This is not really new news, but it's good to see that Elon Musk is following through on it:
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is putting up $100 million for a new XPrize competition aimed at spurring the creation of new carbon removal technologies and helping to ease the climate crisis.
The prize will be the largest cash incentive in history, according to XPrize....About $15 million will be distributed across the teams that choose to participate in the competition as "seed money" to help get their development programs off the ground. Another $5 million will be reserved specifically for student teams.
A grand prize of $50 million will go to whichever team can prove its technology can extract at least 1000 metric tons, or about 2 million pounds, of carbon dioxide per year with the potential to scale up to extracting millions of metric tons of CO2 later down the road. The winner will also have to prove the CO2 can be "durably and sustainably" sequestered — or kept out of the atmosphere — for years into the future.
Carbon capture is something that gets too little attention in the climate debate. Every previous attempt at CCS has been a failure, and at this point most climate activists consider it little more than a scam meant to take attention away from things that are more feasible.
And there's something to that. Nevertheless, one of the dirty little secrets of climate change is that even if, by some miracle, we did did everything we needed to do in order to get to zero carbon emissions by 2050, it still wouldn't be enough. There's just too much carbon in the atmosphere already. To truly address rising temperatures, we need to reduce atmospheric carbon, not merely stabilize it. And planting more trees won't do it.
The big problem with CCS—aside from the basic one of getting it to work—is that a successful system would have to be enormous. Roughly speaking, the infrastructure for removing carbon would need to be similar in size to the infrastructure for adding carbon. In other words, about the size of the entire fossil fuel extraction industry. Big.
But maybe someone can figure out a better way. Good on Musk for identifying this as a place where a billionaire's money just might be able to make a difference.
Planting trees is a proven CCS system that meets the requirements of the XPrize. If that won't meet the needs, then clearly CCS *is* fantasy.
It's also very land-hungry, slower, and vulnerable to wildfires and disease. There might be a better way to do it.
Trees have done a great job of removing carbon from the atmosphere for millions of years. I seriously doubt we'll come up with a better system. We'll see I guess.
Well, since we need a method that doesn't use up precious water resources and land resources, yes, trees aren't going to be the solution.
yep. hate to waste water on something so useless as a tree.
Plants generally have done a very good job of removing carbon from the atmosphere for a very long time, possibly as much as a couple of billion years, and sequestering it as coal and peat. Humans have been busy for the last few centuries unsequestering too much of that carbon. However, plants sequester carbon very slowly. If we have to wait on natural processes, it will take millions of years to recapture all the carbon in the fossil fuels humans have burned.
Actually, fertilizing ocean plankton with iron would be more effective and wouldn't compete for arable land.
Dumping fertilizer in the ocean. What could go wrong?
Well, you'd not want to just 'dump fertilizer' but the ocean is rife with space and water, the two things so desperately needed to make this work. If you could make a method that wouldn't then be a toxic dump or absorb oxygen, you might be onto something.
Hence the attempts to test water-column mixers or iron floats to encourage less toxic oxygen-emitting blooms.
We know from fresh water lakes what happens if the water is over fertilized: Life dies off and foul odors come out of the water and chicken vultures eat the dead fish that float up.
There is enough nutrition in the ocean for the organisms already there and the goal must be to keep those alive and in working order. Which means long other things to limit the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that leaks into the sea.
Nobody is suggesting dumping fertilizer in the ocean. But iron is apparently limiting for plankton growth, so some iron supplementation should goose ocean photosynthesis. Since most of the earth's surface is water, and most of that is ocean, it makes sense to try this. And if the negatives outweigh the positives, it can be stopped.
I supposed it is literally impossible that there could be an unforeseen negative side effect to dumping massing amounts of iron into the ocean so we may as well try it I guess.
Which is WHY we need to do the tests
And NOT just anywhere - the dep oceans are "wet deserts" short of nutrients
Shallow waters like the Gulf of Mexico are NOT
They've actually tried this on a number of occasions. Prohibitively expensive at the scale required to even put the smallest dent in ocean acidification and/or climate change more broadly. Theoretically it's a fine idea, but actually doing it at a geo-engineering level...we're not there yet.
There's a few companies that are trying air capture CO2, such as Carbon Engineering. Musk should hire them to build a full-scale plant down in Boca Chica that can use renewable energy and make their methane fuel from air-captured CO2 and electrolyzed water-to-hydrogen.
There's the tricky part. Sequestration means either trying to pump it back into the ground, combining it chemically with weathering rock, or feeding it to plants for capture.
I've heard some good arguments for grasslands/prairie restoration. They don't sequester quite as much CO2 as trees, but they have a few advantages:
1. The carbon is sequestered in the soil, enriching it.
2. Unlike forests, the CO2 trapped won't be released into the air if there's a wildfire or mass dieback from disease.
3. They can capture CO2 in much drier climates
4. They're more reflective than forests, which tend to be dark and more absorbent of sunlight (offsetting some of the benefits of the CO2 capture).
Come now, if Musk is to be involved, surely some of the solutions must involve launching it into space?-)
Or at least accusing fossil fuels of having paedophile tendencies.
Tiny solar reflectors that cool the Earth just enough to offset SpaceX's emissions. : )
Brett sunlight is irrelevant. Let the planet choose how it grows. Humans just need to cut out the excessive carbon burning. The cat is already out of the bag, the long term damage a sunk cost. The most we can do is limit anymore damage.
Uhh, what? Let the planet what? Kill off humans?
The soil and grass, does, in fact, burn,
That's what was burning (for the most part) in the CZU Complex fire: duff. Which is the organic layer that enriches the trees.
Prarie fires move extremely quickly, which makes them dangerous as you can't outrun them, but also means there is little damage to the soil. Traditional dry land pine forests are similiar, if they are allowed to burn every few years the fire passes quickly with out damaging the soil or the mature pines.
But a hot-dry fire like we had last year - record levels of heat and low humidity - even the succulents were burning.
About your 4 points
1. Some carbon is also ending up as soil organic matter in forests. Leaves fall and branches fall and compost on the ground. Even entire trees that fall end up as compost. A good deal of CO2 develops but a significant fraction stays in the soil.
2. There are grass fires in arid climates as well as forest fires. Ask any California fire fighter.
4. The sunlight that is absorbed by trees provides the energy for carbon capture. No sunlight > no carbon capture > no life.
Maybe in tandem with geoengineering?
Perhaps Zubrin will pitch something like: https://sbir.nasa.gov/SBIR/abstracts/00/sbir/phase1/SBIR-00-1-03.02-8730.html but to power the first stage of Starship. Not entirely sure about the combustion products of CO2 and H2 though - might end-up spewing methane?-)
Didn't some researcher once assert that if he was given enough powdered iron he could start an ice age? Something about fertilizing photosynthetic plankton in the ocean.
The problem is that the algae would die after the bloom, and then potentially release the CO2 back into the water and then the air. They'd need to sink down into the ocean after dying instead to be eaten by lower level ocean wildlife.
Or the plankton consumers would sink down in the ocean.
Nothing personally Drum, but you do realize the atmosphere always has some carbon. Anything that reduces excess carbon is the key. Similarly getting rid of dirty fossil fuels raise male testosterone by reducing estrogen in the environment.
And earth has been warmer than a rocky ball at our distance from the sun should have been ever since our atmosphere settled down to a (primarily) nitrogen/oxygen/CO2 mix with varying amounts other gasses. Joseph Fourier was (possibly) the first Western scientist to figure out that we were too warm around 1820.
When we started using coal in huge quantities we began seriously messing with the mix - and scientists actually pretty accurately predicted the likely results if we "evaporated our coal mines into the air" back a bit before the turn of the 20th century. Throw in accelerating to evaporating our oil into the air, massive deforestation, and here we are - in deep shit and digging.
+1
Do we need the pseudoscience toxic masculinity version?
Errrr what??? Male testosterone has plummeted over the last 100 years,I wonder why fool? Oh, it's all the estrogen from coal ash and industry products. But keep on slamming me. Your toxic.
He's actually not wrong about testosterone and sperm counts. Pollution is bad for all kinds of reasons.
If all the loose women would stop using estrogen based birth control everyone wouldn't be turning gay.
None of this will matter unless we also drastically reduce our resource consumption: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00708-4
Which means reducing people or finding a way to make energy more efficient.
Not that difficult. The average Japanese consumes only 1/2 the amount of resources as the average American, and has a comporable standard of living.
Elon Musk is the super villain we need.
If we must have billionaires I'd rather see them focus on this than on space exploration and colonization.
Journeying to other planets is a glorious long-term goal, but as a survival tactic for humanity, folks seem to willfully ignore that terraforming Mars and transporting millions or billions of people there (even if only for slave labor) would be exponentially even more difficult, expensive, and energy-consuming, and take many more decades, than solving climate change on Earth. 🙄
It's not transferring billions. With careful genetic selection you can do it with under 1,000. It's about ensuring something survives.
Besides that it is harder is all the more reason we start tackling those issues NOW.
We need to terraform Terra first, is how I'd put it.
Yes. I'm one of those who is long over my youthful sci-fi reading, didn't go all-in on Star Trek & the like, & just wants this planet treated better.
And whatever remedies are found, we still must begin reforestation, however long it takes. This isn't about one generation's coping skills.
Earth is the best spaceship we have.
Why does it have to be a zero-sum game between space exploration and "terraforming" earth? If we give up our empire and become a mind-our-own-business kind of nation, there are plenty of resources to do both.
I don't see space exploration as a way to continue the human race after we trash Earth to uninhabitability. Others have already pointed out that that's unrealistic. But it's a way to gain new knowledge about our universe, discoveries which might eventually have practical applications to better life here. And, even if it never provides us with material benefits, what about just plain old thirst for knowledge? Is that a hopelessly naivethought?
I love love love space exploration. Never said we should NOT do it. But as you said, it's not something we should be hanging our survival on while trashing our own planet.
Another probably more efficient way are space colony O'Neill Cylinders at the lagrange points. Bezos prefers this one to Mars.
There is just about no scenario in which Mars is less hostile to life than the Earth is. New ice age. Massive global warming. Asteroid strike. You name it. We have oxygen and nitrogen just floating around in the atmosphere here. Having Mars as some kind of backup plan is silly talk. There may be a good reason to colonize Mars, but that is not it.
What folks? Who's making that argument?
Billionaires, mostly.
e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war
https://www.foxnews.com/science/jeff-bezos-says-we-need-to-leave-earth
Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't continue space exploration. But it shouldn't be a distraction away from solving the serious problems we have here.
Elon does not suggest we trash the Earth. So that's a disingenuous argument.
It's possible to do more than one thing. We can have space exploration AND save the Earth.
Never said we can't do both. I love space exploration. We just shouldn't be hanging our hopes of survival on it.
The only thing worse than inadvertently geo-engineering the planet (global warming) is purposefully geo-engineering the planet.
A CC industry big enough to make a difference in the time frame required is a terrible idea.
Worse?
It's worse to purposefully fix things than to unintentionally destroy things?
Yuck. That sounds like moralistic garbage.
This is no "fix" though. How do you think the environment will react to dumping 100% more carbon into the environment over 150 years and then removing 50% over the course of the next 50?
Here's a hint: not good. We'll be taking one serious problem and making it even worse.
No, we'll be trading a catastrophe for unknowns.
That sounds like you're arguing against straw
On some level I don't understand why we don't plant enormous numbers of fast-growing trees and harvest them for lumber, and repeat. We need the building materials and we need to get the carbon out of the air. Obviously it could never be "the solution", but it could be one piece. With the price of lumber having gone up by 200% since a year ago... maybe the brains associated with bank accounts bigger than mine have had the same thought.
Some species can grow to a size that is suitable for commercial lumber in a decade. So...
Because trees don't grow everywhere, use alot of water, and they catch on fire.
I have a similar idea. We should take plant waste (it doesn't matter whether it's tree branches, or corn stalks, or whatever) and pyrolize it, thus generating methanol (wood alcohol) and charcoal. The charcoal can be dumped in the ocean in subduction zones, which would sequester it for a duration that would be long even in geological terms. The methanol can replace all the methanol that is presently made from natural gas as a chemical industry feedstock.
Charcoal absorbs oxygen through chemical and biological mechanisms. It would be bad to dump in the sea.
what bugs me about this a little bit, is that afaict, this is not an industrial implementation problem, but much closer to a basic research problem that can be solved with money, but is less amenable to prize-competition timelines/incentives.
Au contraire, Stiles, the point of prize competitions is not to make the folks who are already working on a problem work harder. Rather, prize competition timelines and incentives, when the incentives are really big, tend to draw some additional number of the best minds towards the problems they are pushing, instead of the other problems those best minds are otherwise occupied with.
The problem with carbon capture is physics and money. In general terms, let's say burning oil/gas/coal generates 10 units of energy and makes 1 unit of CO2. CO2 is a low energy state molecule and a gas. To capture CO2 requires something like 3-8 units of energy to do one or more of concentrate/transport/pressurize/pump underground/chemically react the CO2. There are energy costs, infrastructure, and logistics involved in the various carbon capture approaches, but all the proposed methods require pouring back in a big chunk of the energy generated by burning the fossil fuels. A 'new break though' might require only 5 units of energy and much less infrastructure, but every method is going to require a big chunk of the energy generated by burning the fossil fuel.
So the cost of generating power with carbon capture is much higher than the cost without carbon capture. Twice as high seems like a reasonable minimum, but it could by several times as high.
Its too bad that the pandemic has apparently not caused enough people to spend some time ruminating on the distinction between a "problem" and a "political problem."
You can have a solution to all sorts of problems. But if something is a "political problem" its a whole different issue because then, even if there is a solution, if enough people want the status quo then the solution will not be implemented.
After putting in solar panels and Tesla powerwalls, I now have two EVs, a 2016 eGolf and a 2019 Tesla Model 3, and my system produces enough energy to run the entire house, both cars, with plenty left over.
We don't have an energy problem, we have an "energy storage" problem. Fossil fuels are still used because its easier to store a gallon of gas than it is the equivalent amount of electrical power in a battery, and our energy use is based on either stored energy or grid supplied energy.
Well, its not like we need to worry about solving the energy storage problem in any technical sense, its already solved.
And when you see solar in action, you realize we don't have an energy problem either. If whatever CC system is developed can be run on solar (and that's how it should be designed, with its operation running when the sun is out), its doesn't matter how energy intensive it is, since the amount of solar energy is essentially unlimited.
Coming back to the beginning, "storage" of solar energy is limited, but the amount of energy itself is not.
Consider it.
Actually it does matter at least in terms of cost. Potential energy might be "unlimited", but payments aren't. Your solar system took some coin to setup, and a little more for maintainence, any CC will be similar. Along with operating costs since it is producing a product that has to be stored. And not just stored for the short term, but sequestered for centuries at least.
I was responding not to cost, as we don't know what system would work, let alone what it would cost.
But if the problem is that the CC system requires quite a bit of energy that we have the energy.
I also mode the point, badly, that solar is already comparable in cost with burning fossil fuels, its just that its basically easier and cheaper to have gasoline in a container than electricity in a battery.
Although, not by much if you subtract moving the gasoline around.
Which is why a solar powered CC plant could require almost any amount of energy and still be feasible.
So you're saying the cost of solar/storage is higher than the cost of damage to the environment?
Bingo.
And how much will carbon capture cost? So much that some of the carbon capture tech is 40+ years old, but no energy company has ever done carbon capture at scale and for long enough that there is a good estimate of the cost.
The industry has plenty of engineers--they've run the numbers, and the cost of carbon capture is so high that the decision would be to eliminate most uses of fossil fuel. Solar + batteries, or even nuclear power was cheaper twenty years ago, and renewals look much better today. So the fossil fuel industry stalls--does nothing mostly, and a few small test projects that don't generate cost data, and plans to stall for another generation.
Musk has at least thought enough about it to include the sequestering part. There is a Swiss company that has a technology to remove carbon from air (not from a stovepipe which is probably the easier way to do it). So far they are selling the CO2 for industrial purposes, aka soda cans.
The problem is that to separate and sequester the carbon takes about 10 times as much useful energy as we get from burning the carbon
Its 10 times as efficient to simply NOT BURN the fossil fuels
The exception to this is plants using sunlight
That's why the Prize competition.
Too much carbon in various places, too many guns on the ground.
Amelioration difficult.
A MOXIE in every home! Democrats could do it via reconciliation! https://mashable.com/article/moxie-makes-oxygen-on-mars/
" An electrolyzer running at temperatures above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit creates an electric current that separates oxygen from compressed carbon dioxide, *leaving carbon monoxide waste.*"
Sounds like a great solution!