CO2 for Trees, Concrete, and Energy

An earlier post on fossil fuel and renewable energy subsidies (End Ethanol/Biofuel and Fossil Fuel Subsidies) noted not taxing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel energy has been called a multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel subsidy.

Environmental Cost Accounting should include the full cost for materials and manufacturing for windmills, solar panels, and lithium batteries as well as equipment needed to raise coal, oil, and natural gas up from underground. Disposal and recycling costs for windmills, solar panels, and lithium batteries are part of lifecycle accounting of environmental costs, just as the disposal and recycling of equipment used for fossil fuel extraction, processing, and distribution.

In between is the active energy producing phase for energy-producing wind, solar, coal, oil, and natural gas. Environmental cost accounting works to measure externalities, costs like pollution from coal, oil, and natural gas, infrasound from windmills, plus bird and bat deaths from windmills and from coal and other fossil fuel particulate pollution.

Then there are carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 emissions are seen as a grave risk to humanity by some, but by others viewed more as food for plants and trees and likely no grave danger to the world.

Of course everyone agrees CO2 is natural and needed for photosynthesis, key to life on Earth. But increasing CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuels are thought a cause of future warming and climate instability. Many conservative and libertarian scholars view increasing CO2 emissions as a risk that should be addressed by, say some, carbon taxes and increased investments in renewable energy research.

But for the rest of this post, I will sidestep the debate about CO2 emissions. Enough people believe CO2 emissions are a danger, from climate modelers, to journalists, politicians, and voters. Everyone should be interested in opportunities to produce energy with less or no net CO2 emissions. How do current wind and solar energy subsidies and mandates stand up when compared to fossil fuel energy coupled with CO2 capture and absorption technologies?

Planting a Trillion Trees
The first and likely best CO2 absorption technology is a tree. A trillion trees will absorb a lot of CO2, and store it for centuries. For an overview, see: How to erase 100 years of carbon emissions? Plant trees—lots of them. (National Geographic, July 4, 2019). The article cites a new study, The global tree restoration potential (Science, July 5, 2019). Another article, Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find (YaleEnvironment306, February 10, 2019), reports:

There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO2 storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university.

How to plant so many tree? Drones can help. These tree-planting drones are firing seed missiles to restore the world’s forests (Fast Company, April 10, 2019).

Or try C-130 military transports. Dropping Trees from the Sky – Hydroseeding (pitara):

The idea may sound bizarre but it has come from The Lockheed Martin Aerospace Company, USA. The company has proposed to transform equipments installed in huge C-130 military transport planes for laying carpets of landmines across combat zones, to plant trees in barren areas.
A company named Areal Forestation Inc. has already been set up to market the idea. According to a spokesperson at Lockheed,”There are 2,500 C-130 planes in 70 countries, so the delivery system for planting forests is widely available as most planes are lying in military hangers, waiting for someone to hire them.”

So that’s the trillion tree technology. Not perfect and maybe expensive, buy less expensive than bringing industrial civilization to a shuddering halt by blocking fossil fuel use.

But Can you Not Build Bridges Out of Stone?
Wood from trillion-tree forests can be turned into a great many houses, boats, and bridges, where for centuries absorbed CO2 will sleep. But competition for CO2 has emerged: CarbonCure Technology Says Goodbye To Carbon Dioxide, Hello To Greener Concrete (Forbes, February 23, 2019):

The concrete industry has a huge footprint; the cement used to make concrete is responsible for up to 7% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. A company called CarbonCure makes a technology for concrete producers that introduces recycled CO2 into fresh concrete. The C02 is converted into a mineral and becomes permanently captured.

The Canadian startup says it’s on a mission to save up to 500 megatonnes of CO2 emissions per year. As of this writing, a counter on its website is nearing 24,000 tonnes (or metric tons). CarbonCure says its tech is being used by more than 100 producers across North America, in concrete masonry and ready mixed concrete plants in the United States and Canada.

More competition for CO2 is discussed in Converting CO2 into usable energy (Phys.org, March 1, 2018). Researchers discovered a process for nickel atom pathways from CO2 to CO, which can generate energy. They are working on the next step to commercialize the process:

“To apply this technology to real applications in the future, we are currently aimed at producing this single atom catalyst in a cheap and large-scale way, while improving its performance and maintaining its efficiency,” said Wang.

Other sky energy capture research: Maybe we can afford to suck CO2 out of the sky after all (MIT Review, June 7, 2018), and Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline (The Atlantic, June 7, 2018), which looks at technology from Carbon Engineering:

Their research seems almost to smuggle technologies out of the realm of science fiction and into the real. It suggests that people will soon be able to produce gasoline and jet fuel from little more than limestone, hydrogen, and air. It hints at the eventual construction of a vast, industrial-scale network of carbon scrubbers, capable of removing greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere.

The Carbon Engineering website explains:

At Carbon Engineering (CE), our contribution to this future is a Direct Air Capture technology – more than 10 years in the making – that can capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. …

Unlike capturing emissions from industrial flue stacks, our technology captures carbon dioxide (CO₂) – the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change – directly out of the air around us. This can help counteract today’s CO₂ emissions, and remove the large quantities of CO₂ emitted in the past that remains trapped in our atmosphere.

From our pilot facility in Squamish, Canada, we have fully demonstrated our Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology and are now commercializing. Our team and partners are working to build industrial-scale DAC facilities that will each capture one million tons of CO₂ per year – which is equivalent to the work of 40 million trees.

Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution linked to The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change (Cognitive Medium, November 21, 2019) which dives deep into Direct Air Capture (DAC) cost and feasibility calculations:

It’s tempting (and fun) to begin by diving into all the many possible approaches to DAC. But before getting into any such details, it’s helpful to think about the scale of the problem to be confronted. How much will DAC need to cost if it’s to significantly reduce climate change? Let’s look quickly at two scenarios for the cost of DAC, just as baselines to keep in mind. I’ll discuss how realistic (or unrealistic) they are below.

These technologies seem missing in energy and climate policy debates
The innovations and technologies above seem not discussed in ongoing energy and climate change debates. Instead, billions of dollars are spent each year by investors, taxpayers, and consumers, and paid through utility bills for wind, solar, ethanol subsidies and taxes. How can the landscapes of what’s possible be expanded to embrace new energy and CO2 capture innovations.

What policies and political processes can best discover and leverage cost-effective technologies to deliver clean and reliable electricity to homes and business, and fuels for transportation?

Additional technology are arriving to reduce and remove CO2 emissions. This BP webpage, Natural gas and the transition to net zero, notes natural gas energy releases less CO2 than coal:

Natural gas has far lower emissions than coal when burnt for power and is a much cleaner way of generating electricity. Switching from coal to gas has cut more than 550 million tons* of CO2 from the power sector this decade alone. 

Natural gas power supports wind and solar power as backup for intermittent energy. Next the BP site reports efforts to reduce flaring and other methane losses in natural gas production process.

Next is a look a coming technology:

Looking ahead, natural gas can be decarbonized. When it’s burned to generate power or heat for industry the carbon dioxide generated can be captured so that it doesn’t reach the air through using carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) technologies. And, it can also be used to produce hydrogen, which produces water-vapour when burned. Through the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative and the Net Zero Teesside project, BP is working to accelerate the potential of CCUS to take the carbon out of hydrocarbons. And, as a member of the Hydrogen Council, BP is supporting hydrogen as a key element of the energy transition. 

Competition for Net Zero
Inc. has this dramatically-titled story: A $150 Million Power Plant Was Just Built in Texas. Humanity Should Pray It Succeeds (Inc. May 11, 2019). NET Power’s innovative natural gas technology is also reported in Vox, Quartz, and Forbes.

Multiple Zero-Carbon Natural-Gas Plants Planned At Lower Cost Than Conventional Plants (Forbes, July 23, 2019) explains that energy is just one of the products NET Power will be selling:

A NET Power plant sells power, CO2, and by-products including nitrogen and argon. The sale of those four products brings the cost of electricity from NET Power’s initial plant down to 1.9¢ per kilowatt hour, Goff said, compared to 4.2¢ for a conventional combined cycle natural gas plant.

Goff does not expect those prices to hold, because 45Q expires for plants built after 2024, and the value of nitrogen and argon will drop as NET Power plants bring more to market.

Other competing energy advances promise new pathways for fossil fuel energy: Scientists extract hydrogen gas from oil and bitumen, giving potential pollution-free energy (Phys.org, August 19, 2019):

Scientists have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen (H2) from oil sands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. This can be used to power hydrogen-powered vehicles, which are already marketed in some countries, as well as to generate electricity; hydrogen is regarded as an efficient transport fuel, similar to petrol and diesel, but with no pollution problems. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oil sands reservoirs, with huge existing supplies found in Canada and Venezuela. Interestingly, this process can be applied to mainstream oil fields, causing them to produce hydrogen instead of oil.

From Trees, Concrete, Nickel and Hydrogen, on to the Deep Blue Sea
Trees have value regardless of fears about CO2 emissions, and so does CarbonCure concrete, CO2/Nickel energy, and NET Power industrial CO2 (used for industrial or to carbonate our soft drinks).

All these technologies are land-based, so we can expand our carbon-capture horizons to the oceans. How can adding iron to the oceans slow global warming? (HowStuffWorks) outlines ocean fertilization proposals, as does Fertilizing the Ocean with Iron: Should we add iron to the sea to help reduce greenhouse gases in the air? (Oceanus Magazine, November 13, 2007), which begins:

“Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age” may rank as the catchiest line ever uttered by a biogeochemist. The man responsible was the late John Martin, former director of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, who discovered that sprinkling iron dust in the right ocean waters could trigger plankton blooms the size of a small city. In turn, the billions of cells produced might absorb enough heat-trapping carbon dioxide to cool the Earth’s warming atmosphere.

From sea to shining sea, carbon dioxide emission problems are opportunities for entrepreneurs, for trees and even for phytoplankton.