Chris: Your message below has caused me to delay responding to other messages in this thread. I found the 68 page report to be new (to me), very well written, and one I will now follow up on closely. I found (p 61 (or 63/68) ) that Professor Jones also has a 2011 text book that I have ordered via inter-library loan. That seems to cover a wider range of geoengineering (or only CDR??) topics. Can anyone report on that book (Title: Engineering Strategies for Greenhouse Gas Mitigation )?
The cite you have given (below) was for a group new to me called ECOR - of which Prof. Jones is a key part . I wish we had more such groups. Professor Jones goes through three types of carbon storage in the oceans, concluding that he likes best the biologic approaches (favored on this list predominantly [and today] by Bhaskar). As I am asking about the ocean resource being appropriate for biochar, this part was welcome news. But Prof. Jones and his co-authors have concluded that ocean resources make no sense for use on land. At the top of p31, they say: "The ocean offers a more promising site than the land for using biological processes on a scale commensurate with the predicted global problem." I need further discussion on this - and will see what Prof. Jones' new textbook says on biochar, BECCS, CROPS, etc. I have to (and will) re-read the report as I can't now find a sentence that I think might have similarly discarded the idea of moving biomass from the oceans to land. If then used for biochar, I see two advantages that I suspect may not have been considered: a) the use of the biomass for energy purposes (through pyrolysis - not combustion), and b) the use of the resulting charcoal for long-lived continuing soil benefits. These two additional uses of ocean biomass I don't see in this report - and both have income (not expense) streams associated with them. Both income streams (and someday also a stream of carbon credits) would seem to have some possibility of covering the (correctly concerns about) costs of transport. The ship portion of transport of many things is featured in this report and seem pretty low per tonne-km . 2. Again, I apologize for responding first to this message rather than several others mostly on CROPS. But I found this Chris-referred report very fascinating - with a large amount about ocean biomass growth that I did not expect. Besides Bhaskar's concern today about not covering one type of ocean photosynthesis, I saw nothing on macroalgae - kelp. More needs to be discussed about this nice report. Ron ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris" <chris.viv...@cefas.co.uk> To: geoengineering@googlegroups.com Cc: "bhaskarmv 64" <bhaskarmv...@gmail.com>, joshic...@gmail.com Sent: Monday, December 17, 2012 6:37:40 AM Subject: Re: [geo] Re: New Research on OIF Ron and list, You might be interested in the ECOR report ‘Enhanced carbon storage in the ocean’ that can be found at: http://www.oceanicresources.org/ecor-news/ocean-sequestration-of-carbon-working-group-report/attachment/ecor_wg_report_4-6_clean/ . It quoted a cost of about £260 per tonne CO2 avoided for OIF. Chris Vivian. On Saturday, 15 December 2012 20:57:39 UTC, Ron wrote: Bhaskar and list: 1. a. The original Strand and Benford paper that you are asking about today (and cited by Joshua Jacobs yesterday) is available without fee at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es8015556 b. Shortly thereafter (in 2009, same journal, no fee) there was a pretty strong negative reaction against their C.R.O.P.S. approach. This objection was based mostly on the need to retain all crop residues for the benefit of the soil. See http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/es9011004 This paper's lead author was Douglas Karlen, with nine co-authors. The cite is Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, 43, 8011–8015 c. Their final four sentences (emphasis added) were: " We conclude that although ocean sequestration may have a role in mitigating atmospheric CO2 concentrations, humankind should not risk the future productivity of our soils by drowning crop residues. Perhaps the CROPS concept could be coupled with the use of a thermochemical platform for production of biofuel where the biochar coproduct could be used not only for CCS but also to remove phosphorus and other aqueous contaminants moving through the soil. The crucial question is whether this can be done without creating unintended environmental consequences. All in all, minimizing environmental changes will require careful study, a balanced approach, and full accounting for all intended and nonintended consequences. d. I emphasized the "biochar" part above because I had not seen this article until today and because biochar was also not being compared in the original paper by Professors Strand and Benford. Neither paper mentioned BECCS, but I think Karlen etal would have similarly been concerned about a failure to address soil improvement. Soil improvement is a (the?) big part of biochar, as shown in bold above. It is this last aspect that I have been anxious to talk further with you about as I wondered whether biochar could be made from fertilized ocean based resources. e. I hope that Professors Strand and Benford can take this opportunity to reply to both you and Karlen, etal. I also hope they can compare CROPS with the biomass options they did not originally consider: biochar, BECCS ,and local burial of biomass. 2. a. Since you are really asking about CDR costs - presumably to compare with your approach for sequestering in oceans, I have to extend this response to include the citation in the Thursday message below from Wil Burns. He gave a PR release to a still-forthcoming paper by Australian Daniel Harrison, whose abstract I found at this site: http://interceder.net/latest_news/Daniel-Harrison b. The Paper abstract: A method for estimating the cost to sequester carbon dioxide by delivering iron to the ocean Order a copy of this article by Daniel Harrison Abstract : If society wishes to limit the contribution of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to global warming then the need to find economical methods of CO2 sequestration is now urgent. Ocean iron fertilisation has been suggested as a low cost mitigation option to capture and store carbon. However previous methods of estimating the cost fail to account for many of the losses and offsets occurring over the storage period. A method for calculating the net carbon stored from iron fertilisation of high nutrient low chlorophyll (HNLC) regions is provided here. The method involves first calculating the direct cost to create phytoplankton biomass in the surface ocean. The net amount of carbon stored is then calculated by considering the fraction of this carbon exported as deep as the permanent thermocline and subtracting losses due to: ventilation, nutrient stealing, greenhouse gas production, and CO2 emitted by the sequestration operation for a given storage period. Commonly available iron fertiliser delivered by ship to the Southern Ocean is considered as a case study using parameters derived from previous fertilisation experiments and modelling studies. On average, a single fertilisation is found to result in a net sequestration of 0.01 t C km-2 sequestered for 100 years or more at a cost of US$457 per tonne CO2. Iron fertilisation experiments show high variability in the amount of biomass created and the fraction exported to depth, the range of uncertainty provides a risk of more carbon released to the atmosphere than sequestered for 100 years, or alternatively, reduced cost if optimistic parameters are assumed. Previous estimates of cost fail to recognise the economic challenge of distributing low concentrations of iron over large areas of the ocean surface and the subsequent loss processes that result in only a small net storage of carbon per km2 fertilised. The cost could be lowered by the use of more energy efficient means to distribute the small amounts of iron required over large regions of remote ocean surface, by improving the performance of the iron fertiliser, or potentially by conducting fertilisation activities only under ideal oceanographic conditions. Keywords : Ocean Iron Fertilisation; Cost; Ship Delivery; Carbon Storage; Carbon Sequestration; Ocean Fertilisation; Nutrient Stealing; Nitrous Oxide Production; Biological Carbon Pump. Acceptance Date: 03 Dec 2012 c. I found this $457/tonne CO2 estimate to be amazingly high - clearly one may be growing more biomass because of IOF, but not getting much sequestration. This figure would translate to more than $1300/tonne of biochar and approaching $1700/tonne carbon. Farmers the world over would do most anything for such prices. 3. I hope we can have discussion on what these two papers are telling us for the world of CDR. I have just also read the latest draft 2 IPCC comparisons we learned about yesterday (saving that for another message). I find the same failure there to compare CDR techniques based on all their attributes. Here mainly I am talking of continuing out-year CDR benefits, but also we/they should be talking about carbon neutral energy benefits. All CDR/geoengineering analyses should be based on more than sequestration and its cost. Ron From: "M V Bhaskar" < bhaska...@gmail.com > To: geoengi...@googlegroups.com Cc: josh...@gmail.com Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2012 4:08:15 AM Subject: [geo] Re: New Research on OIF Joshua How is Ocean Sequestration of Crop Residue related to OIF - Ocean Iron Fertilization. I wonder how Ocean Sequestration of crop residue is regarded as economical. Farm land is generally deep inland - US Midwest, etc., the cost of transporting the crop residue to deep ocean for sequestration would be very high. How would you put it into the depths of the ocean? regards Bhaskar On Friday, 14 December 2012 23:30:30 UTC+5:30, Joshua Jacobs wrote: <blockquote> Despite its shortcomings, OIF may have a role. I don't know if the following research has been followed up on: Ocean Sequestration of Crop Residue Carbon: Recycling Fossil Fuel Carbon Back to Deep Sediments Stuard E. Strand, Gregory Benford For significant impact any method to remove CO 2 from the atmosphere must process large amounts of carbon efficiently, be repeatable, sequester carbon for thousands of years, be practical, economical and be implemented soon. The only method that meets these criteria is removal of crop residues and burial in the deep ocean. We show here that this method is 92% efficient in sequestration of crop residue carbon while cellulosic ethanol production is only 32% and soil sequestration is about 14% efficient. Deep ocean sequestration can potentially capture 15% of the current global CO 2 annual increase, returning that carbon back to deep sediments, confining the carbon for millennia, while using existing capital infrastructure and technology. Because of these clear advantages, we recommend enhanced research into permanent sequestration of crop residues in the deep ocean. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es8015556 On Thursday, December 13, 2012 2:35:53 PM UTC-8, Wil Burns wrote: <blockquote> FYI. Wil http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newscategoryid=2&newsstoryid=10740&utm_source=console&utm_medium=news&utm_campaign=cws -- Dr. Wil Burns, Associate Director Master of Science - Energy Policy & Climate Program Johns Hopkins University 1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Room 104J Washington, DC 20036 202.663.5976 (Office phone) 650.281.9126 (Mobile) wbu...@jhu.edu http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/environmental/master-of-science-in-energy-policy-and-climate/index.html SSRN site (selected publications): http://ssrn.com/author=240348 Skype ID: Wil.Burns Teaching Climate/Energy Law & Policy Blog: http://www.teachingclimatelaw.org </blockquote> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/-/vQTjOyxGAd8J . To post to this group, send email to geoengi...@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineerin...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en . </blockquote> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/-/VN0HmFHoBYIJ . To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
