Apologies if this has been answered before but what mass of olivine is required
per ton of CO2 uptake? Mining an moving bulk material around is not cost free.
Is the olivine to CO2 uptake ratio 1/10th that of coal to CO2 release ratio;
1/10000th of that; some other fraction?
Sent from my iPad
On Jan 26, 2015, at 11:47 AM, Oliver Tickell
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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 , 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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