Climate Change Mitigation and Negative CO2 Emissions
Here’s an article that discussed devices that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
As we all know, the concentration of CO2 in the air now, 410 PPM, is probably greater than it’s been at any time in the last 3.5 million years ago (when sea levels were a mere sixty feet higher).
The article suggests that “carbon-dioxide removal is, potentially, a trillion-dollar enterprise because it offers a way not just to slow the rise in CO2 but to reverse it.”
I’ll let readers come to their own conclusions, but this whole enterprise sounds extremely unlikely to me, since the operation of such devices has its own carbon footprint, and 99.959% of the atmosphere is something other than CO2, meaning that at best, you’ll be screwing around with a lot of irrelevant molecules.
I look at articles like these are advertisements for pseudo-scientific technologies, especially given that we’ve had a workable technology at our fingertips for as long as human civilization has been here on Earth: plants trees.
Craig,
A few points.
First, the article seems to be quite bullish on sequestration. That is something that I have never understood from any side of the ecological discussion. We’re discussing high-pressure gas injection of literally trillions of tons of CO2 into salt structures, and assuming that all will be well.
Why would all be well? The CO2 that is re-injected in enhanced oil refining seems to be seeping out of the wells with a half-life of about 15 years.
The better solution, by far, would be recycling the CO2 back into stable hydrocarbons. Then, if you wanted to put it back into the Earth you could pump hot wax back into an old oil well, and you’d be sure that it would stay put.
If that sounds absurd to you, then you’d begin to understand my viewpoint of pumping liquid CO2 into the Earth at ultra-high pressure, since liquid CO2 is simply a little bit of energy away from being converted into wax – energy that people want to be wasted on pumping the stuff underground for what I suspect wouldn’t be much more than a generation.
Second, it makes a lot of sense to collect CO2 at a smokestack, where concentrations are closer to ~15% rather than 0.041%. The collection process would quite literally cycle the same amount of CO2 in a day from a smokestack as it could in a year in the dilute atmosphere, considering equal sized collection vents. That means that, regardless of what you think of the plans the people have for the collected CO2, these people are pushing an option that is chemically limited to being about 1/365th as efficient as another route that is currently in use.
We’ll eventually have to go after the dilute atmosphere, in which case we’ll probably plant trees, harvest the trees for energy, and collect the CO2 at the smokestack – as they suggest in the article. But even in that scenario, it’s unlikely that the solution would be high-pressure deep Earth injection. We have to monetize the CO2 before the market will begin to collect it.
Thanks for this and for your correction of my math, which I fixed.
You make a great point about sequestration in general.
We agree about attacking point sources; that’s the issue I brought up about the dilute concentrations in the atmosphere.
My main point here is that the manufacturing and operation of this device (whatever it actually is) is extremely unlikely to emit less CO2 than it captures–regardless of what you do with it when it’s collected.
A legitimate approach to atmospheric CO2 is to encourage the development of shellfish that converts CO2 into calcium carbonate which, upon the animal’s death, falls to the ocean floor and is subducted under tectonic plates.
Craig,
The New Yorker article’s focus is very narrow, as Glenn points out CO2 capture, sequestration and harvesting technology comes in many varieties of technologies.
Just one such example is Tuticorin Alkali Chemicals. TAC uses waste CO2 from a coal fired Electricity plant to make baking soda (a base chemical with a wide range of uses including glass manufacture, sweeteners, detergents and paper products).
The technologies’ developer, Carbonclean technologies Ltd, believes the technology has the potential to capture 5-10% of the world’s CO2 coal emissions. It’s no panacea, but certainly a valuable contribution since in many countries industrial steam-making boilers are impractical to operate on renewable energy.
Like energy production itself, there may be no single solution to CO2 reductions, instead an array of different technologies can be developed to cover different situations (even shellfish).
I don’t believe it’s helpful to unilaterally dismiss the possibilities of Carbon Capture technology, even CO2 atmospheric removal technology as fraudulent or impractical, simply because such technologies don’t fit an ideological approach based on a reductionist only agenda.
There’s no reason why differing technologies can’t be pursued allowing a cumulative effect.
I wasn’t aware that I had “an ideological approach based on a reductionist only agenda.”
Craig,
I wasn’t referring to you specifically, I think in your case you probably see any technology that prolongs or competes with technologies you prefer as projects to be discouraged.
Carbon sequestration, conversion, removal and other technologies may ultimately all prove futile, uneconomic or impractical, but such technologies deserve careful evaluation and fair analysis.
In a previous article you described several projects, including Clineworks, along with the scientists involved with the technology as fraudulent and implied the project didn’t actually exist. (I assume because you hadn’t met the people involved).
I found that more than a little harsh considering the years of work and investment spent building several large and very tangible pilot projects operating with a degree of success, and able to be examined. Naturally, I was disappointed when after I referred to their location and scientific reports of their progress, you still refused to acknowledge you error.
Instead you recommend “planting trees” !
Now I’m all for planting trees, but it’s a more than a little simplistic and fatuous to advocate trees alone can make the difference. Trees can absorb CO2, but not as much as you seem to believe. (stressed trees actually emit more CO2 than they absorb).
Trees need land. Trees also need a lot of maintenance when grown near human activity.(In case you hadn’t noticed they tend to burn ! )
The early enthusiasm for planting trees as a way to offset Carbon, especially funded by Carbon Credits, Offsets or Emission trading schemes have proved a disaster ! The resulting bitter disputes and controversy among various environmental organizations, economists and scientists should serve a warning.
Sadly, mismanagement and inherent fundamental flaws of these schemes illustrate the impracticality of the original concept and and should serve as an excellent example of how a popular idea promoted by ideologically and/or moralistically motivated crusaders can end up wasting billions of dollars and totally undesirable results.