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Climate change is killing our planet. The excess production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are filling the atmosphere and warming the Earth faster than natural processes can effectively negate them. Since 1951, the surface temperature has risen by 0.8 degrees C, with no sign of slowing. So now it's time for humans to step in and rectify the problem they created -- by using technology to suck excess CO2 straight from the air.
Direct Air Capture (DAC), is one of a number of (still largely theoretical) methods of collecting and sequestering atmospheric carbon currently being looked at. Despite their varied methods, all of these techniques seek to accomplish the same goal: pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in a form that will not contribute to the effects of global warming.
[...] Unlike current flue gas capture systems, which can only effectively collect CO2 directly from a factory smokestack where the carbon dioxide is more concentrated, DACs can capture carbon at more diverse and distributed sources. And given that roughly half of annual CO2 emissions come from distributed sources (such as vehicle tailpipes), DACs could have a huge impact on climate change.
DACs generally operate by pushing air past a sorbent chemical which binds with carbon dioxide but allows other molecules to pass unimpeded. For example, one of the earliest sorbents employed was a calcium hydroxide solution, which strongly binds with CO2 to create calcium carbonate. The captured CO2 is then unbound from the sorbent, purified and concentrated for use in industrial applications. Of course this is often easier said than done. With the calcium carbonate method (which is derived from the Kraft process), the material must be separated from the solution, dried, and then carbonized at 700 degrees C.
This however reveals the Achilles heel of DACs: their cost. A 2015 study from the National Academies estimated costs of around $400 to $1,000 per ton of CO2 extracted at that time. With nations needed to collectively pull 5 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, every year until 2050, to remain within the bounds of the Paris Climate Accord, doing so with just DACs would prove economically infeasible. The associated energy costs needed to carry out these chemical processes (estimated at 12 gigajoules of electricity per ton of CO2 captured) would be equally staggering.
"Direct air capture could become a major industry if the technology matures and prices drop dramatically," Professor Chris Field, former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC), and Dr Katharine Mach, director of the Stanford Environment Facility, wrote in a 2017 Science article. "Direct air capture might require much less land but entail much higher costs and consumption of a large fraction of global energy production."
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @04:52PM (3 children)
Yep.
And then over several hundred years you end up with soil that is carbon rich to a depth of six or seven feet like terra preta. The entire eastern seaboard of the U.S. needs to look like it did before the white man came. Same with much of central and south America. The thing is that complex polyculture ecosystems can produce extraordinary food yields if managed correctly. But there is not currently any industrial leverage in actually managing those ecosystems.
If you want to invent something enables CO2 sequestration, figure out how to to harvest fruit and nuts robotically in a polyculture hardwood forest. Figure out how to breed, track, and harvest wild turkey, wild boar, and wild venison industrially in a polyculture hardwood forest. Because that is what these areas are going to look like. The only difference will be whether mankind will go extinct before or after these areas return to that kind of ecosystem. Life will find a way to increase the volume of biomass in an area. That is what life does.
The thing is, we want to increase biomass in these areas. That is the whole point of crop management. So the issue isn't whether we can, or whether we want to, but why the food supply system is managed in a way that disallows it. And if you want to know why that is, it is because bankers are running the farms.
We need to be graduating 10k students a year majoring in bioeconomics. We need to be racking up stats world wide as fast as possible so we can start understanding how to turn the practice of permaculture into a science based industrial manufacturing discipline.
We know how to solve the problem. We just don't know how to solve it with the same number of bankers we had yesterday. Which is why every week there is a new perpetual motion scheme in the CO2 sequestration market.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 18 2018, @07:25PM (2 children)
I think I just won this round of Spot the Lunatic!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 18 2018, @07:42PM (1 child)
Incorrect, not a lunatic just kinda bad at writing. I wouldn't quite say "bankers" owning the farms just greedy corporate leaders putting profits over sustainability and environmental protection.
Humanity has massively deforested the entire planet, that is a valid statement about restoring areas. But you are buzzy, unable to separate fact from personal ideology. Well, most of the time anyway.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday September 18 2018, @07:54PM
Well, good luck with eliminating every port east of the Mississippi, many of the most populated cities in the nation, and our nation's capitol so you can plant trees. Let me know how that works out for you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.