Nice idea! As Olaf has written (doubtless he can share the paper with
us) there are areas of the North Sea with very strong tidal currents
that would very effectively tumble any olivine gravel / sand placed on
the seabed, so all you have to do is dump the stuff off ships into
suitable areas of sea.
Of course you would have to perform experiments tracking the fate of the
gravel / sand once put there in order to justify any claims re scale and
rates of carbon sequestration - and that's the difficult bit!
Oliver.
On 26/01/2015 10:49, Andrew Lockley wrote:
As regards transport: costings must follow strategy. To consider the
civil engineering :
I suggest that spreading on beaches is unnecessary and logistically
difficult. Far better to dump the material in shallow coastal waters
with active material transport - especially where erosion threatens
settlements, such as around much of the UK coast. It will be on the
beach soon enough!
Open water deposition can be done with bulk carriers (either split
hull or conveyor / auger fed) . Plenty of ships used for transport of
minerals, grain, bulk powders, etc are available. A better spread will
be less harmful to marine life, so slower deposition rates will be
safer. This suggests conveyor or auger carriers .
For transport from the mine, using open river flows (if that was what
was implied) seems irrational. Rivers would quickly silt, and local
ecosystem effects would be disastrous. In larger rivers, barges would
be viable, but most mines will not be near major rivers. Rail to the
coast also avoids the need to change transport mode. Again, bulk dry
materials are routinely transported by rail, and no innovation is
required. Ports also are commonly fed by rail, so only track to the
mine head from the nearest railway need be newly laid. In Europe, one
is rarely more than a few dozen miles from a railway. A large mine
will function for decades, meaning track civils costs are trivial.
I'm happy to help publish on this. I think a paper that goes down to
site specifics would be very useful. Engineering publications give
clarity and precision to methods - IKEA flat-pack instructions for
fixing the climate.
A
Where do you get that number of $100 per ton of CO2 captured from? You
come close to that number if you use that silly CCS, capture CO2 from
the chimneys of coal-fired power plants, clean it with expensive and
poisonous chemicals and then compress it to a few hundred bars and
pump it in the subsoil. If you use enhanced weathering of olivine you have
$4 for the mining of bulk rock in large open-pit mines
$2 for milling it to 100 micron
?? for transport and spreading (but ?? is certainly not $94);
strategically selecting new mine sites will help to reduce costs of
transport.
So when you do some economic calculations, use realistic figures, Olaf
Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf)
*From:*[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Mike MacCracken
*Sent:* zondag 25 januari 2015 17:27
*To:* Greg Rau; Geoengineering
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology |
The Energy Collective
Let me expand my quick description to be 90% cut in human-induced
emissions (on top of all the natural sinks), so natural CDR does not
count.
And on the proposed removal industry, for $100 per ton of CO2, an
awful lot could be done to replace fossil fuels with other sources of
energy, or even better efficiency, a huge amount of which could be
done for much less, if we’d try. So, nice that there is a CO2 removal
approach as a backstop to what the cost of changing energy would
be—basically, you are suggesting it should cost less than $100 per ton
of CO2 to address the problem. With the new paper in Nature (lead
author is a former intern that worked with me at the Climate
Institute) that the social cost of CO2 is more than twice the cost of,
then it makes huge economic sense to be addressing the problem. So,
indeed, let’s get on with it—research plus actually dealing with the
issue.
Mike
On 1/24/15, 1:40 PM, "Greg Rau" <[email protected]
<http://[email protected]>> wrote:
Mike,
If it takes "a 90% cut in CO2 to stop the rise in atmospheric
concentration", we are already more than half way there thanks to
natural CDR. About 55% of our CO2 emissions are mercifully removed
from air via biotic and abiotic processes. So just 35% to go?
As for "CDR replacing the fossil fuel industry", here's one way to do
that: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10095.full
<http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10095.full> , but low fossil
energy prices (or lack of sufficient C emissions surcharge) are
unlikely to make this happen. Certainly agree that we need all hands
and ideas on deck in order to stabilize air CO2. But for reasons that
continue to baffle me, that is not happening at the policy, decision
making, and R&D levels it needs to.
Greg
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*Mike MacCracken <[email protected]
<http://[email protected]>>
*To:* Geoengineering <[email protected]
<http://[email protected]>>
*Sent:* Saturday, January 24, 2015 9:06 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology |
The Energy Collective
Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy
Collective
In terms of an overall strategy, it takes of order a 90% cut in CO2
emissions to stop the rise in the atmospheric concentration, and that
has to happen to ultimately stabilize the climate (and it would be
better to have the CO2 concentration headed down so we don’t get to
the equilibrium warming for the peak concentration we reach (recalling
we will be losing sulfate cooling).
Thus, to really stop the warming, CDR in its many forms has to be at
least as large as 90% of CO2 emissions (from fossil fuels and
biospheric losses). That is a lot of carbon to be taking out of the
system by putting olivine into the ocean, biochar, etc. at current
global emissions levels (that are still growing). The greater the
mitigation (reduction in fossil fuel emissions), the more effective
CDR can be—what would really be nice is CDR replacing the fossil fuel
industry so ultimately it is as large. I’d suggest this is why it is
really important to always be mentioning the importance of all the
other ways, in addition to CDR, to be cutting emissions—that is really
critical.
Mike
On 1/24/15, 10:19 AM, "Stephen Salter" <[email protected]
<http://[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi All
Paragraph 2 mentions 'carbon negative' nuclear energy. The carbon
emissions from a complete, working nuclear power station are mainly
people driving to work. But digging, crushing and processing uranium
ore needs energy and releases carbon in inverse proportion to the ore
grade. There were some amazingly high grade ores, some once even at
the critical point for reaction, but these have been used. Analysis
by van Leeuwen concludes that the carbon advantage of present nuclear
technology over gas is about three but that the break-even point comes
when the ore grade drops to around 100 ppm. This could happen within
the life of plant planned now.
As we do not know how to do waste disposal we cannot estimate its
carbon emissions. But just because we cannot calculate them does not
mean that they are zero.
Stephen
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design. School of Engineering.
University of Edinburgh. Mayfield Road. Edinburgh EH9 3JL. Scotland
[email protected] <http://[email protected]> Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704
<tel:%2B44%20%280%29131%20650%205704> Cell 07795 203 195
WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs <http://WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/%7Eshs>
<http://WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs <http://WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/%7Eshs>>
YouTube Jamie Taylor Power for Change
On 24/01/2015 14:56, Andrew Lockley wrote:
Poster's note : none of this explains why there's any need for
integration. Chucking olivine in the sea seems easier and cheaper than
all.
http://theenergycollective.com/noahdeich/2183871/3-ways-carbon-removal-can-help-unlock-promise-all-above-energy-strategy
3 Ways Carbon Removal can Help Unlock the Promise of an
All-of-the-Above Energy Strategy
January 24, 2015
“We can’t have an energy strategy for the last century that traps us
in the past. We need an energy strategy for the future – an
all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every
source of American-made energy.”– President Barack Obama, March 15, 2012
An all-of-the-above energy strategy holds great potential to make our
energy system more secure, inexpensive, and environmentally-friendly.
Today’s approach to all-of-the-above, however, is missing a key piece:
carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”). Here’s three reasons why CDR is
critical for the success of an all-of-the-above energy strategy:
1. CDR helps unite renewable energy and fossil fuel proponents to
advance carbon capture and storage (“CCS”) projects. Many renewable
energy advocates view CCS as an expensive excuse to enable
business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions. But biomass energy with CCS
(bio-CCS) projects are essentially “renewable CCS” (previously viewed
as an oxymoron), and could be critical for drawing down atmospheric
carbon levels in the future. As a result, fossil CCS projects could
provide a pathway to “renewable CCS” projects in the future. Because
of the similarities in the carbon capture technology for fossil and
bioenergy power plants, installing capture technology on fossil power
plants today could help reduce technology and regulatory risk for
bio-CCS projects in the future. What’s more, bio-CCS projects can
share the infrastructure for transporting and storing CO2 with fossil
CCS installations. Creating such a pathway to bio-CCS should be
feasible through regulations that increase carbon prices and/or
biomass co-firing mandates slowly over time, and could help unite
renewable energy and CCS proponents to develop policies that enable
the development of cost-effective CCS technology.
2. CDR bolsters the environmental case for nuclear power by enabling
it to be carbon “negative”: Many environmental advocates say that
low-carbon benefits of nuclear power are outweighed by the other
environmental and safety concerns of nuclear projects. The development
of advanced nuclear projects paired with direct air capture (“DAC”)
devices, however, could tip the scales in nuclear’s favor. DAC systems
that utilize the heat produced from nuclear power plants can benefit
from this “free” source of energy to potentially sequester CO2
directly from the atmosphere cost-effectively. The ability for nuclear
+ DAC to provide competitively-priced, carbon-negative energy could
help convince nuclear power’s skeptics to support further
investigation into developing safe and environmentally-friendly
advanced nuclear systems.
3. CDR helps enable a cost-effective transition to a decarbonized
economy: Today, environmental advocates claim that prolonged use of
fossil fuels is mutually exclusive with preventing climate change, and
fossil fuel advocates bash renewables as not ready for “prime time” —
i.e. unable to deliver the economic/development benefits of
inexpensive fossil energy. To resolve this logjam, indirect methods of
decarbonization — such as a portfolio of low-cost CDR solutions —
could enable fossil companies both to meet steep emission reduction
targets and provide low-cost fossil energy until direct
decarbonization through renewable energy systems become more
cost-competitive (especially in difficult to decarbonize areas such as
long-haul trucking and aviation).
Of course, discussion about the potential for CDR to enable an
all-of-the-above energy strategy is moot unless we invest in
developing a portfolio of CDR approaches. But if we do make this
investment in CDR, an all-of-the-above energy strategy that delivers a
diversified, low-cost, and low-carbon energy system stands a greater
chance of becoming a reality.
Noah Deich
Noah Deich is a professional in the carbon removal field with six
years of clean energy and sustainability consulting experience. Noah
currently works part-time as a consultant for the Virgin Earth
Challenge, is pursuing his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC
Berkeley, and writes a blog dedicated to carbon removal
(carbonremoval.wordpress.com <http://carbonremoval.wordpress.com>
<http://carbonremoval.wordpress.com
<http://carbonremoval.wordpress.com/> > )
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