Here is the link:
Doh! Skipped the step. But yes, about a ton and a half of carbon.
Oh yes, there are plenty of implications. Not the least massive ecological disruption, or massive crop failures, widespread floods and droughts, ocean rise, northeast conveyor shutdown - but human migration may become the most pressing and hardest to stop. Leaving hot and foodless places for “the promised land” is only normal.
(For example, how much of the world relies on fishing, which global temperature patterns can severely disrupt. Plagues of locusts in Africa have already been an issue - usually abnormally large populations of something are an indication of an ecology seriously out of balance…)
So one plant (https://climeworks.com/roadmap/orca) captures 4,000 tons (8x500) in a year. One person’s auto, as discussed, produces 1.5 tons a year, so it’s reversing 2666 cars’ worth out of well over 100 million cars on the roads. Tesla by selling half a million zero emission cars a year and climbing, is removing appreciably more. How many of these plants (conveniently located by geothermal power sources) will it take to just break even? How many and how long to make a dent in the existing concentration of CO2?
If there really was an easy or simple way to solve our problem, we’d be doing it.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes. You specifically mentioned fossil fuels, but there’s also stopping meat production.
That’s not the only reason to plant the trees.
Which is why I said:
Stranger
OK, assuming that is even remotely correct: How much does it cost? What does it do to the upper layers of the atmosphere, specially the ozone layer? Because those launches do not just emit CO2, but also a lot of other chemical compounds. Is Milo Minderbinder on board?
You listed good reasons to plant trees, but I meant there are reasons to plant trees to deal with climate change in one way or another besides carbon sequestration. Like increased cloud formation in tropical areas, mangrove replanting to mitigate climate-change-exacerbated flooding, etc. I was just saying direct CO2-related reasons are not the only reasons.
Forestation (both af- and re- ) is a killer app in that regard. There are certainly few downsides to properly-run reforestation (so not monoculture plantations, as you rightly pointed out) and even afforestation looks like a nett good.
If I remember correctly, it does decline, but only over a very long period. Some will be taken up by the ocean until a new equilibrium is reached between carbonate atoms in the water and carbon dioxide in the atmophere; IIRC this takes centuries. Other processes such as surface weathering would cause declines, but on the scale of millenia.
I’ll try to remember to look up the numbers when I get to work today. I’m actually teaching a course on “Energy and the Environment” right now and this is something that I’ll need to remind myself of.
This reminds me of a proposal to accelerate weathering absorption:
The idea is to spread finely crushed rock to farmland. The minerals would absorb CO2, while at the same time, fertilizing the fields. Basalt was considered the best type of rock for this. I’ve also seen proposals to spread crushed rock on beaches.
There is actually a pretty rapid equilibrium of carbon dioxide achieved between the atmosphere and ocean surface layer, hence why a means of capturing dissolved CO2 from ocean surface water is going to be inherently more effective than direct air carbon capture (albeit complicated by the presence of salt in the ocean that tends to clog filters and corrode equipment). Biosequestration and propagation of dissolved CO2 to deeper layers does take much longer, and absorption through weathering is a process of many millennia just because of the inherent slowness of diffusion into a solid material even if it is finely ground to expose maximum surface area.
Stranger
A challenge with this approach is that comminution and distribution are energy-intensive. But I’ve not seen how the numbers work out (I haven’t looked.)
That’s just one plant and I’m sure clean energy from sources besides geothermal could be used to heat up the CO2 to extract from the membrane. I personally think we should do everything. Cleaner, renewable energy; natural carbon sequestration; and plants like this.
There are many carbon capture plants associated with power plants out there. China, in particular, has a few highly effective carbon capture systems with a its most recent capturing megatons per year.
I assume these are more effective because they are capturing concentrated emissions from power plants as opposed to the much more dilute atmospheric CO2. On the other hand, I don’t see why some of these plants couldn’t also try to add a way to sequester the carbon from the atmosphere in the same plant. I’m not an engineer though, so what do I know?
On the one hand, dealing with carbon dioxide is easiest right at the smokestack, where it’s concentrated. On the other hand, what are you going to do with it? If you’re turning carbon dioxide into some other chemical, that process uses as much energy as you’re getting from the power plant to begin with. If you’re sequestering carbon dioxide gas down a well or something, is there a suitable well right next to a suitable place to put a power plant?
A chemical sequestering plant (one that converts the carbon dioxide to something else) can, in principle, make sense, but only if there’s some site where you have really cheap green energy but no conventional consumers nearby to use it. And that’s actually really rare, because there are a lot of industries (computing and aluminum refining both come to mind) that can be sited pretty much anywhere, and which in practice get sited based just on where cheap power is available, because that’s their major cost.
That makes me think of most of the deserts in the world.
No doubt every little bit helps, but on the scale of an 8,000 mile diameter planet with a atmosphere height measured in miles, sequestration plants built by man would have to be as ubiquitous as the installations that got us into this mess, to make a dent in the problem.
I’m inclined to think “fire and forget” biological measures are quicker and easier and can be far greater scale, but I wouldn’t tell someone about the capture plants to not bother. The most obvious thing is to limit what we add to the problem, as fast as we can.
Here’s an article from Wired about old-growth forests, and how they are better at sucking up carbon than newer forests.
Young trees sequester carbon faster, packing it on in the vigorous growth of their early years, but they can’t begin to compete with what large trees have been able to build into their trunks and branches through years and years of maturation. “You can’t sequester a lot of carbon without big trees,” Lutz says. “You just can’t do it.”
This makes old trees—and even Munger’s much-hated dead trees and logs, which can take centuries to rot in the Northwest—not useless but precious. While a single-age stand would lose 1 percent of its carbon storage if it lost 1 percent of its trees, big trees are so important that a 1 percent loss of individuals in an old forest could reduce its carbon by half. And while old forests eventually begin to reach an equilibrium, at which they’re not adding a lot more carbon than they’re losing through death and decomposition, researchers have found that the old growth in Wind River is still sequestering new carbon each year, adding to the huge amount it already stores.
Here’s an article from Wired about Climeworks, if anyone’s interested.
Like I said above, I was being a little tongue in cheek, but the OP did ask and I wanted to give a slightly more out-there proposal.
That said, the cost should be in the ballpark of $1T. Each flight costs around $500k in propellant. Current rockets have expenses far beyond propellant, but they are not fully reusable nor have they driven their various other launch costs down very much. But 87,000 flights is a lot, and would absolutely necessitate a system more like airlines, which can fly for roughly 3x their propellant costs. It should be possible to launch for around $2M if you achieve similar economies. That’s $175B for the flights.
How about the sun shields themselves? They’re mostly plastic and aluminum. They’ll need some kind of satellite bus to move them around, but again, that will achieve significant economies of scale. The current cheapest satellites cost less than $1m/ton, produced in the low thousands. Since the shields are simpler overall (a higher fraction just bulk mylar), and they’re produced in greater quantities, it should be possible to bring this down to $100k/ton. That’s $875B.
So, $1.05T for this crude estimate. You’d want to spend another few hundred billion upfront simply to build out the factories and other launch infrastructure, so maybe bump that to $1.5T.
Using methane propellant, it’s not as bad as you might think. It’s a simple reaction and even the reaction products other than CO2 and H2O are emitted at basically negligible levels. Interestingly, although the exhaust as it leaves the nozzle does contain significant quantities of CO in particular, this species gets oxidized almost completely as it travels down the plume. There’s an analysis of the Raptor engine here, if you’re interested.
Of course, that’s still a lot of flights. The effect isn’t going to be zero. But compared to current emissions, it shouldn’t be a significant impact.
Methane is not currently in common use, but most of the next-gen rocket designs use it. I’d consider that and hydrogen the only two “acceptable” propellants from a long-term environmental standpoint, but hydrogen is probably too expensive here (though with that many flights, maybe you could bring down the price).
I guess that is for LEO, but we are talking Lagrange point L1, right? Allow me to add another zero, falling towards the Sun is not so easy as one would assume. BIP of the world is how much? (My cite states 85$T for 2022, in German, curiously enough, though I searched in English: German Billionen is English Trillions: twelve zeroes).
And are those shields not going to move anyway? They look like sun sails to me, the light they block should exert a lot of pressure.
Next-gen? Do you know how hot it is in Berlin tonight? OK, you are an optimist. I, not so much. But tongue in cheek is fine with me, no hard feelings.
You would think but even there the demonstrated efficacy is less than advertised:
Climeworks’ facility is capable of pulling down only about 4,000 tons of carbon per year—an eye-dropper’s worth of the 40 billion tons the world emits annually.
These kinds of efforts are show projects mostly financed by oil interests to demonstrate that they are doing ‘something’ about climate change while effectively doing nothing to reduce their actual contribution of atmospheric carbon. And of course they’re doing this because bait & switch marketing is what any corporation or small child will do when caught doing something wrong or harmful. But the net effect is as useful as pissing into the wind. We’ve been dumping carbon that has been sequestered for hundreds of thousands to millions of years into the atmosphere in the span of about a century (really in the last sixty years for the bulk of it) and given how diffuse it is there is no physical way to reverse that at anything like the same rate.
We’re going to have to live—or die—with the consequences of our use of carbon fuels, and despite the dreams of ecowarriors, there is also no way to wean industrial society off of these energy sources quickly and without dramatic adverse impacts notwithstanding that there is little political commitment to doing so at all even when there are other security and economic reasons to do so. The United States and its allies could have made the decision at the end of the Cold War to take the money it was dumping into the pseudo-ideological conflict with the Soviet Union and put it massive research and technology development of sustainable energy sources and transportation fuels but instead elected to invade the Middle East, extract oil from tar sands and natural gas and petroleum from underground fields, and create a globalized network of trade utterly dependent upon cheap oil and gas, and thus, here we are.
Stranger
Get the people that can work from home, working from home. It’s a drop in the bucket, but easy to do.
I know there are plenty that don’t want to, or don’t have the correct home situation to do so, but many also have difficulties on the other side.
That would help get cars off the road (both EV and ICE) and all the infrastructure that cars need.