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A Modest Proposal For Sequestration of CO2 In the Antarctic
First time accepted submitter Alienwise writes "Judith Curry reports a scientific concept of an atmospheric CO2 sequestration plant. It would be based in the Antartic to profit from the cold weather, which would facilitate the creation of CO2 snow — which would then be buried. The plant could be powered by windmills." The lead author has agreed to let Curry link to a copy of the final manuscript, if you'd like to read more.
the sweep-it-under-the-carpet method of trash removal
works great for the inlaws, the planet? not so much
It will only cost $10 trillion a year to operate.
Summary suggests wind. Makes sense.
Your reading ability will one day be the stuff of legends.
it really wouldn't hurt you to read the first paragraph, would it? Geez way to start the thread "Dunbal".
I know it's already been said, but the summary itself mentions the proposed power source (not to mention the article!). Is it really too much to ask that you read the few sentences you are replying to before you hit reply? Really?! How fucking lazy can you be? At least it seems like you read the whole entire headline so there's that.
to think that this is a really terrible idea. ... that sounds kind of very unsafe.
It sounds like a great way to enable massive CO2 release just by any heating accident or lack of maintenance... I don't know but
On top of that it looks astronomically expensive.
This doesn't involve eating babies, does it?
#DeleteChrome
Sell it to Coca Cola and Pepsi for making all our drinks fizzy!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This actually seems like a feasible plan.
It plans not just for the extraction of atmospheric CO2, but the long-term storage of it. The power source is wind, so it doesn't fall into the trap of generating more CO2 than it generates.The choice of location makes sense for both the temperature and for the political neutrality. They don't list an actual cost, but it would likely be only in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions in the worst case. Which is a lot of money, yes, but not the trillions or quadrillions some plans have required. And it calls for a demonstration plant first, which would be just a few dozen million.
The only thing I see stopping it is politics. In particular, America and China. Europe seems to at least recognize the need for action, and they're willing to work together to try things. China is generally too selfish and shortsighted to worry about the environment, but you could probably convince them if you could make it somewhat-profitable for them (just have the wind turbines and such made in China, that should satisfy them).
But then it falls on to America. And you're going to need America at least not fighting this plan, because if the US decides to actively fight it, it's not happening. Period. You'd also need them to at least chip in a good chunk of the funding if you're going to do the full plan, make a serious dent in CO2. Problem is, denying the very existence global warming is a political *requirement* for half the country. They'll fight it just on principle, and I can't see the rest of the country fighting back for a project that doesn't have any immediate gains for the US specifically. While some sort of "compromise" could probably pull it off, or with luck it could be swept under the rug and never become a political issue, that's not guaranteed.
Still, it's the best plan I've seen so far.
You should read his other digital regurgitations he heaves upon us.
Hm... the abstract appears to convert 1 B tonnes (1 billion, I assume) into 1012 kg. It also omits a lot of words and is generally difficult to read because of it. They appear to use the coldest ever recorded temperature as their working temperature. They also don't talk about how they're going to keep all that CO2 frozen, or how much energy that's going to cost. Or what you do with the plant after five years when it's surrounded by CO2 dumps.
You've heard the explanation from a few other people, so I'm here to tell you the really important thing that most people won't tell you:
Please kill yourself.
Firstly, read the article as others have suggested. Secondly, even if you didn't read the article, did you really, really think that the real scientists (I make the distinction in case you think you're one) who came up with this idea hadn't thought of those things? Or were you hoping they'd drop by Slashdot, see the holes you've ingeniously managed to poke in their scheme in 30 seconds when they've spent months coming up with it, bow before your mighty intellect and pop a Nobel prize in the post?
Scoffing at something you don't understand is not an intelligent response. Asking questions (or in this case, simply reading TFA) is.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It takes energy to make CO2.
Err, actually no, the reason we're in this mess is because CO2 is a by-product of our favourite way of liberating energy.
That energy will probably come from burning fossil fuels
If the process was (possibly magically) efficient enough, you could run it on fossil fuels as long as you put away more than you create. You may also be fascinated to know that the back of your fridge is hot.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Release Comrade X or we'll firebomb Antartica. You don't want all that carbon up in the air, do you? On the other hand, maybe it'll be cheaper just to burn more fossil fuels or start a fair-sized forest fire.
Can't we just put all that CO2 in beer?
Because it's a greenhouse gas, pay attention.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
When he calls it a modest proposal, does he realize he is copying another title, which essentially indicates he is being completely sarcastic, and not serious at all in what he proposes?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
All we need is a John Carter now to lead a desperate mission to keep the atmosphere machine running... a half-trillion dollars or so later.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Michele Bachmann, is that you?
Building and maintaining a large infrastructure (especially something particularly mechanical like a wind far) in the especially hostile environment of Antarctica is going to have some really interesting engineering problems associated.
Then there's the problem of making sure that the CO2 remains frozen -- especially once the infrastructure is abandoned/broken
finally, there's the time bomb effect -- The antarctic ice belt Isn't static. It moves (albeit slowly) towards the sea, which means you're actually creating a CO2 TIme Bomb for some future generation to deal with.
Perhaps a better solution would be to put the power generation stations on Antarctica and find a way to distribute that energy to the rest of the world (or at least South America, Africa and Australia)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Yes, but -- like anything else useful (water, oxygen), too much of it (also too fast an increase) can kill you (or, in this case, cause catastrophic climate effects).
CO2 isn't the worst of the greenhouse gasses, we're just generating lots and lots and lots of it all of a sudden, and the ecosystem doesn't have the ability to effectively deal with it that fast.
For an example of the effect, try drinking 20 litres of pure water tomorrow (just make sure to do it at a medical facility where they have some hope of reviving you when you collapse).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I had wondered about artificially creating methane hydrate crystals either for storage in deep water or to be used as a cleaner fuel source. They should burn as clean as natural gas. I'm not a hundred percent sure of the process but I believe cold and pressure would cause the crystals to form so it'd involve mostly pumping CO2 into the deep ocean. You'd probably want to keep it semi closed to avoid raising acidity of the ocean water. I never liked the idea of underground storage since some of the biggest disasters in known history have been caused by major releases of CO2. Hydrate crystals are really stable so long as the temperature is stable. Raising deep water temperatures one degree would involve such a massive increase in global temperatures we'd all be dead anyway.
Dr. Agee et al.. If you want people to read it, submit your paper to Arxiv. Publishing via Slashdot is just not the same.
I like the plan of fast-growing trees like poplar being planted in Northern mainland Canada, then being cut and sent north to the Arctic ocean, and towed to places like Ellesmere Island for storage. Those high Arctic islands are so dry and cold, we simulate Mars missions there. The logs will sit there for centuries, holding carbon.
I am amazed at how many people can't figure out that the dude is joking.
If you are saying that you need to create a power source to convert the CO2 from the atmosphere into a form that can be buried, then the logical choice is why you can't simply use this power source to eliminate CO2 producing power sources in the first place.
His 'modest proposal' should have tipped you off. Apparently, it was far too subtle for Slashdot.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
with that frozen stuff, Future Generations!
Too bad you can't complain to the original producers.
Plant trees, then bury them!
(fast growing trees like Eucalyptus trees, which also tend to have a low water requirement)
They had to settle for wind power when they couldn't find enough unicorns that eat CO2 and fart skittles.
1. Build plant in really cold place
2. Profit from cold weather
3. Pull CO2 from atmosphere
4. Bury CO2 snow
5. Mankind benefits
You must be new here, because you've got this all out of order. Here's how it's supposed to go:
1. Build plant
2. Pull CO2 from atmosphere
3. Bury CO2 snow
4. ???
5. Profit!
If profit is not the end goal, then fail. If "mankind benefits" is the last item on the list, then fail. Go back and try it again. You don't have to be evil to get this right, but it helps.
...In a few million years
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I have to admit, this idea is pretty cool. :-)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
A big point of this proposal is the strong, constant katabatic wind currents around Antarctica, which make the generation of large amounts of power feasible. But that power is in Antarctica, not New York, so you can't do much with it.
And, yes, you can extract much more CO2 from the air with a unit of power than is produced generating that power, even from Coal.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
+1 Insightful for you.
With the appropriate farming techniques, which have pretty much been forgotten in the age of high-volume industrial farming, carbon sequestration can be greatly increased.
It frustrates me beyond measure how our society tends to want to solve things with big, sweeping high-cost measures, and then when that becomes a problem, add yet another layer of over-engineering on top of that. Modern farming is one of the biggest problems in the carbon debacle. Cows are kept on bare concrete and fed a steady stream of grain, and the waste is just sloughed off to be turned to muck and eventually dried. Meanwhile, farms that grow produce tend to focus on only one crop (corn, wheat, whatever), thus progressively depleting the soil of resources for that crop, necessitating the high-volume production of fertilizer. Simple measures that can both increase the yield of farmland and create much healthier food, also happen to increase and thrive on carbon sequestration. If this were done on a major scale, I suspect our carbon problems would start to reverse.
But I know... promoting wholistic measures like this make one seem like an old hippy. Honestly, it's too bad. There are so many ways to save effort and improve things, but instead we focus on the dramatic high-effort, high-risk solutions.
It's powered by windmills, Einstein.
Use orbiting shades to shade much of Antarctica so that it is dark most of the summer. This should make it cold enough to form CO2 snow, removing CO2 from the atmosphere. It also would increase H2O snow accumulation, but that's ok as it would bury the CO2 and also tend to counteract sea level rise.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
KENT
Our top story, the population of parasitic tree lizards has exploded, and local citizens couldn't be happier! It seems the rapacious reptiles have developed a taste for the common pigeon, also known as the 'feathered rat', or the 'gutter bird'. For the first time, citizens need not fear harassment by flocks of chattering disease-bags.
Later, Bart receives an award from Mayor Quimby outside the town hall. Several lizards slink past.
QUIMBY
For decimating our pigeon population, and making Springfield a less oppressive place to while away our worthless lives, I present you with this scented candle.
Skinner talks to Lisa.
SKINNER
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA
But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER
No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA
But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA
But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Messing with the environment because we messed with the environment before, what could possibly go wrong?
ice + berg = mountain of ice
ice + burg = village of ice
Am I the only one ... to think that this is a really terrible idea.
It sounds like a great way to enable massive CO2 release just by any heating accident or lack of maintenance.
I was about to post something similar but was checking whether anybody had beaten me to it. You came close.
This looks like a DANDY way to set up a runaway-positive-feedback event:
1) Make gigatons of dry ice by freezing CO2 out of the atmosphere.
2) Bury it in Antarctica.
3) Pray that it stays cold.
4) If the temperature of the burial site rises above â'78.5 ÂC (â'109.3 ÂF) the dry ice starts sublimating, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
5) The released CO2 increases the greenhouse effect, which captures more heat, which raises the temperature, which sublimates more dry ice.
6) Rinse and repeat.
7) Prophet!
Even if the global warming observations aren't the sign of an oncoming anthropogenic overheating disaster, THIS could create one. Artificially sequestering the CO2 would retard natural sequestration mechanisms (such as increased photosynthesis stimulated by higher CO2 levels). Then suddenly (in geologic time) releasing the stockpile back into the atmosphere could leave you with a substantially higher CO2 level than if you hadn't run the project in the first place.
Oops!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Make that:
4) If the temperature of the burial site rises above -78.5 C (-109.3 F) the dry ice starts sublimating, releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We mine fossil fuels (carbon), burn it using oxygen producing carbon-dioxide, and then bury it. Cool. Now I wonder what will we breathe when some idiots manage to bury a significant amount of our oxygen from the atmosphere...
Which is probably why the scammers renamed it 'climate change'.
www.climatedepot.com
LOL at the Slashdot idiots buying the 'global warming' nonsense. "Oh look at me - I'm just so 'caring' and 'kind'!"
Assholes.
This process needs to deal with 30 billion tons of CO2 a year. The average binding energy of CO2 is of the order of 3eV.
That's 10^26 * 10^-19 * 10^10 = 10^17 joules a year. or 10GW 24/7.
And Judith and other deniers think wind power cannot work to produce lots of power 24/7.
Perhaps sudden release of an enormous amount of C02. Suppose this works fairly well. We could sequester carbon for 50 years and then something could happen like another meteor from Mars and damage the refrigeration required. BAM! Sudden global climate chaos. Perhaps people will survive with the carbon intact for hundreds of years and society could degenerate. Then it would be a matter of time before lack of maintenance leads to failure.
I think we would be much better off seeking sequestration in soil enrichment through compost. Another possibility might be to stir up some of the ocean bottom in the dead part of the Pacific and stimulate life there.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
We really need a "-1 stupid".
First, I did not read in the article how the storage is supposed to work for a long enough time. The CO2 has to be stored for a time on the order of 10 000 years, since that is the approximate lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. At atmospheric pressure the temperature has to stay below -78.5C for that. How is an isolated landfill supposed to achieve that?
Second, why on Antarctica? His argument is the environmental temperature, which is 226K on average. The process should run at 133K or 152K. The maximum theoretical efficiency of a cooling plant is cooled temperature over temperature difference. So if this is built in Europe with an average temperature of about 280K, it will require only 1.6-1.7 times as much energy as if the condensation is done on Antarctica. I am sure that the cost increase for building the wind farms on Antarctica alone is much higher than that. The high cost of building all this on Antarctica makes this project totally uneconomical.
Storing the CO2 in the ground, for example in former natural gas deposits makes much more sense than this.
On the other side, storing CO2 in the ground is also neither cheap or save, and having the CO2 released in Antarctica is better than in an inhabited area. Also in my opinion it is better if the CO2 is released within 10 000s or 100 000s of years than if it is stored for eternity, since it is generally needed for life, it is just too much at once now. The lifetime of a CO2 landfill isolated by water ice should be more predictable than the storage under ground.
So if the lifetime of such a landfill is really that long the idea would make sense.
if you want to get corps into mining take 1 ton of co2 up to the place you want to mine nd bring back one ton of ore or processed ore of any kind
this keeps the balance of gravity throughout the system and thus wont unbalance planetary movement.
When did the human race become omnipotent? How can we have so much faith that we can 'fix Earth' when we don't even really understand how it works (follow _any_ science blog and note how many time scientists are 'surprised to discover that ...')?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Explain where all the CO2 we produce went. We KNOW how much we produce from burning fossil fuels et al. 30 billion tons a year.
And the increase in atmospheric CO2 is about equivalent to about 17 billion tons of CO2 a year.
But if it were the trees dying off doing it
a) where is all the 30 billion tons of our production going to
b) why not stop both our CO2 production AND deforestation?
And on the topic, I see this is only to manage 1/30th of our CO2 production. How much will this cost? Multiply that by 30 and you have the cost of this "modest proposal". Now have a look at Judith's rantings on the horrendous cost of changing over to use windfarms and solar panels to replace production.
And compare the cost of that change to the figure you had above.
Rather odd that she's willing to promote an idea EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE.
We are thinking like slave owners, try desperately to annex new land to move an increasingly inefficient economic model to. It doesn't work on cold economic grounds, because this is capital that will be very far away from all other human activity, and have no follow on applications. If you want giant wind farms, put them someplace people can actually use them...
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
...it can't be done
You are describing a kind of perpetual motion machine, which like all such schemes fails when you consider the thermodynamics.
Methane is a reduced form of carbon. CO2 is an oxidized form of carbon. The energy from burning fuels like methane (and other fossil fuels which are also reduced carbon) comes from the thermodynamics of converting reduced carbon to oxidized carbon.
In other words, to convert CO2 from fossil fuels back into methane, we'd have to put all the energy we got out of burning the fuels back in--minus substantial and unavoidable energy losses at both ends of the process.
So basically, your process leaves us with less energy than never burning the fossil fuels in the first place and just leaving them in the ground.
People have been searching for years for Swift's Flying Island of LaPuta, and you've found it! This is truly an exciting developement. Now I know where to go to present my idea for increasing CO2 sequestration in coral reefs by raising the temperature of cold ocean currents to accelerate coral growth in previously coral-lacking regions. The burning of about 3 milion cubic meters/day of natural gas in special combustion chambers at a depth of about 1 kilometer should do the trick. Heating exchangers, LOX and natural gas wells, plants, piping, shipping, should only cost about $3 trillion per year. Chump change these days. Add another $500 billion for submersible mainentance fleets and crew, per year. Peanuts, for massive return. We have the technology, let's do it!
It will be very interesting to hear what the Al Gores of the world think of this – if we could burn all the fossil fuel we want without worries about the global warming “crisis” what would they think? Who needs Al anymore? Who needs his “carbon credits”? Naw, he won’t like the idea.
Leaving aside the utterly disproven notion of AGW
This is where I stopped reading.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yes? Then sequestrate all day long to your hearts content. Just don't steal my oxygen.
But here is the best part - when winter comes the gorillas all freeze to death!
Uhhh, wait a minute.
Nevermind.
In particular, America and China.
China recognizes the necessity of action, and are developing huge wind farms. (6 at 20GW each. By comparison, France uses 80GW.)
A majority in the USA would like to see some action, and indeed, 1/5th of the USA lives under a carbon trading scheme -- with no evidence of any economic damage. A carbon neutral tax takes from the utility companies bottom line, and generates demand for energy efficient products and infrastructure. The official rggi report specifically shows that this is what has been happening over the last 10 years, with net savings for both consumers and business. Furthermore, this region of the US economy has grown in proportion to the rest of the USA. The "damage" of a carbon tax is a conservative myth. And besides, many Republicans want action on climate change, including supply-side economics guru Art Laffer.
Now, China wants the west to pay through the nose before it officially ties itself to any legally binding targets. Same with India, and the rest of the developed world. In my opinion, they have a victim complex, which does have some legitimate basis. But seriously: grow up.
But, returning to your post, it is too black-and-white to suggest that nothing is happening in the USA. And in China, the boots are marching.
Only the regressive climate-change denial machine stops real and cheap action on AGW, and for purely philosophical reasons that are not grounded in out best understanding of either science or economics. These people are not oil industry shills (although they do have oil-sugar-daddys) but they do really believe in the imminent threat of climate-change legislation.
History will not remember them kindly.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Carbons Credits. Biggest legal scam going. And you just reminded me that I need to get my carbon bank up asap.
A thoughtful person would want to know what the consequences were of carbon-limiting legislation around the world, and, a large chunk of the USA.
If you think you already know the answer before looking... then I have no reason to believe that you know anything of value on the subject.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Let me ask you a question. If your options were 1) Use a power source that doesn't require emission of CO2 to clean up CO2 or 2) Replace CO2 emitting power plants with power sources that don't require emission of CO2, which do you think would be more efficient? If you said #1, you missed a law of physics or two.
Obviously it is more efficient to simply produce energy in ways that emit little CO2 in the first place. However, because scientists tend to be very conservative, esp. en masse, we have every reason to believe that there is already too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and it will start to cost real $$$ and lives and human suffering in the coming decades. I am not saying that that is a certainty, but it is certainly a possibility.
So in makes sense to think about ways to remove the extant CO2.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The "don't emit CO2" idea is not a very realistic one as far as reality is concerned.
I have met people who think that there are too many human beings, and the world could do with a big die-off. They are few and far between, and not representative of the majority who take environmental issues seriously. You are imaging a boggie-man if you think that that is what reducing CO2 emissions is all about.
The real question is: how can we sustain our project of civilization long-term?
From a scientific point of view -- which represents our best understanding -- we should be concerned about the long-term consequences of allow atmospheric CO2 to climb. Such measured analysis has nothing to do with kitsch throwaways like: "don't emit CO2" and "mass extinction of humankind".
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
China may happily offer to sell them windmills etc to do it on a massive scale (and burn all the coal to do it ;) ).
China is building huge wind farms. Their energy-policy doesn't make sense at first blush because it isn't based on "four-legs-good, two-legs-bad" when it comes to traditional power generation.
The same could be said of the USA, which generates a huge amount of wind energy, and has developed (along with Europe) the know-how for integrating it seamlessly into the power grid. The USA also has a 1/5th of its economy under a carbon tax, which over the last 10 years, has saved industry and consumers $$$ on their power bills. Interesting how incentive structures give people the little push to save money long-term.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Cool science but incredible $$$ to build one insulated 2km x2km x 16m disposal trench per year should the technology work.
In other words, you're a liberal.
...but, are you using the word "liberal" there as it if means something negative?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Plant more trees. They harvest huge amounts of carbon over their lifetime, require no maintenance, and even reproduce by themselves. The only problem is that solution can't make someone rich.
Sorry BTW, I blew myself and it up.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Yes because maintaining windmills in the artic will be a cakewalk I am sure.
Windmills being noteriously immune to ice and cold weather.
1) Run a diseal generator to keep support staff
2) Have support staff slowly chip ice off windmills, and repair frozen machines
3) Sequester CO2!
Just grow more forests. It not only sequesters the carbon, it frees most of the oxygen for our use, to breathe and stuff.
-- thinkyhead software and media