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Pilot Test Of Storing Carbon Dioxide In Rocks Shows Impressive Outcome (theaustralian.com.au)
For years we have been trying to find different ways to limit carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuels. Some researchers believe that things would be very convenient if we could just deposit carbon dioxide in rocks. A pilot project around this idea has shown an impressive result. John Ross, reporting for the Australian: Scientists say they have demonstrated a foolproof way of sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide -- turning it into rock. An international team of researchers says it has demonstrated for the first time that CO2 can be permanently locked away from the atmosphere by injecting it into volcanic bedrock. The study, reported this morning in the journal Science, could overcome the leakage problems that have plagued attempts to bury CO2 gas underground. Lead author Juerg Matter said between 95 per cent and 98 per cent of the injected CO2 had been mineralised in less than two years, "which is amazingly fast.""Until now it was thought this process would take hundreds to thousands of years," University of Southampton, which led the new study, said in a statement. "The current study has demonstrated that it can take as little as two years."
This is a pilot--first of its kind. It might herald a whole new era for the human race! Or it might not. We'll need many decades of work and repetitions of this study, and studies that grow forth from what we learn here, to know if this is truly a viable technology, or if this study is merely a fluke.
Who did what now?
>> Scientists say they have demonstrated a foolproof way of sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide -- turning it into rock.
Let me tell you about something called "plants," which are an exotic form of life that use clean solar energy to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide. Some people even believe that dead plants can be converted into an equally rare form of sequestered carbon called "coal," though this theory has yet to be proven.
My very first thought was this can be used as part of the Venus terraform
Atmospheric CO2 is about half a percent (400 PPM), though it's rising. Most of these "sequestration" ideas only work if you have high concentrations of CO2 to begin with, so you take the high CO2 concentration from some kind of industrial process and instead of dumping it in the atmosphere, you pump it underground, or in this case into volcanic bedrock. It's not a good way to get existing CO2 levels down. Still, it's a much needed improvement if it works.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Stop clear-cutting all the trees for lumber and to put up crappy strip malls and subdivisions!
That is backwards. A mature forest does not remove net CO2. You need to cut it down, sequester the wood in housing or whatever, and then let the forest regrow. If forests are going to be used to remove carbon, we need to cut down more of them.
Then you did it wrong, and missed something.
This process is expensive and there are better ways to do it. CO2 can be used for enhanced oil recovery which can sequester carbon while also helping improve yield. Since it has positive economic value, it is much more likely to actually happen.
Not only that, but trees are not some infinite carbon sink. There comes a point when emissions lead to climactic changes so great that not even vast forests could deal with the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
The solution is to stop CO2 getting into the atmosphere. If sequestering works, great, though the better solution is to simply move to alternatives that emit a lot less CO2, period. Ending fossil fuel use should be the ultimate goal. If sequestering offers a stopgap measure, so be it, but the long run should be the end of using fossil fuels.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Then you did it wrong, and missed something.
This process is expensive and there are better ways to do it. CO2 can be used for enhanced oil recovery which can sequester carbon while also helping improve yield. Since it has positive economic value, it is much more likely to actually happen.
Technologies and solutions are not mutually exclusive. And operating costs tend to decrease with scale or better technology. If the only reason to deter use of a technology is the up-front operational cost of a pilot program, we wouldn't have a lot of the shit we take for granted nowadays.
Great, if you have a coal power plant sitting on top of bedrock... Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and transporting it to a sequestering facility will most likely be prohibitively expensive.
This would only be used to sequester CO2 from power plants and other large emitters, not from tractors. The problem is that in order to capture the CO2 from the exhaust it takes 25% to 40% more energy than just releasing the exhaust with the CO2. Since you seem to be so worried about the poor then how are they going to pay for that? Some sources of electricity that don't emit CO2 are getting close to the cost of electricity generation with fossil fuels. Having to pay for the extra fuel to power the carbon capture combined with the continued downward trend in clean power pricing will push this into clean powers favour.
Actually, a lot of low-development countries expend high amounts of labor on food production. In North America, it's usually under 2%; in Africa, it can be as high as 40% of the labor force.
When you expand production beyond a certain amount, the secondary resources feeding that production require more effort to collect. Run out of fertile land and you can grow more by bringing fertilizer and irrigation to rocky soil; that may yield less, and so you have to farm a greater area of soil, requiring more fertilizer and more irrigation per land area, *plus* more direct human time spent traversing a larger area to harvest the same amount of food. Increasing the labor of chemists, oil producers, miners, machinists, and so forth to produce the machines, chemicals, fuels, and blunt manual labor involved in food production means you have to pay all these additional wages per unit food, and so food becomes expensive.
Find a way to increase scale--grow food more densely (intensive farming) or grow food on lower-quality land with only *slightly* more human labor than on high-quality land--and you uncap scarcity. Sensing abundance, the population grows. So it is, so it's always been; a violation of this principle would lead to a chunk of the poorest of society simply starving away, so changing this trend is not only unlikely (no precipitating reason), but impossible.
I predict a future in which alternate energy sources become necessarily cheaper. Advances in solar and wind will replace some of the oil and coal; advances in nuclear or a breakthrough technology (e.g. space energy, high-efficiency geothermal) will replace all of it when these exceed the cost of oil (which will increase with more resource exhaustion, and decrease with better drilling technology). The reduced load on the EPA will allow their budget to channel toward creating a strategic oil reserve by scrubbing the atmosphere of CO2, converting it to oil which we can store in the ground. On today's technology, a reasonable budget can thus sequester 1 day's worth of CO2 in 1 year of operation; further technical progress will accelerate that over the next 300 years, and starting at a stable point necessarily means movement goes in the direction of reversal from day one, even if slowly.
That is the least-economically-disruptive outcome and the most likely.
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You can't just plant trees, you have to harvest them when they're grown up and sequester them. Otherwise you'll just run out of land. People don't really like the idea of cutting down forests and burying or sinking the wood into the ocean.
We'd have a nice little carbon sequestration economy going if we made it illegal to recycle paper or wood products.
No, it means that it was a pilot project and it's the first time they've tried this.
It's great news. I've been following as they've been working on this project. Most people wouldn't think we'd have much carbon dioxide here since virtually all of our power is either hydroelectric or geothermal, but we're actually abnormally high emitters per capita. Now, most of that's not easy to capture - we can pretty much rule out the fishing fleet, and two of the three aluminum smelters aren't that close to a geothermal plant (although I don't know if their technique needs to be directly coordinated with a geothermal plant or not). However, geothermal wells also can have surprising levels of CO2 emissions. They're quite varied, and generally far less than burning fossil fuels for power, but some of the worst wells can actually get up to a good fraction of the emissions of of an equivalent amount of fossil fuel power. So this experiment was conducted at Hellisheiði, which is the biggest geothermal plant in Iceland (and one of the biggest in the world), with the goal of making it eventually fully close-cycle. Maybe they'll also reduce their H2S emissions at the same time.
Concerning one thing in the article:
They're already making regular earthquakes on the production end, so what's the big difference? More to the point, who would even notice? Wow, gee, earthquakes in Iceland, we've never gotten those before ;)
I also don't have much concerns about trace metals flowing into waters. Those are geothermal layers. Any waters there are geothermal waters. Which means that they're pretty "contaminated" to begin with. You don't drink geothermal waters, or anything that they flow into. I have a lot more concerns about 1) agricultural / livestock / septic system contamination, and 2) suspended particulate (aka surface water contamination). See Mývatn for the effects of both, Lagarfljót particularly for the latter. Our main areas of concern with bodies of water have generally been with either clouding them or causing algal blooms.
Then again, though, why should we even bother helping reduce CO2 levels? Make Iceland Covered With Redwoods Again! ;)
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
Let's crunch some numbers.
The largest tree planting project that I know of is the Civilian Conservation Core which planted about 3 billion trees in the US over about a decade (source).
Let's say that a 40-year-old tree is sequestering about 1 ton of CO2 (source, and yes, I realize this will vary a lot based on species and location, but we need to start somewhere).
So, let's say that we magically plant 3 billion trees tomorrow. That will sequester 3e9 trees*2e3 lbs/tree*4.54e-13 lbs/gigatonne / 40 years = 0.068 gigatonnes/year of CO2 sequestered. (Note that ton and tonne are different.) In comparison, the US produces about 1.4 gigatonnes a year (source).
I'm not saying that sequestering CO2 in rock is a better scheme, but planting a few *billion* trees won't solve our problem.
(PS. someone check my math. It's easy to screw these calculations up.)
Believe it or not, you're not the first person to think of feedback loops at work in climate change. There are many known feedback mechanisms (relevant wikipedia article), both negative and _positive_. Let's not pretend that the "Net Primary Productivity" feedback mechanism (what you're talking about) will save us. In fact, it seems to be a pretty weak feedback loop compared to feedback loops that are at work. After all, we're burning up a _lot_ of dead plants (many of them from the days when the earth was covered with jungles). We'd need a lot of new plants to make up for it, and they'd have to show up pretty fast to overpower the other feedback mechanisms. It's easy to see that this feedback loop isn't too strong: just look at the amount of biomass around us and compare it to how much was there 50 years ago. The amount of biomass hasn't changed much even though the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has gone up an appreciable amount.
These feedback loops are included in climate models. No one pretends that we fully understand them or model them exactly, but people have put a lot of thought into them and have a decent grasp of their workings.
Stop clear-cutting all the trees for lumber and to put up crappy strip malls and subdivisions!
That is backwards. A mature forest does not remove net CO2. You need to cut it down, sequester the wood in housing or whatever, and then let the forest regrow. If forests are going to be used to remove carbon, we need to cut down more of them.
Well, but old growth forests actually remove more carbon than their younger replacements, so it isn't that simple:
So by leaving an old growth forest in place, we sequester the carbon (in the forest) and improve the uptake.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Except that I seem to recall that most such CO2 tends to leak back into the atmosphere within several years
No. A good site will retain 99% of the sequestered CO2 for at least 1000 years. The CO2 is typically injected into geologic formations that were able to hold methane for millions of years. If the methane didn't leak, why would the CO2?
Because the methane was internally generated inside a pocket that formed over thousands, if not millions, of years of material deposition, and the CO2 was injected into a geologic formation that was ripped open with mechanical machinery and bulldozed shut by underpaid contractors in a few hours?
If the oil wells are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from where the oil is burned are you going to transport the C02 back to the well head?
Very little CO2 is collected from burning oil. Oil is mostly used in transportation, where is is not feasible to collect it. Most CO2 that is collected comes from burning coal or natural gas to generate electricity, or make cement, etc. One option is that instead of moving the CO2 to the oilfield, you can move the generator there, and burn the coal/NG locally. Many oilfields generate a lot of gas as a byproduct. There are a lot of geographically dispersed oil and gas fields, so the CO2 does not need to be piped far. For instance, there are plenty of suitable sites in Southern California, and Pennsylvania, which are close to population centers, and thus close to power plants.
But anyway, CCS is a bridge technology, until we can move away from fossil fuels completely. It is not a permanent solution.
From an articles at Ars Technica today:
'So is this a breakthrough demonstration of carbon storage that can be emulated around the world? Not necessarily. It’s not entirely clear what it is about the CarbFix site that allowed such rapid mineralization. It could be some combination of characteristics of the geology and groundwater chemistry, although the researchers think their approach of dissolving the CO2 in water before injection played a role.
Charlotte Sullivan studies CO2 storage in basalt at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She told Ars that slower rates of mineralization are expected in other locations that have been studied. '
Not as cut and dried as our Australian climate denying mates would have you assume. If it can be replicated then that would be interesting.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world