The Geoengineering Thread

[Graeme]

Geoengineering techniques need more study, says science coalition

More research on the risks and governance of geoengineering the planet's climate by reflecting sunlight into space is needed, a grouping of science bodies and a green NGO have said, as the end of the first week of UN climate talks nears.

Concern about such techniques is significant and so more dialogue and research is needed on the risks and benefits, said the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, a coalition formed in March 2010 of the Royal Society, Italian-based academy of science for the developing world Twas, and US non-profit, the Environmental Defence Fund.

Various techniques for combating global warming by reducing the amount of the sun's energy reaching the earth have been proposed, from huge space reflectors in orbit to stratospheric aerosols released in the upper atmosphere. A UK-backed plan to test the mechanics of inserting such aerosols, using a hosepipe attached to a giant balloon, was postponed in September and the so-called Spice project was criticised by scientists writing in Nature earlier this month.

Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defence Fund and co-chair of the SRMGI, said: "Solar radiation management might sound, at first, like something from science fiction – but it's not. There are already serious discussions beginning about it, and that's why we felt it was urgent to create this governance initiative. Solar radiation management could be a Plan B to address climate change, but first we must figure out how to research it safely. Only then should we even consider any other steps."

guardian

[dohboi]

Thanks, G. Along the same lines:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-geoengineering-earth-.html

Geoengineering could save Earth -- or destroy it

(AP) -- Brighten clouds with sea water? Spray aerosols high in the stratosphere? Paint roofs white and plant light-colored crops? How about positioning "sun shades" over the Earth?

At a time of deep concern over global warming, a group of scientists, philosophers and legal scholars examined whether human intervention could artificially cool the Earth - and what would happen if it did.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/how-to-police-geoengineering/

How to Police Geoengineering?

When people consider using engineering techniques to counter the effects of climate change, they usually think first about the technical difficulties involved. But a new report points out challenges that may be even more important: regulating the research on such technologies, and their potential deployment.

The report is the result of a collaboration organized by the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific organization, and a variety of other nongovernmental organizations.

(Thanks to leanan at TOD's drumbeat for these.)

[Graeme]

Depleted gas reservoirs can double as geologic carbon storage sites

A demonstration project on the southeastern tip of Australia has helped to verify that depleted natural gas reservoirs can be repurposed for geologic carbon sequestration, which is a climate change mitigation strategy that involves pumping CO2 deep underground for permanent storage.

The project, which includes scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), also demonstrated that depleted gas fields have enough CO2 storage capacity to make a significant contribution to reducing global emissions.

During an 18-month span beginning in April 2008, an international team of researchers injected 65,000 tonnes of CO2-rich gas two kilometers underground into a depleted gas field in western Victoria, Australia. That’s about 130 tonnes of CO2 per day, or the amount emitted by a small, 10-megawatt power plant. It’s also the daily CO2 emissions required to supply 6000 average U.S. homes with electricity.

Extensive monitoring conducted during and after the injection found no measureable effect of stored CO2 on soil, groundwater, or the atmosphere.


They’re also plentiful. A 2009 report by the International Energy Agency Greenhouse Gas R&D Program estimates that 160 gigatons of capacity in depleted gas fields—matched to point sources—will be available by 2050.

But the science of storing CO2 in depleted gas fields has needed real-world verification, which is why the CO2CRC team started the Otway Project.

physorg

PS. According to this ref, 160 GTons is the net carbon accumulation in atmosphere!

Cumulative human carbon emissions over the past 200 years (270 Gton) as well as net carbon accumulation in the atmosphere (160 Gton) are known quantities.

[Graeme]

Carbon Capture Is As Easy As Turning CO2 Into Baking Soda

Another method of carbon capture known as mineralization captures carbon as effectively as injection but without the high cost or potential side effects. After the CO2 and other harmful greenhouse gasses are captured, they are converted into mineral byproducts. These byproducts can be stored without the danger of CO2 leaks or sold to reduce the costs of implementing a carbon capture solution. This makes mineralization technology less costly to implement and easier to do in the current political environment.

Skyonic is the first company to secure a U.S. patent for a carbon-capture and mineralization process. The technology, called SkyMine, captures and mineralizes CO2 emitted from flue stacks into marketable byproducts, including sodium bicarbonate, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen chloride, chlorine, and hydrogen. Because it captures CO2 as solid carbonate compounds, there is no concern over earthquakes, groundwater contamination or leakage.

How Mineralization Works

The process is divided into three parts: gas handling, absorption, and electrochemical production. In the gas handling phase, the hot flue gas is cooled to room temperature, harvesting heat and water while heavy metals like mercury are removed. The harvested heat is used to undertake the cost of chemical production while the water is reused.

epmag

[Graeme]

Geoengineering and global food supply

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people. New research led by Carnegie's Julia Pongratz examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production and concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security. Their work is published online by Nature Climate Change January 22.


Even if the geoengineering would help crop yields overall, the models predict that some areas could be harmed by the geoengineering. And there are other risks that go beyond the direct impact on crop yields. For example, deployment of such systems might lead to political or even military conflict. Furthermore, these approaches do not solve the problem of ocean acidification, which is also caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

"The real world is much more complex than our climate models, so it would be premature to act based on model results like ours," Caldeira said. "But desperate people do desperate things. Therefore, it is important to understand the consequences of actions that do not strike us as being particularly good ideas."

eurekalert

[dohboi]

Hard to tell how restricting the amount of sunlight hitting earth would help plants grow. Maybe they are comparing it to the consequences to ag of un-mitigated gw.

Remember also that blocking sun is also going to keep sun from hitting all the nice solar arrays that people are counting on to pave our way to a glorious renewable energized future.

And won't it not only not help ocean acidification, but will accelerate it, since sulfates turn into acid rain?

[Graeme]

My understanding is that the plants grow better because of the increased amounts of CO2. At least they tried to model the effects of decreased sunlight before an actual trial. This method looks to be a non-starter. Back to the drawing board.

[dissident]

Geoengineering and global food supply

New research led by Carnegie's Julia Pongratz examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production and concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security. Their work is published online by Nature Climate Change January 22.

"The real world is much more complex than our climate models, so it would be premature to act based on model results like ours," Caldeira said. "But desperate people do desperate things. Therefore, it is important to understand the consequences of actions that do not strike us as being particularly good ideas."

From what I was able to dig up they did not use chemistry climate models. One of the models, CAM 3.5, has a token sulfphate chemistry package but that is purely for modeling the formation of this aerosol from SO2. No ozone impact, etc. I find this paper to be rather strange. If you are going to study the impact of SO2 injection into the stratosphere on plant growth you would want to account for ultraviolet radiation hitting the surface. The required 10+ million tons of SO2 injection will do a lot of damage to the ozone layer, which will increase surface UV exposure and at the same time tropospheric O3 concentrations. Without addressing these issues the results of the paper are weak. At the current time there is little excuse for doing overly idealized model experiments.

[Graeme]

I guess you found a link to the entire paper too. Did you realise they also used the HadCM3L model? If you haven't found a link, you can find it in the NY Times. Surely their results are worth publishing even if they weren't aware of the effects of ozone depletion. Besides they conclude that reducing CO2 emissions is a better option.

[dissident]

I guess you found a link to the entire paper too.

No the journal is too new and not accessible to me.

Did you realise they also used the HadCM3L model? If you haven't found a link, you can find it in the NY Times.

Thanks for the link to the full article. HadCM3L is also not a chemistry climate model like CAM 3.5.

Surely their results are worth publishing even if they weren't aware of the effects of ozone depletion. Besides they conclude that reducing CO2 emissions is a better option.

Their paper makes it sound like geoengineering would save our crops so we should do it if we are desperate enough. When important questions such as this are being addressed you don't use 20 year old tools for the job. So lower temperatures will help crops. What about higher UV and ozone levels? It's not a separable problem. The temperature effect is, frankly, obvious under the idealized scenarios used in such studies.

But there is actually a problem here. SO2 distributions are assumed to be somehow uniformly distributed. As we all know nothing in life is really ever that simple. Just how one would go about dispersing it "just right" is the trillion dollar question. Not only has no one come up with a way of doing it (30 km high towers, really?) there is the problem of having point-wise injection of SO2. It will create local radiation anomalies that will kick up dynamical responses not envisaged by the original simplifying assumptions. The bottom line is that it is possible that the cooling effect on the troposphere will be irregular. And crops don't like weather irregularity.

[Graeme]

Apart from testing crop yields, the authors also wanted to test the effects of SO2 aerosols on global temperature and rainfall. They admit that their models were first-order estimations. They also expected future models to be more sophisticated. Do you have access to better models? If so, would you be willing to use them and produce more accurate results?

[dissident]

Apart from testing crop yields, the authors also wanted to test the effects of SO2 aerosols on global temperature and rainfall. They admit that their models were first-order estimations. They also expected future models to be more sophisticated. Do you have access to better models? If so, would you be willing to use them and produce more accurate results?

I don't do impacts research and have more than enough on my plate to prevent me from doing side projects like this. But if they wanted to use better models they could have and nothing was stopping them. Here is a sample of the CCMs available:

http://www.pa.op.dlr.de/CCMVal/CCMVal_P ... gCCMs.html

This particular project was focused on the middle atmosphere and halogen impacts. But most of the same models can handle tropospheric chemistry as well and already do ozone and UV to the ground.

[Graeme]

I suppose that is fair enough especially considering that this technique would be a disaster. There are much better ones, some of which I've listed above. But I'm constantly on the lookout for others. . .

[dohboi]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/06/bill-gates-climate-scientists-geoengineering

Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering

Other wealthy individuals have also funded a series of reports into the future use of technologies to geoengineer the climate

As well as Gates, other wealthy individuals including Sir Richard Branson, tar sands magnate Murray Edwards and the co-founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström, have funded a series of official reports into future use of the technology...

"There are clear conflicts of interest between many of the people involved in the debate," said Diana Bronson, a researcher with Montreal-based geoengineering watchdog ETC.

"What is really worrying is that the same small group working on high-risk technologies that will geoengineer the planet is also trying to engineer the discussion around international rules and regulations. We cannot put the fox in charge of the chicken coop."

"The eco-clique are lobbying for a huge injection of public funds into geoengineering research. They dominate virtually every inquiry into geoengineering. They are present in almost all of the expert deliberations. They have been the leading advisers to parliamentary and congressional inquiries and their views will, in all likelihood, dominate the deliberations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as it grapples for the first time with the scientific and ethical tangle that is climate engineering," said Clive Hamilton, professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, in a Guardian blog.

The scientists involved reject this notion. "Even the perception that [a small group of people has] illegitimate influence [is] very unhealthy for a technology which has extreme power over the world. The concerns that a small group [is] dominating the debate are legitimate, but things are not as they were," said Keith. "It's changing as countries like India and China become involved. The era when my voice or that of a few was dominant is over. We need a very broad debate."

[Graeme]

Direct air carbon capture: Oil's answer to fracking?

Since 1999, when Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner wrote the first scientific paper [PDF, download] about capturing carbon dioxide from the air, his unlikely idea has grown into a nascent industry. Four startup companies, including his own, Kilimanjaro Energy, are working on technologies to extract CO2 from the atmosphere using chemical processes. The air-capture startups are funded by billionaires (Bill Gates, Edgar Bronfman Jr.) and venture capitalists (Arch Venture Partners), and they are attracting interest from private equity firms (Warburg Pincus), investment banks (Goldman Sachs), energy companies (Summit Power) and a military contractor (Boeing).

This week, a group of about 70 entrepreneurs, academics, investors and partners gathered in Calgary, Alberta, for the first ever North American conference devoted to air capture. (Someone said it felt like history in the making. That remains to be seen.) As the industry’s pioneer, Lackner, who's affiliated with Columbia’s Earth Institute, played a prominent role, but he was in no mood to celebrate. While climate change was on the agenda, much of the program focused on the biggest emerging market for air capture technology -- namely, using liquid CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

Kilimanjaro’s CEO, Ned David, said that CO2 could do for the oil business what hydrofracking has done for natural gas, unleashing vast amounts of fossil fuels that might otherwise remain in the ground. “A money gusher,” he called it. Others talked about using air capture to make fuels at the military’s Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) and even, half in jest, to “green” the fizz in Coke and Pepsi.

This, of course, was not what Lackner had in mind way back when. “What makes air capture worth doing is its climate impacts,” he told me. “What will pay for it are these other applications.”

“The real problem I want to solve is not interested in being solved,” he lamented.

The conference was the strongest sign yet that direct air capture is becoming a business -- for better or worse.

greenbiz

[Graeme]

Iron is key to reversing global warming, Nature research shows

In a study published in Nature, Gélinas — along with Concordia PhD candidate Karine Lalonde and graduate Alexandre Ouellet, as well as McGill colleague Alfonso Mucci — studies the chemical makeup of sediment samples from around the world ocean to show how iron oxides remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere.

"People around the planet are fighting to reduce the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere in the hopes of reducing climate change. But when it comes to getting rid of the CO2 that's already there, nature herself plays an important role," Gélinas explains. CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and safely trapped on the ocean floor through a natural reaction that fixes the molecule to organic carbon on the surface of large bodies of water.

Through careful analysis of sediments from all over the world, Gélinas and his team found that iron oxides were in fact responsible for trapping one fifth of all the organic carbon deposited on the ocean floor.

With this new knowledge comes increased concern: iron oxides are turning into what might be termed endangered molecules. As their name suggests, iron oxides can only form in the presence of oxygen, meaning that a well-oxygenated coastal ecosystem is necessary for the iron oxides to do their work in helping to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But there has been a worrying decrease in dissolved oxygen concentrations found in certain coastal environments — and this trend is expanding. Locations once teeming with life are slowly becoming what are known as "dead zones" in which oxygen levels in the surface sediment are becoming increasingly depleted. That familiar culprit, man-made pollution, is behind the change.

But there is hope. "This study also represents an indirect plea towards reducing the quantities of fertilizers and other nutrient-rich contaminants discharged in aquatic systems" explains Lalonde, who Gélinas credits with much of the work behind this elemental study. She hopes that better understanding the iron-organic carbon stabilizing mechanism could "eventually lead to new ways of increasing the rate of organic carbon burial in sediments."

physorg

[Graeme]

Study finds room to store CO2 underground

A new study by researchers at MIT shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation's coal-fired powerplants. Though questions remain about the economics of systems to capture and store such gases, this study addresses a major issue that has overshadowed such proposals.

One of the most promising places to store the gas is in deep saline aquifers: those more than half a mile below the surface, far below the freshwater sources used for human consumption and agriculture. But estimates of the capacity of such formations in the United States have ranged from enough to store just a few years' worth of coal-plant emissions up to many thousands of years' worth.

The reason for the huge disparity in estimates is twofold. First, because deep saline aquifers have no commercial value, there has been little exploration to determine their extent. Second, the fluid dynamics of how concentrated, liquefied carbon dioxide would spread through such formations is very complex and hard to model. Most analyses have simply estimated the overall volume of the formations, without considering the dynamics of how the CO2 would infiltrate them.


When liquefied carbon dioxide is dissolved in salty water, the resulting fluid is denser than either of the constituents, so it naturally sinks. It's a slow process, but "once the carbon dioxide is dissolved, you've won the game," Juanes says, because the dense, heavy mixture would almost certainly never escape back to the atmosphere.

While this study did not address the cost of CCS systems, many analysts have concluded that they could add 15 to 30 percent to the cost of coal-generated electricity, and would not be viable unless a carbon tax or a limit on carbon emissions was put in place.

While uncertainties remain, "I really think CCS has a role to play," Juanes says. "It's not an ultimate salvation, it's a bridge, but it may be essential because it can really address the emissions from coal and natural gas."

physorg

[Graeme]

Imagining Carbon Emissions in Underground Exile

“It’s such a big number that it’s sort of hard to grasp what it means,” said Ruben Juanes, a geoscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “With emissions as enormous as they are right now, even if we try to deploy alternate energy technologies as quickly as possible, there’s still going to be a huge source of emissions from fossil fuels that we’d better address.”

So Dr. Juanes proposes a bridge solution — a quick fix for the time being — in the form of carbon capture and storage, or C.C.S. This technology captures carbon dioxide from sources like power plants, converts it into a dense liquid form and then disposes of it deep underground in saline aquifers.

Take a look at a few numbers and you’ll begin to grasp the gravity of the situation. In the United States alone, around 6.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are emitted per year. Of that, maybe a third could be captured from large stationary sources like power plants; let’s round that off to 2 billion metric tons. If converted to liquid, those 2 billion metric tons would amount to 80 million barrels of compressed carbon dioxide produced per day.

To put that figure into perspective, the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day. And remember, that’s only a third of our daily emissions.

Dr. Juanes and his colleagues are not the first to think of storing emissions underground, but they have cleared up some major unknowns. Past studies varied wildly in their estimates for how long the aquifers could function, from just five years to 20,000 years. “We felt that there was such a big disparity in numbers out there that C.C.S. deserved a closer look,” Dr. Juanes said.

nytimes

[Graeme]

Stripping CO2 from air requires largest industry ever

SOME schemes to save the Earth just might cost the Earth. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that scaling up proposals to scrub the atmosphere of carbon dioxide would mean creating the biggest industry there has ever been.

You can strip CO2 from the air with chemical filters or by boosting reactions occurring as rocks weather. Colin Axon of Brunel University in Uxbridge, UK, and Alex Lubansky at the University of Oxford estimated what it would take to remove the 30 gigatonnes of CO2 we emit every year.

That would mean processing 75,000 Gt of dry air. Scaling up proposals to filter air would use 180 Gt of clean water per year, depriving 53 million people of water, on top of the 66 per cent of the world's population who will face water shortages by 2025.

Enhancing rock weathering is no better. It would call for 100 Gt of olivine, a common mineral. This is 12,500 times more than is produced worldwide. To deal with 30 Gt of CO2 we would need to spread the olivine 1 centimetre thick over 3.6 billion square kilometres of dry land, 1000 times more than Earth has available.

newscientist

[Graeme]

Geo-engineering 'a risk' in climate change battle

ATTEMPTS to slow down climate change by large-scale geo-engineering present ''serious risks'' and are unlikely to replace the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Australia's chief scientist has warned.
In an overview of schemes proposed by scientists, researchers at the Office of the Chief Scientist say the main methods of planetary-scale engineering would confront big problems with technical feasibility, political co-operation and cost. But research should be pursued in the hope of developing last-ditch methods to slow climate change.
''Given the difficulty in implementing global action to reduce CO2 emissions from human activities and their continued growth, geo-engineering is one possible approach to combat global warming,'' it said.


The findings of the Australian report are similar to those of recent studies undertaken by Britain's Royal Society and the US Task Force on Climate Remediation Research.

theage