Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

• Challenge 1: Scaling up
• Challenge 2: Energy requirement
• Challenge 3: Siting
• Challenge 4: Cost

the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO2 credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn't look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, and the price to buy the company's carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.

The researchers recognize that there is room for energy efficiency improvements in the future, but DAC units will always be subject to higher work requirements than CCS applied to power plant or industrial flue gases, and there is not a clear pathway to reducing work requirements much below the levels of current DAC technologies.

"Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue."

The Northwest Landowners Association, the North Dakota Farm Bureau and others argue that state laws regulating the underground storage of carbon dioxide are unconstitutional.

“This is really just a made-up work for taking property,” the Northwest Landowners said in a news release Thursday.

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Since peat bogs collect and store large amounts of carbon, they are what is known as a “carbon sink.” So, one way to help the planet would be to protect these spaces, but unfortunately peat, and often the land, is valuable.

"Worldwide, the remaining area of near natural peatland (over 3 million km2) sequesters 0.37 gigatonnes of CO2 a year. Peat soils contain more than 600 gigatonnes of carbon which represents up to 44% of all soil carbon, and exceeds the carbon stored in all other vegetation types including the world’s forests.“ IUCN

Peat is built up dead vegetation that(thanks to the wet and low-oxygen environments) does not break down, creating a sponge-like effect. They hold carbon, help control water flow(helping with both floods and droughts), and improve water quality through filtering.

If harvested on a small and sustainable scale, it can provide a firewood alternative, a plant substrate, a fertilizer, and more. However, the peatlands are drained on large scales, so it is important that people know the importance of these (often hated) areas.

More Info:

• https://youtu.be/MtsQPV49cAk
• https://youtu.be/fOYaUZdgCA0
• https://youtu.be/r-LY17qcQEk

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:

On a slice of the ocean front in west Singapore, a startup is building a plant to turn carbon dioxide from air and seawater into the same material as seashells, in a process that will also produce "green" hydrogen — a much-hyped clean fuel.

The cluster of low-slung buildings starting to take shape in Tuas will become the "world's largest" ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant when completed later this year, according to Equatic, the startup behind it that was spun out of the University of California at Los Angeles. The idea is that the plant will pull water from the ocean, zap it with an electric current and run air through it to produce a series of chemical reactions to trap and store carbon dioxide as minerals, which can be put back in the sea or used on land... The $20 million facility will be fully operational by the end of the year and able to remove 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer of Equatic, which has partnered with Singapore's National Water Agency to construct the plant. That amount is equivalent to taking roughly 870 average passenger cars off the road. The ambition is to scale up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 removal a year by the end of 2026, and from there to millions of metric tons over the next few decades, Sanders told CNN. The plant can be replicated pretty much anywhere, he said, stacked up in modules "like lego blocks...."

The upfront costs are high but the company says it plans to make money by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their pollution, as well as selling the hydrogen produced during the process. Equatic has already signed a deal with Boeing to sell it 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen, which it plans to use to create green fuel, and to fund the removal of 62,000 metric tons of CO2.

There's other projects around the world attempting ocean-based carbon renewal, CNN notes. "Other projects include sprinkling iron particles into the ocean to stimulate CO2-absorbing phytoplankton, sinking seaweed into the depths to lock up carbon and spraying particles into marine clouds to reflect away some of the sun's energy."

But carbon-removal projects are controversial, criticized for being expensive, unproven at scale and a distraction from policies to cut fossil fuels. And when they involve the oceans — complex ecosystems already under huge strain from global warming — criticisms can get even louder. There are "big knowledge gaps" when it comes to ocean geoengineering generally, said Jean-Pierre Gatusso, an ocean scientist at the Sorbonne University in France. "I am very concerned with the fact that science lags behind the industry," he told CNN.

Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/427506

📢📢📢 OpenAir joins 350+ companies and organizations from across the CDR sector to call for a method-neutral EU #CRCF 🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺  docs.google.com/document/d/1...

quite a lot of captured CO2 can go into concrete. Maybe a cement (powder) producer is not able to tap into that method directly, but policy shifts will open it up. There are already several US states with low-embodied-carbon concrete laws creating markets for this purpose.

Any recommendations on books about biochar?

I recently read and enjoyed The Biochar Debate: Charcoal’s Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility by James Bruges. It’s a short read, slightly academic but not stuffy, and written with a sense of urgency. At the end he briefly talks about the CMF (Carbon Maintenance Fee) which I hadn’t heard of and is essentially a proposed strategy for financially incentivizing land-based carbon sequestration (reforestation, increasing soil carbon, etc). I would recommend this book to anyone interested in biochar or climate change.

What other biochar books do people like, and what do you like about them?

entry details in the image text. A QR code is provided for a registration link

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/3903718

Excerpt:

That’s the theory, anyway. But today, the lion’s share of the CO2 captured from industrial processes doesn’t go back into the ground. Instead, 60 percent of it is used to extract more oil, in a controversial process known as “enhanced oil recovery.”

“I think it’s a huge problem,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director of the advocacy group Oil Change International. “The oil and gas industry has done a very good job of co-opting our climate and clean energy policy.”

For over a decade, the U.S. government has been quietly funding the capture of CO2 that is ultimately used to drill more oil. Some experts and researchers argue that the climate impact is net positive: The oil will be drilled anyway, and the process can help companies learn how to capture CO2 more efficiently. But others say that the government shouldn’t be helping companies sustain more fossil fuel extraction.

Excerpt:

That’s the theory, anyway. But today, the lion’s share of the CO2 captured from industrial processes doesn’t go back into the ground. Instead, 60 percent of it is used to extract more oil, in a controversial process known as “enhanced oil recovery.”

“I think it’s a huge problem,” said Lorne Stockman, research co-director of the advocacy group Oil Change International. “The oil and gas industry has done a very good job of co-opting our climate and clean energy policy.”

For over a decade, the U.S. government has been quietly funding the capture of CO2 that is ultimately used to drill more oil. Some experts and researchers argue that the climate impact is net positive: The oil will be drilled anyway, and the process can help companies learn how to capture CO2 more efficiently. But others say that the government shouldn’t be helping companies sustain more fossil fuel extraction.

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