only statement of the kind in the sub-articles, it would be fine. There is, however, a strong disregard for second/third systems effects. Radical approaches alone do not cut it, they have to 'fit'.
Not that it is easy to do in the first place, but please think about the ecosystem as a whole. It is hard to take these type of statements seriously - but this is YC here, an outlet with a lot of media impact. Please communicate a responsible call for action.
[+] [-] chimere|7 years ago|reply
Not much info online, but we have a weekly climate newsletter [2], or you can ask me (cofounder)
[1] https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/
[2] https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...
[+] [-] peacetreefrog|7 years ago|reply
I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990 levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011 in order to avoid paying billions in fines.
It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop global warming.
IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this -- carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things get really bad.
[+] [-] ciconia|7 years ago|reply
The only viable solution in my opinion is for people to realise that our planet's resources are finite and that we need to accept this fact. AS others here have stated, moving from a growth-based economy to a sustainable one is the only way forward. Sustainability and technological startups are diametrically opposed.
[+] [-] lchengify|7 years ago|reply
The guys who run the podcast are not long on CCS as a savior for 1.5 degrees C, but they are incredibly knowledgable about the space and dive into a lot of technical, policy, and economic minutiae that you wouldn't think would exist.
I never exactly knew how much mitigating something like peaker plant composition and more sophisticated demand response can affect existing CO2 emissions. Even things like the opinions of energy executives in the (very silo'd) regional utilities (Dominion Energy, Green Mountain Power, etc) can have a wide-reaching effect on the timeline of policy.
I've listened to the whole run of each of the podcast and it's definitely got me more excited about the space. I'm glad YC is getting more aggressive.
[+] [-] super-serial|7 years ago|reply
Just US $250 billion per year to offset ALL of humanity's carbon emissions. Yes I said ALL. It would cost less than the ongoing 'war on terror.' If I was rich I would be building autonomous mining robots so I could do it myself because I'm not confident governments will take action until it's too late.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|7 years ago|reply
This isn't a smart-arse answer given every additional gallon of oil dug or gas fracked makes the problem worse, the oil industry hasn't yet accepted defeat, and politics still promotes and subsidises fossil.
How then to take that problem out of the realm of political corruption (lobbying) even faster?
We know what to do. Slightly facetiously, simply copy Orkney, we know how, and the cost. Save a little oil for chemicals and plastics that cannot be replaced. Yet we don't. Lobbying and politics is the problem.
[+] [-] csense|7 years ago|reply
Massive, self-replicating system of genetically engineered bacteria? I'm certainly no marine biologist, but I'm pretty sure phytoplankton are a super important part of the world's ecosystem. Suddenly massively increasing the number of them that exist in the open ocean seems like it would wreak havoc on the world's ecological balance.
[+] [-] mark_element|7 years ago|reply
I'm super concerned about externalities for any sort of geo-engineering, but we are going to get some externalities of the present course anyway.
[+] [-] jasaloo|7 years ago|reply
Charles Eisenstein, a prescient thinker on this topic (and others), has advocated for our reconnection and renewed stewardship to/of the earth. That might sound a bit new-agey to some, but after reading his recent book, he made some compelling points:
- mainstream environmentalism has taken a reductionist approach by almost solely dedicating itself to emissions reduction (it has also made the movement vulnerable to climate-change deniers, who are (at least partially) correct in that emissions cannot account for ALL of our environmental issues... e.g. bees dying off has likely nothing to do with carbon emissions, yet the culprit is often vaguely referred to by many activists as "climate change" which has become synonymous with "carbon emissions")
- while reducing our emissions is unquestionably critical, we need to widen our focus to include the following, which are equally if not more important: restoring water cycles, considerate reforestation/halting deforestation, ending pesticide use (which is likely a primary driver of insect die-off, causing catastrophic disruptions in global food chains and biodiversity, both of which are critical to nature's ability to heal itself), and last but not least:
- regenerative, no-till agriculture (versus till-intensive, soil-eroding industrialized agriculture) is an effective tool for restoring these systems, and it also acts a stunningly powerful carbon-sink (by some estimates, if my memory serves me correctly, we could reduce current emissions enormously by converting only 10% of our global industrialized, mono-crop farmland to regenerative, no-till farmland, which IMO is a small endeavor when compared to the tech-intensive and potentially world-altering prospects of massive carbon-sucking machines or injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to induce artificial cooling)
For anyone interested, his recent book is "Climate: A new story." It was the most meditative and thought-provoking collection of ideas that I've read on the state of the environment and climate. It's also incredibly hopeful without being blindly optimistic. In fact, it's rooted in a deep sense of awareness, not just of the many existential ecological crises we face, but of the new mindset we must adopt if we are to truly heal our planet.
[+] [-] singularity2001|7 years ago|reply
1 kg of iron can fix 83000 kg of carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass.
The idea is that you give algae the one ingredient to growth which is very sparse in the oceans yet over-abundant on land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
"Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age"
[+] [-] akshatrathi|7 years ago|reply
What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed from power plants to cement factories.
[+] [-] Jun8|7 years ago|reply
"If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work." In fact, let's at least start brainstorming about plans to deal with Phase 3, too.
The topic of desert flooding has been thought about quite a bit, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project.
[+] [-] ergothus|7 years ago|reply
20 years ago: "I'm sure technology will figure out how to reduce emissions. Sequestering tech is neat, but will only take off if the end product is itself useful in bulk"
10 years ago: "Sequestering tech will take too long and has too many potential complications to rely on, we need to get serious about reduction."
Now: "We're screwed and it's only a matter of how much people end up suffering. I'm very skeptical of sequestering tech, but we need anything that works"
[+] [-] gregcrv|7 years ago|reply
It was not long before the Colorado River began to wreak havoc with its erratic flows. In autumn, the river would drop below the level of the canal inlet, and temporary brush diversion dams had to be constructed. In early 1905, heavy floods destroyed the headworks of the canal, and water began to flow uncontrolled down the canal towards the Salton Sink. On August 9, the entire flow of the Colorado swerved into the canal and began to flood the bottom of the Imperial Valley. In a desperate gamble to close the breach, crews of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose tracks ran through the valley, attempted to dam the Colorado above the canal, only to see their work demolished by a flash flood.[197] It took seven attempts, more than $3 million, and two years for the railroad, the CDC, and the federal government to permanently block the breach and send the Colorado on its natural course to the gulf – but not before part of the Imperial Valley was flooded under a 45-mile-long (72 km) lake, today's Salton Sea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River
[+] [-] aoner|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Never mind, missed the YC dessert flooding article:
>> This system of oases would be used to grow phytoplankton. With additional desalinated water, it could irrigate the surrounding area to propagate vegetation as well as provide fresh water to nearby communities. These oases would operate similarly to the ocean phytoplankton cultivation concept but executed in a relatively controlled and, thereby, safer environment than in the ocean. Unlike BECCS, the oases would absorb CO2 via phytoplankton growth - phytoplankton produce biomass faster than agriculture, reducing the necessary surface area by almost 4x - which would be periodically harvested to extend the length of sequestration and set up downstream use as fertilizer or other higher value products. This would be the largest infrastructure project undertaken, making its scale the main challenge.
[+] [-] stephengillie|7 years ago|reply
For the curious: http://www.scp-wiki.net/object-classes
What Would Dr Bright Do?
[+] [-] soperj|7 years ago|reply
With how well that's been going, I'm wondering why they even need a plan b...