IF we go with the tech assumption of Peter Diamandis, author of Abundance, founder of X-prize, successful social entrepreneur, co-founder of Singularity University…
that the cost of power in the next few decades is going to go through the same over the cliff drop in price as information/bandwidth has over the last 2-3 decades…
[I know, I know, big assumption, but just stay with me for a moment]
but IF we go with that, my question here is
How much will it actually cost to sequester as much carbon as we want out of the atmosphere? The technology we already have, much less the new ones assuredly coming online: what is it? how difficult, expensive? what are the major limiting variables aside from cost of power?
If we take that cost out, which Diamandis, Kurzweil, and other futurists with pretty good track records [check it out] seem fairly certain about, is this 400 ppm (and growing) carbon loading we are doing now that big a problem?
if we cannot do anything about it, yeah, sure.
But as Diamandis argues in his book, history of humans is that we keep knocking down limitations, one after another…
Yes?
Accept the hypothesis/prediction/forecast for energy price crash, that has huge implications for the whole paradigm. And global climate change, through carbon increase and decrease, is just one more variable now under human intervention.
(“Microphase consciousness trying to keep up with macrophase power” in Brian Swimme’s famous phrase.)
There is a chicken and egg issue here. Almost all the additional CO[sub]2[/sub] humans put in the air is from power production. It goes up with the power produced. So if we posit limitless almost free power we have either - unbounded CO[sub]2[/sub] production and so a self defeating premise - or the power production is not CO[sub]2[/sub] producing, in which case the cheapest and simplest thing is to simply shut down all CO[sub]2[/sub] producing power systems and use our now limitless clean power.
The remaining CO[sub]2[/sub] comes from such activities as cement production (1%) and steel production. Cement could be sorted, steel and other refining is a lot harder. So some sequestering may still be needed to reduce humanities CO[sub]2[/sub] footprint to zero.
Limitless power also allows us to keep our hydrocarbon burning activities - we just use the power to synthesise the hydrocarbons out of CO[sub]2[/sub] we pull out of the atmosphere - creating a closed cycle. So we could continue to fly planes with kerosene and pump gasoline into our cars. That is going to require major investment - of a similar order to the current hydrocarbon refinery and oil production infrastructure. Then again, when it costs $100m to drill one well in deepwater Gulf of Mexico, there is a staggering amount of money potentially available in the energy economy.
Finally, you have to work out how this will pan out in a global setting. The availability of super cheap power is of no use here if it is restricted to the already rich. You have work out how to wean developing countries off CO[sub]2[/sub] producing power. Indeed this is arguably the more pressing need.
None of this answers the question posed I’m afraid. But if you are looking to sequestration of existing outputs, the big cost is in modifying things like power producing plants to allow CO[sub]2[/sub] capture, and also factoring the loss of efficiency that occurs when you do this. But as I wrote, the premise makes this issue nonsensical.
Yeah, the first step is obviously to stop the production of (almost) all new industrial CO2. That alone would be huge. Once we’ve got that, very little sequestration would be needed to keep up with (and gain on) the remainder. Carbon can be sequestered quite simply just by growing plants, harvesting them, and stockpiling them somewhere while re-using the land to grow more. It can also be done more quickly, through processes that already exist, where the limiting factor is currently power. For instance, the Navy is already in R&D for a process to produce fuel from seawater-- It’s only practical when you’ve got a fleet containing a nuclear-powered carrier, in the middle of nowhere, but it does appear to be practical in that situation.
A big question about carbon sequestration is whether or not is will stay sequestered–or if it will gradually seep out.
So anyway why would there be a big drop in the cost of power? Fossil fuel power should get more and more expensive–simply because we are using the easiest to get first–so the fuel decades in the future will be very hard to extract. Nuclear was going to be “too cheap to meter”–yet the price of new reactors keeps exploding. While solar PV and wind costs are going down rapidly these are intermittent sources–so the big cost is the cost of energy storage–which are currently very high.
Another way to think of this is that at certain times of day, when the sun in shining and the wind blowing, power will be very cheap. Presumably CO2 sequestration machinery doesn’t need to be run 24/7. It might make sense to run it when intermittent power sources are at a peak and there is surplus available power.