Elon Musk To Offer $100 Million Prize For 'Best' Carbon Capture Tech (reuters.com) 153
Elon Musk on Thursday took to Twitter to promise a $100 million prize for development of the "best" technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions. He said more details would be coming "next week." Reuters reports: Capturing planet-warming emissions is becoming a critical part of many plans to keep climate change in check, but very little progress has been made on the technology to date, with efforts focused on cutting emissions rather than taking carbon out of the air. The International Energy Agency said late last year that a sharp rise in the deployment of carbon capture technology was needed if countries are to meet net-zero emissions targets.
Newly-sworn-in U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to accelerate the development of carbon capture technology as part of his sweeping plan to tackle climate change. On Thursday, he named Jennifer Wilcox, an expert in carbon removal technologies, as the principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy at the U.S. Department of Energy.
Newly-sworn-in U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to accelerate the development of carbon capture technology as part of his sweeping plan to tackle climate change. On Thursday, he named Jennifer Wilcox, an expert in carbon removal technologies, as the principal deputy assistant secretary for fossil energy at the U.S. Department of Energy.
I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
^ this.
Also, stop looking for ways to feel better about burning fossil fuels and just consume less >_>
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Informative)
No, trees are not the answer.
Humanity produces 45 gigatonnes of CO2 per year.
A growing tree absorbs about 20 kg of CO2 per year.
So we would need to plant 2 trillion trees.
A mature forest has 250 trees per hectare. Maybe double that for a growing forest. So 500 trees.
That is 4 billion hectares or 40 million square kilometers.
That is twice the land area of Eurasia.
But Eurasia (and the rest of the world) is either desert, arid steppes, tundra, farmland, or already forested.
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, really *big* trees. :-)
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Informative)
A growing tree absorbs about 20 kg of CO2 per year. ... Maybe double that for a growing forest. So 500 trees.
So you estimate 10000 kg of CO2 per year per hectare, hence around 3600 kg of carbon per year per hectare? There's no need to guess these numbers; primary productivity of forests per hectare has been quantified: "Typical sequestration rates for afforestation/reforestation, in tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, are: 0.8 to 2.4 tonnes in boreal forests, 0.7 to 7.5 tonnes in temperate regions and 3.2 to 10 tonnes in the tropics (Brown et al., 1996)." [fao.org] This should give you useful ranges for estimates.
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Informative)
Your math seems to be off somewhere.
Swiss team found 0.9 billion hectares could store 205 GtC and that global anthropogenic atmospheric carbon burden to date is ~300 GtC.
Source:
https://science.sciencemag.org... [sciencemag.org]
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference in calculation is that the numbers from the article you linked represent the current carbon in atmosphere, but we would also need to offset the new carbon produced while the forest is growing. The new carbon is produced at higher rate than any of the years before.
In addition, you have to consider that about half the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, and is in a dynamic equilibrium with the atmosphere. If we draw CO2 from the atmosphere, the ocean will become a net CO2 emitter.
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If we draw CO2 from the atmosphere, the ocean will become a net CO2 emitter.
No, there are also plants in the ocean. In fact, they sequester far more carbon then forests. With forests the carbon tends to get put pack into the atmosphere as the result of fires or microbes digesting plant matter. In the oceans, plant matter that does not get consumed ends up falling to the depths where it collects - effectively sequestered as it starts the process of being turned into coal / oil.
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Increasing ocean acidity indicates that plants are not removing all the CO2.
That's why we need to help the process along by spreading nutrients in strategic places.
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Swiss team found 0.9 billion hectares could store 205 GtC
0.9 billion hectares is 9 million square kilometers.
That is the area of Europe.
205 GT is less than 5 years of emissions.
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Yeah but we can just burn the trees for power and plant new ones.
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The flaw in your argument is that the trees are not the only things absorbing CO2 in a forest. There are lots of other plants that end up living there too, so the effect is multiplied.
Also 45 gigatonnes is today, and many countries are aiming to reduce their emissions.
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many countries are aiming to reduce their emissions.
Many more countries are increasing their emissions.
India, Indonesia, China, and Nigeria have many new coal-fired power plants under construction. They will be spewing billions of tonnes of CO2 for a century.
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Yes, it's bad.
China, to be fair to them, is still on the growth part of the curve but are set to peak well under where we (the West) did. Unfortunately we can't really expect them to do otherwise, unless we are willing to tank our own economies in solidarity.
But this is a long term project. Unless there is some incredibly breakthrough we are unlikely to see CO2 levels return to normal in our lifetimes. So when I say we need to be reducing, I mean over the long term, and with the West leading the way.
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"That is 4 billion hectares or 40 million square kilometers.
That is twice the land area of Eurasia."
You don't have to plant them the very same day.
You plant trees, cut them and bury them underground, you know, like the people who made the coal for us millions of years ago.:-)
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:4, Informative)
It makes no sense to bury trees while we're still digging up coal. It would be more efficient to burn the trees for energy and leave the coal in the ground.
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Save a tree, split an atom.
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That is twice the land area of Eurasia.
Never fight a land war in Eurasia.
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No, trees are not the answer.
Tree is only a metaphor for more plant life in general. Marine diatoms for instance also absorb large amounts of CO2.
The biggest problem Earth has in the long term is that it will turn into a desert-like planet similar to Mars. Climate change is real, but so is the hysteria, desperation and panic that comes with it. And rather than looking for a quick way to get rid of CO2 would I prefer projects that return deserts into green land again. Any technology in this area that we invent today will be of value to
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The biggest problem Earth has in the long term is that it will turn into a desert-like planet similar to Mars.
I pay a lot of attention to planetary science, and I've never heard this scenario advanced for the Earth. Mars' water is stripped away, basically, by ultraviolet ionization of high-altitude water vapor followed by stripping of the hydrogen by solar wind. There are several reasons that this doesn't happen on Earth, one of which is the ozone layer filtering out the UV well before it reaches the levels of atmosphere with significant amounts of water vapor, and another of which is the Earth's magnetic field.
Th
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I pay a lot of attention to planetary science, and I've never heard this scenario advanced for the Earth.
I suppose it depends on the time scale and how much of an effect humans have in a scenario. Deserts are growing almost everywhere, causing food and water shortages and making land uninhabitable for most life. A lot of it is caused by humans, directly and indirectly. The idea of Earth reaching a Mars-like state is probably thought to happen much sooner than the time scales you were thinking of.
I fear that your numbers may be a bit... off. (Score:5, Interesting)
I fear that your numbers may be a bit... off.
Just for the sake of it...
A single apple tree will produce ~57 to 190 kg of apples per season. [missouri.edu]
If we completely ignore everything but basic sugar content, that's 5.7 to 19 kg of either fructose or glucose (same number and composition of atoms).
I.e. Some 2.28 - 7.6 kg of carbon sequestered as sugar alone. Carbon we could rather easily convert into rather inert plastic. [sciencemag.org]
Or biodegradable, if you're into that whole brevity thing. [bath.ac.uk]
That would be ignoring all other growth the tree does in a year, from leaves to roots and branches.
But the real problem is that your numbers are wrong.
For one, "20 kg of CO2 per year" is actually closer to 22 kg of CO2 per year - for a 10-year-old tree. [urbanforestrynetwork.org]
Further, that new forest would suck up around 2.5 tons of carbon annually, per acre.
I.e. At 45000000 tons of CO2, in 10 years, we could be breaking even by planting some 18000000 acres of new forests.
That's a mere 72843 square kilometers of new forests - or about one Czech Republic of new forests.
Or less than a square kilometer of new forests per every 100000 humans on the planet.
I.e. One new park per every 100k people on the planet.
Or if you want it another way, should every US family plant 20 trees we'd zero out the entirety of global emission of CO2. [carbonpirates.com]
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A single apple tree will produce ~57 to 190 kg of apples per season.
If we completely ignore everything but basic sugar content, that's 5.7 to 19 kg of either fructose or glucose (same number and composition of atoms).
I.e. Some 2.28 - 7.6 kg of carbon sequestered as sugar alone. Carbon we could rather easily convert into rather inert plastic.
Or, we could eat those apples.
I don't like the idea of burning food, that's how civilizations ended in the past. This is worse than "eating your seed corn", if taken literally then at least people eat. We are taking corn and burning it for fuel.
We have the technology to capture carbon from the air, or take what CO2 was taken out of the air by rain and dissolved in the sea, and turn that into plastics, fertilizers, and even hydrocarbons we can use for fuels. We have the technology to produce the energy ne
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I'm not suggesting actually producing plastic from apples, I'm just illustrating that trees capture a whole lot more CO2 than just through the production of cellulose for leaves and tree-growth.
If anything, sugar beet and sugarcane would probably be a better and more economic source of sugar.
But we don't need that to extract CO2 from air. Sabatier process [wikipedia.org] will do that quite easily.
Fuel extracted from air is just a few steps away. [forschung-...icher.info]
The reason I mention plastics, is that both carbon neutral fuel, food and even
Easy to fix (Score:2)
But Eurasia (and the rest of the world) is either desert, arid steppes, tundra, farmland, or already forested.
Yes. And about half of all habitable land is farmland. And 77% of that is used to produce meat. Guess how much that is?
40 million square kilometers exactly.
We seem to have no trouble finding 40 million square kilometers to use for things we don't need. It would technically trivial to turn them into forests. If we all agree to do it, we can have it done by the end of the year.
Or, maybe a bit more realistic, let's say we want to fix half of it. If we'd all started eating an average of 50 gram of meat per day
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No worries, Ol' Musky will solve transportation emissiosn with the hyperloop, VTOL electric jets and tunnels any moment now!
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No worries, Ol' Musky will solve transportation emissiosn with the hyperloop, VTOL electric jets and tunnels any moment now!
All technologies he did not create himself, he developed them into something that can survive in the free market. That is no trivial engineering matter. It seems he's looking for more good ideas to develop that will bring global warming to an end.
It won't be the governments of the world that end global warming. What will end it is private industry bringing good ideas to market. Better ideas that make more money than drilling for oil and gas.
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How many trees would it take to offset those tweets?
Re:I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:5, Informative)
How many trees would it take to offset those tweets?
An old calculation (2010) https://www.fastcompany.com/16... [fastcompany.com] approximated the energy usage of a single tweet to 100 joules with a carbon emission of 0.02 grams, so a twig would probably be plenty.
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100 joules with a carbon emission of 0.02 grams, so a twig would probably be plenty.
Google says that a growing tree absorbs 20 kg of CO2 per year.
So one tweet would be 0.00001 tree-years or 630 tree-seconds.
So, if you plant a tree in your backyard, you can send one tweet every 10 minutes while remaining carbon neutral.
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The birds around my living tweet a heck of a lot more often than once per ten minutes. And often more than one per tree.
The inconsiderate bastards!
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I love this reply and thread. It was really a rhetorical question, but supplying an actual answer with calcs is good too.
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Yep, Trees. We keep killing them, were fucked.
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Yep, Trees. We keep killing them, were fucked.
We are "fucked" only if the rate in which we kill trees exceeds the rate at which we plant more. To make sure we don't kill more trees than we plant we should end the practice of using wood for fuel, at least outside of a few campfires and charcoal grills we use to entertain ourselves.
Save a tree, split an atom.
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Trees have several problems. They are inefficient at capturing carbon. They need water and nutrients, which makes them compete with agricultural land. Once the tree is grown, people cannot resist cutting it down and burning it up.
The cutting it down is fine. Bury that and plant another one in its place. It's only the burning that's a problem.
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So, how much carbon is dumped to atmosphere when you bury a tree? Or were you just planning on forcing the locals to dig the holes and fill them in?
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https://mk0logisticsoftiiud5.k... [kinstacdn.com]
Re: I hope nobody else submits my idea: (Score:2)
But on Mars Musk can't use trees...
Trees and CO2 not well understood by the public (Score:2)
So this means that one tree is not much of a net reducer of atmospheric carbon over its entire lifecycle (including its breakdown). It's more of a temporary carbon sink.
If we want trees to act as a permanent carbon sink, we need to let our forests grow in size an
Even better - actually capture the carbon (Score:2)
Plant trees
Harvest them
Make paper
Add carbon-bearing ink to the paper
Distribute the paper to the masses
Collect the paper and bury it in landfills
There are obvious inefficiencies here, but this sequence actually removes carbon dioxide from the air and sequesters it underground for centuries.
We should try:
Plant trees
Harvest them
Bury them in abandoned coal mines
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Trees are ugly and are not our slaves.
Second, they are not very efficient in capturing CO2 in terms of solar energy consumed. My main problem with trees, which are not sentient, is that they are ugly and take up space. I mean, I acknowledge the past good that trees have done, but at the end of the day we have to realize that humanity has to advance beyond trees. Remember when we used to make boats out of wood? They weren't very good. Synthetics are much better. Synthetic food will be healthier and have a va
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We don't need to bring plants or even non-friendly animals with us to other planets. Cats, dogs, and parrots are OK though.
I'm pretty sure cattle, pigs, and chicken taste better. Someone is going to bring those.
It was by making trees and "ugly" animals our slaves that we ended slavery of humans. It was by making oil, coal, and natural gas our slaves that really put the nail in the coffin of the trade of humans as slave labor. If we don't find a new energy source to replace trees, coal, and oil then expect the practice of humans as slaves to return.
We certainly will not be going to other planets with an economy powered by win
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$100 Million is Cheap! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can perfect the CO2 cycle, you will be lifted into immortal status. One would be at the pinnacle of the current era, while also being at the beginning of the Climate Manipulation era.
$100 Million? This kind of tech will be worth trillions, forever, and ever and ever. On this, to figure that out, you would have to start with... What industry WOULDN"T be affected by this, and then subtract those outliers. Just imagine, you could make everything from jet fuel, to changing the climate of the globe. Where can I invest?
--
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. - Warren Buffett
dig a big hole ... (Score:5, Funny)
... fill with 7 billion people.
The hard part is which 7 billion, but that's politics and this is only a science problem.
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Digging a hole big enough for 7 billion people. Easy peasy, we can make 3.5 billion force the other 3.5 billion to dig a hole to bury them selves. Then 1.75 billion to ... Its not recursion, simple finite iterative loop that will, .... eh.. how shall I put it.... terminate?
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We can throw it all the dead horses we like to beat too.
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This problem can be solved with preemptive execution.
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The hard part is which 7 billion, but that's politics and this is only a science problem.
Let's make this decision scientifically. The people that can wrestle the others in the hole don't end up in the hole.
Or, instead of declaring war on each other we can develop energy that can be high in energy return on investment, low in material and land use needs, low in CO2 emissions, high in reliability, safe, and low in other costs. We know what these are. They are onshore wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear fission. Solar and offshore wind lose big on any meaningful metrics compared to alternativ
Excellent! (Score:4, Insightful)
Carbon capture is extremely important if we're going to halt and even walk back the current runaway train. Fools will scream, "trees!" without realizing that trees are actually carbon neutral which is why try have been around for billions of years without consuming all the CO2. Additionally, trees aren't nearly as effective as machines specifically designed for the task. Last I checked, a carbon capture cylinder can pull 1000 times the CO2 that a tree of comparable size.
If we really want to walk back the damage we've done then we are going to need something many times more effective than current technology or build an obscene number of carbon capture sites. Frankly, I had hoped we would have started building sites by now and then started upgrading them as the technology evolved but well... that would have required leadership to recognize the seriousness of the problem. If politicians were the slightest bit honest then they would recognize the fallout of not fixing climate change is going to dwarf the national debt.
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Trees store carbon, so while overall they are neutral if you remove them then that carbon is released, and planting new ones is an easy way to recapture it.
As for machines being more efficient, sure they are but they are also a lot more effort to manufacture, deploy and maintain. Trees are cheap and easy, and have other benefits like creating new habitats or reversing desertification.
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
AniMoJo, actually do the math. There's no way we can plant enough trees to undo our undoing of the work of the 60,000,000 years of the Carboniferous era.
Even if we took out all of the CO2 production of humans today -- the cars, , and then we also took the planet back to where it was, in terms of tree cover, back 1,000 years ago, it wouldn't put more than a dent in the massive quantities of CO2 we've put into the atmosphere in the last 50-100 years.
People love the idea of planting trees as the solution -- "It's natural! It should work!" But they just aren't making any calculations. I've seen several articles in the last few years on the order of, "If we do this, it'll go a long way towards solving the problems!", but then you look at their math, and find the place where the say, "Well, this could only be a portion of a solution, ..."
We used, and are using, industrial machines to transform fossil fuels dug out of the ground, (not biomass,) into CO2. Those fossil fuels accreted there over millions of years. To undo our industrial mechanical process of converting fossil fuels into CO2, we will have to use electricity, generated somehow, to turn that CO2 back into (sadly:) fuels. There's really no other way to do it.
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I'm not saying trees are the entire solution, merely that they are a useful part of it. They bring other benefits as well as just removing CO2 from the atmosphere, they are cheap and low maintenance.
As we stop using land for stuff that produces masses of CO2 a quick and easy way to repurpose it is to plant trees. Meanwhile we can work on the CO2 extraction technology as well, and on reducing emissions.
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
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The whole idea of growing trees and then burying them doesn't even make sense while we're still digging up fossil coal for burning.
Save a tree, split an atom.
Re:Excellent! (Score:4)
You don't have to cull the trees, you can just like them live and die and replenish naturally because during their lifetimes they store carbon.
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If you don't cull them they die, decay and that process releases all the CO2 the tree stored. HOW ARE YOU NOT UNDERSTANDING THIS?!
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Then it decays and another tree grows in its place and reabsorbs the CO2. Eventually some of it ends up in the ground.
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Some will eventually? How long do you think we have to mitigate climate change? This is a pressing issue and your non-scientific ideas about how the carbon cycle works are not going to save anyone.
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the problem is culling them and putting them into some sort of bottomless pit and covering them so that they don't release CO2
There are many empty mines across the land. One could even use active mines by filling mined out sections with the cull.
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True... but the volume need for the trees will vastly exceed the space in the empty mines because they are mostly coal mines which are almost pure carbon. You will be burying a bunch of oxygen in addition to the carbon.
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There are many empty mines across the land. One could even use active mines by filling mined out sections with the cull.
We are talking about trees, right? Not listening to the idiots that think we need to drop billions of humans in a hole?
I say we save a tree by splitting an atom. An old idea that deserves new technology and wider application.
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Fools will scream, "trees!" without realizing that trees are actually carbon neutral which is why try have been around for billions of years without consuming all the CO2.
Wow... umm... that's some creative thinking.
All that mass of a big tree doesn't appear out of nowhere, and sure as hell all that carbon doesn't come from the ground. So trees either break the laws of physics or they are getting their carbon from the air using that really complex sounding "photosynthesis"
Trees DO suck up all the CO2. Problem is there are all these other living things on the planet that keep making more of it such that the whole thing stays in balance*
* balance changes - over geological time
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Trees DO suck up all the CO2. Problem is there are all these other living things on the planet that keep making more of it such that the whole thing stays in balance*
Tree existed for billions of years before animals. The reason they are carbon neutral is because when they die they release all the CO2 they consumed through decay which are microbes consuming it. The entire reason coal exists is because microbes haven't figured out how to eat dead trees yet.
Your ignorance is both disappointing and typical.
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The decay via consumption is an independent process. If you stick that tree underground it will undergo anaerobic decay releasing CH4 (far worse for the atmosphere) but it will be trapped underground, and over the larger timescales will become that black stuff that got us into this problem.
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)
Trees are not carbon neutral.
Trees sequester carbon in the soil both through root growth and due to fallen plant matter which decomposes. In aerobic decomposition, much of the carbon is retained in the decomposing matter which becomes soil, thus the soil becomes soil carbon. Only in anaerobic decomposition is nearly all of that carbon released into the atmosphere, which is why rainforests tend to be more nearly carbon neutral, while other kinds of forests are carbon sinks.
Please don't lie about trees. They have enough problems as it is.
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Trees are carbon neutral.
Unless you chop the wood and store it somewhere where it can not decay.
A no brainer.
Re: Excellent! (Score:2)
That's like saying humans are water neutral because we all piss it out eventually.
More living people == more unpissed water
Plant some trees bitch.
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Comparing CO2 neutral trees with water neutral humans makes not much sense.
All three countries Iive in are full with woods, we hardly can plant more trees :P
So, who is the bitch?
Re: Excellent! (Score:2)
I just explained why they are not. Which part did you find confusing? I will explain in smaller words.
Prevention is the answer (Score:3, Insightful)
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Sufficient prevention to save us requires conquering hundreds of countries and imposing a police state on the whole world. I'd rather go with the tech option.
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As always prevention is almost always the answer. Most of the bad things in our modern rat race the real answer which everybody ignores is prevention.
Prevention is the answer .... Except for people and industry that cleans up the mess to earn a living.
Imagine a super fantastic 100% digestible food that produces no shit. Do you realize how many people would lose their jobs?
New Coke (Score:2)
Billions of cans of New Coke and store them in Yucca Mountain for a couple thousand years ...
[ Am open to suggestions for alternate soda or storage location. ]
CO2 + lithium nitride (Li3N) (Score:4, Interesting)
Professor Yun Hang Hu and his research team developed a heat-releasing reaction between CO2 and lithium nitride (Li3N) - a compound that is the only stable alkali metal nitride and is made by reacting lithium with nitrogen at room temperature. Reacting lithium nitride with carbon dioxide resulted in amorphous carbon nitride (C3N4), a semiconductor, and lithium cyanamide (Li2CN2), a precursor to fertilizers.
“The reaction converts CO2 to a solid material,” said Hu. “That would be good even if it weren’t useful, but it is.”
In terms of energy release, when Hu’s team added CO2 to less than a gram of Li3N at 330 C (626 F), the surrounding temperature shot up almost immediately to 1,000 C (1,832 F) – which they point out is roughly the temperature of lava flowing from a volcano.
The research team’s work, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry [acs.org].
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Well,
no idea were you live. But on my planet Lithium is one of the most abundant elements available..
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Out of about ~150 elements? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] You are far off anyway :P
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Without an excess of lithium (a minimum of 100 gigatonnes), this chemical reaction is a bad idea. A better idea would be to expend a moderate amount of energy to turn excess CO2 into the form from which it came: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirk... [www.cbc.ca]
Production sites? (Score:2)
Isn't it possible to capture most of it at the sites where we create it? Let's tackle the burning of fossil fuels and production of cement as the two largest elephants in the room (though the f.f. elephant is way, way larger than the cement).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Is it so difficult to add a "capturing module" to a cement factory or a coal powered plant or whatever? I don't know, but I always wondered why we are so shy in attempting to diminish the amount of carbon we add to the system. It's like
Not so fast! (Score:2)
Apparently it is not as easy as I thought (or hoped). The claim is that only amine based removal has ever being implemented industrially and, surely, it comes with pros and cons.
Absorption, or carbon scrubbing, with amines is the dominant capture technology. It is the only carbon capture technology so far that has been used industrially.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Mineral storage seems very attractive - we just accelerate the natural capturing mechanism. The logistics and economy consideration need
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"Is it so difficult to add a "capturing module" to a cement factory or a coal powered plant or whatever? "
Yes, it is, and quite expensive, too.
Freeze the CO2 in Antarctica then DUMP it (Score:5, Interesting)
This idea is not original with me but I think was brought up by a group of Japanese scientists. They realized that winter in the Antarctica interior is cold enough to relatively easily freeze CO2 right out of the atmosphere. (Also not much energy would be wasted freezing water out, the dry valleys of the Antarctic interior are DRY). The chairman of climatology at Purdue University extended this idea by finding the places along the coastline where the strong winds coming from the cold interior would 1) keep the temperatures low 2) provide wind energy for the refrigeration units. This would allow the sequestration of CO2 from the atmosphere at potentially far lower cost than other techniques.
The problem is what do you do with the frozen CO2? Billions of tons of dry ice is going to take up a lot of room. Also, you've got to keep it cold basically forever because otherwise it'll just sublimate and go right back into the atmosphere. For these reasons, the Japanese researchers solution of burying it was problematic.
My solution: Dump or pipe it into the oceanic abyss deeper than 1000m near the coast of Antarctica.
Since dry ice is heavier than salt water, it'll sink to the bottom. If the ice "cubes" are large enough, the rate of melting/sublimation will be low enabling most of it to get past 1000m deep. There, the pressure will keep it in a solid or liquid form even at the slightly above 0C temperatures of the abyss.
The Antarctic continental shelf is narrow in places, it can be less than 100km from the shore to where it drop-offs into the abyss. Some of these drop-offs are near where the aforementioned winds from the interior come to the shore. These would be the ideal locations to build the refrigeration plants and ice conveyer systems. While there would be an environmental impact from having billions of tons of CO2 on the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, depending on the topography, the CO2 could be contained to a relatively small area compared to the vast ocean seafloor.
Obviously more studies need to be done (acidification of the ocean?). But as methane clathrates have shown, gasses can be captured and frozen at the bottom of the ocean for geological ages.
Already done (Score:2)
You need only figure out how to fine-tune algae farming. For a bonus, you get food and fuel as byproducts.
You will doom us all ! (Score:2)
Obligatory Dilbert commic reference.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019... [dilbert.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Dumped in the ocean, it would re-absorb the carbon dioxide you had just released. So this would only be a positive if you captured the carbon dioxide at step 1.
That said, many carbon capture techniques are a bit like this - expose a substance to the atmosphere where it reacts with carbon dioxide, then bake the carbon dioxide back