[geo] Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical? | MIT Technology Review
Poster's note : big takeaway for me was the enormous size of market for EOR CO2 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/ Physicist Peter Eisenberger had expected colleagues to react to his idea with skepticism. He was claiming, after all, to have invented a machine that could clean the atmosphere of its excess carbon dioxide, making the gas into fuel or storing it underground. And the Columbia University scientist was aware that naming his two-year-old startup Global Thermostat hadn’t exactly been an exercise in humility.But the reception in the spring of 2009 had been even more dismissive than he had expected. First, he spoke to a special committee convened by the American Physical Society to review possible ways of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through so-called air capture, which means, essentially, scrubbing it from the sky. They listened politely to his presentation but barely asked any questions. A few weeks later he spoke at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in West Virginia to a similarly skeptical audience. Eisenberger explained that his lab’s research involves chemicals called amines that are already used to capture concentrated carbon dioxide emitted from fossil-fuel power plants. This same amine-based technology, he said, also showed potential for the far more difficult and ambitious task of capturing the gas from the open air, where carbon dioxide is found at concentrations of 400 parts per million. That’s up to 300 times more diffuse than in power plant smokestacks. But Eisenberger argued that he had a simple design for achieving the feat in a cost-effective way, in part because of the way he would recycle the amines. “That didn’t even register,” he recalls. “I felt a lot of people were pissing on me.”CTO and co-founder Peter Eisenberger in front of Global Thermostat’s air-capturing machine.The next day, however, a manager from the lab called him excitedly. The DOE scientists had realized that amine samples sitting around the lab had been bonding with carbon dioxide at room temperature—a fact they hadn’t much appreciated until then. It meant that Eisenberger’s approach to air capture was at least “feasible,” says one of the DOE lab’s chemists, Mac Gray.Five years later, Eisenberger’s company has raised $24 million in investments, built a working demonstration plant, and struck deals to supply at least one customer with carbon dioxide harvested from the sky. But the next challenge is proving that the technology could have a transformative impact on the world, befitting his company’s name. The need for a carbon-sucking machine is easy to see. Most technologies for mitigating carbon dioxide work only where the gas is emitted in large concentrations, as in power plants. But air-capture machines, installed anywhere on earth, could deal with the 52 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions that are caused by distributed, smaller sources like cars, farms, and homes. Secondly, air capture, if it ever becomes practical, could gradually reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As emissions have accelerated—they’re now rising at 2 percent per year, twice as rapidly as they did in the last three decades of the 20th century—scientists have begun to recognize the urgency of achieving so-called “negative emissions.” The obvious need for the technology has enticed several other efforts to come up with various approaches that might be practical. For example, Climate Engineering, based in Calgary, captures carbon using a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a well-established industrial technique. A firm cofounded by an early pioneer of the idea, Eisenberg’s Columbia colleague Klaus Lackner, worked on the problem for several years before giving up in 2012.“ Negative emissions are definitely needed to restore the atmosphere given that we’re going to far exceed any safe limit for CO2, if there is one. The question in my mind is, can it be done in an economical way?” A report released in April by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that avoiding the internationally agreed upon goal of 2 °C of global warming will likely require the global deployment of “carbon dioxide removal” strategies like air capture. (See “The Cost of Limiting Climate Change Could Double without Carbon Capture Technology.”) “Negative emissions are definitely needed to restore the atmosphere given that we’re going to far exceed any safe limit for CO2, if there is one,” says Daniel Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. “The question in my mind is, can it be done in an economical way?” Most experts are skeptical. (See “What Carbon Capture Can’t Do.”) A 2011 report by the American Physical Society identified key physical and economic challenges. The fact that carbon dioxide will bind with amines, forming a molecule called a carbamate, is well known chemistry. But carbon
Re: [geo] Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical? | MIT Technology Review
The current market for CO2 for EOR is closer to 50 million tons a year (about 80% of that supplied from natural reservoirs). Estimated demand in the US could be 10x higher, about 500 million tons. Not sure where the 3 billion tons figure comes from unless it an estimate based on using CO2 to produce oil from residual oil zones. Sent from my iPad On Oct 7, 2014, at 6:33 AM, Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.commailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com wrote: Poster's note : big takeaway for me was the enormous size of market for EOR CO2 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/ Physicist Peter Eisenberger had expected colleagues to react to his idea with skepticism. He was claiming, after all, to have invented a machine that could clean the atmosphere of its excess carbon dioxide, making the gas into fuel or storing it underground. And the Columbia University scientist was aware that naming his two-year-old startup Global Thermostat hadn't exactly been an exercise in humility.But the reception in the spring of 2009 had been even more dismissive than he had expected. First, he spoke to a special committee convened by the American Physical Society to review possible ways of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through so-called air capture, which means, essentially, scrubbing it from the sky. They listened politely to his presentation but barely asked any questions. A few weeks later he spoke at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in West Virginia to a similarly skeptical audience. Eisenberger explained that his lab's research involves chemicals called amines that are already used to capture concentrated carbon dioxide emitted from fossil-fuel power plants. This same amine-based technology, he said, also showed potential for the far more difficult and ambitious task of capturing the gas from the open air, where carbon dioxide is found at concentrations of 400 parts per million. That's up to 300 times more diffuse than in power plant smokestacks. But Eisenberger argued that he had a simple design for achieving the feat in a cost-effective way, in part because of the way he would recycle the amines. That didn't even register, he recalls. I felt a lot of people were pissing on me.CTO and co-founder Peter Eisenberger in front of Global Thermostat's air-capturing machine.The next day, however, a manager from the lab called him excitedly. The DOE scientists had realized that amine samples sitting around the lab had been bonding with carbon dioxide at room temperature--a fact they hadn't much appreciated until then. It meant that Eisenberger's approach to air capture was at least feasible, says one of the DOE lab's chemists, Mac Gray.Five years later, Eisenberger's company has raised $24 million in investments, built a working demonstration plant, and struck deals to supply at least one customer with carbon dioxide harvested from the sky. But the next challenge is proving that the technology could have a transformative impact on the world, befitting his company's name. The need for a carbon-sucking machine is easy to see. Most technologies for mitigating carbon dioxide work only where the gas is emitted in large concentrations, as in power plants. But air-capture machines, installed anywhere on earth, could deal with the 52 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions that are caused by distributed, smaller sources like cars, farms, and homes. Secondly, air capture, if it ever becomes practical, could gradually reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As emissions have accelerated--they're now rising at 2 percent per year, twice as rapidly as they did in the last three decades of the 20th century--scientists have begun to recognize the urgency of achieving so-called negative emissions. The obvious need for the technology has enticed several other efforts to come up with various approaches that might be practical. For example, Climate Engineering, based in Calgary, captures carbon using a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a well-established industrial technique. A firm cofounded by an early pioneer of the idea, Eisenberg's Columbia colleague Klaus Lackner, worked on the problem for several years before giving up in 2012. Negative emissions are definitely needed to restore the atmosphere given that we're going to far exceed any safe limit for CO2, if there is one. The question in my mind is, can it be done in an economical way? A report released in April by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that avoiding the internationally agreed upon goal of 2 °C of global warming will likely require the global deployment of carbon dioxide removal strategies like air capture. (See The Cost of Limiting Climate Change Could Double without Carbon Capture Technology.) Negative emissions are definitely needed to restore the atmosphere given that we're
RE: [geo] Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical? | MIT Technology Review
EOR is certainly useful for oil and gas companies, but of course a large part of that CO2 propellant is coming back to the surface together which the oil or gas that they push out of the reservoir, Olaf Schuiling From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley Sent: dinsdag 7 oktober 2014 12:33 To: geoengineering Subject: [geo] Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical? | MIT Technology Review Poster's note : big takeaway for me was the enormous size of market for EOR CO2 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/ Physicist Peter Eisenberger had expected colleagues to react to his idea with skepticism. He was claiming, after all, to have invented a machine that could clean the atmosphere of its excess carbon dioxide, making the gas into fuel or storing it underground. And the Columbia University scientist was aware that naming his two-year-old startup Global Thermostat hadn’t exactly been an exercise in humility.But the reception in the spring of 2009 had been even more dismissive than he had expected. First, he spoke to a special committee convened by the American Physical Society to review possible ways of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through so-called air capture, which means, essentially, scrubbing it from the sky. They listened politely to his presentation but barely asked any questions. A few weeks later he spoke at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in West Virginia to a similarly skeptical audience. Eisenberger explained that his lab’s research involves chemicals called amines that are already used to capture concentrated carbon dioxide emitted from fossil-fuel power plants. This same amine-based technology, he said, also showed potential for the far more difficult and ambitious task of capturing the gas from the open air, where carbon dioxide is found at concentrations of 400 parts per million. That’s up to 300 times more diffuse than in power plant smokestacks. But Eisenberger argued that he had a simple design for achieving the feat in a cost-effective way, in part because of the way he would recycle the amines. “That didn’t even register,” he recalls. “I felt a lot of people were pissing on me.”CTO and co-founder Peter Eisenberger in front of Global Thermostat’s air-capturing machine.The next day, however, a manager from the lab called him excitedly. The DOE scientists had realized that amine samples sitting around the lab had been bonding with carbon dioxide at room temperature—a fact they hadn’t much appreciated until then. It meant that Eisenberger’s approach to air capture was at least “feasible,” says one of the DOE lab’s chemists, Mac Gray.Five years later, Eisenberger’s company has raised $24 million in investments, built a working demonstration plant, and struck deals to supply at least one customer with carbon dioxide harvested from the sky. But the next challenge is proving that the technology could have a transformative impact on the world, befitting his company’s name. The need for a carbon-sucking machine is easy to see. Most technologies for mitigating carbon dioxide work only where the gas is emitted in large concentrations, as in power plants. But air-capture machines, installed anywhere on earth, could deal with the 52 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions that are caused by distributed, smaller sources like cars, farms, and homes. Secondly, air capture, if it ever becomes practical, could gradually reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As emissions have accelerated—they’re now rising at 2 percent per year, twice as rapidly as they did in the last three decades of the 20th century—scientists have begun to recognize the urgency of achieving so-called “negative emissions.” The obvious need for the technology has enticed several other efforts to come up with various approaches that might be practical. For example, Climate Engineering, based in Calgary, captures carbon using a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a well-established industrial technique. A firm cofounded by an early pioneer of the idea, Eisenberg’s Columbia colleague Klaus Lackner, worked on the problem for several years before giving up in 2012.“ Negative emissions are definitely needed to restore the atmosphere given that we’re going to far exceed any safe limit for CO2, if there is one. The question in my mind is, can it be done in an economical way?” A report released in April by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that avoiding the internationally agreed upon goal of 2 °C of global warming will likely require the global deployment of “carbon dioxide removal” strategies like air capture. (See “The Cost of Limiting Climate Change Could Double without Carbon Capture Technology.”) “Negative emissions are definitely needed to restore the atmosphere given
Re: [geo] Solar radiation management could be a game changer : Nature Climate Change
Chris etal 1. Thanks. I did indeed find the full Irvine letter at http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1038/nclimate2360?utm_campaign=readcube_accessutm_source=nature.comutm_medium=purchase_optionutm_content=thumb_version Much easier to read than in the email sent by Greg Rau. 2. Nature is also willing to sell it to you for $18 (the only source I earlier found) at: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n10/full/nclimate2360.html . I misunderstood the readcube option. 3. My main point though remains - that this seems to be an exchange of pro-con views on SRM that this list would presumably like to hear more about. We have the Irvine side, but not yet a short summary of the Barrett et al side - perhaps even best with Barrett et al (or surrogates) responding to Irvine et al. Ron On Oct 6, 2014, at 2:19 AM, Chris Vivian chris.viv...@cefas.co.uk wrote: Ron, With regard to your point 1, you have seen the full text as it was a 'Letter to the Editor' not a paper. Chris. On Tuesday, September 30, 2014 6:51:57 PM UTC+1, Ron wrote: Greg, Andrew, list: 1. Thanks for the saving on paying for an abstract. Hopefully someone can supply a location to see the full paper or include me in any off-list distribution. 2. The Irvine - Barrett dialog is on governmental policy toward the SRM side of geoengineering. However many forms of CDR are both mitigation (by ICCP definitions), and still a geoengineering approach (there is overlap in a Venn diagram sense). This note to expand the governmental policy discussion a bit. 3. The first good news I am aware of on the broader geoengineering political feasibility topic was announced a few days ago. The City of Stockholm won one million Euros in a (former NYC Mayor) Bloomberg competition between larger European cities. There are dozens of announcement cites possible via easy googling. Harder to find was the 15 page winning proposal from Stockholm, which directly and favorably addresses the issue of political feasibility (first time ever?). I am unaware of any other competition entry that was geo-oriented; none of the four other winners was. Stockholm's entry was on biochar. Maybe some of the city's thoughts could inform the SRM debate - the Bloomberg judging panel found governmental policy (the contest theme) merit. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [geo] Is Capturing Carbon from the Air Practical? | MIT Technology Review
If you are looking for a beneficial and high capacity use of (expensively) concentrated CO2, look no further than using it to restore carbonate saturation state in the ocean via contacting with limestone or Olaf's silicates. By my calculation you'd need to consume some 250 GT of CO2 in this fashion to generate enough alkalinity to restore surface ocean carbonate chemistry to pre-industrial levels. That would seem to dwarf anything EOR has to offer, plus it actually creates a net carbon sink not a source. But then no one is doing to get rich doing this, at least not until those estimated $Ts in economics damages from fossil-energy-(+EOR)-induced ocean acidification kick in. Greg On 10/7/14 4:05 AM, Hawkins, Dave dhawk...@nrdc.org wrote: The current market for CO2 for EOR is closer to 50 million tons a year (about 80% of that supplied from natural reservoirs). Estimated demand in the US could be 10x higher, about 500 million tons. Not sure where the 3 billion tons figure comes from unless it an estimate based on using CO2 to produce oil from residual oil zones. Sent from my iPad On Oct 7, 2014, at 6:33 AM, Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.commailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com wrote: Poster's note : big takeaway for me was the enormous size of market for EOR CO2 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atm osphere-really-work/ Physicist Peter Eisenberger had expected colleagues to react to his idea with skepticism. He was claiming, after all, to have invented a machine that could clean the atmosphere of its excess carbon dioxide, making the gas into fuel or storing it underground. And the Columbia University scientist was aware that naming his two-year-old startup Global Thermostat hadn't exactly been an exercise in humility.But the reception in the spring of 2009 had been even more dismissive than he had expected. First, he spoke to a special committee convened by the American Physical Society to review possible ways of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere through so-called air capture, which means, essentially, scrubbing it from the sky. They listened politely to his presentation but barely asked any questions. A few weeks later he spoke at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory in West Virginia to a similarly skeptical audience. Eisenberger explained that his lab's research involves chemicals called amines that are already used to capture concentrated carbon dioxide emitted from fossil-fuel power plants. This same amine-based technology, he said, also showed potential for the far more difficult and ambitious task of capturing the gas from the open air, where carbon dioxide is found at concentrations of 400 parts per million. That's up to 300 times more diffuse than in power plant smokestacks. But Eisenberger argued that he had a simple design for achieving the feat in a cost-effective way, in part because of the way he would recycle the amines. That didn't even register, he recalls. I felt a lot of people were pissing on me.CTO and co-founder Peter Eisenberger in front of Global Thermostat's air-capturing machine.The next day, however, a manager from the lab called him excitedly. The DOE scientists had realized that amine samples sitting around the lab had been bonding with carbon dioxide at room temperature--a fact they hadn't much appreciated until then. It meant that Eisenberger's approach to air capture was at least feasible, says one of the DOE lab's chemists, Mac Gray.Five years later, Eisenberger's company has raised $24 million in investments, built a working demonstration plant, and struck deals to supply at least one customer with carbon dioxide harvested from the sky. But the next challenge is proving that the technology could have a transformative impact on the world, befitting his company's name. The need for a carbon-sucking machine is easy to see. Most technologies for mitigating carbon dioxide work only where the gas is emitted in large concentrations, as in power plants. But air-capture machines, installed anywhere on earth, could deal with the 52 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions that are caused by distributed, smaller sources like cars, farms, and homes. Secondly, air capture, if it ever becomes practical, could gradually reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As emissions have accelerated--they're now rising at 2 percent per year, twice as rapidly as they did in the last three decades of the 20th century--scientists have begun to recognize the urgency of achieving so-called negative emissions. The obvious need for the technology has enticed several other efforts to come up with various approaches that might be practical. For example, Climate Engineering, based in Calgary, captures carbon using a liquid solution of sodium hydroxide, a well-established industrial technique. A firm cofounded by an early pioneer of the idea, Eisenberg's Columbia colleague Klaus Lackner, worked on the
[geo] Review of Geoengineering Approaches to Mitigating Climate Change
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652614010154 Journal of Cleaner Production Available online 2 October 2014, doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.09.076 In Press, Accepted Manuscript — Note to users Review of Geoengineering Approaches to Mitigating Climate Change Zhihua Zhang John C. Moore Yongxin Zhao Highlights •The main attraction of geoengineering lies in that it has short lead times for technical implementation and act rapidly to mitigate climate change.•Geoengineering schemes cannot stabilize or control all climate parameters at the same time. •Side effects and uncertainties of various geoengineering schemes are huge. Abstract Geoengineering, which is the intentional large-scale manipulation of the environment, has been suggested as an effective means of mitigating global warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we will review and assess technical and theoretical aspects of land-based, atmosphere-based, ocean-based and space-based geoengineering schemes as well as their potential impacts on global climate and ecosystem. Most of the proposed geoengineering schemes carried out on land or in the ocean are to use physical, chemical or biological approaches to remove atmospheric CO2. These schemes are able to only sequester an amount of atmospheric CO2 that is small compared with cumulative anthropogenic emissions. Most of geoengineering schemes carried out in the atmosphere or space are based on increasing planetary albedo. These schemes have relatively low costs and short lead times for technical implementation, and can act rapidly to reduce temperature anomalies caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The costs and benefits of geoengineering are likely to vary spatially over the planet with some countries and regions gaining considerably (e.g. maize production in China) while others may be faced with a worse set of circumstances (e.g. serious drought, climatic extreme events) than would be the case without geoengineering. Since current research on geoenigineering is limited and various international treaties may limit some geoengineering experiments in the real world, the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) provides a framework of coordinated experiments for all earth system modelling groups to test geoengineering schemes. However, these experiments used on a global scale have difficulty with accurate resolution of regional and local impacts, so future research on geoengineering is expect to be done by combining earth system models with regional climate models. Keywords Climate ChangeCarbon Emissions ReductionGeoengineeringCleaner Production -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
