The Mauna Loa observatory’s average atmospheric CO2 in September 2022 was 416 ppm value. That represents an increase from the year before and the years before that. That’s grown by approximately 50% from around 280 ppm in 1750. And that doesn’t account for the atmospheric methane growth that has a strong potential to cause global warming, known as up about 30% since 1983 . This essay contrasts the facts of what will start working to start reducing the CO2 and CO2e in the atmosphere with the overhyped and too hoped-for silver bullets.
Wherever there is a Gordian Knot, there are some who desperately hope that an Alexander will appear with a sword and cut it, relieving them of the need to take any action. And when there is desperation, there are individuals and groups willing to take advantage of it for a number of reasons, including the continuation of their business models, VC investment, or just more research grants (the last of which I dont begrudge in any way shape or form).
Now for the sexy nonsense and practical approaches to reducing atmospheric carbon and methane. The most optimistic quadrant, which receives the most attention and, ideally, the most cash, is where these debates always begin. It’s a positive place to begin. Sadly, just a few items with legs can be found in that area.
Let’s begin by willingly planting a tree. That is a heartwarming tale that appeals to people everywhere. It’s good that certain communities host yearly events. Yes, everything would be wonderful if everyone planted a tree! Okay, no. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with planting a tree, many trees would need to be planted in order to even begin to temporarily address the issue.
According to a 2015 study, Mapping tree density at a global scale , with overlapping authors and published in the journal Nature, there are already around 3 trillion trees on the earth. Since humans started altering the environment to suit our needs, we have removed 3 trillion. Only the last 25 years’ worth of CO2 emissions (with no effect on methane) would require a trillion trees to be planted in order to be balanced out. We don’t magically acquire anything more. It only continues till the trees are uprooted. More to come on the trillion trees.
Less than 8 billion individuals, or 0.8% of a trillion, live on the planet. About 700 million people, who make less than $1.90 per day, are so poor that they are considerably more likely to eat nearby trees’ blossoms, fruit, nuts, leaves, and bark than to establish new ones. Without a doubt, the 25% of the world’s poorest people have issues that outweigh global warming, and as a result, they should not be included in tree planting efforts unless we pay them. Actually, 0.6% of the population might plant a tree.
However, it’s optional. The real population that might plant a tree each year is probably in the single digits. Count that as 0.03 percent of the trillion trees that would need to be planted. That will take far too long.
I cherish trees. I voluntarily planted around 12,000 of them one weekend. My friend who owned the land, though, provided the tractor, tree-planting equipment, and seedlings in addition to purchasing the beer. I didn’t do anything about my sore back from bending down for two days and roughly 20 hours to drop seedlings where they needed to go. Additionally, like my friend, I am a blatant exception. Additionally, it’s possible that later owners cleared the area entirely or in part of the trees.
So, however how endearing it is to see children doing that, we cannot rely on strangers’ goodwill when it comes to finding a solution for trees. Voting will be the only way to address climate change because voluntary actions and improved personal choices will not be sufficient.
Then there is carbon sequestration, use, and storage. I created and iterated on the diagram above a few times. It is a diagram of the scale-problem. The extra 50% I suggested in the first paragraph amounts to roughly one trillion billion tons of CO2. We annually add 35 to 41 billion tons of CO2.
However, our annual global carbon usage—which accounts for all greenhouses, soda production, enhanced oil recovery, and initiatives like ClimeWorks—is only 230 million tons of CO2. A third of that, or around 80 million tons, is used for enhanced oil recovery, which involves injecting CO2 into exhausted oil wells in order to extract more oil, which, when carried out as instructed, produces more CO2 than was injected down. Oh, and the 230 million tons of CO2 that are used today are produced by burning fossil fuels, extracting it from underground where it has already been sequestered to perform improved oil recovery, or using mine tax credits to return it to its original location.
Equinor’s Sleipner gas project in the North Sea and other facilities like it will be reduced to a global CO2 market of about 140 million tons after enhanced oil recovery is eliminated. That represents around 0.4% of the CO2 emissions produced globally in a single year. Although switching to neutral sources of CO2 makes perfect sense, that is still a rounding error. It is the cause of how just barely CCUS enters the practical quadrant.
The market for carbon utilization won’t grow fast enough to significantly reduce our carbon emissions. To believe it will is absurd. However, billions of dollars are being invested in the area by various parties, including governments with considerable fossil fuel income, VCs, and fossil fuel firms. Of course, both the fossil fuel business and the governments that are supported by it require the fig leaf. The VC market is dominated by get-rich-quick MBA types, and there is a striking lack of STEM types, thus they frequently make poor decisions based on incomplete information.
The next item that has a foot in both the practical and desirable quadrant is flue carbon capture, which seizes CO2 as it leaves cement kilns and smokestacks. We’ve been doing this for well than a century as a CO2 feedstock for industry. It is generally known how the chemistry works. We are fully aware of what we are doing, the associated costs, and other details. There is no mystery at all. With initiatives like the Boundary Dam and Petra Nova carbon capture and sequestration debacles, with the latter still being portrayed as a success by many of the usual suspects, the fossil fuel industry is eager to propagate the notion that we simply need to put filters on smokestacks and we’re done.
Both were in no way commercially feasible. Both only managed to catch a very small portion of the total coal emissions from their respective plants. To capture, move, and distribute the CO2, both needed a lot more energy. Both were employed for increased oil recovery, which again produces more CO2 than is buried beneath. Because of this, a sizable portion of flue capture occurs in the illogical quadrants. It’s not a solution; it’s just being marketed as one, whether it’s through high-budget PR campaigns from the fossil fuel business or sincere workers with aspirations of success.
But it also stands a chance in the non-sexy and useful category. Cement is just one of the industrial processes for which we lack excellent solutions. Limestone is heated in a kiln as part of the cement-making process to produce quicklime. CO2 is a significant byproduct of that process. One of the biggest sources of CO2 is the production of cement, and even though we can largely power the process with green electricity, the clinker cylinder poses a challenge because of the benefits of a jet of flame, according to Paul Martin. In some cases, it will be more cost-effective to capture the CO2 from the limestone than to use an alternative cement chemistry. And every year, we will still require around 140 million tons of CO2.
It makes enough sense to have a leg in the dull but useful quadrant if we capture the CO2 from activities we can’t get rid of yet and use it in processes that need it. However, let me remind you that our yearly emissions are 140 million tons of CO2, which is a rounding error. This is not a brilliant sword slicing through a huge web of rope solution; it is an every little bit helps approach.
Now let’s move on to the overrated and essentially pointless quadrant. Direct air capture is given top honors. Think of 1.2 miles of 8 feet thick by 60 feet high fans that drip liquid continuously in order to remove a million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. Imagine heating the liquid to 900 degrees Celsius in order to release the CO2 from the carbonate solution and allow it to be captured afterwards. Imagine that the entire system is powered by natural gas, with two additional carbon capture devices added to catch the CO2 released during the burning of the gas, which accounts for 50% of the CO2 removed from the atmosphere. Imagine if natural gas upstream methane leaks would increase the amount of CO2e by 50%, but they would not be captured. Imagine forcing CO2 from the atmosphere and burned natural gas into tapped oil wells underground to liquefy and enable the extraction of additional crude oil. Imagine that crude oil was refined and burned, releasing 4-5 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as was taken out of it.
Imagine a couple of companies operating this horrible shell business for $250 per ton of CO2 from governments.
Yes, that is the Oxy and Carbon Engineering Permian Basin direct air capture and enhanced oil recovery project, which I foresaw during my in-depth investigation of the direct air capture company a little over three years ago, when it was making headlines everywhere.
Three things stand out about this. A million tons is a rounding error compared to our annual emissions, and the Oxy/CE operation will still release far more CO2e than it will be able to absorb. The third issue is that for any business case to have the remotest chance of success, governments must pour outrageous sums of money into the industry.
Only Carbon Engineering is the worst in this undesirable area. ClimeWorks is somewhat more sincere, yet it is so widely out of all reasonable scales that it resembles a toothpick lost in a forest. It has received an glowing headlines rating for beginning construction on a facility that will remove 36,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. Although 36,000 tons may seem like a lot, consider the situation. When a million tons was already a rounding error on a gnat’s behind, that amounts to 0.036 million tons. It is so much out of proportion to the situation that counting the zeros is pointless.
Do you desire atmospheric CO2? Burn a plant and collect the CO2 it produces. As bad as climate tech gets is creating Rube Goldberg devices to increase oil recovery and siphon money out of government coffers.
The principles of physics and economics are blatantly denied in Saudi Aramco’s gas-powered automobile with carbon capture on the exhaust, which they proudly present at conferences every year, without a care in the world. They are eager to maintain the pretense even though, I’m sure, they are fully aware that it is absolute nonsense. People continue to come up with this ridiculous notion, obviously never having given the chemistry of burning liquid hydrocarbons in the presence of oxygen and the resulting considerably greater mass and volume of CO2 even the first attention. And they obviously never considered what the automobiles with the enormous balloons on them would do with the CO2. Hey, I can still drive my gas guzzler, they merely reason.
Let’s talk about methane flaring next. For a while, it was a wonderful hope. A lot of unusable methane was being pumped straight into the atmosphere by oil and coal operations located all over the world. Additionally, methane is an issue because its global warming potential per UN IPCC 6 ranges from 25 to 71 times that of carbon dioxide for periods of 100 and 20 years, respectively. Yes, the methane emissions of today will be extremely detrimental over the long term and for the next 20 years. Due to its quicker cycling out of the atmosphere, it has a lower concentration than that gas.
However, recollect how I claimed that atmospheric methane has significantly increased? That went up to 1.9 parts per million, or almost 1,900 parts per billion, to make the comparison. 71 times 1.9 is 135, which is nearly equivalent to the 136 more parts per million of CO2 since the start of the industrial revolution.
Yes, methane is an issue on a par with all the carbon dioxide we have produced over the future decades of warming.
(Before atmospheric scientists jump on my case too much, I realize the comparison’s flaws. The fact that it is of a similar order of magnitude but not exactly equal is indicative.)
Of course, climate scientists discovered this before to governmental policy makers. Natural gas was preferable to coal because it has the word “natural” in its name, right? So, natural gas served as the transitional fuel. Even though the STEM professionals in the fossil fuel sector should have known better, they didn’t see it as their responsibility to highlight the enormous negative externalities linked to their profit margins.
Because of this increased reliance on natural gas, there are now much greater emissions of it. The main goal thus became burning excesses off close to coal, gas, and oil extraction, processing, and refinement plants. After all, when natural gas is burned in the atmosphere, its high global warming potential CH4 is converted to CO2, which is the primary cause of global warming, along with water and other substances like nitrous oxides, one of which is a long-lasting chemical with a global warming potential 265 times that of CO2. Ooops.
Flaring does not release as much five times as much methane as the industry claims it does, notwithstanding their numbers. Yes, it is extremely inefficient and dirty to burn fossil fuels in open flames outside of controlled combustion chambers. large surprise
Now let’s go on to the following, boring and useless, quadrant. Let’s begin by discussing mineral weathering in relation to CO2 atmospheric decline. This is literally observing the chemical makeup of crushed rocks slowly alter over months or years in a field. More boring than watching paint dry is this.
Two of the most frequently mentioned minerals for weathering are olivine and magnesite, with olivine having a minor advantage in publicity and magnesite having catalyst-induced faster weathering labs. Naturally, the accelerated weathering takes 72 days as opposed to considerably longer, so faster is relative.
The advocates of olivine weathering propose that we mine gigatons of the silicate from the tectonic zones where it is typically abundant, crush and process it sufficiently to have a reasonable percentage of the mineral, transport it over a distance of potentially thousands of kilometers, and spread it on the ground. They don’t appear to understand the energy and carbon consequences of a mining and distribution operation that would dwarf sand and limestone for the global concrete market in order to make a significant difference. This is about as realistic as hoping that all 8 billion people would suddenly develop a taste for autocastration, fermented yak milk, Morris dancing, and Nickelback.
The worst is accelerated magnesite. The entire area is replete with instances of even the most minute scale and scope assessments being applied incorrectly.
A variation of this is really being done by ClimeWorks, the direct air capture nonsense-burger mentioned earlier. It involves combining CO2 and water before injecting it into a basaltic rock formation, where it reacts with the minerals already present to generate carbonates. The theory is just as ridiculous as it is when given even the tiniest thinking, yet it continues to garner attention and funding from institutions and individuals who ought to know better, with $650 million in the most recent round, to my knowledge.
The tedious and unworkable notion of inspecting the vast majority of the world’s fossil fuel and natural gas sites, processing facilities, pipelines, storage tanks, and LNG ships at least once a year, finding leaks, and instructing the thousands of companies that own, run, or have abandoned these facilities to fix the leaks is also included in this category. Just the five largest countries by pipeline length have around 600,000 km of natural gas pipelines , which gives you an idea of the scope of the task. Many of them are underwater, making external inspection difficult, such like the Nord Stream 1andamp;2 that were destroyed in an act that was thought to be Russian sabotage and the Magrreb Pipeline that runs from Nigeria to Europe.
This is a profoundly idealistic and utopian view, given that a somewhat ludicrous proportion of natural gas has been coming from the rogue state of Russia and its environs, and that US shale oil and fracking providers are among the worst in the world in terms of methane emissions. This is a ridiculous premise, as seen by the $200 billion liability of abandoned oil and gas wells in Alberta alone. The fossil fuel industry, as others have noted, is a Ponzi scam, collecting profits from new extraction now while claiming to cover bad externalities with future revenues that will never materialize.
The average amount of upstream methane leakage for methane that is provided for use around the world is 1.5%. This converts 400 kg of CO2 per MWh of natural gas generation into 800 kg of CO2e per MWh, which is roughly similar to the finest coal facilities and is therefore not very good. With around 1,200 kg of CO2e per MWh, natural gas generation is as terrible as the worst coal plants in the USA with its andgt;3% upstream emissions.
The very slim hope that Europe is clinging to for continuing to use natural gas in excessive volumes despite Russia having catastrophically cut off supply with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines is that very few of the absolute best run European sites and pipelines are below 1% upstream leakage. This is the flimsy hope of the blue hydrogen industry as well—that somehow, someway, everyone involved in the entire supply chain will turn out to be outstanding equipment maintainers capable of covering huge areas. Without significant infusions of government funding in one way or another, that is not going to happen.
Additionally, it won’t address methane produced by coal or shale oil sources. Or from waste dumps. or hog ranches.
What then will be the solution to the issues of too much CO2 and CO2 in the atmosphere? The final quadrant is unsexy but useful. Two of the portions are absolutely dull because they advocated for closing the holes of CO2 and CO2e that we have already dug in our atmosphere.
Building a lot of renewable energy sources and electrifying everything are the two main strategies for reducing CO2 emissions. This is why those two measures are at the top of my frequently requested “The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work.” Multibillion dollar fund management companies, renewables conferences, and renewables developers wishing to energise their professional employees and aid them in strategizing for new markets have all requested the presentation based on that information and related debate.
It’s easy to build a lot of renewable energy. Every MWh of electricity produced using renewable sources replaces a MWh produced using fossil fuels. This entails the removal of 0.4 to 1.2 tons of CO2. Although storage and transmission are required to support renewable energy, producing vast amounts of predominantly wind and solar energy takes priority. To release CO2 from electricity, a system’s capacity factor does not have to be 90%. While renewables are more quicker and less expensive to install than nuclear, it doesn’t hurt.
The process of electrifying things is also quite simple.
Find all the locations where rejected energy is leaving energy services (the useful energy that actually benefits us) or electrical generation, find the source of the rejected energy (usually waste heat from burning fossil fuels), and then substitute electric devices for the energy coming from burning fossil fuels. gas ranges? electric ranges. gas fireplaces a heat pump. EVs? Cars? Gas as a source of heat in industry? Resistance or electric arc heaters. generating electricity with fossil fuels? Back to green energy.
Every time fossil fuels are used to directly distribute energy, that energy service becomes significantly more efficient. While internal combustion vehicles are only approximately 20% efficient well-to-wheel, electric vehicles are 80% efficient wind turbine-to-wheel. Because of this, all of my prior quadrant charts for land, marine, and aircraft transportation showed that the segment’s electrification should be maximized in the useful but unattractive quadrant. Avoiding issues is rarely praised, rewarded, or attractive.
When electrification is the main focus, the 58.1 quadrillion BTUs of rejected energy decrease. The principal energy inputs on the chart’s left therefore decrease as well.
All of the oil, gas, and coal we use doesn’t need to be replaced. A third of the usable energy they provide must be replaced. That is made simple by renewables for electrified energy services.
And that makes it more significant than most people understand that renewable energy sources will contribute 10% of the world’s primary energy in 2021. The efficiency of direct use of electricity has been rising along with electrification of transportation, heating, and other similar systems, which has been improving for years as renewables increase as a proportion of energy. In addition, Vaclav Smil appears to either downplay or overlook this important point in his studies, which has significantly contributed to Bill Gates focusing his attention in the incorrect locations.
Similar to CO2e, the solution may be summed up in four simple steps: leave natural gas in the ground, switch to different refrigerants, put an end to burning things, and improve agriculture.
Leaving natural gas in the ground means that electrical heating and renewable electricity generating will eventually replace it as a source of energy. The global 1.5% upstream emissions levels of the fossil fuel industry will be meaningless if we stop pumping it, plug the wells, and destroy the pipelines for scrap steel since there won’t be any upstream natural gas. Even if it may take some time, the situation is urgent given the size of the issue.
The good thing about methane is that it degrades quite quickly, so if we stop releasing it into the atmosphere, levels will drop fairly soon. Stop digging the hole instead of attempting to speed up the procedure.
Thankfully, switching refrigerants is much simpler. I recently noticed the cheese display fridge at one of my neighborhood grocery stores was only around 25% full and that there were a few HVAC technicians watching it. They informed me during our talk that they were switching from R-22, which has a 1,760-degree global warming potential, to CO2, which has a 1,050-degree global warming potential. When I explained that fuel cell vehicles demand 700 bar hydrogen, they recognized that the required to treble system pressure to 150 bar wasn’t as bad as they had initially feared. Perspective is a topic that extends beyond art classes.
The Kigali Amendment, which has been ratified by nearly all important nations, including the US and China, focuses on this. It modifies the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer by substituting HFCs for CFCs. That wasn’t so awful, but HFOs and CO2 are considerably better than HFCs for preventing global warming than HFCs, which both damaged the ozone layer and were even worse greenhouse gases than HFCs. Due to how simple it is to make the global transition, this entire area is ranked number one on the Project Drawdown cost-benefit analysis ranking . Naturally, it is also on my short list.
Stopping the burning of objects may appear unnecessary. After all, it would appear that electrifying transportation, heating, and power would take care of everything. But in the CO2e category we circle back to the nitrous oxide N2O, which develops from nitrogen and oxygen in the air in the presence of energy from burning things. Additionally, it has 265 times the ability to cause global warming as CO2. Furthermore, it prefers to persist in the atmosphere as N2O for a very long time, in contrast to methane (CH4), which decomposes only fairly quickly. It is produced by jet engines, so reducing the use of biofuels in that section as longer routes may be electrified is crucial. It is produced by marine engines, so it is crucial to reduce the use of biofuels in that sector by electrifying all that can be and properly optimizing the remaining engines. Almost all open flames emit N2O, and we burn a lot of things. Therefore, we must reduce that.
The largest source of N2O is agriculture, notably fertilizers made with ammonia. From birth to finish, they are a problem. The majority of them are made from natural gas, which has methane leaks upstream. They are mostly produced by steam reformation, which combines oxygen from the air with carbon from natural gas to produce a significant amount of CO2. Additionally, when they are applied to fields, they undergo a chemical change that results in the production of a lot of N2O. Accordingly, 10–12 tons of CO2e are produced for every ton of fertilizer.
Due to improvements made during the green revolution and the consolidation of subsistence farmers’ use of semi-arable land into agribusinesses, our fertilizer consumption has remained relatively stable in comparison to the growth of our population and GDP. But even as more people become wealthy and our population continues to expand, peaking between 2070 and 2100, we still need to bend that curve downward. There are thankfully four solid wedges that are simple to spread. Continue clearing the land of subsistence farmers and consolidating agriculture into high-efficiency agribusinesses. Change to low-tillage farming to save on fertilizer. Expand precision agriculture to ensure that only the best fertilizer applications are made. And quickly disseminate agricultural genetics technologies like Pivot Bios increased nitrogen-fixing microorganisms around the world. The final one is already using 25% less fertilizer on a million acres of maize in the US, and co-founder and CEO Karsten Temme informed me that they have a stretch goal of using 100% less fertilizer by 2030.
The next three all focus on maximizing CO2 biological absorption. Unlike methane, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time and raises temperatures for two to three centuries. Therefore, we must expedite its elimination. The absurd panaceas of mechanical and industrial carbon capture have already been discussed.
It’s biology’s time now, though. On a molecular level, it’s slow and ineffective, but there is an insane quantity of plant matter in the earth, and we can add to it. The first step is to persuade subsistence farmers to quit calorie-counting everything they see. A smart follow-up is to get them off of partially arable land so that it can be left fallow. But after that, large-scale tree planting begins. Little Johnny or Ayesha putting a seedling in the neighborhood park, hopefully in the proper spot, is heartwarming, but strategically planting 100 million or more trees a week globally would accomplish much more. Huge greenhouses compel seedlings to flourish. large-scale drone seedling initiatives. Seedlings are matched to specific areas using a lot of machine learning and data analytics.
China is demonstrating how this operates. They are quickly reforesting their territory in the same manner that they deforested it. Over 40 billion trees—4% of a trillion—have been planted since 1990 in an area larger than France, and 60,000 soldiers have been assigned to planting tasks. There were errors, but they were far less serious than the errors caused by deforestation.
Currently, we plant roughly 1.9 billion trees annually while removing about 16 billion. The opposite of sustainable is when trees are mostly harvested for chopsticks, toilet paper, and buildings rather than for use in furniture and other durable constructions. The planting to cutting ratio must be reversed.
Additionally, wetland areas along coastlines that we have paved over once served as incredible carbon sinks but now frequently flood residential areas. It’s time to rewild increasingly vulnerable former marshes, including parts of Houston and Cape Coral in Florida. As long as we consider planned retreat in the face of rapidly rising climate dangers with a modicum of care, it may result in a climate dividend.
The last is dirt. The soil carbon route can begin to function by planting trees, allowing semi-arable land to go fallow, and switching to low-tillage agriculture. The roots of plants absorb carbon just as much as the leaves do, while glomalin-containing threads in mushrooms pull the molecules out and carry them to the soil for long-term storage. Although it takes time, if we stop destroying the underground biomes and let more of them survive for longer periods of time, we will remove a lot more carbon from the atmosphere.
For air carbon capture, the technology is available. Amazing nanotechnology, I tell ya. It comes in little packages, self-assembles into sizable buildings with economic and environmental value, and if we don’t interfere with it, it will produce a green substance that aids in restoring the balance of our planet. The system is known as plants.
The sexy vs. practical quadrant chart is now in place. It complements the ones on ground, sea, and air transportation as well as electricity and energy storage. The series isn’t over, though. There should be at least one more on heating for homes, businesses, and industries. possibly others. Let me know by speaking up.
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