Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

[Bob Wallace]

You disagree that the amount of electricity generated by renewables is not increasing?

the Keeling curve and paleoclimate

You disagree that the amount of CO2 is still increasing (record year 2018) and perhaps, in the near future, get help from living nature? You disagree that paleoclimate records say that if there's this amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, science says: These (pliocene) things have happened and therefore will happen again?

Are you accusing me of something which I have not stated?  Please don't just make stuff up. 

[Bob Wallace]

What makes the difference between painful damage and civilization collapse?  By civilization collapse I assume you mean something of a Mad Max world or a return the the Dark Ages.  What is the tipping point you envision?

Essentials. The endpoint of the trends.
The tipping point: Hunger and thirst. Violence and unsafety, fear.

That's too abstract to have any meaning.

People have been dying in very large numbers due to hunger and thirst for a long time.  Long before the climate began to change.  We may see death rates increase.  Some portion of the world's population has been living with violence , unsafety, and fear for all of recorded history and likely well before. 

The Great Famine of 1315-1317 killed an estimate 7.5 million people in Europe.
The Chalisa Famine which occured in India in 1783/84 killed 11 million.  Another famine in India a few years later killed another 11 million.
The 'Great Four' famines in China in the 1800s killed 45 million.
The famine that hit China at the end of the 1960s killed as many as 43 million.

Throughout history there have been wars that have killed millions upon millions.  As many as 65 million died in World War One.  As many as 85 million died in  World War Two.

Those things did not cause worldwide civilization collapse.  Give me something that might cause civilization collapse thirty years from now.

I will grant you that there may be some climatic consequence we have yet to identify that could really mess things up.  But since we don't know about it you can't use it as an explanation to back your claim.

Let me ask again, what would cause the collapse of civilization about 30 years from now? 

[Tor Bejnar]

It is almost as if most people from the U.S.A. think the world stops at their borders and their TV contexts.

Are you implying it doesn't?   

Massive migrations from hot/wet places (Bangladesh, India, Central America, Middle East), plus a few nuclear bombs tossed here and there (in somebody's desperation), with coastal disruptions and a food scare or two plus some tropical diseases spreading 'north' making Western societies more on edge, all together may cause vigilantism to increase to the point civil society in the traditional sense ceases to exist in many places (like it does in some ghettos and in some war-torn countries today).  I think this could happen by 2050.

The "Wild West" wasn't wild everywhere.  (I very much remember Reies Tijerina (and La Alianza) doing his (their) thing in the 1960s, so that's not so very long ago!  The Wikipedia article doesn't mention their turning a New Mexican highway into a toll road, by stopping cars with a road block, deciding how rich a driver was, and extracting a toll [something like $1 if they looked middle class; $10 if they looked rich].  When the police came to arrest them, they simply got on their horses and rode off into the distance, only to start a new road block someplace else later. More of that time.)

[oren]

Yeah, something like that. Food stresses, water problems, resource depletion, places becoming less livable, heat, drought, storms, flooding and SLR, but with the help of conflicts, trade wars, actual wars, populist leaders, inflation etc.

[zizek]

Big companies are not existential threats to the plant's living flora and fauna.

denialism.

[kassy]

India looks interesting and it is a lot of people. At some point you can not truck in enough water if the monsoons are failing.

Earlier famines are not really a reference point for 2019. Any famine now can be seen better then in the 18th century. If people know you won´t help them they will help themselves in some way.

Hunger and thirst are powerful motivators never mind having kids you know they willl just let starve. At some point you have nothing to lose and ´or die trying´ becomes an option.

Then it mixes with local ideology and it goes boom.

PS: As a radical OT thought my favourite CCS scheme is growing Azolla and weighing it down with lots of career politicians. The whole lot should be dumped into the ocean.

[Bob Wallace]

Remember to distinguish between a localized collapse and global civilization collapse.

We've already seen local civilization collapses due, at least in part, to climate change.  Syria and Sudan’s Darfur region are two conflicts that seem to be partially driven by climate change.  But think out what it would take to cause the entire world to fall into conditions that would drive us back to the stone age.  Or whatever version of civilization collapse you envision.

Think about how rapidly or not rapidly that might happen and what ways we might have to maintain the general civilization we now have, albeit perhaps on a smaller scale.

[nanning]

But think out what it would take to cause the entire world to fall into conditions that would drive us back to the stone age

We can't go 'back' to the stone age I think because we miss the expertise, the know-how. Almost all skills have been forgotten, especially in richer countries.

Our global interconnectedness and extreme dependence on technology makes us very vulnerable. Local collapse will have ripple on effects. I don't think 'we' can scale back. Once it goes, it goes. We don't have the resilience and redundancy like e.g. ecosystems. We've built a house of cards.
Seeing what's left of ideals and enlightenment, empathy and morals, I'd say civilisation is already collapsing.

sorry for the off-topic.

[Bob Wallace]

But think out what it would take to cause the entire world to fall into conditions that would drive us back to the stone age

We can't go 'back' to the stone age I think because we miss the expertise, the know-how. Almost all skills have been forgotten, especially in richer countries.

Our global interconnectedness and extreme dependence on technology makes us very vulnerable. Local collapse will have ripple on effects. I don't think 'we' can scale back. Once it goes, it goes. We don't have the resilience and redundancy like e.g. ecosystems. We've built a house of cards.
Seeing what's left of ideals and enlightenment, empathy and morals, I'd say civilisation is already collapsing.

sorry for the off-topic.

I simply don't buy into domer porn.  The total collapse of civilization due to extreme climate change is as unlikely as the other big fantasy that entertained so many a few years back, the total collapse due to peak oil.

Peak oil is no longer a danger because within a few years we could transform our transportation systems, make some unliked but tolerable changes in lifestyle, and continue on.  There was no oil cliff over which the world would have tumbled but, at worse, a decrease of affordable oil supply played out over several years.

If we screw up and allow extreme climate change we won't wake up one morning and find seas eighty feet higher and summer temperatures unbearable over the entire planet.  Those changes would happen over time and as thing became worse at least a portion of us would devise a way to survive. 

We've got the technology to protect ourselves from extreme heat and grow the food we need in controlled conditions.  We probably couldn't support billions, but we could support hundreds of thousands or millions.  And we can take our knowledge and technology with us as we retreat underground or into heavily insulated buildings during the worst of the heat.

[vox_mundi]

Call for Green Burial Corridors Alongside Roads, Railways and Country Footpaths
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-green-burial-corridors-roads-railways.html

A leading public health expert is calling for a strategic initiative to develop green burial corridors alongside major transport routes because British graveyards and cemeteries are rapidly running out of room. With 500,000 deaths annually in England and Wales, it is likely that there will be no burial space left within five years.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor John Ashton points to the recent announcement of a scheme to plant 130,000 trees in urban areas as a contribution to reducing pollution and global warming. While lacking in ambition, he writes, it gives a clue as to what might be possible by joining up the dots of green environmentalism and human burial.

Open Access: John Ashton, Necropolis in crisis: housing the living is one thing, there is also a problem in housing the dead, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2019)

[Tom_Mazanec]

Just plant a forest the size of the United States (where?) and remove 205 billion tons:
https://news.sky.com/story/planting-a-forest-the-size-of-the-us-could-stop-climate-change-study-11757051
and https://news.mongabay.com/2019/07/two-studies-provide-dueling-looks-at-where-trees-should-go/

[sidd]

Re: where

i attach fig 2 b and c

sidd

[Tom_Mazanec]

Can't solve AGW just by planting trees:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/07/10/reforestation-climate-change-plant-trees/#.XSflZ5NKiis

[Tom_Mazanec]

More on reforestation not being the answer:
https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/7xgymg/planting-billions-of-trees-isnt-going-to-stop-climate-change

[nanning]

"Sucking carbon out of the air is no magic fix for the climate emergency"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/01/negative-emissions-tech-climate-emergency-carbon-dioxide-emissions
By Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London.

Quote:
With a range of options, we might think that negative emissions means that climate change can be tackled, and tackled fast. But evidence that these technologies can work at a small demonstration scale is causing the opposite. Negative emissions are treated as a “get out of jail free” card – a licence to keep emitting and clean up the mess later with new technologies. Politicians and their advisers love them, because they can announce a target such as 1.5C while planning to exceed it, with temperatures hopefully clawed back later in the century through negative emissions.

[DrTskoul]

"Sucking carbon out of the air is no magic fix for the climate emergency"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/01/negative-emissions-tech-climate-emergency-carbon-dioxide-emissions
By Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London.

Quote:
With a range of options, we might think that negative emissions means that climate change can be tackled, and tackled fast. But evidence that these technologies can work at a small demonstration scale is causing the opposite. Negative emissions are treated as a “get out of jail free” card – a licence to keep emitting and clean up the mess later with new technologies. Politicians and their advisers love them, because they can announce a target such as 1.5C while planning to exceed it, with temperatures hopefully clawed back later in the century through negative emissions.

The technology works ( actually it is easy to scrub CO2 from the air). The problem is the footprint of the facilities ( huge surface area needed ), the energy to absorb pure CO2 ( is it not negative ) and the capital needed. All around estimates are really lowballing it. The famous examples of outfits that have been seen lately in the news dont have the skills or the desire to scale them up.

[DrTskoul]

Call for Green Burial Corridors Alongside Roads, Railways and Country Footpaths
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-green-burial-corridors-roads-railways.html

A leading public health expert is calling for a strategic initiative to develop green burial corridors alongside major transport routes because British graveyards and cemeteries are rapidly running out of room. With 500,000 deaths annually in England and Wales, it is likely that there will be no burial space left within five years.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor John Ashton points to the recent announcement of a scheme to plant 130,000 trees in urban areas as a contribution to reducing pollution and global warming. While lacking in ambition, he writes, it gives a clue as to what might be possible by joining up the dots of green environmentalism and human burial.

Open Access: John Ashton, Necropolis in crisis: housing the living is one thing, there is also a problem in housing the dead, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2019)

Composting is even better

[Tom_Mazanec]

An overlooked solution to climate crisis
https://www.dailypioneer.com/2019/columnists/an-overlooked-solution-to-climate-crisis.html

Grasslands are, perhaps, the most neglected ecosystem in the world. However, their ability to meet the climate change challenge must galvanise nations into putting them high on the conservation agenda. The Government must take note

Grasslands across the globe,  especially in India, have played a silent but stellar role in reining in the process of climate change. But according to a study by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, climate change, pollution and various environment alterations across the globe are changing their identity. One of the key contributions made by grasslands is their inconspicuous role in containing carbon levels in the atmosphere. It is this storage capacity for carbon that makes grasslands effective warriors against climate change.

[Ken Feldman]

Here's a link to a good article about biochar and the role it can play in sequestering carbon dioxide.  The format is an interview with the CEO of a start-up company that is making bio-char from bio-mass burning.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/28/biochars-role-in-mitigating-climate-change/

Biochar is a stable form of carbon, made from woody materials in a heat and oxygen-deprived system. Conventionally, biochar has been made as a small residue of biomass power production. Each tonne of biochar contains about three tonnes of carbon dioxide. When the wood is taken and turned into a stable carbon, it can’t escape as a liquid or gas, which would happen if it were burned or decomposed.
Biochar is carbon that you can hold in your hand – like charcoal. In the natural carbon cycle, about 1% of carbon is sequestered. By making biochar of the biomass, you can sequester up to two-thirds of the carbon in the biomass. Nature already knows how to sequester carbon into the soils, but we need to learn.

I’ve read that there are over 50 known use cases for biochar, and new research comes out every month indicating a new use possibility. Could you maybe give us a few examples of the best use cases?
Our first use case is urban landscaping. Plants are under severe stress in urban areas and campuses with not much space to live and runoff water can have a lot of toxins.
Stockholm did a very successful trial where biochar was planted in the root system of the trees as a stormwater filter, aerating the roots and providing some room to move about, while filtering the toxins out.
To me, the most powerful application for biochar is raising the pH of acidic soils, helping the soil ‘microbiome’ by co-composting to put into the ground. This way, biochar can have a long-lasting effect on the living part of the soil, and stabilize the nutrients.
Other use cases include stopping nutrient or other matter leaching into waterways (biofilters), water cleansing, speeding up compost, and environmental remediation from toxins.

[Freegrass]

Is Olivine a solution against Climate Change and Ocean Acidification?

https://projectvesta.org/

[blumenkraft]

Nope.

[morganism]

Great paper on easy nano grain CO2 catalyst, made by simple flame pyrosis. Easy and scalable, this can create a flexible syngas product, and you can "dial" in the CO and H quantities to make fuels or plastics.

This could get rid of oil and gas production in a year or so..... especially if we started switching over to methanol and electric right now, and not subsidizing fossil fuel cars and companies anymore.

"It means it can be used industrially, it can be scaled, it’s super quick to make the materials and very effective,” she says.

“We don’t need to worry about complicated synthesis techniques that use really expensive metals and precursors – we can burn it and in 10 minutes have these particles ready to go. And by controlling how we burn it, we can control those ratios of desired syngas building blocks.”

"“The idea is that we can take a point source of CO2, such as a coal fired power plant, a gas power plant, or even a natural gas mine where you liberate a huge amount of pure CO2 and we can essentially retrofit this technology at the back end of these plants. Then you could capture that produced CO2 and convert it into something that is hugely valuable to industry,” says Dr Lovell."

The researchers say in effect, they are closing the carbon loop in industrial processes that create harmful greenhouse gases. And by making small adjustments to the way the nanoparticles are burned by the FSP technique, they can determine the eventual mix of the syngas building blocks produced by the carbon dioxide conversion.

“At the moment you generate syngas by using natural gas – so from fossil fuels,” Dr Daiyan says. “But we’re using waste carbon dioxide and then converting it to syngas in a ratio depending on which industry you want to use it in.”

For example, a one to one ratio between the carbon monoxide and hydrogen lends itself to syngas that can be used as fuel. But a ratio of four parts carbon monoxide and one part hydrogen is suitable for the creation of plastics, Dr Daiyan says.

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/engineers-find-neat-way-turn-waste-carbon-dioxide-useful-material

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aenm.202001381

[morganism]

a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product and low cost. Ethanol is a particularly desirable commodity because it is an ingredient in nearly all U.S. gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries.

https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-liquid-fuel

"The team’s catalyst consists of atomically dispersed copper on a carbon-powder support. By an electrochemical reaction, this catalyst breaks down CO2 and water molecules and selectively reassembles the broken molecules into ethanol under an external electric field. The electrocatalytic selectivity, or ​“Faradaic efficiency,” of the process is over 90 percent, much higher than any other reported process. What is more, the catalyst operates stably over extended operation at low voltage."

revealed a reversible transformation from atomically dispersed copper to clusters of three copper atoms each on application of a low voltage. The CO2-to-ethanol catalysis occurs on these tiny copper clusters. This finding is shedding light on ways to further improve the catalyst through rational design.

“We have prepared several new catalysts using this approach and found that they are all highly efficient in converting CO2 to other hydrocarbons,”

[Juan C. García]

A good video of "Just have a think":

[morganism]

A new material for separating CO2 from industrial waste gases, natural gas, or biogas

It is capable of completely removing CO2 from gas mixtures without chemically binding CO2.

" The new material is an inorganic-organic hybrid. The chemical basis is clay minerals consisting of hundreds of individual glass platelets. These are only one nanometre thick each, and arranged precisely one above the other.

Between the individual glass plates there are organic molecules that act as spacers. Their shape and chemical properties have been selected so that the pore spaces created are optimally tailored to accumulate CO2. Only carbon dioxide molecules can penetrate into the pore system of the material and be retained there.

In contrast, methane, nitrogen, and other exhaust gas components must remain outside due to the size of their molecules. The researchers have used the so-called molecular sieve effect to increase the material's selectivity for CO2."

https://www.biofueldaily.com/reports/A_new_material_for_separating_CO2_from_industrial_waste_gases_natural_gas_or_biogas_999.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666386420302253?via%3Dihub

[Iain]

It's code-named "Lucy"

The amount of CO2 removed will be tiny, but it shows what a motivation monetary reward is.

"UK sky mining facility sucks carbon out of the air to make eco-friendly diamonds"

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-10-29/uk-sky-mining-facility-sucks-carbon-out-of-the-air-to-make-eco-friendly-diamonds

[kassy]

If you want you can bling out with atmospheric carbon stuff. So you get diamonds and then you can get sunglasses from Covalent which makes them from AirCarbon. Think they can get you a bag too.

Of course these are now small drops but maybe we will end up sucking a whole lot of carbon out of the air that way.

[SteveMDFP]

If you want you can bling out with atmospheric carbon stuff. So you get diamonds and then you can get sunglasses from Covalent which makes them from AirCarbon. Think they can get you a bag too.

Of course these are now small drops but maybe we will end up sucking a whole lot of carbon out of the air that way.

I think it's a ridiculous approach.  Yes, you can take C02 and reduce the oxidized carbon to elemental carbon.  But that's an incredibly energy-intensive process.  It takes more energy than was released when the carbon was burned.

Plants will do something similar using solar energy.  Since they (frequently) grow and reproduce without human energy expenditure, that approach is a no-brainer.  But it's slow, and most of that carbon ends up back in the atmosphere before too long.

Humans can sequester the CO2 with minmial energy expenditure, by combining the acidic CO2 with almost any alkali.  Vast quantities of alkali are needed, so using olivine rock is a rational option.  Basalt too.  There are threads on this forum about all that, so I won't recap them.

Sequestering CO2 from smokestacks is plausible, but not currently economically feasible.  That can be changed with appropriate fees for releasing carbon, and/or credits for sequestration.  Fixing the greenhouse gas problem is really about fixing policy, not individual actions.

[kassy]

I think it's a ridiculous approach.

I think so too. Diamonds from air...that´s weird.

But there might be chances there.

If we overbuild solar + wind we should get lots of energy we do not have a use for so if you time it right you can put more energy into processes although that might be more useful for recycling then making diamonds from the air. Then again if you have the excess energy anyway you can use it.

[crandles]

I think it's a ridiculous approach.

I think so too. Diamonds from air...that´s weird.

At least it produces something potentially valuable to mitigate the cost and isn't likely to end up back in the atmosphere. If it substantially reduces the cost of sequestering carbon, what is not to like? Well ok, perhaps the necessary scale of opportunity isn't there but maybe every little helps.

[Ken Feldman]

As companies seek to reach net zero or even sequester all of their historic emissions, "carbontech" firms are becoming economically viable.

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/carbontech-getting-ready-its-market-moment

Carbontech is getting ready for its market moment

By Heather Clancy
October 28, 2020

It may be a little early to start writing about trends for 2021, but I’m going to do it anyway. What’s on my mind? Carbontech, a category of climate tech I’d love to see break through next year. It's the exciting idea that we can take something that could be considered waste, draw it out of the atmosphere and turn it into a source of revenue or economic growth.

There are signs that give me optimism. This morning, digital payments company Stripe announced a plan to let its merchant customers divert a portion of their revenue to carbon removal projects. The move follows Stripe’s own pledge to put $1 million into four "high potential" projects earlier this year, and the two initiatives are related. The specific technologies that Stripe is funding are carbon-sequestering concrete (CarbonCure), geologic storage (Charm Industrial), direct air capture (Climeworks) and ocean mineralization (Project Vesta).

Lest I forget, another well-known commerce player, Shopify, last month picked carbon removal and carbontech as a focus for its Sustainability Fund, which commits $5 million annually to climate-tech solutions. Some companies it is supporting are the same as Stripe (CarbonCure, Charm Industrial and Climeworks). It is also including ocean sequestration in the mix through its support of Planetary Hydrogen. And it is also letting merchants add options for offsetting that buyers can select during transactions.

How ginormous could the carbontech market get? According to nonprofit Carbon180, the total addressable market for products that could be affected is $6 trillion — with the biggest opportunities for using "waste CO2" found in transportation fuels and building materials. Captured carbon also could be a resource for food, fertilizers, polymers and chemicals. (Before you ask, very few innovators that CCN is tracking are focused on enhanced oil recovery applications.)

[Ken Feldman]

Carbon sequestration investments may be included in a new US stimulus plan early next year.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/09/1011859/biden-calls-for-major-investments-into-carbon-removal-tech/

Biden calls for major investments into carbon removal tech

The president-elect’s transition plan also recommends research and development funding for batteries, renewable hydrogen and advanced nuclear.

James Temple
November 9, 2020

President-elect Joe Biden wasted little time setting a new tone on climate change.

On Sunday, one day after major outlets called the presidential election for the former vice president, the Biden-Harris transition team released documents laying out the incoming administration’s early priorities, including a blueprint for “tackling the climate crisis.”

Most of the details were drawn directly from Biden’s sweeping campaign climate plan, which would dedicate $1.7 trillion to overhaul energy, transportation, agriculture, and other sectors. But the list of areas in which Biden hopes to make “far-reaching investments” includes at least one new term: negative-emissions technologies.That phrase encompasses a number of approaches for drawing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. These can include carbon-sucking machines that companies like Climeworks and Carbon Engineering are developing; methods to speed up natural processes through which minerals capture and lock away carbon; and schemes that rely on plants to absorb carbon dioxide, then convert them into fuel sources and capture any resulting emissions (a process known as “bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration”).

Scientists say that removing billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year by midcentury will be essential for preventing very dangerous levels of global warming.

Policy observers believe that there could be opportunities to incorporate significant research and development funding for clean energy in upcoming economic stimulus packages, noting that such measures have bipartisan support. Indeed, Congress largely beat back the Trump administration’s repeated efforts to slash federal investments in these areas during the last four years.

[morganism]

Carbon capture conversion to sugars-About a third of this process globally is carried out by single-celled algae that live in the oceans

https://phys.org/news/2020-11-scientists-mystery-enigmatic-organelle-pyrenoid.html

The enzyme that performs the first step of the reaction to assimilate carbon dioxide into sugars is a bulky protein called Rubisco assembled from eight identical small subunits and eight identical large subunits arranged together symmetrically. All the parts of this assembly, which is called a holoenzyme, work in concert to perform Rubisco's enzymatic duty. Rubisco's rate of activity—and by extension, the rate at which plants and algae can grow—is limited by its access to carbon dioxide. Free carbon dioxide can be scarce in water, so aquatic algae such as Chlamydomonas reinhardtii sometimes struggle to keep Rubisco working at peak capacity. To counteract this, these algae evolved a special structure called the pyrenoid to supply concentrated carbon dioxide to Rubisco. The pyrenoid is so important that almost all algae on the planet have one. Different species of algae are thought to have evolved the structure independently."

The structural basis of Rubisco phase separation in the pyrenoid, Nature Plants (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41477-020-00811-y

[Sigmetnow]

Elon Musk (@elonmusk)1/21/21, 6:08 PM
Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1352392678177034242
Elon Musk:
Details next week

Everyday Astronaut:
Is a sabatier reactor considered a carbon capture technology? Or maybe a good carbon capture machine can be used for a more efficient and powerful sabatier reactor
Elon Musk:
It’s a good path for fully renewable rocket energy, so solves part of problem, but longer chain hydrocarbons than CH4 are needed to be solid at room temp

[crandles]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1352392678177034242

Elon Musk:
Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology