[geo] TC: How exploring Mars could help us fight climate change on Earth

[Oliver Tickell]

https://theconversation.com/how-exploring-mars-could-help-us-fight-climate-change-on-earth-57164

Advocating an energy intensive highly engineered approach for CO2 
sequestration using olivine / pyroxene. See my comment.


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Oliver Tickell

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Re: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

[Oliver Tickell]

Re "my preference here would be to generate dissolved bicarbonates" - 
that's exactly what olivine weathering achieves:

Mg2SiO4 + 4CO2 +4H2O -> 2Mg2+ + 4HCO3- + H4SiO4

I think that when oceanographers refer to 'alkalinity' that's something 
they measure in terms of moles of HCO3- (if I'm wrong, please correct me).


As Olaf Schuiling (cc'ed) has been saying for years, this is probably 
best achieved in the marine or coastal environment, letting the sea do 
most of the grinding work for you - either by wave action on beaches or 
tidal currents on the sea floor.


For those who are interested, this 2008 paper proposes a scheme to 
reverse the calcification process, turning CaCO3 + H2O + CO2 into Ca++ + 
2HCO3-, 
[https://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~gideonh/reports/Cquestrate_report.pdf]. The 
paper provides useful background to all this but IMHO it's a poor idea 
compared to 'olivine option'.


Oliver.

On 03/03/2016 19:06, Greg Rau wrote:

Further questionable shells-as-CO2-management advocacy here:
http://www.thefishsite.com/articles/615/carbon-sequestration-potential-of-shellfish/
http://earthtechling.com/2016/03/could-oyster-shells-sequester-carbon/

As Oliver points out, typical marine CaCO3 formation generates CO2 at 
the expense of dissolved seawater calcium and bicarbonate ions: 
Ca(HCO3)2aq ---> CaCO3s + CO2g + H2O. On the other hand, reverse this 
reaction and you might have something:

http://climatecolab.org/contests/2012/electric-power-sector/c/proposal/1304174
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es102671x

You can consume CO2 and generate marine CO3s by adding an externally 
derived source of alkalinity, e.g. silicate minerals, kinetics 
permitting.  However, my preference here would be to generate 
dissolved bicarbonates.  This about doubles the carbon stored per mol 
of alkalinity added, while the dissolved form helps counter the bio 
effects of ocean acidification.


Then there is the Franz's angle that shellfish consume and repackage 
plankton in a way that better sequesters this carbon and keeps it from 
regenerating CO2. This is probably true, but how big is this carbon 
pool relative to the CO2 generated above and generated by shellfish 
respiration that is the largest fate of plankton C consumed by 
shellfish? In general then, aren't shellfish net sources of CO2, and 
don't shellfish producers and consumers then need to be taxed 
according?  ;-)


Greg




*From:* Oeste <oe...@gm-ingenieurbuero.com>
*To:* oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org; andrew.lock...@gmail.com;
geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
*Cc:* Renaud de RICHTER <renaud.derich...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* Wednesday, March 2, 2016 5:37 AM
*Subject:* Re[2]: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

    Completion of the argument from Oliver Tickell against oyster
farming in the ocean or shelf might induce the opposite result:
Oysters are filter feeders within the food chain. They remove all
kind of suspended matter from the water column inklusive
phytoplankton, phytoplankton detritus, clay
particles and bacteria. They produce faeces in the shape of rather
solid pellets containing organic C plus carbonate and silicate
shells of the phytoplankton plus some clay. The faeces
pellets become much faster sedimented than the suspended matter
they did feed with. This might be the reason that oysters induce a
lower loss of debris oxidation and dissolution to CO2 and/or
HCO3- on their way down as without the oyster action. The CaCO3
shell debris of dead oysters becomes as well part of the
sediment. These and similar processes of food chain dependence
turn ocean sediments into organic and inorganic C storages.
Have a look at an fictive ocean containing a food chain composed
only of phytoplankton and bacteria: Organic and inorganic waste of
phytoplankton sinks down to the sediment very slowly: The organic
debris would be consumed complete by bacteria during the slow
sinking of the debris, even the slow sinking small CaCO3
and SiO2 shells of the phytoplankton might even come to complete
dissolution on their way down.
This would result in an ocean much more acidified and probable
with much more oxygen deficient zones than any ocean habitat
containing oysters and further parts of the recent food chain.
All sediments within the deeper ocean basins below the calcium
carbonate compensation depth would be free of any inorganic and
organic C.
Franz D. Oeste
-- Originalnachricht --
Von: "Oliver Tickell" <oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org
<mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org>>
An: andrew.lock...@gmail.com <mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>;
"geoengineering" <geoengineering@googlegroups.com
<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>>

Re: [geo] carbon sequestration by oysters

[Oliver Tickell]

There seems to be a fundamental error in this analysis. Far from 
sequestering CO2, this process emits CO2 to the atmosphere according to 
the reaction:


Ca++ + 2HCO3- => CaCO3 + CO2

In the process depleting ocean alkalinity.

Oliver.

On 01/03/2016 22:27, Andrew Lockley wrote:



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25796916

Ying Yong Sheng Tai Xue Bao. 2014 Oct;25(10):3032-8.

Estimation and experiment of carbon sequestration by oysters attached 
to the enhancement artificial reefs in Laizhou Bay, Shandong, China


Gong PH, Li J, Guan CT, Li MJ, Liu C.

Abstract

Through sampling investigation of fouling organisms on the enhancement 
artificial reefs set up in Laizhou Bay, it was proved that oyster 
(Ostrea plicatula) was the dominant fouling species. Therefore the dry 
mass of shell (Ms), total fresh mass (Mt) and thickness (T) of oyster 
attached on the reefs were analyzed. The results showed that the Mt 
and Ms presented seasonal variation (P < 0.01), that is, the values 
were the lowest in April and the highest in December. The reef age and 
the length of the time the enhancement reefs placed in the sea had 
significant effect on Mt, Ms and T. With the increment of reef ages, 
all indices increased obviously. The carbon sinks of oysters attaching 
to the tube enhancement reefs constructed in 2009, 2010 and 2011 in 
Laizhou Bay were 17.61, 16.33 and 10.45 kg · m(-3), respectively. The 
oysters on the enhancement reefs of Jincheng marine ranch with an area 
of 64.25 hm2 had fixed carbon of 297.5 t C (equivalent to 1071 t of 
CO2) from 2009 to 2013 in Laizhou Bay. To capture and store the same 
amount of CO2 would cost about 1.6 x 10(5)-6.4 x 10(5) US dollars. 
Therefore, oysters attaching to the enhancement reefs bring about 
remarkable ecological benefits.


PMID: 25796916

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Re: [geo] Direct Separation Technology for Low Emissions Intensity Lime and Cement.

[Oliver Tickell]

The most interesting thing about this is that they appear to have 
completely ditched the carbon-negative magnesium-based cements they 
bought out from Novacem, a UK company that went into liquidation after 
spending millions on R I have searched their site and not a mention 
anywhere. A disappointment as the idea appeared to hold considerable 
promise - but presumably it just ended up never quite making the grade 
as a construction material. Anyone out there know the story? Oliver.


On 29/10/2015 01:26, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : Tim Kruger proposed an ocean alkalinization process 
based on similar chemistry


http://www.calix.com.au/cement-and-lime.html?utm_content=buffer10eb0_medium=social_source=twitter.com_campaign=buffer

Direct Separation Technology for Low Emissions Intensity Lime and Cement.

Calix’s Recent Patent Application spurs Commercial Interest and an EU 
Grant Application.


In our last newsletter, we announced a recent patent application for 
the use of Calix’s CFC technology in ordinary Portland cement 
production, to enhance efficiency and future-proof the industry by 
efficiently capturing CO2. Since then, we have applied for a European 
Union “Horizons 2020” grant – “Project LEILAC” – to demonstrate the 
technology, and numerous very positive discussions with major players 
in the global cement and lime industry on project participation and 
licensing the technology.


LEILAC is a joint European-Australian collaboration to develop a 200 
tpd pilot plant for lime and cement production using breakthrough 
technology to capture CO2, called Direct Separation. Lime and cement 
production together account for more than 5 % of global CO2 emissions. 
LEILAC will demonstrate the capture of ~60 % of this CO2 without 
significant energy or capital penalty.


Direct Separation is achieved solely by re-engineering the process 
flows used in the best available technology for lime and cement 
calcination. Carbonate calcination occurs by indirect counterflow 
heating, and consequentially the flue gases are not mixed with the CO2 
emitted from the carbonate minerals. This technology is already 
operating at a commercial scale for magnesite calcination. No 
separation technologies, new materials or processes are required.


Direct Separation is a breakthrough, and adds a new strategy for CCS. 
It can greatly assist the European Union to meet its target of 
80% emissions reduction by 2050, with around half of these emissions 
reductions coming from industries such as lime and cement.


- See more at: 
http://www.calix.com.au/cement-and-lime.html?utm_content=buffer10eb0_medium=social_source=twitter.com_campaign=buffer#.dpuf


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Re: [geo] new geoengineering method; plus energy policy simulator

[Oliver Tickell]

All good stuff but an astonishing willingness to countenance underground 
coal gasification, a horrifyingly polluting technology. See at

http://mwfrost.com/coal_retirement_plan/

Case against here:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2402220/coal_gas_company_warns_stop_campaigning_or_we_will_sue.html

I have written to MW Frost asking him to reconsider. Cheers, Oliver.

On 01/11/2015 16:43, Erik Neumann wrote:
Poster's note: unfortunately this geoengineering method is so new that 
it is not included as a choice in the energy simulator.


http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/every-climate-concerned-billionaire-should-do-this-to-save-the-world/413020/

Buy Coal Now!

Buying coal while it’s still in the ground, in effect, constitutes
a very inexpensive, very simple form of geoengineering.


So the key is to put less carbon into the atmosphere. Most
policies, accordingly, focus on preventing people from burning
fuels. But what if the fossil fuels were never taken out of the
ground in the first place? 


Frost believes that instead of regulating to limit the burning of
fossil fuels, we should just never remove the fuels from earth’s
crust in the first place.

“The U.S. coal deposits represent a potential store of future CO₂
emissions,” Frost told me. “The assumption, the policy assumption,
is that they need to be extracted. But what if we just sequester
this carbon while it’s still in coal form?”

By permanently keeping coal in the ground, carbon dioxide is, in
turn, permanently kept out of the atmosphere. It will never trap
heat in the atmosphere or debase the ocean. As such, buying
unmined coal constitutes an incredibly cheap form of offsetting
carbon consumption. But that’s not all it does: By sequestering
coal from the global market, coal’s price rises. So coal
retirement becomes a voluntary way of pricing in the mineral’s
considerable climate, environmental, and public-health costs.
Coal’s price could even rise internationally, weaning other
nations off the fuel.
the key is to put less carbon into the atmosphere. Most policies,
accordingly, focus on preventing people from burning fuels. But
what if the fossil fuels were never taken out of the ground in the
first place?

But if a billionaire (or a large non-profit with similar
purchasing power) really wanted to augment their coal-buying
efforts and buy the climate more time, they would have to invest
in what many people think of as “real” geoengineering, and what
the UN calls Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). These are
processes that pull carbon out of the atmosphere so it can be
trapped on or below the surface. But you could do this without
fanciful technology. A recent economic study out of Oxford
University found that the most efficient NET over the next 50
years


will not be carbon-capturing pumps or artificial photosynthesis
but trees. Afforestation—planting forests where there were none
before—is the best, most effective way in the short term to remove
carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it.

Were a donor or government to combine the two methods, they could
shape the global climate on both ends: removing carbon from the
atmosphere as they also reduced the influence of future carbon.



http://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9649518/energy-policy-simulator

Think you’ve got good energy policy ideas? This tool lets you see
if they’d work.

Energy Innovation , a San
Francisco-based think tank, has created what may be the coolest
tool for energy nerds I've ever seen. It's called the Energy
Policy Simulator , and it
lets anyone see the impacts of their energy policy choices on a
whole range of outputs, including US greenhouse gas emissions.

The modeling is the result of two years of work and has been
peer-reviewed


 by
"scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Stanford, and Berkeley, U.S. national laboratories, and two
Chinese research groups." It shows not only the results of
individual policies, but how various policies interact.

The version accessible on the website is actually somewhat
stripped down, as the creators didn't want it to be overwhelming
to newbies. If you want the full meal deal, with the ability to
tweak all the options and parameters, you can download a complete
version, along with all the data and methodology. (The web version
is fun and easy to use; to deal with the full version, you need
some 

Re: [geo] Evidence for deep-ocean frozen methane release VERY bad news?

[Oliver Tickell]

The message seems to be that most methane is oxidised to CO2 in the water.

That means the main consequence may not be a warming one. Seas margin 
destabilisation leading to collapse and tsunamis would not be nice. Nor 
would spread of anoxia. Nor would additional ocean acidification.


Oliver.

On 15/10/2015 15:28, Eric Durbrow wrote:

Abstract:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GC005955/abstract

Press Release:

Warming ocean temperatures a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean 
in areas with little marine life, might attract scant attention. But this is 
precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane 'ice' transition from a 
dormant solid to a powerful greenhouse gas.

New University of Washington research suggests that subsurface warming could be 
causing more methane gas to bubble up off the Washington and Oregon coast.

The study, to appear in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, shows 
that of 168 bubble plumes observed within the past decade, a disproportionate 
number were seen at a critical depth for the stability of methane hydrates.

"We see an unusually high number of bubble plumes at the depth where methane hydrate would 
decompose if seawater has warmed," said lead author H. Paul Johnson, a UW professor of 
oceanography. "So it is not likely to be just emitted from the sediments; this appears to be 
coming from the decomposition of methane that has been frozen for thousands of years."

Methane has contributed to sudden swings in Earth's climate in the past. It is 
unknown what role it might contribute to contemporary climate change, although 
recent studies have reported warming-related methane emissions in Arctic 
permafrost and off the Atlantic coast.

Of the 168 methane plumes in the new study, some 14 were located at the 
transition depth -- more plumes per unit area than on surrounding parts of the 
Washington and Oregon seafloor.

If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere 
and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to 
get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into 
carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper 
offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into 
coastal waterways.

"Current environmental changes in Washington and Oregon are already impacting local 
biology and fisheries, and these changes would be amplified by the further release of 
methane," Johnson said.

Another potential consequence, he said, is the destabilization of seafloor 
slopes where frozen methane acts as the glue that holds the steep sediment 
slopes in place.

Methane deposits are abundant on the continental margin of the Pacific 
Northwest coast. A 2014 study from the UW documented that the ocean in the 
region is warming at a depth of 500 meters (0.3 miles), by water that formed 
decades ago in a global warming hotspot off Siberia and then traveled with 
ocean currents east across the Pacific Ocean. That previous paper calculated 
that warming at this depth would theoretically destabilize methane deposits on 
the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs from northern California to Vancouver 
Island.

At the cold temperatures and high pressures present on the continental margin, 
methane gas in seafloor sediments forms a crystal lattice structure with water. 
The resulting icelike solid, called methane hydrate, is unstable and sensitive 
to changes in temperature. When the ocean warms, the hydrate crystals 
dissociate and methane gas leaks into the sediment. Some of that gas escapes 
from the sediment pores as a gas.

The 2014 study calculated that with present ocean warming, such hydrate 
decomposition could release roughly 0.1 million metric tons of methane per year 
into the sediments off the Washington coast, about the same amount of methane 
from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout.

The new study looks for evidence of bubble plumes off the coast, including 
observations by UW research cruises, earlier scientific studies and local 
fishermen's reports. The authors included bubble plumes that rose at least 150 
meters (490 feet) tall that clearly originate from the seafloor. The dataset 
included 45 plumes originally detected by fishing boats, whose modern sonars 
can detect the bubbles while looking for schools of fish, with their 
observations later confirmed during UW research cruises.

Results show that methane gas is slowly released at almost all depths along the 
Washington and Oregon coastal margin. But the plumes are significantly more 
common at the critical depth of 500 meters, where hydrate would decompose due 
to seawater warming.

"What we're seeing is possible confirmation of what we predicted from the water temperatures: 
Methane hydrate appears to be decomposing and releasing a lot of gas," Johnson said. "If 
you look systematically, the location on the margin where you're getting the largest 

Re: [geo] Re: Smart reforestation must go beyond carbon: expert | CIFOR Forests News Blog

[Oliver Tickell]

See also this article on The Ecologist by Peter Bunyard:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2776099/without_its_rainforest_the_amazon_will_turn_to_desert.html


 Without its rainforest, the Amazon will turn to desert

Peter Bunyard

2nd March 2015

Tweet http://twitter.com/share


   Mainstream climatologists predict a 15% fall in rainfall over the
   Amazon if it is stripped of its rainforest. But the 'biotic pump'
   theory, rooted in conventional physics and recently confirmed by
   experiment, shows that the interior of a forest-free Amazon will be
   as dry as the Negev desert. We must save the Amazon before it enters
   a permanent and irreversible dessication.



On 30/05/2015 22:49, Brian Cartwright wrote:

To the geoengineering group,

I'm curious whether group members are familiar with the biotic pump 
model of Gorshkov and Makarieva; this article gives a quick introduction:


http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0130-hance-physics-biotic-pump.html

A big climate benefit of inland forests is that phase change from 
evapotranspiration - condensation creates low-pressure areas that 
pull in moisture and create healthy weather circulation. Seems to me 
that widespread deforestation is aggravating stalled hot-weather 
trends by blocking this kind of circulation. The leaf area of a mature 
forest offers considerably more surface area for evaporation than the 
same area of open water on ocean or inland lake.


Brian Cartwright

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Re: [geo] Coral bleaching under unconventional scenarios of climate warming and ocean acidification - NCC

[Oliver Tickell]

On a technical point, is ocean acidification actually an IPCC 
responsibility? It's a separate issue from climate change (tho with 
common cause) and may be better dealt with under a separate institution 
with a better track record of actually achieving results, for example, 
the International Maritime Organisation and / or UNEP.


Oliver Tickell

On 28/05/2015 04:16, John Nissen wrote:

Hi Ron,

The inability of IPCC to get to grips with the ocean acidification 
problem is grounds for complaint.  Aggressive CDR may be the only path 
to reduce atmospheric CO2 to a reasonably safe level, given the 
uncertainty of the effects of ocean acidification on the food chain.  
A huge amount is at stake, since about 15% of the world population 
rely on fish for the protein in their diet [1].


Further measures specifically for acidification may be added to CDR - 
I am thinking of olivine rock crushing and ideas put to me by Oliver 
Tickell and Olaf Schuiling.  There is also the possibility of specific 
local cooling measures for helping corals, e.g. using cloud 
brightening as suggested by Stephen Salter and others.


None of this is mentioned by IPCC, yet disruption to coral life and 
the marine food chain could be a significant threat to humanity, 
affecting particularly the under-developed countries and small island 
states.


The Earth System is now well outside the safe limits (safe for 
humanity) which have been obtained during the past eight thousand 
years, during which human civilisation has developed and on which 
modern civilisation now relies.


A determined effort is needed to bring the Earth System back to the 
old norm, rather than risk than we can adapt successfully to major 
change in the pipeline: a lethal combination of excessive ocean 
acidification, excessive global warming, excessive climate change and 
complete Arctic meltdown (coupled with meltdown of the West Antarctic 
Ice Sheet).


This effort is what IPCC should be demanding from governments, 
otherwise we are heading for global catastrophe from which 
civilisation might find it difficult to recover.


On the other hand, this is an unprecedented opportunity for 
international collaboration in the interests of all of us: to take 
charge of our own future on this planet and restore the 'old 
normality'.  It can be done, but only if the nettle of geoengineering 
is grasped straight-away.


Cheers, John

[1] https://www.msc.org/healthy-oceans/the-oceans-today/fish-as-food


On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 6:12 PM, Ronal W. Larson 
rongretlar...@comcast.net mailto:rongretlar...@comcast.net wrote:


List:  cc Greg et al

See below.

On May 27, 2015, at 12:28 AM, Greg Rau gh...@sbcglobal.net
mailto:gh...@sbcglobal.net wrote:


Certainly agree that new and unconventional marine
management/mitigation methods are likely going to be needed

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v2/n10/full/nclimate1555.html?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201210


*[RWL1:  Greg (overly modest?) was himself the first author of
this excellent 2012 plea for more thought needed on means of
reducing ocean acidification -  the topic of this thread, **with
an SRM slant, ** started yesterday by Andrew.  Unfortunately
behind the usual Nature paywall, fortunately I found hi above
Nature contribution, with its strong CDR slant, at:*

*http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/shs/Hurricanes/Greg%20Rau%20ocean%20carbon.pdf*
*I recommend it strongly and thank Greg for citing it.
*


That message has strangely fallen on deaf ears at the policy
level.  The current mantra is either adequately and quickly
reduce CO2 levels or hope that ecosystems will be resilient,
neither of which seems likely.  Check out the new NOVA production
Lethal Seas on PBS for a sobering look at the ocean
acidification problem and the preceding mantra again repeated.
Lethal indeed.

*[RWL2:  Only released this past few weeks, it is at:
*http://www.thirteen.org/programs/nova/#lethal-seas
*Agreed that NOVA is not talking Greg’s CDR option search, but the
video is indeed “sobering” - and highly supportive of Greg’s
concerns.*
*
*
*A bit more also below. *



Greg

On May 26, 2015, at 9:30 AM, Fred Zimmerman
geoengineerin...@gmail.com mailto:geoengineerin...@gmail.com
wrote:y Ande


For skimmers:

The conclusions drawn from this body of work, which applied
widely used algorithms to estimate coral bleaching8 , are that
we must either accept that the loss of a large percentage of the
world’s coral reefs is inevitable, or consider technological
solutions to buy those reefs time until atmospheric CO2
concentrations can be reduced.

An optimum approach to preserve coral reefs would most likely
advocate a mitigation intensive scenario such as RCP2.6 (ref. 6)
that addresses global-scale ocean acidification concerns17 in
combination with detailed monitoring

Re: [geo] Mineral protection of soil carbon counteracted by root exudates : Nature Climate Change

[Oliver Tickell]

Does this mean that adding finely ground olivine to soils could (in 
addition to chemically sequestrating CO2) help to preserve soil carbon 
from oxidation - by neutralising oxalic acid perhaps, and by protecting 
soil carbon in 'mineral protected compounds'?


--

Oliver Tickell

On 05/05/2015 12:08, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : newly-identified mechanism for carbon release gives 
opportunity for management and geoengineering intervention


http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2580.html

NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE
Mineral protection of soil carbon counteracted by root exudates

Marco Keiluweit, Jeremy J. Bougoure, Peter S. Nico, Jennifer 
Pett-Ridge, Peter K. Weber  Markus Kleber

doi:10.1038/nclimate2580

30 March 2015

Abstract
Multiple lines of existing evidence suggest that climate change 
enhances root exudation of organic compounds into soils. Recent 
experimental studies show that increased exudate inputs may cause a 
net loss of soil carbon. This stimulation of microbial carbon 
mineralization (‘priming’) is commonly rationalized by the assumption 
that exudates provide a readily bioavailable supply of energy for the 
decomposition of native soil carbon (co-metabolism). Here we show that 
an alternate mechanism can cause carbon loss of equal or greater 
magnitude. We find that a common root exudate, oxalic acid, promotes 
carbon loss by liberating organic compounds from protective 
associations with minerals. By enhancing microbial access to 
previously mineral-protected compounds, this indirect mechanism 
accelerated carbon loss more than simply increasing the supply of 
energetically more favourable substrates. Our results provide insights 
into the coupled biotic–abiotic mechanisms underlying the ‘priming’ 
phenomenon and challenge the assumption that mineral-associated carbon 
is protected from microbial cycling over millennial timescales.


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Re: [geo] Generation of electricity from CO2 mineralization: Principle and realization - Springer

[Oliver Tickell]

But then, as Olaf has already told us, it's most effective to use Mg 
silicates 'nature's way' with natural weathering in large bulk with 
powder spread on land, beaches, mud flats, sea beds. The alkalinity is 
quite well locked up. For Ca silicates I think of Portland cement and 
it's not notably reactive stuff in mild acid. HCl does a good job 
cleaning it off bricklaying tools overnight but carbonic acid will 
surely take its time.


As I recall the activation process for these alkaline earth metal 
silicates is itself very energy intensive so 'first obtain your 
activated Mg silicate' is not a very helpful instruction. Not at all 
like digging olivine off a beach in Turkey or Oman! I do wish the 
authors luck with this but I'm not optimistic!


Thanks, Oliver.

On 09/03/2015 16:48, Greg Rau wrote:
Answer - not much.  But as the authors hint, if they can figure out 
how to use natural alkalinity say from silicates to maintain the 
required electrode pH gradient (the key to the process) then they will 
really have something:

To cope with such gigantic amount of CO2, other abundant
source, such as calcium or magnesium silicates, might be
considered as potential alkaline source candidates. The current
study indicates that the calcium silicate after activation
is reactive and could be dissolved at pH value of 9.5–11
which is enough to generate the electricity in this CMFC
system [30]. Thus, how to activate the natural silicates efficiently
and harvest the electricity from carbonation of these
silicates is our next research focuses.

Another key feature is the use of H+/H2 redox as the internal energy 
carrier. If this H is not conserved then the cost/benefit changes.  In 
any case, a very cool idea that merits further research.


Greg


*From:* Oliver Tickell oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org
*To:* andrew.lock...@gmail.com; geoengineering
geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Sent:* Monday, March 9, 2015 3:06 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Generation of electricity from CO2
mineralization: Principle and realization - Springer


Where you have such alkaline wastes, clearly they can (and IMHO
should) be used to mineralise CO2, and great if you can generate
power at the same time. But the main question surely is: how great
is that resource? Use 100% of it for CO2 fixation, and how much
does it add up to? Oliver.

On 07/03/2015 09:17, Andrew Lockley wrote:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11431-014-5727-6
China Technological Sciences
December 2014, Volume 57, Issue 12, pp 2335-2343
Date: 11 Dec 2014
Generation of electricity from CO2 mineralization: Principle and
realization
HePing Xie et al
Abstract
Current CO2 reduction and utilization technologies suffer from
high energy consuming. Thus, an energy favourable route is in
urgent demanding. CO2 mineralization is theoretically an energy
releasing process for CO2 reduction and utilization, but an
approach to recovery this energy has so far remained elusive. For
the first time, here we proposed the principle of harvesting
electrical energy directly from CO2 mineralization, and realized
an energy output strategy for CO2 utilization and reduction via a
CO2-mineralization fuel cell (CMFC) system. In this system CO2
and industrial alkaline wastes were used as feedstock, and
industrial valuable NaHCO3 was produced concomitantly during the
electricity generation. The highest power density of this system
reached 5.5 W/m2, higher than many microbial fuel cells. The
maximum open circuit voltage reached 0.452 V. Moreover, this
system was demonstrated viable to low concentration CO2 (10%) and
other carbonation process. Thus, the existing of an
energy-generating and environmentally friendly strategy to
utilize CO2 as a supplement to the current scenario of CO2
emission control has been demonstrated.
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Re: [geo] Survivable IPCC projections are based on science fiction - the reality is much worse - The Ecologist

[Oliver Tickell]

I would rather see it as an attack on the IPCC's pre-emptive stance 
that, before there is such a thing as field-proven CDR, political will 
behind it, public acceptance for it, funding mechanisms, etc etc, that 
the one and only climatically viable emissions scenario they put forward 
sneakily / covertly assumes that CDR will take place on the 100s of Gt 
scale late this century and puts this forward with no statement that 
this is what is is doing leaving it to others to unpick their assumptions!


Oliver.

On 27/02/2015 19:21, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : probably one of the more robust attacks on the 
viability of CDR I've seen for a while.


http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2772427/survivable_ipcc_projections_are_based_on_science_fiction_the_reality_is_much_worse.html

The Ecologist

Survivable IPCC projections are based on science fiction - the reality 
is much worse

Nick Breeze
27th February 2015

The IPCC's 'Representative Concentration Pathways' are based on 
fantasy technology that must draw massive volumes of CO2 out of the 
atmosphere late this century, writes Nick Breeze - an unjustified hope 
that conceals a very bleak future for Earth, and humanity.


It is quite clear that we have no carbon budget whatsoever. The 
account, far from being in surplus, is horrendously overdrawn. To 
claim we have a few decades of safely burning coal, oil and gas is an 
utter nonsense.


The IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published in 
their latest report, AR5, a set of 'Representative Concentration 
Pathways' (RCP's).
These RCP's (see graph, right) consist of four scenarios that project 
global temperature rises based on different quantities of greenhouse 
gas concentrations.


The scenarios are assumed to all be linked directly to emissions 
scenarios. The more carbon we emit then the hotter it gets. Currently 
humanity is on the worst case scenario of RCP 8.5 which takes us to 
2°C warming by mid century and 4°C warming by the end of the century.


As Professor Schellnhuber, from Potsdam Institute for Climate Research 
(PIK) said, the difference between two and four degrees is human 
civilisation.
In 2009 the International Union of Forest Research Organisations 
delivered a report to the UN that stated that the natural carbon sink 
of trees could be lost at a 2.5°C temperature increase.
The ranges for RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 both take us over 2.5°C and any idea 
that we can survive when the tree sink flips from being a carbon sink 
to a carbon source is delusional.


Where does this leave us?

Of the four shown RCP's only one keeps us within the range that 
climate scientists regard as survivable. This is RCP 2.6 that has a 
projected temperature range of 0.9°C and 2.3°C.
Considering we are currently at 0.85°C above the preindustrial level 
of greenhouse gas concentrations, we are already entering the range 
and as Professor Martin Rees says: I honestly would bet, sad though 
it is, that the annual CO2 emissions are going to rise year by year 
for at least the next 20 years and that will build up accumulative 
levels close to 500 parts per million.


The recent US / China agreement supports Rees's contentions. But even 
if Rees is wrong and we do manage to curtail our carbon emissions, a 
closer look at RCP 2.6 shows something much more disturbing.


In his image (see graph, right), IPCC SMP Expert Reviewer David 
Tattershall has inserted vertical red lines to mark the decades 
between years 2000 and 2100. Within this 21st Century range he has 
also highlighted a steep decline in atmospheric concentrations of 
greenhouse gases (shown by the steep declining thick red line).
It is interesting that concerted action for emissions reductions is 
timed to occur just beyond the date for the implementation of a 
supposed legally binding international agreement.
Stopping emissions does not reduce atmospheric carbon. The emissions 
to date are colossal and the warming effect is delayed by around 40 
years. Therefore, even if we halt emissions, we know there is much 
more warming to come. That will also set off other positive feedbacks 
along the way that will amplify the warming further, stretching over 
centuries.


So how does the IPCC achieve these vast reductions in greenhouse gases?

If we look at the vertical red lines, at around 2025 the steep decline 
in atmospheric greenhouse gases begins. Accumulated emissions not only 
are reduced to zero in 2070 but actually go negative.


This chart shows that carbon is removed from the atmosphere in 
quantities of hundreds of billions of tonnes, for as far ahead as 2300 
to sustain a temperature beneath 2°C.


What makes this idea of projected large-scale Carbon Dioxide Removal 
(CDR) even more perverse is the talk by policymakers of a carbon 
budget. This refers to the amount of fossil fuel that can be burned 
before we are at risk of reaching a 2°C rise in global mean temperature.


It is quite clear that we have no 

Re: [geo]_Re:_A_graphic_to_help_map_the_Carbon_Dioxide_Removal_(“CDR”)_field_|_Deich

[Oliver Tickell]

Interesting!

Clearly this reaction is good in a biodigester - but does it also take 
pleace in ordinary open air/water weathering? If so then it reduces the 
benefit to be gained from weathering olivine, as CH4 is a powerful GHG.


Best, Oliver.

On 31/01/2015 12:39, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


And if you add fine-grained olivine to the biodigester you add three 
advantages:


1.You shift part of the CO2 in the biogas to the liquid as 
bicarbonate. So the biogas becomes richer


2.The digester doesn’t smell anymore, because the iron in the olivine 
combines with the H2S as iron sulphide


3.The absolute amount of produced methane also increases thanks to the 
reaction


6 Fe2SiO4 +  CO2 + 14 H2O à4 Fe3O4 + *CH4*+ 6 H4SiO4 . This reaction 
is catalyzed by the fine-grained magnetite crystals that form, and has 
been tested at several dutch universities. The reaction is well-known 
from places where the ocean bottom is composed of olivine rocks, and 
where seawater seeps into fractures, Olaf Schuiling


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of 
*markcap...@podenergy.org

*Sent:* zaterdag 31 januari 2015 2:02
*To:* voglerl...@gmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* RE: 
[geo]_Re:_A_graphic_to_help_map_the_Carbon_Dioxide_Removal_(“CDR”)_field_|_Deich


Noah,

Nice clear graphic.  Love it.

Please add C from N separation within your Transformation approach.

C (carbon) from N (plant nutrients, a big one being nitrogen as 
ammonia or nitrate) separation can be a fermentation or a chemical 
process.  The most common fermentation is anaerobic digestion (AD). 
 An up and coming chemical process is hydrothermal liquefaction (HL). 
 Both processes economically produce energy in the form of CH4 and 
longer chain hydrocarbons.  Both have a by-product of CO2 at about 40% 
of the biogas produced.  (The HL biogas production is at 200 atm and 
350C, which allows for very inexpensive production of pure CH4 
separate from the pure CO2.)


You should show both separation processes because they each scale much 
larger than any of the three (Biomass burial, Pyrolysis, or BECCS) you 
show currently.  They scale larger because the plant nutrients are not 
sequestered with the carbon and they are both economically viable on 
the energy alone with wet biomass such as seaweed forests: as low as 
1% solids for AD and as low as 10% solids for HL.


Include an arrow over to Pure compressed CO2 from each separation 
process.


Your chart will be much more complete and accurate.

Thank you

Mark E. Capron, PE
Ventura, California
www.PODenergy.org http://www.PODenergy.org

 Original Message 
Subject:

[geo]_Re:_A_graphic_to_help_map_the_Carbon_Dioxide_Removal_(“CDR”)_field_|_Deich
From: Michael Hayes voglerl...@gmail.com
mailto:voglerl...@gmail.com
Date: Fri, January 30, 2015 10:49 am
To: geoengineering@googlegroups.com
mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com

Noah,

The statement that ...biochar can be burned to create electricity
instead of applied to soils as a carbon sink. is questionable as
biochar 'fuel' is charcoal. Only that which is buried is 'biochar'.

Yet, I believe Ron Larson (IBI) can best express this point.

Also, your mission objective of map the most prominent aspects of
CDR would seem to open up the effort to listing the many
important 'prominent aspect' of the biotic approach such as the
production of food, feed, fuel, fertilizer, polymers and fresh
water (etc.). In short, the biotic can pay for itself while the
non-biotic can not.

This is a profoundly important aspect which many authors in this
field ignore. We must ask ourselves if we wish climate change
mitigation to be at the whims of the political purse sting or
financially independent and based solely on the science...not the
thin ice of political popularity.

Best,

Michael


On Thursday, January 29, 2015 at 10:53:49 AM UTC-8, andrewjlockley
wrote:


https://carbonremoval.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/a-graphic-to-help-map-the-carbon-dioxide-removal-cdr-field/

Everything and the Carbon Sink

Noah Deich's blog on all things Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

A graphic to help map the Carbon Dioxide Removal (“CDR”) field

JANUARY 22, 2015

For the carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”) field, breadth is
simultaneously a blessing and a curse. On the bright side, the
numerous approaches to CDR suggest the potential for deploying a
diverse portfolio of CDR projects that reduces both the risks and
costs of preventing climate change. But the down side of breadth
is complexity, which makes the CDR field difficult to explain and
envision, and can lead to confusion about how to catalyze
development of CDR approaches as a result.

In the graphic below, I’ve attempted to categorize and map the
most prominent aspects of CDR in as 

Re: [geo] Re: The olivine reaction

[Oliver Tickell]

It look interesting, however I am unconvinced. It turns out that the 
seawater acidity is lowered only by concentrating out HCl, in 
potentially huge amounts. Some of this may displace existing manufacture 
of HCl by chemical industry, but beyond that it's a hazardous waste. 
Then there is the problem of MgO discharge: as soon as the ocean is made 
alkaline, that provokes precipitation of carbonate, rather than 
formation of HCO3- as solute. And then there is the increased energy 
use, which even if from solar panels, might be more effectively used to 
displace fossil generation.


Oliver.

On 01/02/2015 19:39, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Attached

On 1 Feb 2015 18:25, Renaud de_Richter ecologi...@gmail.com 
mailto:ecologi...@gmail.com wrote:


*Thanks to Magnesium, desalination plants could become net
absorbers – rather than net emitters – of carbon dioxide*


  
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/desalination-plant-carbon-dioxide-source-sink



  Switching desalination plants from carbon dioxide source to sink

22 January 2015 Katie Lian Hui Lim
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/more/?author=896

A UK researcher has proposed a new process to decompose waste
desalination brine http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/c4ew00058g
using solar energy that could allow desalination plants to act as
a sink rather than a source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and
*help to neutralise ocean acidity*.^1
( ^P A Davies, /Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol./, 2015, DOI:
10.1039/c4ew00058g http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/c4ew00058g 
(This paper is free to access.))



Approximately 30 billion m^3 of freshwater is produced by
desalination each year, and this is predicted to double within the
next decade
http://www.globalwaterintel.com/market-intelligence-reports/ to
meet global demand.^To combat the increased energy consumption and
carbon dioxide emissions associated with this growth in capacity,
research efforts have turned to employing renewable energy.

In the system devised by Philip Davies
http://www.aston.ac.uk/eas/staff/a-z/dr-philip-davies/ at Aston
University, magnesium chloride in waste brine is hydrolysed by
energy generated by heliostat fields to magnesium oxide, which is
discharged to the ocean. Due to its alkaline nature, this
subsequently neutralises ocean acidity and gradually removes
carbon dioxide through the conversion of magnesium oxide to
bicarbonate, similar to ocean liming, with the advantage that the
neutralising material is sourced from the seawater itself rather
than mined. Hydrochloric acid produced as a byproduct could
potentially be sequestered into silicate rocks.

Although this approach would increase the energy requirement of
the plant by 50%, Davies calculates that this is offset by the
carbon dioxide absorption capacity; each plant would remove 18,200
tonnes of carbon dioxide per year rather than emitting 5300
tonnes. This would result in 0.4% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide
emissions being absorbed given a doubling in the current
desalination capacity.

Davies acknowledges that lowering the energy required to dewater
brine prior to decomposition would be a major benefit. ‘Not much
energy is needed to decompose magnesium chloride in brine to
magnesium oxide, which makes the use of solar energy potentially
very attractive,’ he says. ‘If we could find better ways to
dewater the brine this would become very energy efficient as a
means of avoiding carbon dioxide.’ He also warns that the effects
of magnesium oxide discharge on local marine environments should
be thoroughly assessed, a sentiment echoed by Silvano Mignardi
http://www.dst.uniroma1.it/Mignardi, an Earth scientist at the
Sapienza University of Rome in Italy: ‘Environmental issues
involved in the ocean discharge of magnesium oxide and in the
management of hydrochloric acid have to be carefully evaluated.’

Phil Renforth
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/earth/academic-staff/dr-phil-renforth/,
a geo-environmental engineer from Cardiff University, highlights
that a major advantage of Davies’ process is that it can be
appended to existing technology. ‘This approach may allow the
industry to transform itself from a carbon dioxide villain into a
force for good in the climate change debate.


Le mercredi 28 janvier 2015 14:16:16 UTC+1, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf)
a écrit :

I think that not everybody realizes that some 300 million tons
of CO2 are captured every year by the weathering of basic
silicates, notably the most common one, olivine. To
demonstrate this, the diagram below shows the analytical data
of some 20 spring water samples in olivine rocks in Turkey. It
shows what happens when rain falls on soils on top of olivine
rocks. The rainwater contains 

Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

As I recall there are nickel mines in Canada that have released large 
volumes of olivine-rich overburden.


Also SA diamond mines produce a lot of kimberlite, also olivine rich. 
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberlite


Oliver.

On 28/01/2015 09:23, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


There are a fairly large number of open-pit chromite mines which occur 
in olivine rocks (dunites). This means that they have large dumps of 
crushed dunites, which provide of course even cheaper olivine to use 
than mining fresh rocks. The same holds for magnesite mines, the 
magnesite is in veins in olivine rock. The one I know best is in 
northern Greece, and there are at least 10 million tons of crushed 
olivine rock on the tailings. The olivine mines in Norway, notably 
Aheim are practically free of overburden (no climate for laterite 
formation, and fairly steep topography), Olaf Schuiling


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Lockley

*Sent:* dinsdag 27 januari 2015 23:59
*Cc:* Geoengineering
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Energy Planning and Decarbonization 
Technology | The Energy Collective


Can anyone shed any light on whether there are already large opencast 
mining operations in the world with significant amounts of 
olivine-rich overburden?


If that's the case, they'll already have all the necessary mining and 
transport equipment in place. Furthermore, dumping the overburden is a 
massive headache for miners. CDR could solve this.


Getting rid of overburden olivine by marine dumping for CDR could be 
like the EOR of the oil industry.


Combining it with erosion reduction would make this a win-win operation.

Any coal mine with a 3:1 ratio of overburden to coal becomes carbon 
neutral, and metal ore mines become massively carbon negative.


A

On 27 Jan 2015 16:42, Mike MacCracken mmacc...@comcast.net 
mailto:mmacc...@comcast.net wrote:


Hi Greg—The flaw in both of our arguments seems to be our assumption 
that the world is rational. Right now there are tremendous 
opportunities for cost-effective (i.e., few-year payback) efficiency 
steps and yet, as noted in a CEO survey in the news yesterday, despite 
the clear risk and the opportunities to do something about it, the 
surveyed CEOs don’t seem to think this is a significant issue. There 
are also tremendous opportunities to slow the warming by cutting 
short-lived species—all quite straightforward and with many 
co-benefits to health, air quality, biomass preservation and 
more—maybe the world is moving slowly to eventually do that. 
Fortunately, the cost of renewables/alternative energy sources is 
coming down so that change is starting, but lots more could be done 
that is cost effective (witness solar panels on my roof giving me a 
9+% guaranteed after tax return on investment) and there is just not a 
real sense of urgency even though the Social Cost of Carbon studies 
(not just the new one in Nature) show an external cost of order 
$200/ton of CO2. Where is rationality in all of this? In a rational 
world, lots would be going on in mitigation and then there would still 
be value in pulling CO2 lower, and augmented weatherization would be 
then a really key step (certainly worth researching, but given all the 
cost effective opportunities right now not being taken advantage of, 
diverting money to go forward with mineral weathering seems to me a 
diversion of money form the most cost effective approaches). So, my 
problem is not with air CO2 management in concept, just that it would 
be so much more cost effective not to put the CO2 into the air in the 
first place.


Mike

On 1/26/15, 11:27 PM, Greg Rau gh...@sbcglobal.net 
http://gh...@sbcglobal.net wrote:


Mike et al.,
I don't think anyone is asking mineral weathering to singlehandedly 
solve the problem, though the fact that it  can and will naturally 
solve the problem given enough time means it does have the proven 
capacity to do so, unlike any other CDR scheme I am aware of. How much 
accelerated weathering we do does largely come down to extraction, 
processing, and movement of mineral mass. Yes, Gt's of CO2 mitigation 
does require Gt's of mineral, but why is this necessarily a 
showstopper if we fail to stabilize CO2 by other means? We currently 
extract about 2.5 Gt of minerals/yr. Is it unthinkable that we 
wouldn't/couldn't double or triple this in the interest of helping to 
stabilize air CO2, climate and ocean acidity? Or would you prefer to 
impact vastly larger land areas and potentially disrupt food and fiber 
production by employing IPCC-endorsed BECCS or afforestation? All 
methods of air CO2 management have benefits, costs, impacts, and 
tradeoffs.  Let's hope that we invest in the research to well 
understand these for all of the CO2 management options available,  and 
that we then make rational decisions on their deployment (in time) 
 based on this info. Given the decisions and endorsements made so far, 
I'm not 

Re: [geo] Olivine costs

[Oliver Tickell]

Even a very low $/t price becomes  a large sum when multiplied by many 
Gts. The questions are surely:

1. Is it cheap compared to alternatives?
2. Is it cheap relative to the impacts of climate change and ocean 
acidification? And
3. Is it affordable in the context of the global economy, and the 
expenditures we have no trouble making such as those on 'security'?


Oliver

On 26/01/2015 22:28, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

At Andrew Lockley's suggestion, I am posting what I sent him off-line.
David

Well, the overburden assumption is clearly a key one.  But let's accept your 
assumption that both the mining and the transport costs for olivine are 1/10th 
that of coal.  That still results in a cost of 1/3 the coal investment for each 
ton of coal dealt with by olivine.  Still not cheap.
And you seem to assume that society will be fine with mining all that olivine 
with no remediation of the mine sites at all.  That seems a questionable 
assumption.
I am not arguing that olivine should be rejected as a tool in the toolbox; only 
that calling it cheap is questionable.



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Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

It's actually very rude to dismiss Olaf's work on this as 'just so' 
stories. He has done laboratory tests of olivine dissolution rates in 
water under conditions of agitation, field tests of olivine particle 
evolution in farmland in the Netherlands, and is in touch with other who 
have, eg, measured biotic acceleration of olivine dissolution by 
lugworms on coastal mudflats.


That's not to say that there is not much more work to be done. But field 
experimentation is expensive and few funders are coming forward to pay 
for this kind of work. Some promise, for sure, but are very short on 
delivery.


Your idea that it's somehow 'scientific' to stick with 'results' that we 
know to be false by several orders of magnitude is to my mind somewhat 
paradoxical.


We know about the silicate, and indeed in many marine areas - those 
polluted by agricultural and sewage runoff - the bloom of diatoms at the 
expense of other algae would be a considerable benefit, replacing 
carpets of chocking algae with healthy populations of fish. Diatoms also 
do not expel CO2 from marine bicarbonate as part of the shell building 
process, and are good at sequestering carbon to deep water. The silicic 
acid will only cause 'massive diatom blooms' where all the other 
nutrients are already present to cause massive algal blooms in any case, 
so the effect will only be to replace one algal bloom with another.


The main metals liberated by the dissolution of olivine are Mg (already 
abundant) and Fe which is in many places a limiting nutrient. Nickel is 
not normally considered an olivine constituent, though olivine is often 
found with nickel bearing ores.


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 11:22, Francesc Montserrat wrote:
As for now, Suzanne Hangx and Chris Spiers provided a working model, 
resulting in a set of (dissolution rate) values. Until the time that 
someone comes up with a better model and/or more accurate values, I 
think that the scientific method dictates we stick with the previous one.
You know I agree with you in principle, Olaf, but mentioning just-so 
anecdotes/facts/observations is not enough to discredit a 
model...fortunately. Most, if not all, models start with being a very 
strong abstraction of reality, only to be tuned as mechanistic 
knowledge of the process under investigation increases. Slowly, such 
models become the minimal adequate models (MAM) we normally use to 
explain and/or predict those processes.


Let's be scientific about it and come up with a better tuned model for 
olivine dissolution and relevant consequences in terms of carbonate 
system, carbon sequestration and downstream ecological impacts in 
natural waters, including seawater.


As for Andrew's questions on location of the mines etc., I think that 
Nils Moosdorf, Phil Renforth and Jens Hartmann have done a good job in 
their paper answering the primary questions 
(http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es4052022). As for coastal 
defense win-win: have a look at this 
(http://www.dezandmotor.nl/en-GB/), and then imagine one (partially) 
made up of olivine...but be careful to also imagine that the olivine 
in such a semi-natural structure releases concomitant amounts of 
silicate (conceivably causing massive diatom blooms, especially in the 
later months of the year when silicate is depleted in seawater) and 
considerable amounts of Nickel (of which we simply don't know what it 
does to the foodweb).


Cheers,
Francesc


On 26-01-15 10:33, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) wrote:


Well, you better forget the model of Hangx and Spiers, as it has no 
relation to reality. They forget that grains roll on the beach and 
collide and scour each other knocking off micron sized slivers, they 
use weathering rates obtained in clean laboratories under exclusion 
of biotic factors, and they assumed that waters of the sea do not 
move. I attach a rebuttal of it (Schuiling, R. (2014) Climate Change 
and CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere. Natural Science, 6, 659-663. 
doi: 10.4236/ns.2014.69065 
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ns.2014.69065). A nice walk along the 
beach would have saved them a lot of wasted time.


*From:*geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Christoph Voelker

*Sent:* zondag 25 januari 2015 17:15
*To:* andrew.lock...@gmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | 
The Energy Collective


Well, firstly there has been the study of Hangx and Spiers (2009),

Hangx, S. J. T.,  Spiers, C. J. (2009). Coastal spreading of olivine 
to control atmospheric CO2 concentrations: A critical analysis of 
viability. /International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control/, /3/(6), 
757–767. doi:10.1016/j.ijggc.2009.07.001


who arrive at the conclusion

The feasibility of the concept depends on the rate of olivine 
dissolution, the sequestration capacity of the dominant reaction, and 
its CO2 footprint. Kinetics calculations show that offsetting 30% of 
worldwide 

Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

We can certainly agree that more research is desperately needed - and 
needs to be funded. Govts way prefer highly engineered 'solutions' like 
nuclear power and 'classic' CCS, which are also far more expensive. I 
don't get it, but then I'm not a politician.


Well done with your own research on the lugworms BTW.  In a way it does 
not matter, though it's clearly interesting, what the precise mechanism 
is - the important thing is that the biotic weathering enhancement does 
indeed take place.


Two things are needed: 1) some very well thought out and effective 
experimental designs, and 2) the money to carry those experiments out.


Re the permits, one thing we do know is that the experiments are not in 
any sense 'dangerous'. This stuff is naturally occurring and widespread 
in the environment anyway. The 'worst case' is really just that it does 
very little at all!


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 17:42, Francesc Montserrat wrote:

Dear Oliver, dear list

First off: I never had the intention to be rude about either Olaf or 
his work. I recognise his work for what it is, but we have to be fair 
here: He did his shaking experiments in freshwater, which naturally 
then rises to be pH 9 and beyond. The farmland experiment fizzled a 
bit, because the initial groundwater conditions were not measured and 
as for the biotic acceleration by lugworms, that's my own work. Yes, 
they increase the dissolution of olivine. But as of yet, I cannot say 
whether that is by intestinal action, or simply by the fact that they 
also exhale CO2 and thus increase olivine dissolution. Also I have 
performed some 10 different shaking/agitation experiments in SEAwater, 
which is a strongly buffered and complex system so that the 
theoretical 1:4 relationship does not hold. In fact, from our results 
it seems that the Mg in the seawater is interfering in the expected 
alkalinity increase. From all those agitation experiments, the main 
message is: alkalinity up (but not 1:4), DIC up, Silicate up, Nickel 
up...but ONLY when olivine is added in high enough amount. The story 
that Nickel is not an olivine constituent is thus not true. I have a 
molar Ni:Mg ratio of ca. 1:150 in the olivine I use which comes from 
the well-known dunite mine in Aheim, Norway.


If we know those model results (of Hangx and Spiers) to be off by 
orders of magnitude, this implies that someone has some solid 
observations, right ? Where are those published ? Same goes for all 
the other claims that you stake about the diatom blooms. From your 
words it seems it is already known what the downstream ecological 
effects will be. If so...if this is already known and in the white 
literature, please accept my apologies and let us bundle all this 
knowledge and step up to some of the larger dredging companies here in 
The Netherlands or to a govermental body. If there actually already IS 
a fool-proof method, then we should definitely jump on it !


Please, get me straight: I am NOT trying to discredit Olaf, because I 
do think that the principle of his idea will work. What I do want to 
advocate is to go about this a bit more scientific than just coming up 
with grand plans that no governing body will ever issue permits for 
because the boundary conditions are not known. If I would get my way, 
I'd be doing the same as Olaf: trying out these fantastic plans, 
preferably on larger scales. But the reality is that you need hard 
bloody numbers to convince those who issue the permits. Again, if that 
knowledge is already there: I humbly bow my head and ask for 
apologies. Until then, let's not pretend that we don't know what we 
don't know, and get our bloody arses working on it !


Francesc



On 26-01-15 17:30, Oliver Tickell wrote:


It's actually very rude to dismiss Olaf's work on this as 'just so' 
stories. He has done laboratory tests of olivine dissolution rates in 
water under conditions of agitation, field tests of olivine particle 
evolution in farmland in the Netherlands, and is in touch with other 
who have, eg, measured biotic acceleration of olivine dissolution by 
lugworms on coastal mudflats.


That's not to say that there is not much more work to be done. But 
field experimentation is expensive and few funders are coming forward 
to pay for this kind of work. Some promise, for sure, but are very 
short on delivery.


Your idea that it's somehow 'scientific' to stick with 'results' that 
we know to be false by several orders of magnitude is to my mind 
somewhat paradoxical.


We know about the silicate, and indeed in many marine areas - those 
polluted by agricultural and sewage runoff - the bloom of diatoms at 
the expense of other algae would be a considerable benefit, replacing 
carpets of chocking algae with healthy populations of fish. Diatoms 
also do not expel CO2 from marine bicarbonate as part of the shell 
building process, and are good at sequestering carbon to deep water. 
The silicic acid will only cause 'massive diatom blooms' where all

Re: [geo] Energy Planning and Decarbonization Technology | The Energy Collective

[Oliver Tickell]

It's about 1:1 by mass CO2:olivine. Theoretically you should get a bit 
more CO2 but after allowances for impurities etc 1:1 is probably a 
better figure.


I would just note: there have been comments that it's not realistic to 
have to shift Gt of stuff in order to sequestrate Gt of CO2. But IMHO 
that's precisely what you should expect.


Oliver.

On 26/01/2015 16:54, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

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; 
1/1th of that; some other fraction?

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 26, 2015, at 11:47 AM, Oliver Tickell 
oliver.tick...@kyoto2.orgmailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org 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: geoengineering@googlegroups.commailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.commailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] 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 
gh

[geo] John Nissen interview from COP20 on The Ecologist

[Oliver Tickell]

http://bit.ly/1waCUIa


John Nissen speaking at AMEG's COP20 press conference. Photo: still from 
video on unfccc6.meta-fusion.com/ . 
http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/2670980/the_melting_arctic_john_nissens_emergency_call_to_action.html 




 The melting Arctic - John Nissen's emergency call to action
 
http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/2670980/the_melting_arctic_john_nissens_emergency_call_to_action.html
 /15th December 2015/

The Earth faces an imminent crisis caused by runaway Arctic warming. So 
says climate campaigner John Nissen, who travelled to COP20 in Lima to 
impress the dangers on delegates - and urge them to emergency action to 
cool the Arctic before it's too late. Tomás d'Ornellas, editor of 
Tecnews.pe, met him there ...


/Read More... 
http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/2670980/the_melting_arctic_john_nissens_emergency_call_to_action.html/ 


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Re: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | Science/AAAS | News

[Oliver Tickell]

See also: 
http://www.ecojustice.ca/media-centre/press-releases/sask.-family-demands-answers-on-carbon-capture-and-storage-risks


This does raise the question - if these entirely new problems were not 
caused by the CCS, what was it?


It looks a bit like air and water contamination from fracking. The gas 
cos say it's nothing to do with them - but if it's not them, then why 
did the problems suddenly kick off the moment fracking started?


Anyway, as Olaf says, you can chemically sequester CO2 from the 
atmosphere in Mg silicate bearing rock for about $10/tonne. So what's 
the point in the 30% extra coal burn, the expensive chemical 
engineering, the pipelines, and the non-zero hazard anyway?


Oliver.

On 17/10/2014 16:39, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

On the Weyburn leak claims, these were promptly investigated and determined to 
not be related to the Weyburn field operations.  See a summary here:  
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bmordick/investigations_find_no_evidenc.html


Sent from my iPad

On Oct 17, 2014, at 6:58 AM, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) 
r.d.schuil...@uu.nlmailto:r.d.schuil...@uu.nl wrote:

Researchers also calculated that the CO2 pumped into the Weyburn field could 
never escape. Fortunately it is a very thinly populated area so only a number 
of cattle and wild animals died when it started to leak. I am not claiming that 
all potential CCS would start to leak, but there are safer ways to capture CO2. 
There is no reason to capture CO2 from coal fired plants, you can capture it 
anywhere, so go for the safest and cheapest solution(see attachment), Olaf 
Schuiling

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.commailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley
Sent: donderdag 16 oktober 2014 16:52
To: geoengineering
Subject: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | 
Science/AAAS | News


http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/10/storing-greenhouse-gas-underground-million-years

MARC HESSE

Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years

When Canada switched on its Boundary Dam power plant earlier this month, it signaled 
a new front in the war against climate change. The commercial turbine burns coal, 
the dirtiest of fossil fuels, but it traps nearly all the resulting carbon dioxide 
underground before it reaches the atmosphere. Part of this greenhouse gas is pumped 
into porous, water-bearing underground rock layers. Now, a new study provides the 
first field evidence that CO2 can be stored safely for a million years in these 
saline aquifers, assuaging worries that the gas might escape back into the 
atmosphere.

It's a very comprehensive piece of work, says geochemist Stuart Gilfillan of the 
University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. The 
approach is very novel.

There have been several attempts to capture the carbon dioxide released by the 
world's 7000-plus coal-fired plants. Pilot projects in Algeria, Japan, and 
Norway indicate that CO2can be stored in underground geologic formations such 
as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep coal seams, and saline aquifers. In 
the United States, saline aquifers are believed to have the largest capacity 
for CO2 storage, with potential sites spread out across the country, and 
several in western states such as Colorado also host large coal power plants. 
CO2 pumped into these formations are sealed under impermeable cap rocks, where 
it gradually dissolves into the salty water and mineralizes. Some researchers 
suggest the aquifers have enough capacity to store a century's worth of 
emissions from America's coal-fired plants, but others worry the gas can leak 
back into the air through fractures too small to detect.

To resolve the dilemma, geoscientists need to know how long it takes for the 
trapped CO2 to dissolve. The faster the CO2 dissolves and mineralizes, the less 
risk that it would leak back into the atmosphere. But determining the rate of 
dissolution is no easy feat. Lab simulations suggest that the sealed gas could 
completely dissolve over 10,000 years, a process too slow to be tested 
empirically.

So computational geoscientist Marc Hesse of the University of Texas, Austin, 
and colleagues turned to a natural lab: the Bravo Dome gas field in New Mexico, 
one of the world's largest natural CO2 reservoirs. Ancient volcanic activities 
there have pumped the gas into a saline aquifer 700 meters underground. Since 
the 1980s, oil companies have drilled hundreds of wells there to extract the 
gas for enhanced oil recovery, leaving a wealth of data on the site's geology 
and CO2storage.

To find out how fast CO2 dissolves in the aquifers, the researchers needed to 
know two things: the total amount of gas dissolved at the reservoir and how 
long it has been there. Because the gas is volcanic in origin, the researchers 
reasoned that it must have arrived at Bravo Dome steaming hot--enough to warm 
up the surrounding rocks. 

Re: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | Science/AAAS | News

[Oliver Tickell]

Your reasoning is sound, in principle, but here's the funny thing. All 
the climate 'solutions' that are getting picked up on are seriously big, 
technical and expensive, offering very poor value for money. CCS is one 
example. Nuclear power is another. And come to think of it, you coud say 
the same for carbon trading systems that have cost consumers dear, and 
handed over billions to polluters.


So in fact, I disagree, I do not support 'all of the above' in carbon 
sequestration, but rather doing what is low-cost, low impact, low-tech, 
low-risk and could be begun pretty much immediately on a large scale.


Despite Olaf and others working hard for many years to get the word out 
about 'Rock Weathering CCS' - RW-CCS - it has picked up close to zero 
traction. What does this tell us about the world? And the world of 
climate change mitigation?


Answers welcome, Oliver.

On 17/10/2014 18:15, Hawkins, Dave wrote:

The argument for including CCS in a portfolio of methods to manage GHGs is that 
is a technique that may facilitate the adoption of policies to make power 
generators and large industrial plants responsible for limiting/eliminating 
releases of CO2 from their facilities.  CCS is not the only technique that 
could play this role but it is one that could contribute to a broader effort.

Keeping CCS in the mix should not be seen as dismissing other options.  If we 
get policies adopted to make large emitters responsible for their CO2 emissions 
then there will be markets for a broad range of options and competition will 
determine whether there is a single winner, or more likely, there emerges an 
ecosystem of techniques occupying different niches.
At the moment, the technical availability of CCS has enabled the adoption of 
CO2 emission limits for coal-fired power plants in Canada and proposed CO2 
limits in the U.S.
David

Sent from my iPad


On Oct 17, 2014, at 12:24 PM, Oliver Tickell oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org wrote:

See also: 
http://www.ecojustice.ca/media-centre/press-releases/sask.-family-demands-answers-on-carbon-capture-and-storage-risks

This does raise the question - if these entirely new problems were not caused 
by the CCS, what was it?

It looks a bit like air and water contamination from fracking. The gas cos say 
it's nothing to do with them - but if it's not them, then why did the problems 
suddenly kick off the moment fracking started?

Anyway, as Olaf says, you can chemically sequester CO2 from the atmosphere in 
Mg silicate bearing rock for about $10/tonne. So what's the point in the 30% 
extra coal burn, the expensive chemical engineering, the pipelines, and the 
non-zero hazard anyway?

Oliver.


On 17/10/2014 16:39, Hawkins, Dave wrote:
On the Weyburn leak claims, these were promptly investigated and determined to 
not be related to the Weyburn field operations.  See a summary here:  
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/bmordick/investigations_find_no_evidenc.html


Sent from my iPad

On Oct 17, 2014, at 6:58 AM, Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf) 
r.d.schuil...@uu.nlmailto:r.d.schuil...@uu.nl wrote:

Researchers also calculated that the CO2 pumped into the Weyburn field could 
never escape. Fortunately it is a very thinly populated area so only a number 
of cattle and wild animals died when it started to leak. I am not claiming that 
all potential CCS would start to leak, but there are safer ways to capture CO2. 
There is no reason to capture CO2 from coal fired plants, you can capture it 
anywhere, so go for the safest and cheapest solution(see attachment), Olaf 
Schuiling

From: geoengineering@googlegroups.commailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
[mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Lockley
Sent: donderdag 16 oktober 2014 16:52
To: geoengineering
Subject: [geo] Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | 
Science/AAAS | News


http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/10/storing-greenhouse-gas-underground-million-years

MARC HESSE

Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years

When Canada switched on its Boundary Dam power plant earlier this month, it signaled 
a new front in the war against climate change. The commercial turbine burns coal, 
the dirtiest of fossil fuels, but it traps nearly all the resulting carbon dioxide 
underground before it reaches the atmosphere. Part of this greenhouse gas is pumped 
into porous, water-bearing underground rock layers. Now, a new study provides the 
first field evidence that CO2 can be stored safely for a million years in these 
saline aquifers, assuaging worries that the gas might escape back into the 
atmosphere.

It's a very comprehensive piece of work, says geochemist Stuart Gilfillan of the 
University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. The 
approach is very novel.

There have been several attempts to capture the carbon dioxide released by the 
world's 7000-plus coal-fired plants. Pilot projects in Algeria, Japan, and 
Norway indicate that CO2can

Re: [geo] Fwd: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?

[Oliver Tickell]

I could take an article for The Ecologist about this apparent attempt to 
'bounce' the scientific community into accepting a proposal that has not 
been adequately discussed and over which no consensus exists.


If anyone wants to write it, please mail, Oliver.

On 20/08/2014 12:41, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Posted at the request of John, as below.

A

-- Forwarded message --
From: John Shepherd j...@noc.soton.ac.uk mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk
Date: 20 Aug 2014 13:35
Subject: Fwd: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?
To: Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com 
mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com
Cc: Steve Rayner steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk 
mailto:steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk, Woods, Emma 
emma.wo...@royalsociety.org mailto:emma.wo...@royalsociety.org


Andrew

You are correct in suspecting that the Royal Society had nothing to do 
with this. Please see message below… Please could you post a link to 
this, and if possible also re-title the thread so that any 
misunderstanding is minimised ? Meanwhile I am seeking to get a more 
accurate correction approved so that you can post that too…


Best wishes

John

Begin forwarded message:

*From: *Woods, Emma emma.wo...@royalsociety.org 
mailto:emma.wo...@royalsociety.org

*Subject: **RE: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?*
*Date: *20 August 2014 11:01:28 BST
*To: *John Shepherd j...@noc.soton.ac.uk 
mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk, Steve Rayner 
steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk mailto:steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk

*Cc: *Andy Parker apark...@gmail.com mailto:apark...@gmail.com

Hello again,
Just to say that if you're not already aware, the article 
onmotherboard.vice.com http://motherboard.vice.com/now contains the 
following (making an RS response even less likely):
/Update: This article formerly stated that the Royal Society of 
London was behind the proposal; it is fact written by an affiliated 
scientist, but has not yet formally been endorsed or recognized by 
the organization. Motherboard regrets the error./

//
All the best,
Emma
-Original Message-
From: Woods, Emma
Sent: 20 August 2014 10:47
To: 'John Shepherd'; Steve Rayner
Cc: Andy Parker
Subject: RE: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?
Thanks for flagging this up, John. I've passed it on to our Press 
Office, who will decide whether to issue a correction - I suspect 
not, but I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again,
Emma
-Original Message-
From: John Shepherd [mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk]
Sent: 19 August 2014 19:16
To: Steve Rayner
Cc: Woods, Emma; Andy Parker
Subject: Re: RS involvement in framework for GE research ?
Steve  Andy
That’s what I thought: unfortunate….
I’ll leave it to Emma to decide whether a media correction is needed, 
but maybe one (or both) of you could post something on the Google 
group in response to Andrew Lockley’s posting ?

John
On 19 Aug 2014, at 16:39, Steve Rayner steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk 
mailto:steve.ray...@insis.ox.ac.uk wrote:

 John

 This is an egregious misattribution. I think that the author confused
 my membership of the RS Working Group with ³membership²of the RS
 despite the fact that I specifically said that the 3 social scientists
 on the WG were not FRSs

 Steve

 On 19/08/2014 15:43, John Shepherd j...@noc.soton.ac.uk 
mailto:j...@noc.soton.ac.uk wrote:


 Emma

 I¹ve just picked up this report on the web

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/geoengineering/XhxpmuYOmIo 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/geoengineering/XhxpmuYOmIo


 I don¹t know whether there was any RS involvement in this framework
 (nothing that I know of) but if it¹s a mis-attribution you may want
 to issue a clarificationŠ

 John



This email is sent on behalf of The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House 
Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG, United Kingdom.
You should carry out your own virus check before opening any 
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Re: [geo] Climate science: Stratospheric folly : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

[Oliver Tickell]

I'm sure we all values Tim's opinions greatly, but $18 does seem a bit 
steep.


Meanwhile you can read this for free:

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic is home to large reservoirs of 
methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Photo: NASA Earth Observatory. 
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2370255/we_must_cool_the_arctic_before_its_too_late.html 




 We must cool the Arctic before it's too late
 
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2370255/we_must_cool_the_arctic_before_its_too_late.html
 /29th April 2014/

The decline of Arctic sea ice demands a response, writes Matthew 
Worsdale. As Arctic temperatures rise, so does the danger of huge 
eruptions of methane - a powerful greenhouse gas - that will tip the 
climate into 'hot'. The only solution is geo-engineering.


/Read More... 
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2370255/we_must_cool_the_arctic_before_its_too_late.html/


On 29/04/2014 08:13, Andrew Lockley wrote:


http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v508/n7497/pdf/508457a.pdf

Climate science: Stratospheric folly

Tim Kruger
Nature 508, 457 (24 April 2014)
doi:10.1038/508457a
Published online 23 April 2014

Tim Kruger examines an argument against injecting aerosols into the 
atmosphere to counter climate change.


No abstract. Hopefully someone can provide the article

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[geo] John Nissen's article published on The Ecologist

[Oliver Tickell]

http://bit.ly/1g5L7E1

Preservation of the fragile Arctic sea ice is essential if we are to 
prevent abrupt climate change. Photo: NASA. 
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2272758/we_must_prevent_abrupt_climate_change.html 




 We must prevent abrupt climate change
 
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2272758/we_must_prevent_abrupt_climate_change.html
 /8th February 2014/

Weird weather from serious flooding in the UK to acute cold and drought 
in the USA follows from the warming Arctic and disruptions to the jet 
stream, writes John Nissen. We must act now to prevent sudden changes in 
global climate.


/Read More... 
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2272758/we_must_prevent_abrupt_climate_change.html/


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inline: 370387.jpg

Re: [geo] TERRA FUTURA 2013: INTERVIEW WITH VANDANA SHIVA ABOUT GEOENGINEERING | NoGeoingegneria

[Oliver Tickell]

Vandana Shiva is a great woman that you really should have heard of! But 
more as a campaigner for India's small farmers, environment, human 
rights of indigenous peoples, etc, than as a scientist. If she says she 
has been published in all these learned journals it's probably true, but 
probably her articles are not deeply technical ones. Oliver.


On 28/10/2013 10:38, Tom Wigley wrote:

Folks,

I'd never heard of Vandana Shiva before this. I was intrigued by the
statement in her biosketch that she had published 300 papers in
leading scientific and technical journals.

No matter what else she has done, she certainly does not have much of
a record as a bona fide scientist, at least as far as publications
goes. From Web of Science I find ...

... under Shiva, Vandana: 4 papers, the most cited of which has been 
cited a grand total of 2 times


... under Shiva, V: 41 papers, the most cited of which has been cited
a grand total of 14 times and 21 of which have zero citations.

Whoever wrote the biosketch must be close to the record for inflation
of the facts.

Tom.

+++

On 10/28/2013 4:26 AM, O Morton wrote:

Dear David

When you're responding to my arguments, how do you get from carefully
and thoughtfully, in the quotation Ron offers, to in all ways the
human imagination can conceive? To me, and I suspect most readers,
carefully and thoughtfully means precisely what you say is required:
that people should asses specific climate geoengineering proposals on
their merits -- as they should assess other responses to the
carbon/climate crisis -- and pass over some that they find unsupportable

On humans are of course part of nature; I don't think there's any of
course about it. How much and in what ways humans are part of nature
seems to me to be the question which anthropocene politics attempt to
answer, not an agreed ground from which people start.

Best as ever

Oliver

On Sunday, 27 October 2013 21:01:22 UTC, David Hawkins wrote:

Without making an argument that we should never pursue any form of
geoengineering, let me note an obvious response to Oliver's
arguments quoted below.
The fact that we are already manipulating nature in many ways does
not support an argument that we should therefore manipulate it in
all ways that human imagination can conceive.  Our job is to
exercise good judgement in deciding where to go and where to stop.
  So purely as an intellectual matter, the option of not doing some
forms of geoengineering cannot be rejected.  It is not a valid
argument to respond to criticisms of specific forms of
geoengineering by saying we already manipulate nature a lot.

(I put nature in quotes to start because humans are of course part
of nature. We don't act on nature; we act in nature.  But our
capacity to change the functioning of many ecosystems previously
largely uninfluenced by humans, is enormous.  The fact that we are a
part of nature does mean we can argue that we should be comfortable
with any actions we take because they are natural.  That stance
conveniently would discard any responsibility we have for
considering the impacts of our actions.)

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 27, 2013, at 3:34 PM, Ronal W. Larson
rongre...@comcast.net javascript:mailto:rongre...@comcast.net
javascript: wrote:

List   cc Andrew

 This interview is of course not good news;  Dr.  Shiva has a
pretty strong following in environmental circles.

 I add a few comments here for three reasons

  First because she has said all of the same things about
biochar (not mentioned in the transcript below) on several
occasions.  She wrote a very confused forward (as though she hadn't
read it) to a major biochar book by Albert Bates (at his invitation)
- should anyone want to see more on her CDR/biochar views. Albert,
a leader in both fields, says that mostly the Permaculture movement
is behind biochar, not listening to her.  Her views on biochar are
the same as given below.

 Second,  because I have today read the following in Oliver
Morton’s excellent book (“Eating the Sun”) on photosynthesis.  He
comments on views like hers in the last chapter where he reports
(pages 389ff) on the views of (former “Geo list member) Peter Read.
   a.  Oliver wrote p 392:   “What’s more, we are rearranging
the world……. in a decentralized, slapdash way.  The idea we might do
it better should not be rejected for an unworkable if understandable
desire that we not do it at all.”
b.  A paragraph later:  “We can’t let a romantic idea that
nature should be free to carry on regardless dominate our thinking;
nature is everywhere under our influence already.
  c.  One more paragraph later.   We are on the flight deck, and
we are alone.   We are at the controls and we have no option but to
use 

Re: [geo] Hybrid CDR/SRM system for consideration

[Oliver Tickell]

Hi Sev, interesting paper. Where are you proposing to get your hydrated 
silicon from? I did not see that in your discussion. Have you thought of 
simply including ground olivine in your flakes?


Regards, Oliver.


On 06/10/2013 00:07, sevcla...@me.com wrote:
Geoengineering is a near continuum. Jostling for pre-eminence between 
CDR and SRM approaches is both unnecessary and weakens our collective 
voice. Some geoengineering concepts span both categories. My concept 
of /Organic Mariculture and Biosequestration/ is one such newcomer. It 
uses rice husks coated with iron-silicon-phosphate rich material to 
produce buoyant fertiliser flakes which deliver natural, ultra-slow 
release nutrients to oceanic phytoplankton. Disseminated to suitable 
and nutrient-deficient oceanic sites, these flakes are expected to 
cause increased: marine biomass; carbon flux to the sediments of deep, 
cold oceans; and albedo from the additional chlorophyll, DMSP-derived 
cloud cover, and DMS-derived sulphate aerosols. By my rough 
construction, they may be made to do this profitably, at scale, and 
with acceptable speed and safety, once the science has been validated 
and approvals obtained. The concept also benefits from offering a 
sustainable, reversible and likely-politically-acceptable solution in 
which all nations may participate and receive net benefits.


I ask this community to consider the attached summary. Supporting 
documents are available from me at sevcla...@me.com for those 
interested, or these could be posted online here should the demand be 
there. I am emboldened to make this request for constructively 
critical discourse because the work has been encouraged by Martin, 
Lord Rees, the immediate past president of The Royal Society in a 
personal communication and because of our desperate need for viable 
solutions.

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Re: [geo] Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia

[Oliver Tickell]

See 
http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/climatepdfs02/ClimImpts1258VolcaClimChg00.pdf

for discussion of impacts on climate.

On 01/10/2013 00:48, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas 
volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia


 Authors

Significance

Based on ice core archives of sulfate and tephra deposition, one of 
the largest volcanic eruptions of the historic period and of the past 
7,000 y occurred in A.D. 1257. However the source of this “mystery 
eruption” remained unknown. Drawing on a robust body of new evidence 
from radiocarbon dates, tephra geochemistry, stratigraphic data, a 
medieval chronicle, this study argues that the source of this eruption 
is Samalas volcano, part of the Mount Rinjani Volcanic Complex on 
Lombok Island, Indonesia. These results solve a conundrum that has 
puzzled glaciologists, volcanologists, and climatologists for more 
than three decades. In addition, the identification of this volcano 
gives rise to the existence of a forgotten Pompeii in the Far East.


-- Forwarded message --
From: Article Notifications notificat...@highwire.stanford.edu 
mailto:notificat...@highwire.stanford.edu

Date: Oct 1, 2013 12:46 AM
Subject: Link to an Article from PNAS
To: andrew.lock...@gmail.com mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com
Cc:


The following article from PNAS may be of interest to you:

Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas 
volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia 
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/26/1307520110.abstract


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Re: [geo] The National Academies Contemplate Geoengineering - GeoSpace - AGU Blogosphere

[Oliver Tickell]

This observation is completely wrong.

Yes, limestone is dissolved by carbonic acid H2CO3 to create bicarbonate 
Ca(HCO3-)2. But the deposits in caves are carbonate, formed by the 
reverse reaction in which CO2 is emitted. So no carbon is locked away. 
Carbonate is just moved from one place to another.


If the bicarbonate makes it to the sea, then it may remain in solution 
for some time. But as soon as carbonate is deposited, the carbon gain is 
lost.


This is the problem with putting quicklime into oceans. It has to be 
done very carefully and at very low concentrations or it just 
precipitates out as carbonate emitting CO2 in the process - all those 
emissions kilning lime for zero benefit!


The proper reaction to utilise is the weathering of olivine as 
previously discussed many times ... Oliver.


On 01/10/2013 14:42, Fred Zimmerman wrote:
I think there is some value in the layman's perspective. Sometimes it 
helps to be further away from the discussion. For example I thought 
this observation was rather telling.


The committee gave respectful attention to schemes that even their
proponents consider iffy. Schrag, for instance, mentioned an
“impractical” idea he and his colleagues had to create a massive
acid exchange to remove carbon from the air.When carbon dioxide is
mixed with water, it forms a mild acid called carbonic acid
(carbonated water). Limestone can neutralize the acid, as it does
in caves, where the carbon gets bound up in stalactites and
stalagmites.Schrag’s proposal uses massive amounts of quicklime –
the product of breaking down limestone using heat – to neutralize
atmospheric and ocean carbon. Multiple times throughout his
description Schrag branded the plan “completely impractical” – it
requires massive amounts of energy and manpower to operate – yet
the committee asked thoughtful follow-up questions.




---
Fred Zimmerman
Geoengineering IT!
Bringing together the worlds of geoengineering and information technology
GE NewsFilter: http://geoengineeringIT.net:8080


On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 5:31 AM, Andrew Lockley 
andrew.lock...@gmail.com mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com wrote:


Poster's note : little new content other than a few names in this
layman's report.


http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/2013/09/27/the-national-academies-contemplate-geoengineering/

The National Academies Contemplate Geoengineering

By Thomas Sumner

The ideas seem lifted from a James Bond super villain’s dastardly
plot: carpeting the Earth with whitened clouds, constructing giant
solar reflectors in space, using chemicals to change the makeup of
the atmosphere. But with scientific models predicting potentially
devastating changes in the world’s climate, seemingly impractical
and improbable geoengineering solutions become more and more
alluring.This month at the National Academy of Sciences in
Washington D.C., a 16-person ad hoc committee of scientists held
its second meeting to discuss the practicality of various methods
of purposefully changing Earth’s environment to combat climate
change, sometimes called climate engineering or geoengineering.
Convened purely for investigation and discussion rather than
making recommendations, the group cast a wide net for ideas, even
those they might ultimately reject as made- for-Hollywood only.One
geoengineering approach would inject aerosols into the
stratosphere to reflect away solar radiation. A 2009 scientific
paper evaluated benefits, risks, and costs of using aircraft,
balloons, and other means to loft aerosols, as depicted in this
figure from the paper. Credit: Brian West.The first morning of the
September 10-11meeting, Harvard University geology
professor Daniel Schrag addressed the committee, laying out the
climate issues geoengineering hopes to solve.Schrag said the
consequences of climate change—sea level rise, more severe weather
extremes, ocean acidification—demand action. However, even in a
best case scenario with a perfect political climate and a quick
move to low-emission energy sources, Schrag said fixing carbon
dioxide emissions within the foreseeable future would be
impossible.“Scientifically we can’t fix this problem for 100
years,” he argued.This lack of a single simple and viable solution
is what makes geoengineering worth considering, according to Gary
Geernaert, director of the US Department of Energy’s Climate and
Environmental Sciences Division, who spoke to the
committee.“There’s no silver bullet for climate change,” said
Geernaert said. “We need to look at all the available solutions.”

Wild potential plans
Geoengineering breaks down into two main approaches: capturing
carbon and reflecting solar radiation.The first aims to remove
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby reducing the
greenhouse effect warming the 

Re: [geo] CO2 mitigation: $$/benefit

[Oliver Tickell]

Ken, I do like your way of looking at this!

FYI I attach the part of my book Kyoto2 which addresses these questions. 
Oliver.


On 14/09/2013 17:02, Ken Caldeira wrote:
Had the Romans discovered fossil fuels, and invented automobiles and 
power plants and so on, and applied the logic recommended by Nordhaus, 
right now


-- the great ice sheets would be melting, with sea-level probably 
rising a meter per century

-- oceans would be acidified, coral reefs gone
-- the arctic as we know it today would be gone
-- the tropics would be suffering from blistering heat
-- etc

Would we be glad that the ancient Romans listened to their economists, 
and maximized their net present value so they could go on a 
fossil-fueled spending binge for a century or two?




As an aside, when I say we should or should not do something, or that 
something is good or bad, I am presenting my personal opinion as a 
human being and not pretending that it is a scientific result.


When Eduardo Porter repreresents Nordhaus as says, If investments in 
CO_2  abatement are not competitive, we would do better by investing 
elsewhere and using the proceeds to cover warming’s damage., is this 
supposed to be a representation of personal values, or is this a 
finding of the science of economics?  If the latter, then I would 
know to see how this science proceeds from empirical facts to 
prescriptive statements about what we ought to do.  What is the 
experiment that would demonstrate the truth of the quoted sentence?


Science tells us facts about the world. Religion and morality tell us 
about what we ought or ought not to do.  Is economics a science or a 
religion?




I prefer the speed of light to be 6 x 10**8 m/s, instead of a measly 3 
x 10**8 m/s. Is this like Nordhaus saying he prefers a discount rate 
of 4%? Do facts matter here, or do we just dress up our values with a 
little mathematics and pretend it is a science?




___
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science
Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
+1 650 704 7212kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu 
mailto:kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab@kencaldeira




On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Greg Rau gh...@sbcglobal.net 
mailto:gh...@sbcglobal.net wrote:




http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/business/counting-the-cost-of-fixing-the-future.html

Interesting article navigating the SCC (social cost of carbon)
issue, critical measure for evaluating the applicability of any
mitigation action/technology.

One revealing quote from Nordhaus:

“Investments in reducing future climate damages to corn and trees
and other areas should compete with investments in better seed,
improved rotation and many other high-yield investments.” If
investments in CO_2  abatement are not competitive, we would do
better by investing elsewhere and using the proceeds to cover
warming’s damage. We would still have money left over. Professor
Nordhaus says he prefers a 4 percent discount rate. Using it in “A
Question of Balance,” he calculates that the optimal carbon tax
comes in at around $11 per ton of CO_2 .

Greg
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Title: Costing the future


 

Costing the future - From Kyoto2 chapter 4 by Oliver Tickell (Zed Books) 
 How are we value the future? The question is an important one in considering the economics of climate change, as we have to balance the optimum balance of inter-generational transfers of wealth and of costs. Should we assess the wealth

Re: [geo] Re: DAC vs CRD?

[Oliver Tickell]

Using olivine is indeed dirt-simple - in principle. Rather harder is to 
move beyond common sense and back-of-envelope calculations to develop 
the kind of certainty of outcome (in terms of time frame for example) 
that big spenders would probably need before spending on it. Tracking 
the fate of 1mm olivine particles in dynamic areas of ocean and 
coastline over several years is not a trivial matter, nor cheap.


Interesting article on the sea otters. But what exactly do the authors 
propose to do, to increase their numbers? The obvious answer is to kill 
off some of the killer whales, but I can imagine enormous protest at the 
mere idea of it.


Oliver.

On 28/08/2013 03:30, Michael Hayes wrote:
Can anyone explain to me why the use of olivine, to adjust ocean pH 
and thus increase natures CDR, should not be used? It does seem 
somewhat dirt simple.


Also, here is an eye opener concerning the importance of maintaining 
balance in the marine environment:


Otters and Climate Change 
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=12-P13-00037segmentID=4


According to two scientists at the University of California at Santa 
Cruz, a small animal could have a big impact on climate change. 
Professor Chris Wilmers explains how sea otters could be key to 
preserving kelp forests, one of the world’s great carbon sinks.


Best,

Michael


On Friday, August 23, 2013 11:05:20 AM UTC-7, Greg Rau wrote:

Article below. The usual suspects and viewpoints, e.g. :

Pulling vexing carbon emissions straight from the sky might
become an important way to keep climate change in check. As pilot
projects move forward, the prospect of capturing carbon dioxide
from the air is growing increasingly plausible, though it may be
some time before the technology, the demand and the costs align to
make a dent in global emissions.

To review, pulling those pesky carbon emissions straight from the
sky already annually consumes 55% of our emissions for free, and
the absolute quantity of this DAC is (lucky for us) increasing:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/08/07/science.1239207.full
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/08/07/science.1239207.full
If one is interested in further denting global emissions,
perhaps the first thing to do is to figure out how to additionally
accelerate/enhance/modify/engineer these existing, highly
successful systems, rather than ignoring nature and designing a
new air capture process from the ground up.

for carbon capture systems [DAC], the main energy sink isn't
so much in collecting CO2 in the first place, but in regenerating
the absorber and making a pure stream of the gas.

Exactly. This is why nature's existing, very successful CRD
assiduously avoids this step and why our attempts at further
denting air CO2 should also. On the other hand if CO2 EOR is
your end game, then you are obviously stuck with making conc CO2
while also increasing atmospheric CO2: typically in EOR CO2 in
oil CO2 out. How such schemes get mentioned in the context of
saving the planet is something I find breathtaking.

Speaking of actually saving the planet, if you haven't already
done so, there's still time to vote for The Planet Physician's air
capture (and so much more) concept here:

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/20/planId/1303630

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/20/planId/1303630

and/or vote for this point source CO2 mitigation idea:

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304003

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/10/planId/1304003

Your humble messenger,
Greg


CARBON CAPTURE:


  Air capture needed as a tool to fight climate change, scientists say

Umair Irfan, EE reporter

Published: Friday, August 23, 2013

Pulling vexing carbon emissions straight from the sky might become
an important way to keep climate change in check. As pilot
projects move forward, the prospect of capturing carbon dioxide
from the air is growing increasingly plausible, though it may be
some time before the technology, the demand and the costs align to
make a dent in global emissions.

Earlier this year, instruments showed atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations rising above 400 parts per million for the first
time in 800,000 years (/ClimateWire/
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1059979974/, April 24).

Energy consumption, and consequently carbon emissions, is poised
to grow further even as cars, homes and aircraft become more
efficient. Fossil fuels will continue to be the major energy
source in the coming century as countries like China harness this
energy to drive economic development.

As a result, some researchers argue that direct air capture is a
necessary, though not 

Re: [geo] Governance of Geoengineering – A personal view

[Oliver Tickell]

I think the characterisation of Germany's Energiewende as a regression 
to fossil fuelled energy system is both cheap and wrong. Yes, they are 
closing nuclear power stations, but they are also making a huge shift of 
truly global significance to renewables and in the process creating a 
model of how to do it, that other countries will surely follow. Coal 
burning in the power sector has increased across Europe, but not because 
of nuclear closures. The main reason is that coal prices are very low 
(thanks in part to US switch to shale gas in power sector so much of 
their coal is now exported) while the EUETS carbon price has collapsed. 
Coal burning in Europe has increased to the detriment of much more 
expensive gas.


I note that your paper is for African Academy of Sciences. Surely all 
the more important for African audience to stress the importance of a 
switch to renewable energy, solar in particular, especially as huge coal 
burning projects in southern Africa are getting off the ground with 
ruinous consequences for climate.


Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 22:31, Andrew Lockley wrote:


This is a draft article I wrote for the African Academy of Sciences. 
I'd really appreciate any comments on it - before I irrecoverably 
embarrass myself!


Thanks

A

---

Governance of Geoengineering – A personal view

Climate change is here to stay.  That much is certain.  Due to the 
heat capacity of the oceans, we always feel the effect of emissions 
past.  Meanwhile, not only do emissions continue, but there’s still a 
breakneck rush to build carbon-spewing plant and vehicles.  This is 
true not only in the developing world, but also in affluent countries 
that are switching back to fossil – such as Germany, which has turned 
against nuclear. So not only are we bracing ourselves for the climate 
change that’s already in the mail, we’re also wilfully accelerating 
the process.
But it gets worse.  As emissions are cleaned up in the developing 
world, the aerosol haze which mutes global warming will fade away – 
exposing us to the full glare of a changing climate.  Furthermore, we 
are potentially exposed to major tipping points in the Earth’s climate 
system, such as the postulated release of methane in the Arctic.  Even 
in the unlikely event that we manage to rapidly decarbonise the 
economy, we may still find find that any intervention is too little, 
too late.
As a technology, geoengineering – and specifically solar radiation 
management -  is also here to stay.  We know we can do it.  We know we 
can do it fairly cheaply - certainly much more cheaply than rapid, 
large-scale mitigation.  We also know that it will work, albeit 
imperfectly, in reducing the impacts of climate change.  So what to do 
with this terrifyingly powerful technology?  We must bear in mind two 
facts.  Firstly, we are still emitting.  Secondly, even if we stop 
emitting there is at least a chance the climate is already in a 
dangerously unstable state.  Faced with a position like that, it’s 
hard to argue that we shouldn’t at least explore geoengineering 
technology.  And we’d be exploring for a very good reason:  committing 
to NOT geoengineering is rapidly beginning to look like a very 
dangerous idea indeed.
Beyond exploring, what could deployment actually look like? Well 
here’s the problem: the real world is a messy, dirty place.  We live 
in a world which tolerates reckless emissions, and much more besides.  
Protectionism, warfare, human rights abuses, genocide.  These are all 
ugly things that go on and the world tolerates them, to a greater or 
lesser extent.  We don’t have an effective global governance policy 
for such things, although we do try sometimes.  We have treaties, 
which are optional.  We have resolutions, which are ignored.  We have 
sanctions, which are ineffective.  And we have bombs, which yield 
highly unpredictable outcomes, and are more effective as a threat than 
as an intervention.  None of the above is terribly efficient at 
getting people or countries to behave themselves. So why do we pretend 
geoengineering will really be ‘governed’ by anything, or anyone?
My argument is that it won’t be governed at all.  Or at least, there 
isn’t any reason to assume that there will be a single, overall 
framework of governance that delivers an effective policy – regardless 
of whom that single, effective policy favours.
Could we not image a world where a chaotic muddle of overlapping and 
competing geoengineering schemes exists?  Take for example, a 
situation where a power bloc determines a policy of minimal 
intervention, but is overruled by a private carbon offset firm who 
offer to ‘top up’ the intervention.  This seems superficially 
possible, if not necessarily plausible.  Or perhaps a top up scheme 
could be provided by a nation state looking to preserve its glaciers?  
This top up could be provided in defiance of a state looking for a 
‘light touch’ geoengineering scheme, which allows it to open up 

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

Thanks - useful papers. I did not know about Olaf's paper looking at 
spreading olivine sand on dynamic areas of seabed. I prefer his approach 
of letting the movement of the sea do the grinding for you, rather than 
using 30% of the C gain to grind the olivine to a fine powder using 
fossil energy. But one way this approach could make sense is, when solar 
PV gets even cheaper than it is now, to use solar electricity to do the 
grinding so there is very little carbon debt. Also it is interesting to 
know that dispersal of 1um olivine powder by commercial shipping could 
provide an appropriate amount of carbon drawdown to offset current 
emissions. This something that environmentally responsible shipping 
companies should consider, at least on a scale to offset their own 
emissions.


Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 19:11, Rau, Greg wrote:
If one is interested in silicate addition to the ocean (both for 
direct chemical and indirect bio effects on C), then I refer you to 
these links and refs therein:

http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014009/pdf/1748-9326_8_1_014009.pdf
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/2/551/2011/esdd-2-551-2011.pdf

Lots more silicate minerals around than just ash, and yes potential 
for positive (and negative) cation and anions effects on bio C, but 
lets find out.

Greg

From: Oliver Tickell oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org 
mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org

Organization: Kyoto2
Reply-To: oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org 
mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org 
mailto:oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org

Date: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 7:59 AM
To: geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com 
mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean 
fertilization in MEPS


Thanks! My last sentence should have read And of course the other 
question is re the chemical composition of the silicate in the ash and 
its particle size as this will determine its quality as a source of 
silicic acid. So you understood.


the rate of weathering is proportionate to surface area so small 
particles are hugely more effective at releasing silicic acid than 
large ones. Olivine grain sizes of 0.1mm are proposed for terrestrial 
application and far smaller than this (~ micrometre scale) for marine 
use so that the particles can weather during their residence in the 
water column. The 'powdery' fraction of the ash will give the greatest 
silicic acid contribution.


It's hard for me to comment further without seeing the paper but it's 
good to know that these questions have been considered, Oliver.


On 21/08/2013 15:05, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
Bear in mind that the North East Pacific is a high-nutrient, 
low-chlorophyll (HNLC) area that is known to be limited by iron. The 
paper gives estimated sea water concentrations of silicate in the 
North East Pacific in the top 20 metre mixed layer in August 2008 
when the volcanic eruption occurred of 5,000-15,000 nM (nana molar) 
compared to an estimated 6-20 nM supply from the ash fallout over the 
fertilized area in the Gulf of Alaska.
Your second point was unclear but I assumed you were querying the 
release rate of the silicate from the ash. The ash used in the 
experiment was collected on a fishing boat during the eruption and 
stored dry in containers. The experiment only used the  2 mm size 
fraction. The release rate of silicate in the experiments was 170 
nmol silicate per gram of ash in the first hour and up to 585 nmol 
silicate per gram of ash after 20 hours.

Chris.

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 10:12:19 AM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:


IMHO the significance of the silicic acid would depend on the
time of year. In the spring silicic acid is generally abundant so
adding more of it would make little difference. One it has all
been used up and diatoms are giving way to other phytoplankton a
boost of silicic acid would give rise to a second diatom bloom -
so it would be very significant. And of course the other question
is how effectively the chemical composition of the silicate in
the ash and its particle size as this will determine its quality
as a source of silicic acid.

Have the authors given any serious examination to such questions?
Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 09:55, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
ï¿1Ž2
I have seen the paper but cannot post a copy online. In the
paper the authors did measure the release of nitrate, nitrite,
ammonia, phosphate and silicate in leaching experiments and
concluded that the impact of these macronutrients released from
Kasatochi ash on primary productivity was probably
minimal.ï¿1Ž2They also suggested that the release of trace
metals other than iron could also have influenced phytoplankton
growth.

ï¿1Ž2

Chris.
ï¿1Ž2
On Monday, August 19, 2013 4:23:59 PM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet,
but here

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

IMHO the significance of the silicic acid would depend on the time of 
year. In the spring silicic acid is generally abundant so adding more of 
it would make little difference. One it has all been used up and diatoms 
are giving way to other phytoplankton a boost of silicic acid would give 
rise to a second diatom bloom - so it would be very significant. And of 
course the other question is how effectively the chemical composition of 
the silicate in the ash and its particle size as this will determine its 
quality as a source of silicic acid.


Have the authors given any serious examination to such questions? Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 09:55, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
I have seen the paper but cannot post a copy online. In the paper the 
authors did measure the release of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, 
phosphate and silicate in leaching experiments and concluded that the 
impact of these macronutrients released from Kasatochi ash on primary 
productivity was probably minimal. They also suggested that the 
release of trace metals other than iron could also have influenced 
phytoplankton growth.


Chris.

On Monday, August 19, 2013 4:23:59 PM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet, but
here is a related one.
http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf
http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf
They do recognise that diatoms need silicic acid but do not seem
to have thought of volcanic ash as a source of silicic acid, only
of iron.

Re olivine application, it is worth noting that olivine is a
mixture of Mg silicate and Fe silicate. Some proportion, to be
determined, of the iron in olivine will become bioavailable as
weathering progresses.

Oliver.
===

The ocean response to volcanic iron fertilisation after the
eruption of
Kasatochi volcano: a regional-scale biogeochemical ocean model
study
A. Lindenthal1
, B. Langmann1
, J. Patsch ¨
2
, I. Lorkowski2
, and M. Hort1
1
Institute of Geophysics, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
2
Institute of Oceanography, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence to: B. Langmann (baerbel@zmaw.de javascript:)
Received: 29 June 2012 – Published in Biogeosciences Discuss.: 26
July 2012
Revised: 18 April 2013 – Accepted: 8 May 2013 – Published: 5 June 2013




On 19/08/2013 15:03, Oliver Tickell wrote:

This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind
paywall) it appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to iron
fertilisation. Oddly they have not considered the role of silicic
acid from the dissolution of Mg silicate species in the finely
powdered volcanic ash. Silicic acid is often the limiting
nutrient for diatoms, as they use it to make their silica shells.
There is ample geological evidence of diatom (specifically)
blooms being associated with falls of volcanic ash.

Is anyone able to post the actual article? Oliver.

On 17/08/2013 17:13, Wil Burns wrote:

FYI. wil


MEPS - Vol. 488 - Table of contents
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/

*Mar Ecol Prog Ser (Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599)*
Copyright © 2013 Inter-Research. Published August 15


*Olgun N, Duggen S, Langmann B, Hort M, Waythomas CF, Hoffmann
L, Croot P *
Geochemical evidence of oceanic iron fertilization by the
Kasatochi volcanic eruption in 2008 and the potential impacts on
Pacific sockeye salmon
MEPS 488:81-88
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/p81-88/ | Full text
in pdf format
http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2013/488/m488p081.pdf


-- 
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 javascript:

http://advanced.jhu.edu/academic/environmental/master-of-science-in-energy-policy-and-climate/index.html

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
http://www.teachingclimatelaw.org

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http

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

Thanks! My last sentence should have read And of course the other 
question is re the chemical composition of the silicate in the ash and 
its particle size as this will determine its quality as a source of 
silicic acid. So you understood.


the rate of weathering is proportionate to surface area so small 
particles are hugely more effective at releasing silicic acid than large 
ones. Olivine grain sizes of 0.1mm are proposed for terrestrial 
application and far smaller than this (~ micrometre scale) for marine 
use so that the particles can weather during their residence in the 
water column. The 'powdery' fraction of the ash will give the greatest 
silicic acid contribution.


It's hard for me to comment further without seeing the paper but it's 
good to know that these questions have been considered, Oliver.


On 21/08/2013 15:05, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
Bear in mind that the North East Pacific is a high-nutrient, 
low-chlorophyll (HNLC) area that is known to be limited by iron. The 
paper gives estimated sea water concentrations of silicate in the 
North East Pacific in the top 20 metre mixed layer in August 2008 when 
the volcanic eruption occurred of 5,000-15,000 nM (nana molar) 
compared to an estimated 6-20 nM supply from the ash fallout over the 
fertilized area in the Gulf of Alaska.
Your second point was unclear but I assumed you were querying the 
release rate of the silicate from the ash. The ash used in the 
experiment was collected on a fishing boat during the eruption and 
stored dry in containers. The experiment only used the  2 mm size 
fraction. The release rate of silicate in the experiments was 170 nmol 
silicate per gram of ash in the first hour and up to 585 nmol silicate 
per gram of ash after 20 hours.

Chris.

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 10:12:19 AM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:


IMHO the significance of the silicic acid would depend on the time
of year. In the spring silicic acid is generally abundant so
adding more of it would make little difference. One it has all
been used up and diatoms are giving way to other phytoplankton a
boost of silicic acid would give rise to a second diatom bloom -
so it would be very significant. And of course the other question
is how effectively the chemical composition of the silicate in the
ash and its particle size as this will determine its quality as a
source of silicic acid.

Have the authors given any serious examination to such questions?
Oliver.

On 21/08/2013 09:55, Chris Vivian wrote:

Oliver,
�
I have seen the paper but cannot post a copy online. In the paper
the authors did measure the release of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia,
phosphate and silicate in leaching experiments and concluded that
the impact of these macronutrients released from Kasatochi ash on
primary productivity was probably minimal.�They also suggested
that the release of trace metals other than iron could also have
influenced phytoplankton growth.

�

Chris.
�
On Monday, August 19, 2013 4:23:59 PM UTC+1, Oliver Tickell wrote:

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet,
but here is a related one.
http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf 
http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf
They do recognise that diatoms need silicic acid but do not
seem to have thought of volcanic ash as a source of silicic
acid, only of iron.

Re olivine application, it is worth noting that olivine is a
mixture of Mg silicate and Fe silicate. Some proportion, to
be determined, of the iron in olivine will become
bioavailable as weathering progresses.

Oliver.
===

The ocean response to volcanic iron fertilisation after the
eruption of
Kasatochi volcano: a regional-scale biogeochemical ocean model
study
A. Lindenthal1
, B. Langmann1
, J. Patsch �
2
, I. Lorkowski2
, and M. Hort1
1
Institute of Geophysics, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
2
Institute of Oceanography, KlimaCampus, University of
Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence to: B. Langmann (baerbel@zmaw.de)
Received: 29 June 2012 � Published in Biogeosciences
Discuss.: 26 July 2012
Revised: 18 April 2013 � Accepted: 8 May 2013 �
Published: 5 June 2013




On 19/08/2013 15:03, Oliver Tickell wrote:

This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind
paywall) it appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to
iron fertilisation. Oddly they have not considered the role
of silicic acid from the dissolution of Mg silicate species
in the finely powdered volcanic ash. Silicic acid is often
the limiting nutrient for diatoms

Re: [geo] sperm whales and oif

[Oliver Tickell]

I believe this is well authenticated. I read a New Scientist feature on 
the topic maybe a year ago. The main thrust was that this maintains the 
populations of fish and other marine life. With the huge reductions in 
whale populations the oceans as a whole have become less productive - 
and fish catches have declined not only as a result of over-fishing. It 
turns out that Greenpeace did well to choose the whales as their iconic 
life form as they are keystone species in the functioning of global 
marine ecosystems. Oliver.


On 19/08/2013 21:34, Greg Rau wrote:
If whales increase the ocean carbon sink (and I've got to read the 
fine print to be convinced), then the obvious geoengineering response 
is to breed more whales. And/or will whale harvesters now need to pay 
a carbon tax? Could partnering with ETC and Greenpeace on this be far 
behind?

Greg


*From:* Fred Zimmerman geoengineerin...@gmail.com
*To:* geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Sent:* Monday, August 19, 2013 9:49 AM
*Subject:* [geo] sperm whales and oif


  *Reference: *Proc Roy SocBhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0863


  Sperm whale poo offsets carbon by fertilising the oceans with
  iron
  
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/16/sperm-whale-poo-offsets-carbon-by-fertilising-the-oceans-with-iron/

By Ed Yong http://discovermagazine.com/authors?name=Ed+Yong |
June 16, 2010 8:00 am
Sperm_whales

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/files/2010/06/Sperm_whales.jpg
While the world wrangles over ways of reducing carbon emissions,
some scientists are considering more radical approaches to
mitigating the effects of climate change. Dumping iron dust into
the world’s oceans is one such strategy. Theoretically, the iron
should act as fertiliser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization, providing a key
nutrient that will spur the growth of photosynthetic plankton.
These creatures act as carbon dioxide pumps, removing the
problematic gas from the air and storing the carbon within their
own tissues. When the plankton die, they sink, trapping their
carbon in the abyss for thousands of years.
It may seem like a fanciful idea, but as with much of our
technology, nature beat us to it long ago. Trish Lavery from
Flinders University has found that sperm whales fertilise the
Southern Ocean in exactly this way, using their own faeces. Their
dung is loaded with iron and it stimulates the growth of plankton
just as well as iron dust does.
Sperm whales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale are
prodigious divers, descending to great depths in search of prey
like squid. When they’re deeply submerged, they shut down all
their non-essential bodily functions. Excretion is one of these
and the whales only ever defecate when they reach the surface. By
happy coincidence, that’s where photosynthetic plankton
(phytoplankton) make their home – in the shallow column of water
where sunlight still penetrates. So by eating iron-rich prey at
great depths and expelling the remains in the shallows, the whales
act as giant farmers, unwittingly seeding the surface waters with
fertiliser.
There are approximately 12,000 sperm whales left in the Southern
Ocean. By modelling the amount of food they eat, the iron content
of that food, and how much iron they expel in their faeces, Lavery
calculated that these whales excrete around 50 tonnes of iron into
the ocean every year.  And based on the results of our own iron
fertilisation experiments, the duo calculated that every year,
this amount of iron traps over 400,000 tonnes of carbon in the
depths, within the bodies of sinking plankton.
Previously, scientists assumed that whales (and their carbon
dioxide-rich exhalations) would actually weaken the Southern
Ocean’s ability to act as a CO2 pump. But according to Lavery,
this isn’t true. She worked out that the whales pump out just
160,000 tonnes of carbon through their various orifices. All of
these figures are probably conservative underestimates but even
so, they suggest that sperm whales remove around 240,000 more
tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere than they add back in. They
are giant, blubbery carbon sinks.
However, their true potential will go largely unfulfilled thanks
to our harpoons. Many sperm whales have been killed by industrial
whalers, and the population in the Southern Ocean has declined by
some 90%. On the bright side, the Southern Ocean’s population
represent just 3% of the global total, so this species may have an
even greater role as a warden for carbon than Lavery has
suggested. Other seagoing mammals probably have a part to play
too, provided that they feed at depth and 

Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind paywall) it 
appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to iron fertilisation. 
Oddly they have not considered the role of silicic acid from the 
dissolution of Mg silicate species in the finely powdered volcanic ash. 
Silicic acid is often the limiting nutrient for diatoms, as they use it 
to make their silica shells. There is ample geological evidence of 
diatom (specifically) blooms being associated with falls of volcanic ash.


Is anyone able to post the actual article? Oliver.

On 17/08/2013 17:13, Wil Burns wrote:

FYI. wil


MEPS - Vol. 488 - Table of contents
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/

*Mar Ecol Prog Ser (Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599)*
Copyright © 2013 Inter-Research. Published August 15


*Olgun N, Duggen S, Langmann B, Hort M, Waythomas CF, Hoffmann L, 
Croot P *
Geochemical evidence of oceanic iron fertilization by the Kasatochi 
volcanic eruption in 2008 and the potential impacts on Pacific sockeye 
salmon
MEPS 488:81-88 http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/p81-88/ | 
Full text in pdf format 
http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2013/488/m488p081.pdf



--
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 mailto: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


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Re: [geo] New article on non-anthropogenic ocean fertilization in MEPS

[Oliver Tickell]

I have not found an open source version of this paper yet, but here is a 
related one.

http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/3715/2013/bg-10-3715-2013.pdf
They do recognise that diatoms need silicic acid but do not seem to have 
thought of volcanic ash as a source of silicic acid, only of iron.


Re olivine application, it is worth noting that olivine is a mixture of 
Mg silicate and Fe silicate. Some proportion, to be determined, of the 
iron in olivine will become bioavailable as weathering progresses.


Oliver.
===

The ocean response to volcanic iron fertilisation after the eruption of
Kasatochi volcano: a regional-scale biogeochemical ocean model
study
A. Lindenthal1
, B. Langmann1
, J. Patsch ¨
2
, I. Lorkowski2
, and M. Hort1
1
Institute of Geophysics, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, 
Germany

2
Institute of Oceanography, KlimaCampus, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, 
Germany

Correspondence to: B. Langmann (baerbel.langm...@zmaw.de)
Received: 29 June 2012 -- Published in Biogeosciences Discuss.: 26 July 2012
Revised: 18 April 2013 -- Accepted: 8 May 2013 -- Published: 5 June 2013




On 19/08/2013 15:03, Oliver Tickell wrote:
This is very odd. Based on the abstract only (article behind paywall) 
it appears that they attribute the diatom bloom to iron fertilisation. 
Oddly they have not considered the role of silicic acid from the 
dissolution of Mg silicate species in the finely powdered volcanic 
ash. Silicic acid is often the limiting nutrient for diatoms, as they 
use it to make their silica shells. There is ample geological evidence 
of diatom (specifically) blooms being associated with falls of 
volcanic ash.


Is anyone able to post the actual article? Oliver.

On 17/08/2013 17:13, Wil Burns wrote:

FYI. wil


MEPS - Vol. 488 - Table of contents
http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/

*Mar Ecol Prog Ser (Print ISSN: 0171-8630; Online ISSN: 1616-1599)*
Copyright © 2013 Inter-Research. Published August 15


*Olgun N, Duggen S, Langmann B, Hort M, Waythomas CF, Hoffmann L, 
Croot P *
Geochemical evidence of oceanic iron fertilization by the Kasatochi 
volcanic eruption in 2008 and the potential impacts on Pacific 
sockeye salmon
MEPS 488:81-88 http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v488/p81-88/ | 
Full text in pdf format 
http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps2013/488/m488p081.pdf



--
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 mailto: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


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Re: [geo] Global Warming: Geoengineering Trucks and Climate Change Adaptation

[Oliver Tickell]

Evaporating water using heat after a flood may be effective in the case 
of flooded bedroom, to dry it out, but never to dispose of bulk flood 
waters for the simple reason that the amount of thermal energy required 
is far too great - 2.25MJ/kg. In simple terms, to evaporate a gram of 
water per second requires 2.25kW + the heat needed to bring the water to 
boiling point, so say 3kW. And after an hour you have evaporated 3.6kg 
of water. In very round numbers 1kWh/kg. Let's say that your flood has 
dumped 1m of water over 100 square km  = 100,000,000,000 kg. To 
evaporate that you will need 100 terawatt hours of energy. To put that 
in context, total UK electricity consumption is 345 TWh/y.


Oliver.

On 18/07/2013 15:34, Stephen wrote:

Thanks,

The technology was also explained in aprevious post  
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21topic/geoengineering/Nh0WI7Ur6Mg  and 
will be more effective in moving water, since most times, flooded areas have no 
'empty spaces' to pump water to.



The technology has some potential, and could be developed using

On 2013-07-18 09:20, rongretlar...@comcast.net wrote:
 Stephen:

  Very sorry to hear of the serious flooding in Freetown. But this
 list is not the correct one to look to for support. I would suggest
 that using electricity to turn water to steam would be a good more
 expensive than a wood-fired system. Some electricity would of course
 be needed for pumping - and one would hope that most of the water
 could be moved by pumping, not through steam generation.

 Ron

 -
 FROM: Stephen step...@trpns.com
 TO: geoengineering@googlegroups.com
 SENT: Thursday, July 18, 2013 7:31:17 AM
 SUBJECT: [geo] Global Warming: Geoengineering Trucks and Climate
 Change Adaptation

 http://www.sierraexpressmedia.com/archives/59059

 Flood makes headlines -- many times -- every year for havoc it brings to
 individuals, communities, cities and nations. It affects developed and
 developing countries. It results, at varying magnitude, from natural and
 human activities. Floods can be harsh with impact lasting for several
 months. Control and management methods increasingly used, most times,
 fall short of preventing damage.

 In recent months, climate change has been cited as responsible massive
 flooding experienced around the world. Climate change also, is ascribed
 to other anomaly in weather condition noticed around. Global warming,
 for which reason we have climate change, is internationally debated for
 agreement concerning control.

 Flooding is severe for developing countries -- where erosion ravages
 too. In sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, there is crisis with
 these situations and recovery -- most times -- is minute, or never. There
 is a solution; a truck, about the size of the regular gas truck, having
 a system of electric steam boiler rather than the tank, to steam away
 floods, or erosion.

 This is a fresh concept, with power to cut water amounts from any site
 within minutes. An electric steam boiler system will be attached to a
 truck. It will have an inlet, and outlet. The inlet will draw in water,
 into a distillation chamber of low pressure and mid-temperature.

 Processed water after this stage would go into the immersion heating
 element chamber, to be transformed to steam, then to the outlet, into
 the atmosphere. The system will steam up to 20 liters of water -- per
 minute -- for a session of three hours, with efficiency of more than 90%.

 Three to five trucks can be used at the same time, to hasten the
 objective and reduce damage. The electric steam boiler system will be
 powered by the new rechargeable systems used in electric cars, and will
 work independently of the vehicle engine. In future the electric system
 may power the vehicle and the boiler, but for more uptime and
 efficiency, all the available energy will go towards delivering steam.

 Design of the truck, its features and impact on meteorology is a
 research report away. Details in the report will visit components,
 arrangement, scale, usability, control, environmental impacts and
 advantages. The trucks will be preferably used in daylight, when steam
 can easily mix with air, and not 'immediately' affect 'humidity' or
 alter the weather.

 Setting up the technology is not going to be rocket science, but work
 to be done, will lie mostly on its impact on the meteorology. This
 aspect makes the technology similar to Geoengineering. Geoengineering
 (or climate engineering) is the deliberate and large-scale intervention
 in the Earth's climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming.

 Geoengineering targets the root causes of global warming, but the truck
 targets results of climate change. Geoengineering can be categorized
 with mitigation of global warming-causing factors, but the truck
 technology aligns with climate change adaptation.

 With some of the similarities and differences, the trucks can be called
 Geoengineering trucks, since it 

Re: [geo] Re: Oli Morton with Opinion Article on Nitrogen Geoengineering

[Oliver Tickell]

An interesting thought, but of course there is much more to it than 
botanical gardens. Commercial introductions, seeds in shoes, gardeners, 
military usage ... and then of course all the animals, from rats to cane 
toads to sheep to anopheles mosquitos ... and let's not forget the 
fungi, such as the phytophera now causing havoc. Oliver.


On 14/07/2013 01:05, Russell Seitz wrote:
In writing of  homogocene issues  Oliver Morton  has floated a 
variation of the theme of  the 'anthropocene ' that might  take on a 
life of its own .


Though Greek-Latin portmanteau words are deservedly suspect , there 
has long been a need for an adjective to designate and reify a very 
important ecological consequence of the age of exploration--  the 
nonchalant  homogenization of the biosphere that arose from the 
 intercontinental exchange of flora via the botanical gardens of the 
imperial powers of the 18th and 19th centuries.


By darwin's day, every nation had one , and they collectively 
transferred such no-longer-exotics as rhododendrons, eucalypts and 
arucaria,  to name but a few, together with their symbionts and soil 
fauna, from  uninhabited regions and obscure refugia to the four 
corners of the earth.


There's no getting around it-  the Homogocene is to the Anthropocene 
as the  Pleistocene is to the Holocene




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Re: [geo] Artificial Photosynthesis – The Future of Carbon Dioxide Removal?

[Oliver Tickell]

Why the concern over removing carbon dioxide? The important thing about 
such technology is that it produces hydrogen directly, which can in turn 
be stored and used to generate electricity or propel vehicles in its own 
right, or used as feedstock for methane  or ammonia production. In this 
way it will displace fossil fuels and lead to less CO2 being emitted. 
Oliver.


On 09/07/2013 22:18, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Article link
http://www.ecopedia.com/environment/artificial-photosynthesis-the-future-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-in-solar-forests/

Paper link
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl401615t

In a May, 2013 paper in NANO Letters, titled “A Fully Integrated 
Nanosystem of Semiconductor Nanowires for Direct Solar Water 
Splitting.” With co-authors are Chong Liu, Jinyao Tang, Hao Ming Chen 
and Bin Liu, Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s 
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the 
first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. The 
article is about as fun to read as the title, but it makes a very 
clear point – artificial photosynthesis is not only possible, it can 
potentially be done at even greater efficiency than by the plants it 
is based on. The research is based on solar cells that split water 
molecules and combine them with airborne carbon dioxide to produce the 
simple sugar glucose and oxygen. Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley 
Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, explains it like this, “The 
photo-generated electrons in the silicon nanowires migrate to the 
surface and reduce protons to generate hydrogen while the 
photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide nanowires oxidize water to 
evolve oxygen molecules. The majority charge carriers from both 
semiconductors recombine at the ohmic contact, completing the relay of 
the Z-scheme, similar to that of natural photosynthesis.” In English, 
the artificial photosynthesis cells are comprised of two sides, one 
made of titanium oxide and the other of silicon. There are also a host 
of co-catalysts that help the process get started. Each cell works 
almost identically to a standard solar voltaic cell, but instead of 
using the displaced electron to create a current, it uses the electron 
to chemically adjust the structure of molecules in the cell. The 
photosynthesis inside the artificial leaf structures is currently not 
very efficient; in fact it is a paltry 12% efficient. That’s slightly 
lower than the efficiency of plants. Up to this point, all such 
projects have been focused on a single solar leaf. This is the first 
successful attempt at creating a viable network of integrated leaves 
that act in a similar manner as trees. The total output of the system 
was similar to that of a 10 ft. Maple tree. This could be a hugely 
important advance in solar technology as it has the potential to 
remove the need for inverters or batteries in solar applications. The 
solar leaf will produce a storable energy and remove carbon dioxide 
from the air. This would allow the installation of solar leaves in 
areas where traditional battery storage systems are not feasible. At 
the current efficiency level, it doesn’t make sense to pursue this 
technology, but there are several carbon reducing catalysts that, in 
theory, should be able to break the 12% threshold. The only real 
sticking point in the entire artificial photosynthesis game is that 
artificial catalysts are still not able to efficiently utilize carbon 
dioxide in the concentrations that are currently in the atmosphere. 
Until researchers are able to overcome this fundamental issue, even 
the most efficient carbon dioxide transferring solar trees will not be 
feasible on a large scale.


See more at:
http://www.ecopedia.com/environment/artificial-photosynthesis-the-future-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-in-solar-forests/#sthash.PQDVflEm.dpuf

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[geo] Fwd: New Publication: The role of Geoengineering in China's Strategic Response to Climate Change

[Oliver Tickell]

 Original Message 
Subject: 	New Publication: The role of Geoengineering in China's 
Strategic Response to Climate Change

Date:   Sun, 07 Jul 2013 23:52:35 -0500
From:   jon symons jonsym...@gmail.com
Reply-To:   jon symons jonsym...@gmail.com
To: Climate Change Info Mailing List climat...@lists.iisd.ca



Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to a new paper published by The Pacific 
Review concerning China's approach to solar radiation management:

Edney, K and Symons, J. (2013) China and the blunt temptations of geoengineering: 
the role of solar radiation management in China’s strategic response to climate 
change The Pacific Review 26(4).

The paper can be downloaded here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/m7PvHD8PDrb9iGaKtbz3/full

Amid growing alarm over the rising atmospheric concentration of greenhouse 
gases, increasing attention is being given to ‘geo-engineering’ technologies 
that could counteract some of the impacts of global warming by either reducing 
absorption of solar energy (solar radiation management (SRM)) or removing 
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Geo-engineering has the potential to 
dramatically alter the dynamics of global climate change negotiations because 
it might cool the climate without constraining fossil fuel use. Some scholars 
have expressed concern that certain states may be tempted to act unilaterally. 
This paper assesses the approach that China is likely to adopt towards 
governance of SRM and the implications this holds for broader international 
climate negotiations. We survey Chinese public discourse, examine the policy 
factors that will influence China's position, and assess the likelihood of 
certain future scenarios. While Chinese climate scientists are keenly aware of 
the potential benefits of geo-engineering as well as its risks, we find that no 
significant constituency is currently promoting unilateral implementation of 
SRM. China will probably play a broadly cooperative role in negotiations toward 
a multilaterally governed geo-engineering programme but will seek to promote a 
distinctive developing world perspective that reflects concerns over 
sovereignty, Western imperialism and maintenance of a strict interpretation of 
the norm of common but differentiated responsibility.

I hope that some of you find this paper useful.

Best regards,

Jonathan Symons
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Re: [geo] OIF vs. Agricultural Dead Zones. Irony. Hippocracy.

[Oliver Tickell]

Another thing to bear in mind is that by draining wetlands we have 
greatly reduced the flow of iron into the oceans. This is because peat 
produces complex organic acids (eg, humic acid) which dissolve and 
chelate iron - abundant in many rocks - and carry it down to the ocean. 
So we have already experimented inadvertently by reducing iron inputs 
to the ocean. And of course this is the most useful form of iron as it 
is in a highly soluble and bio-available form. And we have replaced that 
iron with masses of silt, nitrate and phosphate from stupid kinds of 
agriculture.


Oliver.

On 26/06/2013 09:38, Joshua Jacobs wrote:
Because of the torrential summer rains, potentially driven by regional 
climate instability, the largest dead zone ever is predicted in the 
Mississippi river delta.  Regardless of the climate influences, 
agricultural run off from business as usual economic activity is 
driving greater environmental impacts than any Ocean Iron 
Fertilization experiment ever has.  As of yet, I am unaware of any 
intentional ocean fertilization experiment that has had the impact of 
a single dead zone of any river anywhere.  The irony being that the 
worst case scenarios imagined for any small ocean fertilization 
experiment have yet to compare, by orders of magnitude, to the impact 
of dead zones created from accepted practices.  The hippocracy being 
the deriders of ocean fertilization have nothing to say about the dead 
zones.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130621-dead-zone-biggest-gulf-of-mexico-science-environment/
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Re: [geo] The Caldeira If you Sterilize the Ocean We'd Still Have Chicken McNuggets Hypothesis questioned by Ocean expert

[Oliver Tickell]

And I challenge anyone to construct a plausible narrative in which human 
civilization survives the extinction of life in the oceans.


Oliver.

On 08/06/2013 10:01, Ken Caldeira wrote:

Andrew,

Please respond to what I said and not what you imagine I said.

The issue has to do with a hypothetical case of sterilization of the 
oceans. There was no reference to climate change in my statement.


I challenge anyone to construct a plausible causal chain that would 
lead from sterilization of the oceans to downfall of human civilization.


This is not an expression of my values, this is an expression of my 
scientific understanding.


Let all realize that I spend a large chunk of my time trying to 
investigate and protect human threats to ocean ecosystems.


*This Scientist Aims High to Save the World's Coral Reefs*
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1t=1amp;islist=falseid=176344300m=178462367 
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1t=1islist=falseid=176344300m=178462367

(Aired Monday, 4/22 on NPR's All Things Considered; 7 minutes, 49 seconds)

Best,

Ken

On Saturday, June 8, 2013, Andrew Lockley wrote:

In my view, history provides the best guide to the future.

Civilisations are not long lived at the best of times, and their
messy and painful demise is usually accompanied by minor climate
disruption.

The more complex the civilisation, the less robust it is, as there
is a greater interconnectedness, and hence a greater ability to
transmit shocks through the system. To further explain : our
ancestors would not have heard about an antipodean earthquake,
whereas now such a tremor can send markets into meltdown in minutes.

The idea that despite this much more vulnerable society, the
American middle class will survive the worst climate change in
human history without disruption to the Chicken McNugget supply,
or to the ability of Hollywood to produce Game of Thrones, is
completely bizarre.

Someone, somewhere will likely be eating a piece of battered
chicken meat. Someone, somewhere will probably still have a
working digital camera and some kind of transmission equipment .
This does not equate to an uninterrupted experience for the US
middle class.

A

On Jun 8, 2013 8:42 AM, Emily L-B em...@lewis-brown.net wrote:

Hi all, I'd propose you put this hypothesis to Dan Laffolley
(you can google him).
There are so many responses to this I am overwhelmed and can't
respond coherently. Apart from anything else, my understanding
is that decay of ocean matter would release noxious gases. So
while there may be O2, it may be polluted.
Best wishes,
Emily.
Sent from my BlackBerry

*From: * Ken Caldeira kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu
*Sender: * geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Date: *Sat, 8 Jun 2013 15:05:06 +0800
*To: *jrandomwin...@gmail.comjrandomwin...@gmail.com
*ReplyTo: * kcalde...@gmail.com
*Cc:
*geoengineering@googlegroups.comgeoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Subject: *[geo] The Caldeira If you Sterilize the Ocean We'd
Still Have Chicken McNuggets Hypothesis questioned by Ocean
expert

David,

The residence time of oxygen in the atmosphere + ocean +
biosphere with respect to the lithosphere is millions of years.

There are about 4 x 10 ** 19 mol of O2 in the atmosphere. The
rate of removal of this O2 by organic carbon weathering is
about 4 x 10 ** 12 mol per year.  I am not sure about pyrite
oxidation and so on but you can check out the attached paper
for an entree into the literature.

In any case, the 1000 year number you cite is not based on any
reliable literature value. A better guess might be that we
would have breathable oxygen on the order of a million years
if you eliminated all life on land and sea.  If life were
eliminated in the oceans only, I don't know of anything that
would impede our ability to eat Chicken McNuggets and watch TV
indefinitely.

Let me make it clear that I value life in the oceans quite
highly and do not at all like Chicken McNuggets.  (For some
reason, nutters on the web think that you can't discuss
anything unless you are advocating actually doing it.)

Best,

Ken

On Saturday, June 8, 2013, David Lewis wrote:

During the QA after his 2012 AGU talk entitled /Ocean
Acidification:  Adaptive Challenge or Extinction
Threat?/, Ken Caldeira said:  I actually think*if you
sterilize the ocean*, yes vulnerable people would be hurt,
poor people would be hurt, but that*we'd still have
Chicken McNuggets and TV 

Re: [geo] Money

[Oliver Tickell]

Excuse my ignorance - AGU? EGU?

What I do know is that people very often omit any discussion of ARW in 
their papers, reviews, etc, on CO2 drawdown. And that it is entirely 
absent from the policy debate. Probably because it comes in at a tenth 
of the cost, and zillionth the risk, of their preferred options.


Since ARW has been published quite widely, and is included in the Royal 
Society's review of geoengineering, it is hard to see the omission as 
accidental.


Oliver.

On 08/06/2013 04:35, Russell Seitz wrote:
Instead of adding yet another interest group to the crowded scene, 
many of the aims discussed here could be accomplished by established 
by creating  new sections within the the AGU and EGU,  automatically 
qualifying them  for a place at those organizations'policy discussion 
table,


As can be seen from the absence of SRM  from the agenda AGU's 
forthcoming  ( June 24-26) science policy conference in Washington , 
the absence of such sections from the scene is already consequential.


On Wednesday, June 5, 2013 10:26:18 AM UTC-4, Oliver Tickell wrote:

There has been sod all funding for studies of accelerated rock
weathering. Some work has been done, on farmland in Holland for
example,
but to get this wiely accepted it's important to know how fast ground
olivine weathers in different grain sizes, on land, on coast,
different
climates, effects on rivers draining olivined catchments, effects on
marine biota from washout of Fe (if any) / H4SiO4, usefulness as
fertiliser to restore Mg where lacking in soils, etc etc.

All of which really should be done before any large scale deployment.
Oliver.

On 05/06/2013 10:58, Andrew Lockley wrote:

 Where do people think extra money is needed to further the study of
 geoengineering?

 A

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Re: [geo] Money

[Oliver Tickell]

There has been sod all funding for studies of accelerated rock 
weathering. Some work has been done, on farmland in Holland for example, 
but to get this wiely accepted it's important to know how fast ground 
olivine weathers in different grain sizes, on land, on coast, different 
climates, effects on rivers draining olivined catchments, effects on 
marine biota from washout of Fe (if any) / H4SiO4, usefulness as 
fertiliser to restore Mg where lacking in soils, etc etc.


All of which really should be done before any large scale deployment. 
Oliver.


On 05/06/2013 10:58, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Where do people think extra money is needed to further the study of 
geoengineering?


A

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Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

[Oliver Tickell]

But why no mention of CDR by accelerated rock weathering (AGR)? This is 
one of the solutions selected by the Virgin Challenge - the one from 
Netherlands. And it is being promoted by Olaf Schuilling, who is a 
member of this Geoengineering Group.


This is a low tech, low cost approach - which consists of mining olivine 
bearing rock, grinding it up to approx 0.1mm, and spreading it land / 
coast where it will completely weather away over a period of under 10 
years, converting CO2 to bicarbonate in solution. All for ~$10/tCO2. 
Emissions for mining, transport, grinding, just a few % of the CO2 gain.


So what's not to include about it? Oliver.

On 02/06/2013 20:29, RAU greg wrote:
Thanks, David, very nice review. Where our technology departs from the 
higher profile abiotic methods you discuss is: 1) expensively 
concentrated CO2 is not formed (or stored), 2) reactions occur at 
ambient T and P - exotic chemicals and conditions are avoided (so 
far), 3) excess ocean rather than excess air CO2 can be mitigated, 
avoiding the need for more complex air scrubbing technology. Why go to 
the added expense/effort of getting air CO2 into solution to then do 
chemistry when vast areas of the surface ocean are already 
supersaturated in CO2?  Doing the chemistry there completely avoids 
the giant land footprint and energy required for air scrubbing that 
you mention, as well as avoids the need for molecular CO2 
sequestration or use.  Obviously, the safety of doing this in the 
ocean needs to be researched, but generating ocean alkalinity would 
seem an improvement over our current ocean acidification program. 
I'm not alone in my thinking; this builds on Kheshgi (1995), House et 
al. (2007), and Harvey (2008) among others.

-Greg


*From:* David Appell david.app...@gmail.com
*To:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Cc:* m2des...@cablespeed.com
*Sent:* Sun, June 2, 2013 10:55:22 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

Mark:

I have an article in this month's Physics World magazine that answers 
some of these questions:


“Mopping Up Carbon,” Physics World, June 2013, pp. 23-27.
http://www.davidappell.com/articles/PWJun13Appell-air_capture.pdf

David


On 6/2/2013 8:05 AM, Mark Massmann wrote:
 I'm wondering if anyone can respond to these questions:

 I could be missing this, but how long is it estimated to take for 
the devices to capture each ton of CO2? If the systems were installed 
to capture coal plant emissions, I'd imagine that the capture rate 
would be maximized. However installing the systems outside of those 
sources might lower the capture rate to the point that the system 
becomes impractical (i.e. like installing a wind farm in a location 
that's simply not windy enough on average)



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Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

[Oliver Tickell]

From David A's article:
One interesting initiative is
the Virgin Earth Challenge, which was launched in
2007. Sponsored by Richard Branson, it offers $25m
to whoever can demonstrate a sustainable and scalable design to 
permanently remove a billion tonnes

of carbon from the air every year for 10 years. Some
2600 groups applied to the challenge and last November the finalists 
were picked – six from the US and

one each from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands,
Switzerland and Canada – who now have five years
in which to win the prize.

I think all involved were expecting the winner to be announced a few 
years ago. It seems to be dragging out unnecessarily. Since after all, 
the whole predicate of this is that urgent action is needed!


Oliver.

--
Oliver Tickell
Kyoto2 - for an effective climate agreement.

On 03/06/2013 16:59, RAU greg wrote:


Thanks. Yes, lots of great ideas out there.
Speaking of the Virgin Earth Challenge (apparently the only CDR game 
in town), what the heck happened to the prize? Did they quietly select 
a winner, split the money among finalists, or say sorry, no winner, 
thanks for all of the great ideas, we were just kidding.??? For all 
of the initial splash, the VEC seemed to end very somberly. Given the 
importance of the topic and Branson's apparent enthusiasm, why?

-Greg


*From:* Oliver Tickell oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org
*To:* gh...@sbcglobal.net
*Cc:* david.app...@gmail.com; geoengineering@googlegroups.com; 
m2des...@cablespeed.com

*Sent:* Mon, June 3, 2013 2:42:47 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

But why no mention of CDR by accelerated rock weathering (AGR)? This 
is one of the solutions selected by the Virgin Challenge - the one 
from Netherlands. And it is being promoted by Olaf Schuilling, who is 
a member of this Geoengineering Group.


This is a low tech, low cost approach - which consists of mining 
olivine bearing rock, grinding it up to approx 0.1mm, and spreading it 
land / coast where it will completely weather away over a period of 
under 10 years, converting CO2 to bicarbonate in solution. All for 
~$10/tCO2. Emissions for mining, transport, grinding, just a few % of 
the CO2 gain.


So what's not to include about it? Oliver.

On 02/06/2013 20:29, RAU greg wrote:
Thanks, David, very nice review. Where our technology departs from 
the higher profile abiotic methods you discuss is: 1) expensively 
concentrated CO2 is not formed (or stored), 2) reactions occur at 
ambient T and P - exotic chemicals and conditions are avoided (so 
far), 3) excess ocean rather than excess air CO2 can be mitigated, 
avoiding the need for more complex air scrubbing technology. Why go 
to the added expense/effort of getting air CO2 into solution to then 
do chemistry when vast areas of the surface ocean are already 
supersaturated in CO2?  Doing the chemistry there completely avoids 
the giant land footprint and energy required for air scrubbing that 
you mention, as well as avoids the need for molecular CO2 
sequestration or use.  Obviously, the safety of doing this in the 
ocean needs to be researched, but generating ocean alkalinity would 
seem an improvement over our current ocean acidification program. 
I'm not alone in my thinking; this builds on Kheshgi (1995), House et 
al. (2007), and Harvey (2008) among others.

-Greg


*From:* David Appell david.app...@gmail.com
*To:* geoengineering@googlegroups.com
*Cc:* m2des...@cablespeed.com
*Sent:* Sun, June 2, 2013 10:55:22 AM
*Subject:* Re: [geo] Re: Meanwhile, in CDR news...

Mark:

I have an article in this month's Physics World magazine that answers 
some of these questions:


“Mopping Up Carbon,” Physics World, June 2013, pp. 23-27.
http://www.davidappell.com/articles/PWJun13Appell-air_capture.pdf

David


On 6/2/2013 8:05 AM, Mark Massmann wrote:
 I'm wondering if anyone can respond to these questions:

 I could be missing this, but how long is it estimated to take for 
the devices to capture each ton of CO2? If the systems were installed 
to capture coal plant emissions, I'd imagine that the capture rate 
would be maximized. However installing the systems outside of those 
sources might lower the capture rate to the point that the system 
becomes impractical (i.e. like installing a wind farm in a location 
that's simply not windy enough on average)



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Re: [geo] Fwd: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2 world

[Oliver Tickell]

This problem of ocean acidification is surely best solved by application 
of ground up olivine bearing rock to land / coast, so removing carbonic 
acid and replacing it with alkaline Mg++ and HCO3- (bicarbonate). The 
runoff from land will of course end up in the oceans.


Oliver.

On 15/05/2013 12:52, Andrew Lockley wrote:

Please see below and attached.

A


-- Forwarded message --
From: E Couce e.co...@bristol.ac.uk
Date: 15 May 2013 12:47
Subject: Re: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2 world
To: Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com
Cc: geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com


Dear Andrew and all,

thanks for the interest on the paper. It can be accessed on
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50340/abstract

Attached is an unformatted draft (also available for download free of
charge on my website)

Best regards,
Elena



On 15 May 2013 00:26, Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com wrote:

Poster's note:  Hopefully the author (see cc ) will be kind enough to submit 
her paper to this list, as I lack a URL or copy

Citation

Couce, EM, Irvine, PJ, Gregorie, L, Ridgwell, AJ  Hendy, E 2013, ‘Tropical 
coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2world’. Geophysical Research 
Letters, vol 40.

Abstract

Continued anthropogenic CO2 emissions are expected to impact tropical coral 
reefs by further raising sea surface temperatures (SST) and intensifying ocean 
acidification (OA). Although geoengineering by means of Solar Radiation 
Management (SRM) may mitigate temperature increases, OA will persist, raising 
important questions regarding the impact of different stressor combinations. We 
apply statistical Bioclimatic Envelope Models to project changes in 
shallow-water tropical coral reef habitat as a single niche (without resolving 
biodiversity or community composition) under various Representative 
Concentration Pathway and SRM scenarios, until 2070. We predict substantial 
reductions in habitat suitability centered on the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool under 
net anthropogenic radiative forcing of ≥3.0 W/m2. The near-term dominant risk 
to coral reefs is increasing SSTs; below 3 W/m2 reasonably favorable conditions 
are maintained, even when achieved by SRM with persisting OA. ‘Optimal’ 
mitigation occurs at 1.5 W/m2 because tropical SSTs over-cool in a 
fully-geoengineered (i.e. pre-industrial global mean temperature) world.

Key Points:

• Large reductions in reef habitat suitability under net radiative forcing 3 
W/m2
• Rising SSTs are greater threat for tropical coral reefs than ocean 
acidification
• Solar Radiation Management may help maintain coral reef habitat over near-term




--

---
Dr. Elena Couce
School of Geographical Sciences
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
E-mail: e.co...@bristol.ac.uk
Web: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/elena-m-couce




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Re: [geo] Fwd: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2 world

[Oliver Tickell]

Where there is a specific need to reduce acidity around a particular 
coral reef, or other location, of course you would want to target the 
ground rock application to that particular place. This might indeed be 
to land in a catchment from which streams run into a coral lagoon, for 
example, or it may be to beaches where dissolution would be helped by 
wave action. It would also be possible to grind the rock to 
nanometer-scale dimensions so as to rapidly dissolve the rock in the 
water. However the much larger energy input required to grind very fine 
powders would make this less effective in reducing global CO2.


Oliver.

ps - agreed that you would want to be careful of raising river pH too 
much - but remember we are already reducing river pH by CO2 / SO2 / NOx 
acidification.


On 15/05/2013 13:17, Andrew Lockley wrote:

That would surely depend on the ocean circulation around reefs.  It
would be impractical to exert short-term control over reef pH if the
surrounding water was from the ocean.  Only where ripurine and coastal
flows were a significant part of the local budget would adjusting the
pH of either be effective.  There's only so much adjustment to a
river's pH you could make before destroying its ecosystem, so
well-mixed reef water wouldn't be controllable using river pH tweaks.

A

On 15 May 2013 13:09, Oliver Tickell oli...@its.me.uk wrote:

This problem of ocean acidification is surely best solved by application of
ground up olivine bearing rock to land / coast, so removing carbonic acid
and replacing it with alkaline Mg++ and HCO3- (bicarbonate). The runoff from
land will of course end up in the oceans.

Oliver.


On 15/05/2013 12:52, Andrew Lockley wrote:

Please see below and attached.

A


-- Forwarded message --
From: E Couce e.co...@bristol.ac.uk
Date: 15 May 2013 12:47
Subject: Re: Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2
world
To: Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com
Cc: geoengineering geoengineering@googlegroups.com


Dear Andrew and all,

thanks for the interest on the paper. It can be accessed on
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50340/abstract

Attached is an unformatted draft (also available for download free of
charge on my website)

Best regards,
Elena



On 15 May 2013 00:26, Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com wrote:

Poster's note:  Hopefully the author (see cc ) will be kind enough to
submit her paper to this list, as I lack a URL or copy

Citation

Couce, EM, Irvine, PJ, Gregorie, L, Ridgwell, AJ  Hendy, E 2013,
‘Tropical coral reef habitat in a geoengineered, high-CO2world’. Geophysical
Research Letters, vol 40.

Abstract

Continued anthropogenic CO2 emissions are expected to impact tropical
coral reefs by further raising sea surface temperatures (SST) and
intensifying ocean acidification (OA). Although geoengineering by means of
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) may mitigate temperature increases, OA will
persist, raising important questions regarding the impact of different
stressor combinations. We apply statistical Bioclimatic Envelope Models to
project changes in shallow-water tropical coral reef habitat as a single
niche (without resolving biodiversity or community composition) under
various Representative Concentration Pathway and SRM scenarios, until 2070.
We predict substantial reductions in habitat suitability centered on the
Indo-Pacific Warm Pool under net anthropogenic radiative forcing of
≥3.0 W/m2. The near-term dominant risk to coral reefs is increasing SSTs;
below 3 W/m2 reasonably favorable conditions are maintained, even when
achieved by SRM with persisting OA. ‘Optimal’ mitigation occurs at 1.5 W/m2
because tropical SSTs over-cool in a fully-geoengineered (i.e.
pre-industrial global mean temperature) world.

Key Points:

• Large reductions in reef habitat suitability under net radiative
forcing 3 W/m2
• Rising SSTs are greater threat for tropical coral reefs than ocean
acidification
• Solar Radiation Management may help maintain coral reef habitat over
near-term




--

---
Dr. Elena Couce
School of Geographical Sciences
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
E-mail: e.co...@bristol.ac.uk
Web: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/elena-m-couce



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Re: [geo] Natural iron fertilization by the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption - Achterberg, GRL

[Oliver Tickell]

Too bad they did not explore the effect on relative abundance of 
phytoplankton. Seabed deposits show that volcanic ash is associated with 
increased populations of diatoms - to be expected since diatoms tend to 
predominate so long as the silica they need to be build their shells is 
present as silicic acid. This has implications for CO2 since diatoms are 
effective at sequestering surface water CO2 to deep ocean layers (as 
various forms of solid / dissolved C). more so than other phytoplankton. 
Oliver.


On 23/03/2013 11:48, Andrew Lockley wrote:


Poster's note : paper from earlier thread, which commentators describe 
as demonstrating limited potential for OIF generally, due to low macro 
nutrient supply. (Eg 
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0322-iron-fertilization-fail.html)


http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50221/abstract

Keywords:

iron fertilization;volcanic eruption;Eyjafjallajökull Volcano

Abstract

[1] Aerosol deposition from the 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano 
Eyjafjallajökull resulted in significant dissolved iron (DFe) inputs 
to the Iceland Basin of the North Atlantic. Unique ship-board 
measurements indicated strongly enhanced DFe concentrations (up to 10  
nM) immediately under the ash plume. Bioassay experiments performed 
with ash collected at sea under the plume also demonstrated the 
potential for associated Fe release to stimulate phytoplankton growth 
and nutrient drawdown. Combining Fe dissolution measurements with 
modeled ash deposition suggested that the eruption had the potential 
to increase DFe by 0.2 nM over an area of up to 570,000 km2. Although 
satellite ocean color data only indicated minor increases in 
phytoplankton abundance over a relatively constrained area, comparison 
of in situ nitrate concentrations with historical records suggested 
that ash deposition may have resulted in enhanced major nutrient 
drawdown. Our observations thus suggest that the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull 
eruption resulted in a significant perturbation to the biogeochemistry 
of the Iceland Basin.


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[geo] Fwd: Climate Radio 2013

[Oliver Tickell]

 Original Message 
Subject:Climate Radio 2013
Date:   Mon, 4 Mar 2013 14:16:44 +
From:   Phil England p...@switch-off.co.uk
To: Phil England p...@switch-off.co.uk



*Climate Radio is back in 2013 with a new monthly programme. The first 
two shows are available now to listen online, download or subscribe to 
in iTunes. You can also check out the programmes on the New 
Internationalist http://newint.org/contributors/phil-england/website.*


---

*#1: An Arctic Wake-Up Call 
http://climateradio.org/an-arctic-wake-up-call/*


Starting the series in our traditional way with a look at the science, 
we speak to Professors *Tim Lenton* and *Peter Wadhams* about the 
surprising rate of change we are now seeing in the Arctic's natural systems.


/In the absence of urgent action on climate change, there may be a 
number of tipping points in climate-driven systems in the Arctic, which 
threaten to rapidly escalate the danger for the whole planet. A collapse 
of summer sea-ice, increased methane emissions from thawing permafrost, 
runaway melting of the Greenland ice-sheet, and a collapse of the 
thermo-haline circulation, may all be approaching in the Arctic and will 
have disastrous consequences for global climate and sea levels. These 
together comprise a wake-up call to reinvigorate efforts to tackle 
climate change. A lack of consensus on precisely how fast any tipping 
points are approaching in the Arctic should not be used as an argument 
for inaction. (Environment Audit Committee, Protecting The Arctic 
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenvaud/171/171.pdf, 
September 2012, p.21)./


*#2: Protecting the Arctic http://climateradio.org/protecting-the-arctic/*

Where scientists see warning signs, oil companies and their friends in 
government see only economic opportunity. Last September a cross-party 
parliamentary committee of MPs in the UK called for a moratorium on 
drilling in the Arctic – concerned about the potential impact on climate 
change and about the lax safety regime surrounding this high-risk 
activity. In January this year, the UK government rejected the 
committee’s key recommendations using old science to suggest that Arctic 
drilling could be compatible with avoiding dangerous climate change. At 
the same time a Freedom of Information Act request discovered the 
government had been lobbying against EU legislation designed to make 
Arctic drilling safer.


Over the course of 2012 Shell’s claims that they were “Arctic Ready” 
collapsed after a succession of calamities while investors and other oil 
companies started getting cold feet. We look at how Shell’s Arctic 
drilling plans pose a risk to your pension and what you can do about it. 
Featuring *Joan Walley MP* (Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee), 
*Charlie Kronick* (Greenpeace), *Louise Rouse* (Fair Pensions) and 
*James Marriott* (Platform).


---
Full descriptions of the programmes can be found at: 
http://climateradio.org/

---
You can follow Climate Radio on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClimateRadio
---
Many thanks to Artists Project Earth for their support for these programmes
---
*If you no longer wish to receive these email, just reply with 
unsubscribe as the subject line*




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[geo] Fwd: Geoengineering event in Oxford

[Oliver Tickell]

Forumers, FYI:

Geoengineering - the problem of competing values in environmental and 
technological governance http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/1518


Professor Steve Rayner, Co-Director, Oxford Geoengineering Programme, 
Oxford Martin School; Director, Institute of Science, Innovation and 
Society, Oxford Martin School and James Martin Professor of Science and 
Civilization


This event is part of a seminar series:'Ethics and 21st Century 
Challenges'. All the seminars are free and open to all; however booking 
is recommended. Sandwiches provided on a first-come, first-served basis.


1 March from 12:00 to 13:30 Humanities Building Lecture Theatre 2nd 
Floor, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG


Acess event details: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/oxfordenv 
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/oxfordenv



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Re: [geo] CDR: Stanford weighs in

[Oliver Tickell]

It is frankly somewhat amazing that this review contains no mention at 
all of what appears to be the single lowest cost and lowest impact way 
of removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere, namely the accelerated 
weathering of magnesium silicate bearing rock by spreading the 
pulverised rock at land and littoral zones.


Given that this system is now quite widely published, such ignorance is 
surely deliberate. How is it to be explained? Oliver.


On 18/02/2013 23:31, Rau, Greg wrote:



  
http://planetsave.com/2013/02/18/stanford-scientists-aim-to-remove-co2-from-atmosphere/


  Stanford Scientists Aim To Remove CO2 From Atmosphere

Joshua S Hill
*
*

Turn the clock back a decade and we had all sorts of grand plans for 
reducing our greenhouse gas emissions levels, hoping that by 2020 we 
would be on the path to saving our planet.


Reducing Carbon Means Destroying Carbon 
http://c1planetsavecom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2013/02/750px-Cwall99_lg.jpg 



Image Credit: Wikimedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cwall99_lg.jpg

Welcome to 2013 and … not so much.

Unsurprisingly, scientists at Stanford University have recently come 
out and said that curbing our CO2 emissions may simply not be enough 
any more. Instead of simply hoping the long-tail of emissions 
reductions do /something/, they believe we need to start looking at 
carbon-negative technologies that actively remove carbon dioxide from 
the atmosphere.


“To achieve the targeted cuts, we would need a scenario where, by the 
middle of the century, the global economy is transitioning from net 
positive to net negative CO2 emissions,” said report co-author Chris 
Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system 
science at Stanford. “We need to start thinking about how to implement 
a negative-emissions energy strategy on a global scale.”


The Stanford scientists findings are summarised in a report 
by Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which describe 
a suite of emerging carbon-negative solutions to global warming.



BECCS

“Net negative emissions can be achieved when more greenhouse gases are 
sequestered than are released into the atmosphere,” explained Milne, 
an energy assessment analyst at GCEP. “One of the most promising 
net-negative technologies is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture 
and storage.”


For example, a BECCS system could convert woody biomass, grass, and 
other vegetation into electricity, chemical products, or fuels such as 
ethanol, leaving the CO2 emissions released during the process to be 
captured and stored.


Estimates show that by 2050 BECCS technologies could sequester 10 
billion metric tonnes of industrial CO2 emissions from installations 
like power plants, paper mills, ethanol processors, and other 
manufacturing facilities. But we have a ways to go before we are 
technologically able to manage this.



Biochar

Biochar is a plant byproduct similar to charcoal that is made from 
lumber waste, dried corn stalks, and other plant residues. A process 
called pyrolysis — which heats the vegetation slowly without oxygen — 
produces carbon rich chunks of biochar that can be placed in the soil 
as a fertiliser, which locks the CO2 underground instead of letting 
the CO2 re-enter the atmosphere as the plant decomposes as it 
naturally would.


EHowever, long-term sequestration “would require high biochar 
stability,” they wrote. “Estimates of biochar half‐life vary greatly 
from 10 years to more than 100 years. The type of feedstock also 
contributes to stability, with wood being more stable than grasses and 
manure.”



Net-negative Farming

Another option included in the GCEP report is the idea of net-negative 
farming. The authors cited research done by Jose Moreira of the 
University of Sao Paulo who found that from 1975 to 2007, ethanol 
production from sugar cane in Brazil resulted in a net-negative 
capture of 1.5 metric tons of CO2 per cubic meter of ethanol produced.


“In this model, the system took 18 years to recoup carbon emissions, 
with most reductions coming from soil replenishment from root growth 
and replacement of gasoline with ethanol,” the GCEP authors wrote.


However, questions remain about the long-term effects of ethanol 
combustion on climate.



Other Options

The report also explored other options, such as sequestering carbon in 
the ocean, specifically the problem of ocean acidification. Currently, 
the more CO2 the oceans absorb the more acidic they become, resulting 
in algae blooms often seen in locations throughout Asia as well as the 
Gulf of Mexico in the US.


However, research by David Keith of Harvard University suggests that 
adding magnesium carbonate and other minerals to the ocean to reduce 
acidity would also sequester atmospheric CO2 in absorbed in seawater.


For more information on these options, check out the full report here 
http://gcep.stanford.edu/events/workshops_negemissions2012.html.


*
*
--
You received 

Re: [geo] Volcanos and climate change: Location, location, location

[Oliver Tickell]

Precisely - the aerosol cooling effect takes place on a timescale ~ 1-10 
years, the CO2 warming effect over ~ 1-10,000 years.


It is well known that volcanic outpourings can have major effects of 
this type, especially when extensive outpourings of the kind that 
produced the Deccan Traps and Siberian Traps. The Siberian Traps are 
associated with the Permian Triassic boundary and in this case the ~ 3 
million km3 of molten lava poured over a huge Permo-Carboniferous coal 
basin causing massive methane and CO2 emissions over ~600ky. something 
similar happened when a large bolide struck the Yucatan limestone 
formation ~ 65My ago - causing the end-Cretaceous extinction event.


--
Oliver Tickell
e: oli...@its.me.uk

On 11/02/2013 22:03, Rau, Greg wrote:



  Interesting – no discussion of cooling effects of aerosol release?
  Short-lived relative to CO2? -Greg



  Volcano Location: Greenhouse-Icehouse Key? Episodic Purging of
  'Carbonate Capacitor' Drives Long-Term Climate Cycle

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130207115014.htm

Feb. 6, 2013 — A new Rice University-led study finds the real estate 
mantra location, location, location may also explain one of Earth's 
enduring climate mysteries. The study suggests that Earth's repeated 
flip-flopping between greenhouse and icehouse states over the past 500 
million years may have been driven by the episodic flare-up of 
volcanoes at key locations where enormous amounts of carbon dioxide 
are poised for release into the atmosphere.


We found that Earth's continents serve as enormous 'carbonate 
capacitors,' said Rice's Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study in 
this month's /GeoSphere/. Continents store massive amounts of carbon 
dioxide in sedimentary carbonates like limestone and marble, and it 
appears that these reservoirs are tapped from time to time by 
volcanoes, which release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the 
atmosphere.


Lee said as much as 44 percent of carbonates by weight is carbon 
dioxide. Under most circumstances that carbon stays locked inside 
Earth's rigid continental crust.


One process that can release carbon dioxide from these carbonates is 
interaction with magma, he said. But that rarely happens on Earth 
today because most volcanoes are located on island arcs, tectonic 
plate boundaries that don't contain continental crust.


Earth's climate continually cycles between greenhouse and icehouse 
states, which each last on timescales of 10 million to 100 million 
years. Icehouse states -- like the one Earth has been in for the past 
50 million years -- are marked by ice at the poles and periods of 
glacial activity. By contrast, the warmer greenhouse states are marked 
by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and by an ice-free 
surface, even at the poles. The last greenhouse period lasted about 50 
million to 70 million years and spanned the late Cretaceous, when 
dinosaurs roamed, and the early Paleogene, when mammals began to 
diversify.


Lee and colleagues found that the planet's greenhouse-icehouse 
oscillations are a natural consequence of plate tectonics. The 
research showed that tectonic activity drives an episodic flare-up of 
volcanoes along continental arcs, particularly during periods when 
oceans are forming and continents are breaking apart. The continental 
arc volcanoes that arise during these periods are located on the edges 
of continents, and the magma that rises through the volcanoes releases 
enormous quantities of carbon dioxide as it passes through layers of 
carbonates in the continental crust.


Lee, professor of Earth science at Rice, led the four-year study, 
which was co-authored by three Rice faculty members and additional 
colleagues at the University of Tokyo, the University of British 
Columbia, the California Institute of Technology, Texas AM University 
and Pomona College.


Lee said the study breaks with conventional theories about greenhouse 
and icehouse periods.


The standard view of the greenhouse state is that you draw carbon 
dioxide from the deep Earth interior by a combination of more activity 
along the mid-ocean ridges -- where tectonic plates spread -- and 
massive breakouts of lava called 'large igneous provinces,' Lee said. 
Though both of these would produce more carbon dioxide, it is not 
clear if these processes alone could sustain the atmospheric carbon 
dioxide that we find in the fossil record during past greenhouses.


Lee is a petrologist and geochemist whose research interests include 
the formation and evolution of continents as well as the connections 
between deep Earth and its oceans and atmosphere..


Lee said the conclusions in the study developed over several years, 
but the initial idea of the research dates to an informal 
chalkboard-only seminar at Rice in 2008. The talk was given by Rice 
oceanographer and study co-author Jerry Dickens, a paleoclimate 
expert; Lee and Rice geodynamicist Adrian Lenardic, another co-author, 
were

Re: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture and storage - Catalysis Science Technology (RSC Publishing)

[Oliver Tickell]

Unfortunately my confusion is only deepening ...
There is more CO2 in the np system - but I thought it was meant to be 
H2CO3, not CO2.

There is HCO3- on the nickel - but no bicarbonate in the system.
If the solution is acidic (ie, there is lots of H+ in the solution), 
where is the acidity coming from if not from dissociation of carbonic acid:

H2CO3 + H2O = H+, HCO3- = 2H+, CO3=  ?
But you say only carbonic acid present.

Oliver.

On 07/02/2013 23:51, gaurav bhaduri wrote:

Dear all

Thank you for your interest in our work and your comments. To clarify 
some of the misunderstanding in the process conditions that I'd like 
to clarify. When we bubble CO2 in water with and without the 
nanoparticles, we observed that there is more CO2 in the nanoparticle 
system than in pure water. We also observed that there was HCO3- ions 
on the surface of the Ni nanoparticles surface, we thus explained that 
this enhancement could be due to adsorption of the HCO3- (from the 
acid) onto the Ni surface. We in no place claim the formation of CO3-- 
ions, to be clear on this point the system we are addressing in this 
article is at a acidic pH (5). Thus there is only carbonic acid 
species present no bicarbonate or carbonate system as they exist at 
higher pH values.


Now coming to the point of mineralization. We are currently working on 
this (as explained by Dr Siller, previously) and would like to use 
silicates as our metal source (Ca2+ or Mg2+).


Regarding the confusion of sea or oceanic system. We do not tend to 
imply the use of Ni nanoparticles in the ocean or any thing around it. 
The relation with sea urchin (or the marine environment) is just that, 
the use of Ni to study the hydration reaction we triggered by the 
studies done on the sea urchin by Dr Siller and my other colleagues.


Our major application is to use this system as a satellite unit 
(plant) to an operational point source emitter (for example a power 
plant). The carbonate mineral thus produced would be used as landfill 
or in any other useful application. As mentioned above, we are working 
on the use of silicate sources (terrestrial) for the source of the 
alkali earth metals (Ca2+ or Mg2+), thus ruling out acidification of 
the ocean or any relation to the ocean.


Hope I was able to explain the application of our technology. If you 
still have any doubts, please feel free to ask. We will try our level 
best to clarify any confusion.


Thanks to all

Kind regards
Gaurav

On Thursday, 7 February 2013 18:49:41 UTC, Greg Rau wrote:

Thanks for responding.  I really don't follow this. If I have a
beaker of water fully equilibrated with air (CO2) and add your Ni
particles, you are saying that more HCO3- and ultimately CO3s will
spontaneously be produced. This won't happen unless
thermodynamically favored, and if that water if fully equilibrated
with air CO2 there is no thermodynamic condition that will force a
change in the C chemistry.  If your Ni particles are somehow
consuming H+ or producing OH- then you've got a driving force, but
you still need a source cations to make CaCO3s (am
very interested to learn how you cheaply extract cations from
silicates.)  Otherwise, adding a catalyst to a system at
thermodynamic equilibrium does nothing.  On the other hand, adding
something to seawater that overcomes the natural, chemical
inhibition of abiotic CaCO3s precipitation could really cause some
serious precipitation and CO2 injection into the atmosphere. No?
-Greg

From: lidija...@gmail.com javascript: lidija...@gmail.com
javascript:
Reply-To: lidija...@gmail.com javascript: lidija...@gmail.com
javascript:
Date: Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:32 AM
To: geoengineering geoengi...@googlegroups.com javascript:
Subject: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible
hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture and
storage - Catalysis Science  Technology (RSC Publishing)


With presence of Ni we have increases at the same time trapping of
CO2 and increased the rates of conversion to carbonic acid on room
temperature and on the atmospheric pressure.
We still working to find the best mineralisation pathway - we will
use silicates (magnesium calcium silicates) as a source of Ca2+ or
Mg2+.
While nickel nanoparticles are toxic as already mentioned in the
paper we do not propose to spread this around in the enviroment
but to have local disposal next to power plant or industrial plant.
We made brief cost - 8$ per ton of CO2 if we can recover Ni 99%
yield based on current price of nickel.
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Re: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture and storage - Catalysis Science Technology (RSC Publishing)

[Oliver Tickell]

There is nothing trivial about ocean chemistry! Many a salt water 
aquarium owner knows this all too well. Thanks for the link, Oliver.


On 08/02/2013 14:01, lidijasil...@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Oliver,
I think it is not so trivial as you wrote - different steps of 
reactions which you wrote are prefered at different pH.
Please for example see this web link and graph on the bottom of the 
web page:
http://ion.chem.usu.edu/~sbialkow/Classes/3650/Carbonate/Carbonic%20Acid.html 
http://ion.chem.usu.edu/%7Esbialkow/Classes/3650/Carbonate/Carbonic%20Acid.html

best wishes,
Lidija

On Friday, 8 February 2013 11:52:15 UTC, Oliver Tickell wrote:


Unfortunately my confusion is only deepening ...
There is more CO2 in the np system - but I thought it was meant to
be H2CO3, not CO2.
There is HCO3- on the nickel - but no bicarbonate in the system.
If the solution is acidic (ie, there is lots of H+ in the
solution), where is the acidity coming from if not from
dissociation of carbonic acid:
H2CO3 + H2O = H+, HCO3- = 2H+, CO3=  ?
But you say only carbonic acid present.

Oliver.

On 07/02/2013 23:51, gaurav bhaduri wrote:

Dear all

Thank you for your interest in our work and your comments. To
clarify some of the misunderstanding in the process conditions
that I'd like to clarify. When we bubble CO2 in water with and
without the nanoparticles, we observed that there is more CO2 in
the nanoparticle system than in pure water. We also observed that
there was HCO3- ions on the surface of the Ni nanoparticles
surface, we thus explained that this enhancement could be due to
adsorption of the HCO3- (from the acid) onto the Ni surface. We
in no place claim the formation of CO3-- ions, to be clear on
this point the system we are addressing in this article is at a
acidic pH (5). Thus there is only carbonic acid species present
no bicarbonate or carbonate system as they exist at higher pH values.

Now coming to the point of mineralization. We are currently
working on this (as explained by Dr Siller, previously) and would
like to use silicates as our metal source (Ca2+ or Mg2+).

Regarding the confusion of sea or oceanic system. We do not tend
to imply the use of Ni nanoparticles in the ocean or any thing
around it. The relation with sea urchin (or the marine
environment) is just that, the use of Ni to study the hydration
reaction we triggered by the studies done on the sea urchin by Dr
Siller and my other colleagues.

Our major application is to use this system as a satellite unit
(plant) to an operational point source emitter (for example a
power plant). The carbonate mineral thus produced would be used
as landfill or in any other useful application. As mentioned
above, we are working on the use of silicate sources
(terrestrial) for the source of the alkali earth metals (Ca2+ or
Mg2+), thus ruling out acidification of the ocean or any relation
to the ocean.

Hope I was able to explain the application of our technology. If
you still have any doubts, please feel free to ask. We will try
our level best to clarify any confusion.

Thanks to all

Kind regards
Gaurav

On Thursday, 7 February 2013 18:49:41 UTC, Greg Rau wrote:

Thanks for responding.  I really don't follow this. If I have
a beaker of water fully equilibrated with air (CO2) and add
your Ni particles, you are saying that more HCO3-
and ultimately CO3s will spontaneously be produced. This
won't happen unless thermodynamically favored, and if that
water if fully equilibrated with air CO2 there is no
thermodynamic condition that will force a change in the C
chemistry.  If your Ni particles are somehow consuming H+ or
producing OH- then you've got a driving force, but you still
need a source cations to make CaCO3s (am very interested to
learn how you cheaply extract cations from silicates.)
 Otherwise, adding a catalyst to a system at thermodynamic
equilibrium does nothing.  On the other hand, adding
something to seawater that overcomes the natural, chemical
inhibition of abiotic CaCO3s precipitation could really cause
some serious precipitation and CO2 injection into the
atmosphere. No?
-Greg

From: lidija...@gmail.com lidija...@gmail.com
Reply-To: lidija...@gmail.com lidija...@gmail.com
Date: Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:32 AM
To: geoengineering geoengi...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [geo] Re: Nickel nanoparticles catalyse reversible
hydration of carbon dioxide for mineralization carbon capture
and storage - Catalysis Science  Technology (RSC Publishing)


With presence of Ni we have increases at the same
time trapping of CO2 and increased the rates of conversion

[geo] Fwd: New report highlights SLCF emissions in the Nordic countries

[Oliver Tickell]

There is at least one kind of geo-engineering that is both effective and 
uncontroversial - reducing black carbon emissions - in particular those 
reaching the Arctic!


 Original Message 
Subject:New report highlights SLCF emissions in the Nordic countries
Date:   Mon, 4 Feb 2013 13:55:37 +
From:   Michael Funch m...@norden.org
Reply-To:   Michael Funch m...@norden.org
To: Climate Change Info Mailing List climat...@lists.iisd.ca
CC: 	h...@nst.dk h...@nst.dk, Anna Gran a...@norden.org, Frøydis 
Johannessen f...@norden.org




*New report highlights SLCF emissions in the Nordic countries*

/Conclusions and recommendations on Nordic actions against Short-lived 
Climate Forcers: New report produced as a follow up to the Svalbard 
Declaration from the Environment Ministers in the Nordic countries*.*/


High concentrations of Short-lived Climate Forces such as black carbon 
may have a large impact on global warming, especially for the Arctic 
region. The good news, however, is that early reductions of such 
pollutants could reduce the speed of global warming in the short term. 
Emission reductions will also have important health benefits.


Realising that global emissions of SLCFs can only be effectively abated 
through broad international, regional and national initiatives, the 
Nordic Ministers of Environment from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway 
and Sweden adopted  the Svalbard Declaration in March 2012 and agreed 
to improve the basis for national and joint Nordic initiatives.


To support the work initiated by the ministers, the Nordic Climate and 
Air Quality Group under the Nordic Council of Ministers has now produced 
a new report with nine specific policy recommendations on immediate 
Nordic actions, Nordic campaigns and international actions.


Read the full report 
http://www.norden.org/en/publications/publikationer/2012-567.


Read the Svalbard Declaration 
http://www.norden.org/en/nordic-council-of-ministers/council-of-ministers/nordic-council-of-ministers-for-the-environment-mr-m/declarations-and-statements/svalbard-declaration-on-shortlived-climate-forcers. 



*Background *

Recent scientific findings have identified that the so-called 
Short-lived Climate Forcers (SLCFs) such as black carbon (soot) might 
have a larger impact on global warming than earlier assessments have 
indicated, especially for the Arctic climate, resulting in rapid melting 
of snow and ice in the Arctic region. Abatement of these emissions would 
reduce the speed of global and Arctic warming.


The Nordic Climate and Air Quality Group under the Nordic Council of 
Ministers held a seminar in June 2012 where scientist and policy-makers 
discussed recent scientific developments and on-going activities related 
to SLCF's. This included national experiences with emission inventories, 
identification of cost-effective measures to cut emissions and the 
drawing up of national action plans as well as the development in the 
field of international co-operation on SLCFs.


In addition, the workshop adopted a number of conclusions and 
recommendations on scientific research, monitoring and modelling 
underlining that particular emphasis should be directed towards the 
Arctic region, and the need to intensify collaboration with Russia. All 
presentations at the workshop are also included in the report.




Venlig hilsen/
Kind regards

*
Michael Funch
*Seniorrådgiver/Senior Adviser

Direct +45 21 71 71 43
m...@norden.org mailto:m...@norden.org

Nordisk Råd/Nordisk Ministerråd/
Nordic Council/Nordic Council of Ministers
Ved Stranden 18
DK-1061 København K
Tel +45 33 96 02 00
Fax +45 33 96 02 02
_http://www.norden.org_

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[geo] Fwd: Bright Water discussed in Physics Today

[Oliver Tickell]

I don't think this was posted to the group ...



http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/phtoad/v66/i2/p17_s1


--
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 Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard ?University

se...@post.harvard.edu mailto:se...@post.harvard.edu

617 661-0269

This message  its attachments may contain confidential or proprietary 
information. Copying or dissemination of such  text or attachments 
without the permission of the author is forbidden. © Russell Seitz 2012 
 All rights reserved.










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[geo] Why Greenland’s melting could be the biggest climate disaster of all

[Oliver Tickell]

http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-greenlands-melting-could-be-the-biggest-climate-disaster-of-all/ 


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Re: [geo] fun fact: area of USA (or Europe) is about 2% of planetary area

[Oliver Tickell]

This makes perfect sense, but albedo enhancement can still be useful in:
1. cooling overheating cities, improving local environment and cutting 
electricity usage for a/c.
2. producing local cooling where most important, eg in the polar 
regions. Just as dark particles (soot / black carbon) are making warming 
worse in the Arctic, so whitening surfaces (getting rid of the soot for 
a start) will reduce that warming.


Oliver.

On 16/01/2013 19:00, Ken Caldeira wrote:

Folks,

To offset the global mean temperature response to a doubling of 
atmospheric CO2 content, you need to deflect back to space about 2% of 
sunlight reaching the Earth.


This is often a hard number to get your head around.

Well, it turns out that the area of the US is almost 10 million km2 
whereas the area of the world is a little over 500 million km2, so the 
US land area is about 2% of Earth's surface area, so we are talking 
about deflecting sunlight away from Earth over an area approximately 
equivalent to the area of the United States.


This indicates why land surface albedo approaches have difficulty. If 
you can change surface albedo an average of 0.1 (when viewed from 
space through clouds etc), then you would need to change the albedo by 
this amount over an area equivalent to 10 times the area of the United 
States to offset a doubling of atmospheric CO2 content.


Incidentally, the area of the continent of Europe is slightly over 10 
million km2, so this analogy works for Europe also. (Note that the 
area of the European Union is less than half the total area of the 
European continent. There is a lot of Russia in Europe.)


Best,

Ken

PS. I encourage you to watch an interview with me yesterday on Current 
TV related to the Keystone XL pipeline: 
http://current.com/shows/the-young-turks/videos/climate-scientist-if-obama-approves-keystone-xl-his-legacy-will-be-shameful


___
Ken Caldeira

Carnegie Institution for Science
Dept of Global Ecology
260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
+1 650 704 7212kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu 
mailto:kcalde...@carnegiescience.edu

http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab@kencaldeira

*Caldeira Lab is hiring postdoctoral researchers.*
*http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/Caldeira_employment.html*

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[geo] Fwd: Bright Water article in Environment Magazine

[Oliver Tickell]

 Original Message 
Subject:Bright Water article in Environment Magazine
Date:   Wed, 12 Sep 2012 21:10:00 -0400
From:   Russell Seitz russellse...@gmail.com




Bright water is the lead topic in /Environment/ magazine'snew article on 
'Soft Geoengineering : 
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.2012.711672



http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00139157.2012.711672







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[geo] Re: Peatland geoengineering: an alternative approach to terrestrial carbon sequestration

[Oliver Tickell]

Two problems:
1. Peatland formation is a slow process - far too slow to sequestrate but a 
tiny fraction of CO2 emissions as they occur.
2. The first priority must surely be to stop peatland destruction which is 
proceeding apace across the tropics but especially in Indonesia, where 
swamp forests are being cleared, drained, and converted to palm oil 
plantations to provide Europe with low carbon biodiesel. See for example 
http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0722-pt-best-violation-satgas.html#

Oliver.

On Saturday, August 11, 2012 11:26:59 AM UTC+1, andrewjlockley wrote:

 Posters note - This is a new and promising technique

 http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1974/4404.short

 Peatland geoengineering: an alternative approach to terrestrial carbon 
 sequestration

 Christopher Freeman, Nathalie Fenner* and Anil H. Shirsat

 Terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems contribute almost equally to the 
 sequestration of ca50 per cent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and already 
 play a role in minimizing our impact on Earth’s climate. On land, the 
 majority of the sequestered carbon enters soil carbon stores. Almost 
 one-third of that soil carbon can be found in peatlands, an area covering 
 just 2–3% of the Earth’s landmass. Peatlands are thus well established as 
 powerful agents of carbon capture and storage; the preservation of 
 archaeological artefacts, such as ancient bog bodies, further attest to 
 their exceptional preservative properties. Peatlands have higher carbon 
 storage densities per unit ecosystem area than either the oceans or dry 
 terrestrial systems. However, despite attempts over a number of years at 
 enhancing carbon capture in the oceans or in land-based afforestation 
 schemes, no attempt has yet been made to optimize peatland carbon storage 
 capacity or even to harness peatlands to store externally captured carbon. 
 Recent studies suggest that peatland carbon sequestration is due to the 
 inhibitory effects of phenolic compounds that create an ‘enzymic latch’ on 
 decomposition. Here, we propose to harness that mechanism in a series of 
 peatland geoengineering strategies whereby molecular, biogeochemical, 
 agronomical and afforestation approaches increase carbon capture and 
 long-term sequestration in peat-forming terrestrial ecosystems.


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[geo] Re: FW: AMAZING SIGHT IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

[Oliver Tickell]

Has anyone considered another attribute of pumice - that chemically it
surely includes a lot of Mg2SiO4 - which absorbs CO2 as it weathers to
bicarbonate? As such it will counter AGW by drawing down CO2, and will
counter ocean acidification by adding alkalinity to the ocean. It will
also add silicic acid to the ocean, the limiting nutrient for diatoms,
whose fall to the depths is also an important CO2 vector. The key
thing here is that pumice should remain on the ocean surface long
enough for the weathering reaction to take place. Typically the
reaction is quite slow but the constant abrasion of pumice against
pumice under wave action should speed it up considerably. Biotic
factors may also come into play, if the pumice pieces are colonised by
algae for example.

Oliver Tickell

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[geo] 12 January - The politics of climate change: Geo-engineering, shale gas and nuclear power

[Oliver Tickell]

 Original Message 
Subject: 	EVENT REMINDER: 12 January - The politics of climate change: 
Geo-engineering, shale gas and nuclear power

Date:   Wed, 4 Jan 2012 11:28:19 +
From:   Katherine Roberts krobe...@policy-network.net
To: Katherine Roberts krobe...@policy-network.net



*THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE *

*SEMINAR SERIES *

*January**12^th , 17^th and 26^th*

*Westminster*

**

*12.30 to 14:00*(/light lunch from 12pm/)

Dear colleague,

Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed a good break over the Christmas period.

*_Next week sees the first_*in our series of three small seminars we are 
running as a continuation of the work around The Politics of Climate 
Change with Anthony Giddens. *__*


Amidst the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression climate 
change and energy security have slipped down the political agenda. The 
recent outcome of the Durban Summit was an important step in agreeing a 
binding successor to the Kyoto protocol. But alone it is simply not 
enough. Negotiations about limiting carbon emissions have so far had a 
very limited effect on the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.


This seminar series will take a non-partisan look at the particular 
advantages and pitfalls of alternative energy sources.


***NEXT WEEK -- REGISTER NOW***

*12th January 12.30-2pm 'The prospects for geo-engineering'*

/Confirmed Speakers/

*Anthony Giddens,*former director of the LSE and author of The Politics 
of Climate Change.


*Martin Rees,*Master of Trinity College Cambridge, former President of 
the Royal Society.


*James Wilsdon*, professor of science and democracy at the University of 
Sussex former director of the Science Policy Centre at the Royal Society.


*17th January 12.30-2pm 'Shale gas: Positive breakthrough or 
environmental disaster?'*


/Confirmed Speakers/

*Anthony Giddens*, former director of the LSE and author of The Politics 
of Climate Change.


*Paul Stevens*, senior research fellow, energy environment and 
development, Chatham House, emeritus professor of petroleum policy at 
the University of Dundee.


*26th January 12.30-2pm 'What Role for Nuclear Power?'*

/Confirmed Speakers/

*Paul Ekins*, professor of Energy and Environment Policy at the UCL 
Energy Institute, University College London.


*Craig Bennett*, director of Friends of the Earth's policy and campaigns 
department and formerly Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge 
Programme for Sustainability Leadership


*Paul Dorfman*, founding co-ordinator of Nuclear Consulting Group and 
senior researcher, University of Warwick


Please let us know if you would like to attend.

We look forward to meeting you in January

Kind regards,

Katherine

Katherine Roberts

**Stakeholder  Events Manager**

Policy Network

DL: 0207 340 2216

E: krobe...@policy-network.net

Follow Policy Network

(w) www.policy-network.net http://www.policy-network.net/(t) twitter 
@policynetwork
http://twitter.com/#%21/policynetwork(nl) Policy Network Newsletter 
http://www.policy-network.net/register(f) Facebook 
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Policy-Network/160270683241?ref=ts


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[geo] Re: anti-moral hazard?; Bodansky on law; Libya's wind farms

[Oliver Tickell]

The Libya wind greenhouse idea looks like fun but would surely incur
massive capital cost. Will it really be a better investment that solar
PV now that PV capacity has fallen below $1/W? Or better than
conventional wind turbines in Western Sahara? Oliver.

On Dec 8, 1:28 pm, J.L. Reynolds j.l.reyno...@uvt.nl wrote:
 I've been poked more than once by Andrew Lockley to cross-post from my 
 Twitter feed to this group. I'll try to do so (but also encourage you all to 
 follow me at @geoengpolicy ). For now, three interesting items:

 An editorial in the UK Guardian cited the prospect of climate engineering as 
 reason to push harder for mitigation. Is this the anti-moral hazard in 
 action?http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/03/climate-change-ob...

 Daniel Bodansky is one of the leading scholars of international environmental 
 law.  He wrote on climate engineering back in 1996, I think. A recent draft 
 paper of his is attached.

 The delegation from Libya's transitional government to Durban COP17 touted a 
 proposed alternative energy scheme (copied below). It got the attention of 
 Clare Heywood, and subsequently Andrew Sullivan, one of the most widely read 
 political bloggers. Although not climate engineering, Heywood and then 
 Sullivan framed it as 
 such.http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0f852f8c-1d00-11e1-a26a-00144feabdc0.h...http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/12/to-1750-or-beyond/http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/12/reviving-1750-climato...http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/12/were-boned.html

 Best,
 - Jesse

 The Libyan Climate Change Initiative he has come to Durban to promote would 
 see dozens of enormous greenhouse-like structures up to 15km in diameter 
 built across the Sahara and Arabian deserts.
 Each would suck in air, that would be heated and then escape at high speed 
 through large venting towers.
 This conversion of daylight into steady winds would, he said, power rings 
 of wind turbines that would, with the help of a huge global network of 
 electricity connectors, generate enough power to end the world's reliance on 
 traditional fossil fuels.

 -
 Jesse L. Reynolds, M.S.
 PhD Candidate
 European and International Public Law
 Tilburg Sustainability Center
 Tilburg University, The Netherlands
 email: 
 J.L.Reyno...@uvt.nlhttp://www.tilburguniversity.edu/webwijs/show/?uid=j.l.reynoldshttp://twitter.com/geoengpolicy

  Bodansky 2011 Governing Climate Engineering.pdf
 1201KViewDownload

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[geo] Re: Monbiot Claims SAI already tested ... with catastrophic results

[Oliver Tickell]

Re choice of minerals, it must really depend on what is locally
available so as to minimise transport costs and emissions - and
particularly to include readily available stocks of mine waste, for
example from nickel mines, diamond mines. Mine wastes are great as
there's lots of them, there is no need to cause fresh environmental
damage, infrastructure - roads, railways, ports etc - is generally in
place to shift them, and often they are already milled to some extent,
reducing grinding overheads (both $ and C). Choices typically include
olivine / serpentine / peridotite / granite / volcanic ash.

BTW someone previously said there was loads of Ca silicate. For some
reasons there is mainly Mg silicate with not much Ca silicate.
Doubtless the result of some twist of ocean chemistry which I have not
yet elucidated.

Also to pick up on another discussion, the reaction we want now is not
silicate to carbonate, but silicate to bicarbonate, which typically
ends up in the oceanic reservoir - like that you get double the CO2
sequestration. This is the natural result of dispersal and weathering
in the aequeous phase. On this basis a tonne of olivine gives you a
little over a tonne of CO2 sequestration.

Oliver.

On Sep 26, 4:45 am, rongretlar...@comcast.net wrote:
 Oliver, Greg etal

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[geo] Re: Monbiot Claims SAI already tested ... with catastrophic results

[Oliver Tickell]

Actually this option does not look too bad on first sight - low cost,
low tech, so that's a good start, and the chemistry looks right too.
Biggest problem is the delay of approx 100y before the results come
through, if I read the paper right. That's a long time for us to have
to wait. Also if we change our minds, its a long lead time for
reversal.

Go for Mg silicate weathering on land / intertidal zones, and the CO2
drawdown is immediate, operating on a decadal time scale.

Re the kinetics of Mg silicate, they are unfavourable if carried out
in a chemistry lab. Carried out in nature and enhanced by activity of
fungi, bacteria, roots, digestive systems of worms and higher animals,
etc, it's a great deal faster - the biospheric enhancement factor
speeds it up by several orders of magnitude.

Oliver.

On Sep 26, 4:09 pm, Rau, Greg r...@llnl.gov wrote:
 And to round out the options, let’s not forget Harvey’s 
 limestone-rain-in-the-ocean 
 method:http://iod.ucsd.edu/courses/sio278/documents/harvey_08_co2_mitigation...
 While billed as (eventual) air capture, I view this as ocean CO2 capture – 
 bomb upwelling areas with limestone to consume the excess CO2(aq) prior to 
 degassing to air.  Don’t forget that the ocean emits in gross 300 GT CO2/yr. 
 If we can cut that by 1% it would have a huge effect on air CO2.  No?
 Humbly,
 Greg

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[geo] Re: Monbiot Claims SAI already tested ... with catastrophic results

[Oliver Tickell]

Hi, I'm familiar with CQuestrate and Tim Kruger, but my understanding
is that this is all about kilning CaCO3 to CaO + CO2, then hydrating
CaO to Ca(OH)2, then putting that in ocean to react with CO2 to Ca++ +
2(HCO3)- - a net gain of one CO2. The problems are that this is energy
intensive, and in alkaline conditions you get a high rate of CaCO3
precipitation which just takes you back where you started, and in the
long term all the Ca / CO2 ends up as CaCO3 anyway. If CQuestrate is
now taking silicates as their starting point, I can only be glad that
colleagues such as Olaf Schuilling, and to some extent I, have managed
to convince him that Mg silicate is a much better starting point than
Ca carbonate. Oliver Tickell.

On Sep 23, 3:20 pm, Chris chris.viv...@cefas.co.uk wrote:
 Oliver,

 In his reference to Dumping lime or calcium or magnesium silicates
 into
 the sea..., George Monbiot was referring to the concept put forward
 by Tim Kruger of Cquestrate - seewww.cquestrate.com.

 Chris Vivian.

 On Sep 23, 12:40 pm, Oliver Tickell oliver.tick...@kyoto2.org wrote:







  Monbiot's real mistake here is to swallow the conclusion of the Royal
  Society report on the subject, whole and undigested, without critical
  scrutiny or attention to other sources of information - in particular
  as regards the weathering of magnesium silicate (not enough Ca
  silicate to bother with):

  Monbiot reports: Dumping lime or calcium or magnesium silicates into
  the sea, where they react with carbon dioxide. Fairly safe. Effective.
  Expensive. Has
  the advantage of potentially reversing ocean acidification, but the
  amount of quarrying required to produce enough ground-up rock is
  likely to be prohibitive. 

  A) where does he get the idea that it's about dumping it in the sea?
  It is about spreading the rock powder on land, and in intertidal
  zones.
  B) So it's fairly safe. Why only fairly? This is just to
  accelerate a natural process that is going on all the time anyway.
  C) Expensive - how much? People who have done the sums
  conservatively estimate $10-15 per tCO2. Making it one of the cheapest
  options around.
  D) It will only potentially reverse ocean acidification. Well,
  insofar as the science of chemistry potentially applies. He seems to
  be implying that maybe chemistry is potentially all wrong. George,
  tell us more!
  D) The amount of quarry is likely to be prohibitive - is it? Has he
  done the sums? Has he asked anyone who has done the sums? Or is this
  just his uniformed guess? For a start there are Gt of already mined
  rock that can be used, in mine tailings around the world. From then
  on, roughly 1t of rock sequesters 1t of CO2. So you need to mine an
  amount of rock comparable to the amount of fossil fuel we are burning.
  If it's not prohibitive to mine the coal, why's it prohibitive to
  mine the rock?

  Oliver Tickell.

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[geo] Re: Monbiot Claims SAI already tested ... with catastrophic results

[Oliver Tickell]

Monbiot's real mistake here is to swallow the conclusion of the Royal
Society report on the subject, whole and undigested, without critical
scrutiny or attention to other sources of information - in particular
as regards the weathering of magnesium silicate (not enough Ca
silicate to bother with):

Monbiot reports: Dumping lime or calcium or magnesium silicates into
the sea, where they react with carbon dioxide. Fairly safe. Effective.
Expensive. Has
the advantage of potentially reversing ocean acidification, but the
amount of quarrying required to produce enough ground-up rock is
likely to be prohibitive. 

A) where does he get the idea that it's about dumping it in the sea?
It is about spreading the rock powder on land, and in intertidal
zones.
B) So it's fairly safe. Why only fairly? This is just to
accelerate a natural process that is going on all the time anyway.
C) Expensive - how much? People who have done the sums
conservatively estimate $10-15 per tCO2. Making it one of the cheapest
options around.
D) It will only potentially reverse ocean acidification. Well,
insofar as the science of chemistry potentially applies. He seems to
be implying that maybe chemistry is potentially all wrong. George,
tell us more!
D) The amount of quarry is likely to be prohibitive - is it? Has he
done the sums? Has he asked anyone who has done the sums? Or is this
just his uniformed guess? For a start there are Gt of already mined
rock that can be used, in mine tailings around the world. From then
on, roughly 1t of rock sequesters 1t of CO2. So you need to mine an
amount of rock comparable to the amount of fossil fuel we are burning.
If it's not prohibitive to mine the coal, why's it prohibitive to
mine the rock?

Oliver Tickell.

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Re: [geo] New report(s) on carbon dioxide removal

[Oliver Tickell]

My own view in all of this is that what we need above all is research so 
we are in a position of knowledge, not conjecture. There may well be a 
synergy between biochar and rock dust (and why not ground up bones and 
organic waste from abbatoir / fish processing waste while we are about 
it?). There is the potential for a hugely transformative technology here 
- and the experiments need to be done so we know the answers.


Oliver, Kyoto2.

On 21/09/2011 22:53, John Nissen wrote:


Hi Duncan,

Thank you for your tremendous effort to describe all the available
CDR/NET technologies together, in a comprehensive way such to allow a
comparison.

I've been discussing biochar and rock crushing with Ron Larson and
Oliver Tickell; we concluded that there was scope for a combined method,
which could be scaled up to remove many gigatonnes of carbon per year at
low cost.  (We've used weight of carbon rather than CO2 in our
calculations.)

I think you should have a separate column for benefits, because biochar
has several:  it improves soil, reduces need for fertiliser (thus avoids
considerable emissions), reduces water requirements, and is applicable
in poorer countries for improved, productive and profitable farming.

It is now recognised that ocean acidification could be far more serious
and more urgent than hitherto suggested, such that we'd need CDR to get
the atmospheric level of CO2 below 350 ppm within twenty or thirty
years.  For the first ten years, we'd have to build up CDR such as to
cancel out global CO2 emissions.  Then we'd have to ramp up CDR a bit
further to actually reduce the CO2 level.  I would like to see biochar
take a significant role - but it would require education and
infrastructure projects to mobilise farmers worldwide.

Cheers,

John

--

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Duncan McLaren
duncan.p.mcla...@gmail.com mailto:duncan.p.mcla...@gmail.com wrote:

Group members may find my assessment of negative emissions
technologies (NETs) of interest.

The full report runs to about 100 pages, and can be found at

https://sites.google.com/site/mclarenerc/research/negative-emissions-technologies

A summary version written for Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and
NI) will be published online later today.

The assessment covers a wide range of NETs, but not SRM techniques. It
considers capacity, cost, side effects, constraints, technical
readiness, accountability and more for about 30 options.

I'd be delighted to get feedback and comments.

regards
Duncan

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[geo] Re: Public perceptions paper

[Oliver Tickell]

This CF question is actually quite complex. You can have a CF of 0.7 for 
a nuke but actually that's because it's working 70% of the time and for 
30% it is broken or undergoing maintenance (often for longish periods of 
days / weeks / months). A CCGT with a CF of 0.7 would most likely be 
modulating its output to meet actual demand and the 30% of 
non-generation would mainly represent times of low demand, with routine 
maintenance timed to take place during low demand periods.


This means that the CCGT is making a far more valuable contribution to 
electricity supply than the nuke: there are times while the nuke is down 
when additional fossil supply will be needed to make good the shortfall 
(adding to the nuke's effective emissions); and there are periods when 
the nuke is generating when the CCGT would be on standby or shut down 
for the night (reducing the nuke's effective emissions reductions). So a 
KWh from a nuke does not directly compare to a KWh from a CCGT either in 
terms of value, or in terms of CO2 emissions. This needs to be taken 
into account.


Yes, can you contact the authors for their view? Oliver.

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e: oli...@its.me.uk
p: +44 1865 728118
a: 379 Meadow Lane, Oxford OX4 4BL, UK.


On 23/08/2011 14:32, Stephen Salter wrote:

Oliver

Actual output for nuclear is typically around 0.7 but the carbon debt 
was all incurred before operation and turning them off does not reduce 
it.  The carbon for the plant is all released before operation and if 
this is delayed we may ask if there is a carbon equivalent of interest.


Let's ask Storm van Leeuwen.

Stephen

Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design
Institute for Energy Systems
School of Engineering
Mayfield Road
University of Edinburgh EH9  3JL
Scotland
Tel +44 131 650 5704
Mobile 07795 203 195
www.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs

On 23/08/2011 13:36, Oliver Tickell wrote:

Stephen, I was interested to see your recent post, below.

Reading the paper, there is something I am not clear about. A nuclear 
power station is typically on full blast all the time giving a 
capacity factor of 1 (except when it has to go off). However a gas 
plant will modulate its output according to demand, giving I would 
guess a typical capacity factor of say 0.6 (guess).


So, when the authors compare nuclear power and CCGT emissions, are 
they forcing the CCGT to have a CF of 1 like nuclear? If so this is 
to greatly exaggerate the actual CO2 emissions that you would expect 
from a CCGT.


Another factor to consider is that as we get more intermittent 
renewables like wind and solar PV on the grid, the effect will be to 
further reduce the CF of gas plant - since when wind is generating 
strongly, CCGTs will scale back their output. This will further 
reduce the CCGT's CO2 emissions


Regards, Oliver.


==

Stephen Salter s.sal...@ed.ac.uk Aug 23 11:58AM +0100 ^ 
mailbox:///C%7C/Documents%20and%20Settings/Oliver/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/s4tkdjyp.Oliver/Mail/Local%20Folders/Inbox?number=128158075#digest_top


Hi All

While a nuclear power station is working normally the main CO2 emissions
are the plant operators driving to work or slipping out for a smoke.
However quite a lot of oil is needed for more... 
http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering/msg/6c0b24968aac4022



The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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[geo] Public perceptions paper

[Oliver Tickell]

Stephen, I was interested to see your recent post, below.

Reading the paper, there is something I am not clear about. A nuclear 
power station is typically on full blast all the time giving a capacity 
factor of 1 (except when it has to go off). However a gas plant will 
modulate its output according to demand, giving I would guess a typical 
capacity factor of say 0.6 (guess).


So, when the authors compare nuclear power and CCGT emissions, are they 
forcing the CCGT to have a CF of 1 like nuclear? If so this is to 
greatly exaggerate the actual CO2 emissions that you would expect from a 
CCGT.


Another factor to consider is that as we get more intermittent 
renewables like wind and solar PV on the grid, the effect will be to 
further reduce the CF of gas plant - since when wind is generating 
strongly, CCGTs will scale back their output. This will further reduce 
the CCGT's CO2 emissions


Regards, Oliver.


==

Stephen Salter s.sal...@ed.ac.uk Aug 23 11:58AM +0100 ^ 
mailbox:///C%7C/Documents%20and%20Settings/Oliver/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/s4tkdjyp.Oliver/Mail/Local%20Folders/Inbox?number=128158075#digest_top


Hi All

While a nuclear power station is working normally the main CO2 emissions
are the plant operators driving to work or slipping out for a smoke.
However quite a lot of oil is needed for more... 
http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering/msg/6c0b24968aac4022


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