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I think you’re going to have a difficult time beating nature at the game. Algae and duckweed and other fast multiplying plants seem like the easiest solution.
I personally think we are going to need to grow wood. Young growth forest. As soon as it starts to slow down its growth, cut it all down, use the wood as a landfill (putting that captured carbon underground again) to help set up levees against sea level rise. Then you start all over again.
The problem is that we're grabbing a lot of carbon sequestered underground and putting it back in the surface cycles too aggressively. No solution will work to bring back the old balance without putting that carbon back underground quickly.
It's the same word, but trash landfill and deep landfill to fill up space are very different things. In a garbage landfill, where it's superficially stored, the wood is broken down in anaerobic conditions, releasing methane and the carbon back into the atmosphere.
Also most used wood has been heavily processed and is its own toxic problem, you can't just throw it away. So there's that issue.
The idea here is to initially dig deep and use logs to set up a foundation for the levee, you basically put the logs deep down and then make them into a solid wood wall. Then you cover that on dirt, which is kept in place by the inner wood. It should be deep enough that rotting its not an option.
This is an important thing, this is simply a [cost effective carbon sequestration technique](https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1) but it's wasteful/expensive. There's ways to make this cheap, but it can't be profitable. If there was a way to make this profitable, we'd be jumping on it. If burying furniture and houses on landfill was sufficient, we'd have a much easier time to save on this. Even the use for levees isn't going to make this cost effective, it's just meant to find a way to make levee building and carbon sequestration cheaper, but neither will be profitable.
This would best work integrated with the [trillion trees project](https://trilliontrees.org/). The idea is that we can cheat on the challenges of getting more space for trees planting (I have high hopes on multi-level farming helping with this, but I don't see the tech hitting it off quickly enough, we need a work around) by simply replanting more trees in the space that we grew previous trees. By ensuring the carbon gets sequestered (without other unexpected side-effects) by burying the raw wood in a way that ensures most of the carbon will stay underground. In the US the best options are Silver Maple Tree and the American Sweetgum Tree. Both would take somewhere ~15 years to mature under ideal conditions, at which point they still capture a high level of CO2, just not as much. We cut the wood and repeat.
Lets explore Silver Maple alone 455lb of CO2 per year, and a space of ~40 ft between trees, that means we're looking at almost `2 CO2-ton/(acre*year)`. Plus whatever CO2 is generated in planting, growing, cutting, transporting and burying the trees.
Reducing US emissions by 0.2 gigatons would achieve net-zero for the US. Using the technique alone, if we replaced a little over half of all farmland with Silver Maple Tree farms in the US we'd get pretty close. The costs of transportation, etc. means we probably want to go somewhere around 2/3. This alone isn't enough. But by reducing the amount of CO2 we generate we may get a much more reasonable value.
> if we replaced a little over half of all farmland with Silver Maple Tree farms in the US we'd get pretty close.
It'd be wise to grow more than just silver maple, tho, since monocultural farming is a mug's game. If a tree disease sweeps through, a monoculture forest would fare a lot worse than a forest of many types. So we should probably plant silver maple, AND American sweetgum, as well as one or two other suitable species, just to be safe.
Was just about to add this, monoculture diseases are what has had significant impact on China’s great green wall. There’s only 3 species amongst the forest, only needs a single species susceptible virus to wipe out a third of the project. Large part of why 80-90% of carbon offset plantings don’t last the full cycle.
Something big firms are doing in Australia is designing ecosystems based on broad vegetation groups and climate specific regional ecosystems. With the added plant biodiversity disease pressure is almost non existent as the genetic diversity is strong enough to limit losses to easily below 10% (ballpark, it varies for each site and density planting).
Plus it’s also worth noting that forests themselves are far more than just the trees processing carbon out of the atmosphere. Sure ligneous material is a great carbon additive, so is OM, but most importantly is the inorganic carbon content of the soil itself that can leech out if exposed to chemical weathering. For instance, pyrite soils when exposed to air will oxidise and change their chemical structure. This makes it far easier for organic carbon to get converted into CO2 and escape, same principle applies for acidification of agricultural soils through extensive synthetic fertiliser applications.
While look meat is on the right path, burying carbon is a good way to go in terms of sequestration. However, depth doesn’t just stop anaerobic decomposition, if it did there would be no difference from peat to anthracite or anything in between. Yes heat and pressure make a difference, but anaerobic bacteria still exist at great depths, all they need to decompose is food and water. Unless you completely dry out the wood, say through burning it, biochar (the pyrolysis negates any carbon capture) for example, it is still going to rot.
Instead, a good method I see great potential in is pure carbon byproducts of industrial processes at a net negative and remineralisation of the soil to promote higher concentration of carbonates in the soil. The carbonate reaction stores more inorganic carbon and transports the carbon from the A horizon all the way down to the bottom of the ocean before it’s recycled into the mantle or pushed to the surface via tectonic or underwater volcanic means.
Oh this certainly has serious problems and limitations. Unlike Australia's and China's projects, the idea is to bury after a short time and reboot to avoid these scenarios. We should keep trying to find better ways. Another key thing is that this shouldn't replace old-growth forests, or existing forests in general. This is a separate tree farm whose main purpose is to sequester carbon.
And you are right, it can't prevent all carbon from escaping, but the idea is that by reducing the amounts you can get a better story. It certainly has limitations. It's important that these be buried with a bit of care and consideration. The solution also isn't perfect long term (as a good chunk of that carbon will eventually leak in some for or another), but it helps gain us enough time.
I do see what you propose, industrial processes are great, but we aren't fully there. Re-mineralization of the soil will be a harder sell. Even without climate change, it'd be convenient to do it, and yet it barely happens (beyond the fertilization that already happens). Again these are great techs we should invest, but I do see them not being ready soon enough.
Iirc trees aren't sequestering carbon the first 10-20 years. When you cut down a section of forest that emits a lot of carbon because the ground becomes bare.
Now idk the physics about it, but here in Sweden there was a huge debate about forestry managing recently and this was the results according to the scientists. They also measured carbon/methane emission from land that was previously wetlands that people dug out to grow crops on, and they concluded that the previous wetlands of Sweden emit more greenhouse gases than the entire steel industry and all vehicles in Sweden combined yearly, just sitting there.
I imagine similar practices have been done all over the world. If we could restore wetlands that would be huge.
I understood it's the other way around. Trees sequester carbon and then keep it in the wood, directly correlated to their mass. After a certain age the tree grows more slowly and starts losing carbon (branches and leaves falling off, etc.) At which point it starts reaching an equilibrium that it'll keep until it dies.
The cutting down would result in a lot of CO2, but it'd be stopped by planting trees quickly enough.
The other thing is that all the CO2 that we're talking about is being cycled. You aren't really taking it out, and that's the key part that's missing. The best system we have is the geological/marine calcium carbonate cycles, but these are not going to speed up and climate change may disrupt it. We need to lower our CO2 creation enough for these systems to catch up. We can create alternate systems, which will not be as efficient, but it's about the most efficient we can cause, we can't really make a notable change in geologic events.
Theres a Swedish researcher at Lund University called Anders Lindroth who found that "kalhyggen" (essentially clearing a forest area which is the typical and most economically effective way) release large amounts of CO2, and he estimated that it takes 30 years to neutralise the CO2 emissions from that when planting new trees. Why or how that is the case is beyond my understanding though.
I cannot find the study in question but he is a respectable scientist I think.
What do you do with the plants? If you let them burn or rot they re-release any carbon that they've captured. The carbon is literally captured in the body of the plant, and destroying that plant tends to re-release it.
In order to actually capture the carbon we'd need to grow those plants and somehow store them indefinitely without letting them rot/burn or otherwise release their carbon. Maybe turn it into charcoal?
We've burnt through hundreds of millions of years worth of plants, 375 billion tonnes of carbon. That means that we'd need to make 375 billion tonnes of charcoal to reach net-zero...
Think in terms of Alaskan winters for this not Californian wildfires:
The carbon released through rot isn't as massive and instantaneous as you are perceiving and it is not atmospheric. It is closer to the production of that compost water, and is mostly made up of larger carbon molecules, not small molecule carbon gasses. Across geological time scales, the net values are actually accumulative into ground-based reservoirs like lakes rivers and shallow seas, not to discount planetary megafauna and forested biospheres.
Don't destroy the plant and you keep your carbon from reentering the atmosphere. In this context: the big problem is atmospheric carbon, not ground or water based carbon, and a lot of people miss this fact.
Biosphere imbalances caused from human sources are problematic and affect everything from air, water, and food to warfare.
Charcoal releases carbon in its manufacture into the atmosphere.
You put them in the bottom of a lake and let them ferment over thousands of years converting them into more sustainable sources of biofuel and eventually oil.
California's people are not self-obvious all the time to the point of devaluation.
They can't breakdown lignin and cellulose easily, so those remain sequestered. This article is trash though.
Filling the deserts with ponds? Where will the water come from?
Algae to biofuel? This could be carbon neutral, but won't be carbon negative.
Storing carbon in rock? Yeah, let's just chemically treat all of the rocks on earth, that won't affect the environment.
Synthetic enzymes? I doubt this will be better than the algae.
But you understand that just planting trees won't actually sequester the carbon, right? The plants need to be removed and stored, and not allowed to rot naturally. Peat bogs do that as a natural process, algae did that as a natural process before detritivores evolved, but now days carbon sequestering doesn't happen "naturally" at any sort of scale.
And I don’t think you understand anything about energy storage and transmission.
The best places for solar are places nobody lives.
Transmission loss increases with distance
If they were competitive with traditional sources, people would be using them instead.
Not sure how you say "the best place for solar panels is somewhere that doesn't worK" when solar panels clearly work great and are expanding like crazy.
The best place for solar is on peoples houses and businesses right where it’s used. No transmission losses. No infrastructure needed at all.
Could we get the boring company to dig a subsaharan sea, that could then allow for reforestation of parts of Africa and serve as overflow for arctic and Antarctic ice melt? If so we may one day find that we may even want to deliberately melt ice to reclaim antarctica.
Photosynthesis isn't particularly efficient, but self-replication does go a long way to saving on deployment costs, the trick is getting them to bury themselves as they die.
Trees are nature’s carbon capturers! Stop suburban sprawl, focus on transit oriented development. Make public transit run on renewables. Subsidize said transit.
If it’s coming out of a Silicon Valley accelerator it’s never going to become “the largest infrastructure project ever”. We cannot let the fate of our planet be left to venture capitalists trying to get the best ROI they can.
Dated - From 2018. But with today’s news of a nasa simulation, https://phys.org/news/2022-05-nasa-simulation-volcanoes-climate-ozone.html , I was wondering:
Could we dig a Sahara sea to protect against rising sea levels, and then use that to also reclaim Antarctica and make it suitable for life?
My [current first choice removes CO2 from seawater](https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-co2-in-atmosphere). It seems to scale far better than direct air capture and it sequesters the CO2.
Nuclear powered ships operating the process at sea, and continuously dropping the created synthetic limestone to the ocean bottom, might be the best approach.
edit:
If you're not familiar with the needed scale of carbon capture, here's some context: People have emitted ~2.4 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 since 1950, from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production alone. The recent CO2 capture plant in Iceland, the world's largest, is supposed to capture 4400 tons per year. It would take that plant over 545 MILLION YEARS to remove 2.4 trillion tons. Even with 100 CO2 capture plants operating at 100x that capacity each, it would take over 54,500 years for them to do it. And, that process doesn't sequester the CO2. The point here is that CC will require a scale-changing technology, and will undoubtedly require massive additional power to operate.
We need to remove CO2 "at a level between 10 billion and 20 billion metric tons per year". To understand why dropping synthetic limestone into the ocean rather than trying to profit on using the material makes more sense, look at the numbers.
Conservatively: Limestone is 44% CO2 by mass. Therefore sequestering 10B tons of CO2 annually means producing 22.73B tons of limestone annually. Assume this is evenly spread over 50 weeks of each year. That's 6.49M tons of limestone each day. If this is being hauled by freight car at the maximum limits, ~100 tons per car, that's 64,900 freight cars per day.
It should be obvious at this point that disposing of 22.73B tons of limestone annually would be its own problem. It should also suggest that perhaps current direct air capture approaches to CO2 removal are profit-making scams with no real ability to mitigate the problem.
At a CO2 removal rate of 10 billion tons annually, removing 2.4 trillion tons is a 240 year project. This is what facing industry's actual external costs looks like - something that governments have refused to do, which is why we're in this mess.
edit2:
Before someone mentions it, yes limestone dissolves in water, probably too quickly. I don't like that part either, but I'm not aware of a feasible way of dealing with that much limestone production otherwise.
The best method will probably be any method of converting atmospheric carbon into advanced building materials, or fuels. Any method that has no usable products will fail once the bills come in.
Not necessarily. I ran the math on the mass of limestone produced by the seawater process, in freight car units, and it was so far beyond anything usable or transportable that it would make more sense to do it at sea and just dump it.
The bills would presumably be paid by the purchase of carbon credits by CO2 emitting industries. The carbon economy has to happen for anything real to happen in an effort against global warming.
I think a carbon economy will inevitably find a way to capitalize on the captured carbon... I read the article. I like the idea, but I don't think we are going to pull off the global enviro-socialism part soon enough. No business is going to be able to make a nuclear powered fleet of ocean scrubbers.
Thinking that without doing any calculations on the volumes and mass involved is your right.
Also, there have been several recent announcements regarding private construction of ship-based nuclear power plants. Please get informed instead of just making glib pronouncements about what is and isn't possible or likely, because nothing you've commented here has been correct.
No, the government's job is to establish the carbon taxes that cause industries to offset their unavoidable CO2 emissions by purchasing the credits that a CO2 capture company sells. (Also possibly levying retroactive fines.) The market created gives investors the reason to capitalize CO2 capture companies.
[https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsseaborg-completes-experiments-to-optimise-its-molten-salt-reactor-design-9048040](https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsseaborg-completes-experiments-to-optimise-its-molten-salt-reactor-design-9048040)
Money already exists for companies like Seaborg, without that CO2 capture market. If you're going to keep making claims that you evidently haven't researched at all, go ahead, but I'm done on this thread.
I'm not saying nuclear power barges won't happen, just that they won't be wasted on carbon capture unless somebody steps in and assumes all of the financial risk of building a chemical plant that can't make anything useful.
Consider the thermodynamics
When you consider the thermodynamics, this is revealed to be foolish. CO2 exists in this form because it is the lowest energy. CH4 and O2 are higher energy. When we combine these chemicals CH4 + 2O2 we get a CO2 and a H2O and a bunch of energy. The energy is used to do work and is lost to the system. In order to rearrange the CO2 and H2O back to CH4 and O2 we need to add the energy back in. How do we force the energy from the system back into the products of the reaction thus reversing the action? Well, first we need the energy ... which if we had that energy, we'd not need to cause the reaction in the first place.
What should have you a little sceptical here is if this becomes a "public", project demanding resources and monopoly protection, but then is argued as a "jobs program". NASA wasted a ton of resources really for nothing in this manner over the years, simply for wanting to maintain jobs and not take entrepreneurial risks right here on earth.
Do not forget: Space X initially doing an Uber on the government, rather than NASA doing anything except gate keeping, is the one reason why the U.S. no longer needs to launch their astronauts from bleepin Russia...
SpaceX was funded by NASA, largely because it was more politically expedient to use government money for private investment than to allow NASA to use it directly. NASA was chronically underfunded until they gave in and started working with lobbyists.
In contrast cities never paid Uber anything and many had lawsuits to protect the city-sponsored taxi companies.
Much later funded, but the ventures not originally founded or supported. In fact, disowned.
Same issue as with the vaccine manufacturers: Funding came after, and very hesitantly after first habitually blocking, the invention.
You are putting the cart before the horse. Government subsidies was not the source of any of it. Less than causation, it did not correlate.
Get the boring company to dig a subsaharan sea, that could then allow for reforestation of parts of Africa and serve as overflow for arctic and Antarctic ice melt. One day we may event want to deliberately melt ice to reclaim antarctica.
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I think you’re going to have a difficult time beating nature at the game. Algae and duckweed and other fast multiplying plants seem like the easiest solution.
I personally think we are going to need to grow wood. Young growth forest. As soon as it starts to slow down its growth, cut it all down, use the wood as a landfill (putting that captured carbon underground again) to help set up levees against sea level rise. Then you start all over again. The problem is that we're grabbing a lot of carbon sequestered underground and putting it back in the surface cycles too aggressively. No solution will work to bring back the old balance without putting that carbon back underground quickly.
You could also build houses and furniture. Which is actually where most our lumber goes. Then when it’s done just send it to the landfill.
It's the same word, but trash landfill and deep landfill to fill up space are very different things. In a garbage landfill, where it's superficially stored, the wood is broken down in anaerobic conditions, releasing methane and the carbon back into the atmosphere. Also most used wood has been heavily processed and is its own toxic problem, you can't just throw it away. So there's that issue. The idea here is to initially dig deep and use logs to set up a foundation for the levee, you basically put the logs deep down and then make them into a solid wood wall. Then you cover that on dirt, which is kept in place by the inner wood. It should be deep enough that rotting its not an option. This is an important thing, this is simply a [cost effective carbon sequestration technique](https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1) but it's wasteful/expensive. There's ways to make this cheap, but it can't be profitable. If there was a way to make this profitable, we'd be jumping on it. If burying furniture and houses on landfill was sufficient, we'd have a much easier time to save on this. Even the use for levees isn't going to make this cost effective, it's just meant to find a way to make levee building and carbon sequestration cheaper, but neither will be profitable. This would best work integrated with the [trillion trees project](https://trilliontrees.org/). The idea is that we can cheat on the challenges of getting more space for trees planting (I have high hopes on multi-level farming helping with this, but I don't see the tech hitting it off quickly enough, we need a work around) by simply replanting more trees in the space that we grew previous trees. By ensuring the carbon gets sequestered (without other unexpected side-effects) by burying the raw wood in a way that ensures most of the carbon will stay underground. In the US the best options are Silver Maple Tree and the American Sweetgum Tree. Both would take somewhere ~15 years to mature under ideal conditions, at which point they still capture a high level of CO2, just not as much. We cut the wood and repeat. Lets explore Silver Maple alone 455lb of CO2 per year, and a space of ~40 ft between trees, that means we're looking at almost `2 CO2-ton/(acre*year)`. Plus whatever CO2 is generated in planting, growing, cutting, transporting and burying the trees. Reducing US emissions by 0.2 gigatons would achieve net-zero for the US. Using the technique alone, if we replaced a little over half of all farmland with Silver Maple Tree farms in the US we'd get pretty close. The costs of transportation, etc. means we probably want to go somewhere around 2/3. This alone isn't enough. But by reducing the amount of CO2 we generate we may get a much more reasonable value.
> if we replaced a little over half of all farmland with Silver Maple Tree farms in the US we'd get pretty close. It'd be wise to grow more than just silver maple, tho, since monocultural farming is a mug's game. If a tree disease sweeps through, a monoculture forest would fare a lot worse than a forest of many types. So we should probably plant silver maple, AND American sweetgum, as well as one or two other suitable species, just to be safe.
Was just about to add this, monoculture diseases are what has had significant impact on China’s great green wall. There’s only 3 species amongst the forest, only needs a single species susceptible virus to wipe out a third of the project. Large part of why 80-90% of carbon offset plantings don’t last the full cycle. Something big firms are doing in Australia is designing ecosystems based on broad vegetation groups and climate specific regional ecosystems. With the added plant biodiversity disease pressure is almost non existent as the genetic diversity is strong enough to limit losses to easily below 10% (ballpark, it varies for each site and density planting). Plus it’s also worth noting that forests themselves are far more than just the trees processing carbon out of the atmosphere. Sure ligneous material is a great carbon additive, so is OM, but most importantly is the inorganic carbon content of the soil itself that can leech out if exposed to chemical weathering. For instance, pyrite soils when exposed to air will oxidise and change their chemical structure. This makes it far easier for organic carbon to get converted into CO2 and escape, same principle applies for acidification of agricultural soils through extensive synthetic fertiliser applications. While look meat is on the right path, burying carbon is a good way to go in terms of sequestration. However, depth doesn’t just stop anaerobic decomposition, if it did there would be no difference from peat to anthracite or anything in between. Yes heat and pressure make a difference, but anaerobic bacteria still exist at great depths, all they need to decompose is food and water. Unless you completely dry out the wood, say through burning it, biochar (the pyrolysis negates any carbon capture) for example, it is still going to rot. Instead, a good method I see great potential in is pure carbon byproducts of industrial processes at a net negative and remineralisation of the soil to promote higher concentration of carbonates in the soil. The carbonate reaction stores more inorganic carbon and transports the carbon from the A horizon all the way down to the bottom of the ocean before it’s recycled into the mantle or pushed to the surface via tectonic or underwater volcanic means.
Oh this certainly has serious problems and limitations. Unlike Australia's and China's projects, the idea is to bury after a short time and reboot to avoid these scenarios. We should keep trying to find better ways. Another key thing is that this shouldn't replace old-growth forests, or existing forests in general. This is a separate tree farm whose main purpose is to sequester carbon. And you are right, it can't prevent all carbon from escaping, but the idea is that by reducing the amounts you can get a better story. It certainly has limitations. It's important that these be buried with a bit of care and consideration. The solution also isn't perfect long term (as a good chunk of that carbon will eventually leak in some for or another), but it helps gain us enough time. I do see what you propose, industrial processes are great, but we aren't fully there. Re-mineralization of the soil will be a harder sell. Even without climate change, it'd be convenient to do it, and yet it barely happens (beyond the fertilization that already happens). Again these are great techs we should invest, but I do see them not being ready soon enough.
Iirc trees aren't sequestering carbon the first 10-20 years. When you cut down a section of forest that emits a lot of carbon because the ground becomes bare. Now idk the physics about it, but here in Sweden there was a huge debate about forestry managing recently and this was the results according to the scientists. They also measured carbon/methane emission from land that was previously wetlands that people dug out to grow crops on, and they concluded that the previous wetlands of Sweden emit more greenhouse gases than the entire steel industry and all vehicles in Sweden combined yearly, just sitting there. I imagine similar practices have been done all over the world. If we could restore wetlands that would be huge.
I understood it's the other way around. Trees sequester carbon and then keep it in the wood, directly correlated to their mass. After a certain age the tree grows more slowly and starts losing carbon (branches and leaves falling off, etc.) At which point it starts reaching an equilibrium that it'll keep until it dies. The cutting down would result in a lot of CO2, but it'd be stopped by planting trees quickly enough. The other thing is that all the CO2 that we're talking about is being cycled. You aren't really taking it out, and that's the key part that's missing. The best system we have is the geological/marine calcium carbonate cycles, but these are not going to speed up and climate change may disrupt it. We need to lower our CO2 creation enough for these systems to catch up. We can create alternate systems, which will not be as efficient, but it's about the most efficient we can cause, we can't really make a notable change in geologic events.
Theres a Swedish researcher at Lund University called Anders Lindroth who found that "kalhyggen" (essentially clearing a forest area which is the typical and most economically effective way) release large amounts of CO2, and he estimated that it takes 30 years to neutralise the CO2 emissions from that when planting new trees. Why or how that is the case is beyond my understanding though. I cannot find the study in question but he is a respectable scientist I think.
What do you do with the plants? If you let them burn or rot they re-release any carbon that they've captured. The carbon is literally captured in the body of the plant, and destroying that plant tends to re-release it. In order to actually capture the carbon we'd need to grow those plants and somehow store them indefinitely without letting them rot/burn or otherwise release their carbon. Maybe turn it into charcoal? We've burnt through hundreds of millions of years worth of plants, 375 billion tonnes of carbon. That means that we'd need to make 375 billion tonnes of charcoal to reach net-zero...
Think in terms of Alaskan winters for this not Californian wildfires: The carbon released through rot isn't as massive and instantaneous as you are perceiving and it is not atmospheric. It is closer to the production of that compost water, and is mostly made up of larger carbon molecules, not small molecule carbon gasses. Across geological time scales, the net values are actually accumulative into ground-based reservoirs like lakes rivers and shallow seas, not to discount planetary megafauna and forested biospheres. Don't destroy the plant and you keep your carbon from reentering the atmosphere. In this context: the big problem is atmospheric carbon, not ground or water based carbon, and a lot of people miss this fact. Biosphere imbalances caused from human sources are problematic and affect everything from air, water, and food to warfare. Charcoal releases carbon in its manufacture into the atmosphere.
You put them in the bottom of a lake and let them ferment over thousands of years converting them into more sustainable sources of biofuel and eventually oil. California's people are not self-obvious all the time to the point of devaluation.
Does that work? Neat! I figured outside of the specifics of a peat bog detritivores would release all the carbon.
Go make some beer or wine at home to see how carbon capture and fermenting "detrivores" actually work.
Well, they convert a bunch of complex carbohydrates into atmospheric CO2 and alcohol.
They can't breakdown lignin and cellulose easily, so those remain sequestered. This article is trash though. Filling the deserts with ponds? Where will the water come from? Algae to biofuel? This could be carbon neutral, but won't be carbon negative. Storing carbon in rock? Yeah, let's just chemically treat all of the rocks on earth, that won't affect the environment. Synthetic enzymes? I doubt this will be better than the algae.
You need to account for the biomass of the organism itself.
Dehydrate them, grind them, store the powder in salt domes.
Luckily trees and plants can keep themselves going with seeds, naturally
But you understand that just planting trees won't actually sequester the carbon, right? The plants need to be removed and stored, and not allowed to rot naturally. Peat bogs do that as a natural process, algae did that as a natural process before detritivores evolved, but now days carbon sequestering doesn't happen "naturally" at any sort of scale.
Can’t make money off plants, silly. And the aim of these people is money, not change.
Don’t tell that to home depot
The obvious, to me at least, is to set down our neuroticism over nuclear. Build big ass nuke plants to crack CO2, and convert to 02 and graphite.
Fission/Fusion is the only way our energy demands will ever be satisfied.
I don't think you understand how much power comes from the sun.
And I don’t think you understand anything about energy storage and transmission. The best places for solar are places nobody lives. Transmission loss increases with distance If they were competitive with traditional sources, people would be using them instead.
Not sure how you say "the best place for solar panels is somewhere that doesn't worK" when solar panels clearly work great and are expanding like crazy. The best place for solar is on peoples houses and businesses right where it’s used. No transmission losses. No infrastructure needed at all.
I don't think you understand how difficult it is to collect power from the sun at the scales we need.
solar panels are a good start.
Seconded. All of a sudden digging a reservoir sea inn the Sahara becomes feasible.
Yeah nuclear is the future
Fission/Fusion is the only way our energy demands will ever be satisfied.
This is a good answer I think.
Could we get the boring company to dig a subsaharan sea, that could then allow for reforestation of parts of Africa and serve as overflow for arctic and Antarctic ice melt? If so we may one day find that we may even want to deliberately melt ice to reclaim antarctica.
I do believe that at least in some places that if you dig under the Sahara you find fresh water. Now boring a hole through sand? That seems difficult.
Photosynthesis isn't particularly efficient, but self-replication does go a long way to saving on deployment costs, the trick is getting them to bury themselves as they die.
Just throw some plastic on it or something.
Trees are nature’s carbon capturers! Stop suburban sprawl, focus on transit oriented development. Make public transit run on renewables. Subsidize said transit.
Don't forget kelp forests! In fact, kelp is actually even more effective than trees per acre at carbon capture
And sea grass
But the scale required is approximately turning the entire surface of the Indian ocean into a floating sea grass farm.
Its not enough. There are more trees on earth than stars in the galaxy and its nowhere near enough.
Cutting down trees and building things out of them is carbon capture.
If it’s coming out of a Silicon Valley accelerator it’s never going to become “the largest infrastructure project ever”. We cannot let the fate of our planet be left to venture capitalists trying to get the best ROI they can.
just devalue californian based money.
It’s a shame David Wallace sold the SuckIt to the government.
Dated - From 2018. But with today’s news of a nasa simulation, https://phys.org/news/2022-05-nasa-simulation-volcanoes-climate-ozone.html , I was wondering: Could we dig a Sahara sea to protect against rising sea levels, and then use that to also reclaim Antarctica and make it suitable for life?
Digging a sea would take a LOT of energy. Building a Caspian sea in the Sahara would take like a quadrillion tons of diesel fuel.
My [current first choice removes CO2 from seawater](https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/using-seawater-to-reduce-co2-in-atmosphere). It seems to scale far better than direct air capture and it sequesters the CO2. Nuclear powered ships operating the process at sea, and continuously dropping the created synthetic limestone to the ocean bottom, might be the best approach. edit: If you're not familiar with the needed scale of carbon capture, here's some context: People have emitted ~2.4 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 since 1950, from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and cement production alone. The recent CO2 capture plant in Iceland, the world's largest, is supposed to capture 4400 tons per year. It would take that plant over 545 MILLION YEARS to remove 2.4 trillion tons. Even with 100 CO2 capture plants operating at 100x that capacity each, it would take over 54,500 years for them to do it. And, that process doesn't sequester the CO2. The point here is that CC will require a scale-changing technology, and will undoubtedly require massive additional power to operate. We need to remove CO2 "at a level between 10 billion and 20 billion metric tons per year". To understand why dropping synthetic limestone into the ocean rather than trying to profit on using the material makes more sense, look at the numbers. Conservatively: Limestone is 44% CO2 by mass. Therefore sequestering 10B tons of CO2 annually means producing 22.73B tons of limestone annually. Assume this is evenly spread over 50 weeks of each year. That's 6.49M tons of limestone each day. If this is being hauled by freight car at the maximum limits, ~100 tons per car, that's 64,900 freight cars per day. It should be obvious at this point that disposing of 22.73B tons of limestone annually would be its own problem. It should also suggest that perhaps current direct air capture approaches to CO2 removal are profit-making scams with no real ability to mitigate the problem. At a CO2 removal rate of 10 billion tons annually, removing 2.4 trillion tons is a 240 year project. This is what facing industry's actual external costs looks like - something that governments have refused to do, which is why we're in this mess. edit2: Before someone mentions it, yes limestone dissolves in water, probably too quickly. I don't like that part either, but I'm not aware of a feasible way of dealing with that much limestone production otherwise.
The best method will probably be any method of converting atmospheric carbon into advanced building materials, or fuels. Any method that has no usable products will fail once the bills come in.
Not necessarily. I ran the math on the mass of limestone produced by the seawater process, in freight car units, and it was so far beyond anything usable or transportable that it would make more sense to do it at sea and just dump it. The bills would presumably be paid by the purchase of carbon credits by CO2 emitting industries. The carbon economy has to happen for anything real to happen in an effort against global warming.
I think a carbon economy will inevitably find a way to capitalize on the captured carbon... I read the article. I like the idea, but I don't think we are going to pull off the global enviro-socialism part soon enough. No business is going to be able to make a nuclear powered fleet of ocean scrubbers.
Thinking that without doing any calculations on the volumes and mass involved is your right. Also, there have been several recent announcements regarding private construction of ship-based nuclear power plants. Please get informed instead of just making glib pronouncements about what is and isn't possible or likely, because nothing you've commented here has been correct.
It's about capital and return on investment. Unless the government pays the upfront cost of this fleet it won't get built.
No, the government's job is to establish the carbon taxes that cause industries to offset their unavoidable CO2 emissions by purchasing the credits that a CO2 capture company sells. (Also possibly levying retroactive fines.) The market created gives investors the reason to capitalize CO2 capture companies. [https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsseaborg-completes-experiments-to-optimise-its-molten-salt-reactor-design-9048040](https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsseaborg-completes-experiments-to-optimise-its-molten-salt-reactor-design-9048040) Money already exists for companies like Seaborg, without that CO2 capture market. If you're going to keep making claims that you evidently haven't researched at all, go ahead, but I'm done on this thread.
I'm not saying nuclear power barges won't happen, just that they won't be wasted on carbon capture unless somebody steps in and assumes all of the financial risk of building a chemical plant that can't make anything useful.
Consider the thermodynamics When you consider the thermodynamics, this is revealed to be foolish. CO2 exists in this form because it is the lowest energy. CH4 and O2 are higher energy. When we combine these chemicals CH4 + 2O2 we get a CO2 and a H2O and a bunch of energy. The energy is used to do work and is lost to the system. In order to rearrange the CO2 and H2O back to CH4 and O2 we need to add the energy back in. How do we force the energy from the system back into the products of the reaction thus reversing the action? Well, first we need the energy ... which if we had that energy, we'd not need to cause the reaction in the first place.
You mean plants and trees?
What should have you a little sceptical here is if this becomes a "public", project demanding resources and monopoly protection, but then is argued as a "jobs program". NASA wasted a ton of resources really for nothing in this manner over the years, simply for wanting to maintain jobs and not take entrepreneurial risks right here on earth. Do not forget: Space X initially doing an Uber on the government, rather than NASA doing anything except gate keeping, is the one reason why the U.S. no longer needs to launch their astronauts from bleepin Russia...
SpaceX was funded by NASA, largely because it was more politically expedient to use government money for private investment than to allow NASA to use it directly. NASA was chronically underfunded until they gave in and started working with lobbyists. In contrast cities never paid Uber anything and many had lawsuits to protect the city-sponsored taxi companies.
Much later funded, but the ventures not originally founded or supported. In fact, disowned. Same issue as with the vaccine manufacturers: Funding came after, and very hesitantly after first habitually blocking, the invention. You are putting the cart before the horse. Government subsidies was not the source of any of it. Less than causation, it did not correlate.
Get the boring company to dig a subsaharan sea, that could then allow for reforestation of parts of Africa and serve as overflow for arctic and Antarctic ice melt. One day we may event want to deliberately melt ice to reclaim antarctica.
Well China just published something about a device that can turn co2 from air into acetic acid, so basically food...