The Geoengineering Thread

[Graeme]

Carbon Capture and Storage: Carbon Dioxide Pressure Dissipates in Underground Reservoirs

The study debates some of the conclusions drawn in an earlier study by Ehlig-Economides and Economides, countering their claims that carbon dioxide cannot feasibly be stored underground. These earlier findings, according to the Berkeley Lab researchers, only considered closed-system subsurface formations, with limited mechanisms for relieving the pressure.


According to lead researcher Dr. Quanlin Zhou, although large-scale pressure build-up may have a limiting effect on storage capacity, it is not as significant as claimed previously by Ehlig-Economides and Economides. Dr. Zhou and fellow researcher Dr. Jens Birkholzer considered three different types of storage reservoirs: closed, partially closed and open. They indicate that the storage of carbon dioxide deep underground will occur mainly in partially closed or open formations, where pressure build-up is relieved naturally by movement of native saline waters into regions far away from where carbon dioxide injection occurs.

The authors conclude that CCS can still be considered as a practical means of mitigating carbon dioxide emissions as there is more capacity to store carbon dioxide underground than suggested in the study of Ehlig-Economides and Economides.

sciencedaily

[Graeme]

Sucking carbon dioxide from air too costly, say physicists - May 11, 2011

Mopping carbon dioxide directly from the sky costs too much be an economically viable way to mitigate global warming, a two-year study by 13 physicists has found (press release). One method, using reactive chemicals, would cost at least $600 to remove each tonne of CO2 from the air – around eight times more pricey than capturing the gas from the industrial flue stacks of power plants, the report [pdf] concludes.

The study – published by the American Physical Society on 9 May – doesn’t put a figure on the costs of innovative technologies from researchers and private companies who claim to be able to capture CO2 from air more cheaply.

“They proved that one specific way to capture carbon dioxide from air is expensive,” says Klaus Lackner, at Columbia University in New York, who has developed one of the new technologies. But that, he says, does not mean other methods are not worth pursuing. “If you study penguins, you might jump to the conclusion that birds can’t fly.”

Princeton University physicist Robert Socolow, who co-chaired the study, says the report could not evaluate the costs of other technologies, because there was no verifiable data to draw on. “We didn’t want to try to come up with premature numbers and then have an argument,” he says.


Lackner’s resin-based system uses swings of humidity to capture and release CO2. His work is being commercialised by Kilimanjaro Energy, based in New York and San Francisco, and his visions of landscapes of ‘artificial trees’ sucking up CO2 get frequent media coverage. “I think we can get into the game at around $200 per tonne of CO2, and drop the price from there,” he says.

Another contender is the company Global Thermostat, co-founded in 2006 by physicist Peter Eisenberger - who founded Columbia University’s Earth Institute – and economist Graciela Chichilnisky. The team uses amine solvents to grab CO2 and recycles the sorbent using low-temperature steam (waste heat from other industrial processes). It has a pilot plant at SRI International, in Menlo Park, California.

The APS report makes reference to these systems – indeed, 30 of its 119 pages are devoted to discussing how to improve the air carbon-capture process. But it doesn’t try to quantify their prospects. “Our report doesn’t say ‘slam the door’,” points out Socolow. “In the review process, most people said we needed to be more negative.”

nature

[dohboi]

That sucks. (Sorry--couldn't help myself )

“In the review process, most people said we needed to be more negative.”

What do you make of that snippet of quote?

[Graeme]

Good you got a sense of humour! I guess there are no doomers on the Nature Editorial staff. They're trying to be objective but at same time suggest that there may be a solution with the private sector efforts. We'll see. . .

[dohboi]

Interesting. I got the opposite impression. It sounds to me like the editors thought the article was too optimistic about the prospects of any carbon capture method to work, while the authors were trying to make clear that it was only the one method that they were critiquing.

But maybe I need new reading glasses.

And yes, I continue to occasionally laugh into the gale. Not sure if this is a sign of sanity or madness.

[scas]

While its easy to throw junk in the air and block out the sun, industrial scale CO2 capture is not going to happen soon enough to stop our collapse. All one has to do is consider the scale of modern fossil fuel farming, and realize that sequestration attempts must be on a scale larger than that. Anyone know how to draw down and store 27 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year? That's the equivalent in mass of drawing out and storing 600 000 titanic ships every year.

Maybe in 30 years we might get lucky and fusion powered atmospheric carbon scrubbers become available. We should have built them thirty years ago because we need them now. In any case, we would need to sequester carbon for tens of decades even hundreds of years while maintaining the aerosol cloud to prevent runaway heating. Now is when we regret cutting funding for fusion/fission/renewables/geoengineering these past decades.

None the less, we have to try. Maybe it turns out that we actually can maintain an aerosol cloud for a hundred years while drawing down the carbon. All this occurring under the veil of war, collapse, and global attrition. Or maybe global peace, but that just seems unlikely unless we invent a famine gruel and easy contraceptive.

Anyone who interprets this history of activism to say that greens are to blame for global warming

No one is blaming the greens for GW. But as has been made the point over and over, that an anti-nuclear stance tends to mean gas or coal instead (even though its not the Greens intention to get a sideways replacement).This has resulted in an atmospheric CO2 ~1 ppm higher. It is rare we see nuclear plants being replaced by renewables, and even when this is done, I would have preferred the renewable to replace the coal/gas plant. You can declare innocence, disagree amicably, or get angry. It's all good.

Anyway, you may enjoy this book on various energy courses. It is a free download.

http://www.withouthotair.com/
http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html

[Graeme]

How Brighter Clouds Fight Climate Change (Without Dr. Strangelove)

In 1990, a British cloud physicist named John Latham wrote a letter, [PDF] to the journal Nature, in which he suggested that injecting tiny droplets of water into marine clouds to increase their reflectivity might be a way "to inhibit or neutralize global warming."

And then? "Nothing happened for 10 years except for a couple of angry letters saying it was a horrible thing to play God and why didn’t I go knock on the door of the president and tell him to stop burning fossil fuels," Latham recalls.

But as greenhouse gas emissions kept growing, Latham’s odd idea gained traction. It spawned a succession of peer-reviewed scientific papers, sparked debate in the scientific community and eventually led to the organization of a loosely-knit group of international scientists who now want to see if brightening marine clouds might actually be a feasible way to slow down or stop global warming.

"We’d like to move towards a limited-area field experiment," Latham says.

I met Latham — a leading thinker in the emerging field of geoengineering — last week during a fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He is 73 years old, semi-retired and unpaid, but passionate about putting his scheme to a test. Latham is collaborating with about two dozen scientists, including "a couple of other geriatrics" (his words, not mine) who play key roles: Stephen Salter is a British engineer who came up with the idea of using unmanned, satellite-controlled, wind-powered ships (below) to travel the oceans and disseminate the seawater, and Armand Neukermans is an inventor and entrepreneur (he helped develop inkjet printer technology at Hewlett Packard) who is working on developing a sprayer able to deliver very fine seawater droplets to the clouds. Interestingly, Neukermans’ research has been supported by a small grant ($300,000) from a fund established by Bill Gates to support innovative climate and energy research.

greenbiz

[dohboi]

I'm surprised Graeme missed this one. So I guess I have to do his dirty work for him

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8579100/IPCC-considering-sending-mirrors-to-space-to-tackle-climate-change.html

IPCC 'considering sending mirrors to space to tackle climate change'

Reflective aerosols would be sent into space under a series of radical “geo-engineering” measures being considered by the UN climate science body to tackle climate change, leaked documents disclose.

... Experts suggested that the documents, leaked from inside the IPPC to The Guardian, show how the UN and other developed countries are “despairing” about reaching agreement by consensus at the global climate change talks.

But the newspaper reported that scientists admit that even if the ideas theoretically work, they could cause irreversible consequences.

(My emphases)

Thanks to Seraph over at TOD's oildrum for the link and quote.

I will now condescend to quote my own reply from there:

Yeah, no possibility of unintended consequences there, eh??

Just for starters, many looking at the dramatic drop in price and meteoric rise in production numbers of solar panels are hoping that this could play a major roll in the world energy picture within just a few years.

But if sunlight is diminished, won't that also diminish the value of this source of power?

And the world is undergoing dramatic increases in food prices.

If light to food crops is diminished, won't that diminish their productivity?

Insolation is not the problem, so why solve what is not the problem?

All analogies fail to capture the utter stupidity and immorality of our collective behavior.

But how about this: We have built a huge damn with no outlet that we keep building higher every year. But we (and everyone else, every living thing in fact) live down in the valley above the damn and the steep cliffs on either side means there is no other place to go as the water behind the damn keeps rising. So we are slowly flooding our only living space with no place to escape to. Faced with this situation, we keep right on furiously building the damn higher, but now some people are going to build yet another damn further up stream to (temporarily, of course) keep some of the water from the stream from coming down to our ever deepening lake, even though we need that water to drink, to irrigate our fields, to wash with...

The idiocy is so immense, it truly boggles the mind.

Yet we all participate in the idiocy every day.

What a mess we are and have made of the whole thing.

[Newfie]

Very true. We have hacked up what we have done, but some think we are smart enough to do it right in the fix. Not bloody likely.

Still, if you are sufficiently desperate you will try anything. What do you have to loose?

[ritter]

Still, if you are sufficiently desperate you will try anything. What do you have to loose?

Just an extra "o"?

(It was too good to pass up, Newfie. Sorry!)

[Pops]

Still, if you are sufficiently desperate you will try anything. What do you have to loose?

Just an extra "o"?

(It was too good to pass up, Newfie. Sorry!)

Engineers! Loose the Engineers!

This whole thread reminds me of what the guy said about these things, he called it committing serial engineering.

Build a dam, it blocks the fish run.
Install fish ladders, the gravel beds are covered.
Build hatcheries, the slack water kills the fry.
Ship fry downstream on barges, seals eat stupid fry.
Kill seals.

The perfectly engineered solution is just around the corner.

Double sorry Newf

[Newfie]

It's OK guys, its OK.

I have moments of hope, but they fade.

[AgentR11]

What do you have to lose...

Z: "Bob, funding is in, execute Operation Sunshade."
B: "Roger that, Launch! I repeat, GO FOR LAUNCH"

bird flies, mirrors deploy, align, test, all fine and dandy...

a tweak here,
a tweak there. mmm comfy...
a decade here, a decade there,
nasa, rsa, cnsa... close their doors, no money.. someone else can do it.

a decade here, a decade there, a century...
Z3: "Hey BobMkIV, we need to ease off the mirrors, net-e input will be dropping for a decade or so.."
B: "err, I em... kinda ah... can't. The controllers failed last year."
Z3: "o"
Z3: "Is there a church near here?"

[dohboi]

Nicely put.

[Newfie]

Yes, exactly.

In my line of work I get to see just how much better we are at building than maintaining.

One of my clients has what they call "capital maintenance" which is an oxymoron. It is tacit acknowledgement that they just run it into the ground and then replace it.

Further, I clearly see that, even in public safety issues, there is an ongoing test and maintenance program when there are Federal inspectors and fines involved. Otherwise? Pfft!

[Graeme]

UN scientists vet global warming fixes

On the heels of another halting round of talks on climate change, UN scientists this week will review quick-fix options for beating back the threat of global warming that rely on technology rather than political wrangling.

Experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting for three days from Monday in the Peruvian capital Lima, will ponder "geo-engineering" solutions designed to cool the planet, or at least brake the startling rise in Earth's temperature.

Seeding the ocean with iron, scattering heat-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, building towers to suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, and erecting a giant sunshade in space are all on the examining table.

watoday

[Graeme]

Saving Nature by Ending It: Geoengineering and the Moral Case for Conservation [Video]

Climate change is a foregone conclusion. The amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere from two centuries-worth of fossil fuel burning (and, apparently, with decades more worth to come, given the glacial pace of efforts to slow said emissions) is enough to substantially warm global average temperatures. And that leaves so-called geoengineering—the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of planetary processes, in the words of the Royal Society—as the leading candidate for a techno-fix of the global warming problem, a fix the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will begin to explore in Lima, Peru this week.

"The Arctic is melting much faster than people expected," noted physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary, during a talk outlining why "nature" should be preserved at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Equinox Summit in early June. "My generation utterly failed" to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, he remarked. "The next generation will have to do it."

Keith is one of the world's leading proponents of geoengineering research as well as an advisor on climate and energy to one of the world's leading philanthropists (and richest men), Bill Gates. As a maker of machines, including the first atomic-scale interferometer, Keith doesn't think we're running out of techno-fixes or even beginning to approach any limits on resources, technological progress or even the Earth's ability to support an expanding human population. "It is true that we will run out of easy oil in the Middle East with profound geopolitical impacts, but that's very different than running out of oil," he said. "We have an absurd amount of hydrocarbons in the world and a growing technological ability to get them out at prices we can afford."

In other words, peak oil (or coal or natural gas) won't save us from climate change. What might, according to Keith? Government regulations, which are what has allowed progress on remedying environmental problems from air pollution to eliminating toxic heavy metals from the soil.

So what then is the impetus for such regulations? A popular position, taken by both environmental groups and big business, is that nature offers economic value. So-called ecosystem services—such as clean water or pollination of crops—contribute billions to the global economy.

scientificamerican

[Graeme]

The radical science of geo-engineering: Maybe it’s not so crazy

In the absence of meaningful international progress on a workable emissions-reduction strategy, some climate experts have begun to ponder more radical Plan B solutions designed to prevent a torrid future filled with fierce hurricanes, vanishing glaciers and flooded lowlands.

These “geo-engineering” technologies (see sidebar), some seemingly plucked from the realm of science fiction, propose techniques to artificially reduce global temperatures and soak up excess carbon as an alternative to traditional fixes, such as green power and energy-efficient buildings. The proposals run the gamut from whitening clouds to capturing airborne carbon and deploying vast quantities of reflective materials into the orbit around Earth to deflect incoming solar rays.

About 60 scientists and international relations experts gathered this week in Lima to contemplate the rapidly growing body of geo-engineering science and, in effect, consider a once-unthinkable question: Should the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees Kyoto (and its eventual successor), seriously consider geo-engineering as part of its arsenal for fighting global warming?

The meeting in Lima is an indication that the science of geo-engineering is gaining a new aura of legitimacy on the world stage, even though few would dispute that it represents a drastic response to arresting climate change. Not only is it rife with complicated legal and ethical questions, there is also the terrifying prospect of what could happen if one of these global-scale interventions fails or has unforeseen consequences.

theglobeandmail

[Graeme]

Geo-engineering: green versus greed in the race to cool the planet

Geo-engineering – artificial efforts to mitigate global warming by manipulating weather patterns, oceans, currents, soils and atmosphere to reduce the amount of greenhouses gases – evokes ideological, political and financial passions. For those who have more or less given up on UN climate talks, it is, along with nuclear power, the only practical planetary way to avoid catastrophic climate change; for others, it is an irresponsible move into the unknown by the rich world that will inevitably have unintended consequences, most probably for the poorest.

But as attempts to get major economies to agree to reduce emissions through energy efficiency falter, so groups of scientists, universities and entrepreneurs are coming together, patenting ideas and pressing the case with governments and the UN to back experiments as the first step towards wide-scale deployment of a suite of technologies.

From just a few individuals working in the field 20 years ago, today there are hundreds of groups and institutions proposing experiments. They fall broadly into two camps: one aims to remove greenhouse gases from the air and store them underground; the other, more controversially, tries to cool the Earth down by reflecting sunlight from the atmosphere or space in a process known as solar radiation management.

The range of techno-fix ideas is growing by the month. They include absorbing plankton, growing artificial trees, firing silver iodide into clouds to produce rain, genetically engineering crops to be paler in colour to reflect sunlight back to space, fertilising the ocean with iron nanoparticles to increase phytoplankton, blasting sulphate-based aerosols into the stratosphere to deflect sunlight, covering the desert with white plastic to reflect sunlight and painting cities and roads white.

There are serious proposals to launch a fleet of unmanned ships to spray seawater into the atmosphere to thicken clouds and thus reflect more radiation from Earth. Most controversial of all is an idea to fire trillions of tiny mirrors into space to form a 100,000-mile "sunshade" for Earth.

Most are unlikely to be seriously considered but some are being pushed hard by entrepreneurs and businessmen attracted by the potential to make billions of dollars in an emerging system of UN global carbon credits. Research by ETC, the Canadian-based watchdog, shows at least 27 patents have been granted to inventors and assignees including Bill Gates, Dupont, the US government and various corporations. Chemical engineer Michael Markels has four patents, Professor Steven Salter of Edinburgh University and climate change scientist David Keith have two.

guardian

[dohboi]

G's been a bit quiet here for the last week or so, so I though I'd throw him this bone:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389556711000281

Fighting global warming: The potential of photocatalysis against CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs, tropospheric O3, BC and other major contributors to climate change

At the laboratory scale, photocatalysis is a promising method to convert many air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, to safer products for human health but also environmentally more acceptable, such as nitrate and carbon dioxide...

► Photocatalysis can destroy all long-lived well mixed GHGs: CO2, CH4, N2O, CFCs, HCFCs.
► Photocatalysis can also eliminate short-lived climate forcers soot, BC, O3, NOx, SOx.
► Indoor and outdoor large scale local pollution remediation applications are given.
► Self cleaning coatings, paints and glass for urban use are commercially available.
► In the near future photocatalysis can help to fight global warming and climate change.