Haven't there been movies made about Solar Radiation Management schemes gone awry? (Unless, of course, you meant Supply Relationship Management, or Schoberer Rad Messtechnik, or the Society for Range Management, Sri Ramaswami Memorial University...
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Fifty-five million years ago, when scientists believe the Earth was in a near-runaway state, dangerously overheated by greenhouse gases, the Arctic Ocean was also a very different place. It was a large lake, connected to the greater oceans by one primary opening: the Turgay Sea.
When this channel closed or was blocked nearly 50 million years ago, the enclosed body of water became the perfect habitat for a small-leaved fern called Azolla. Imagine the Arctic like the Dead Sea of today: It was a hot lake that had become stratified, suffering from a lack of exchange with outside waters. That meant its waters were loaded with excess nutrients.
Azolla took advantage of the abundant nitrogen and carbon dioxide, two of its favorite foods, and flourished. Large populations formed thick mats that covered the body of the lake. When rainfall increased from the changing climate, flooding provided a thin layer of fresh water for Azolla to creep outward, over parts of the surrounding continents.
Azolla bloomed and died like this in cycles for roughly 1 million years, each time laying down an additional layer of the thick blanket of sediment that was finally found in 2004 by the Arctic Coring Expedition.
The fact that the fern only needs a little over an inch of water under it to grow makes the whole scenario seem just within reason—that is, until you learn how much carbon this carbon dioxide-hungry plant sucked up over the course of those million years.
"Around half of the CO2 available at the time," said Jonathan Bujak, who studies dust and fine plant particles as a palynologist. "Levels dropped from between 25,000 and 35,000 [parts per million] to between 15,000 and 16,000 ppm."
Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) could be a key technology option in reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the world’s fossil fuel power plants. But, the technology has become better known for its setbacks than successes in recent years. This week revealed a glimmer of hope for CCS supporters as the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that construction has begun on the world’s largest post-combustion CCS facility.
The Petra Nova project is located near Houston, Texas and is a joint venture between the U.S. DOE, NRG Energy and JX Nippon. With a current price tag topping $470 million, the project is expected to capture up to 90% of emissions from 240 MW of electricity generation capacity.
If there is any hope of staving off the worst effects of climate change, many scientists say, this must be part of it — capturing the carbon that spews from power plants and locking it away, permanently. For now, they contend, the world is too dependent on fossil fuels to do anything less.
If all goes as planned, the effort in Saskatchewan will be the first major one of its kind at a power plant, the equivalent of taking about 250,000 cars off the road. And at least in theory, that carbon dioxide will be kept out of the atmosphere forever.
“Think about how far we’ve come,” said Mr. Zeleny, who recently retired after four decades here, most recently as plant manager.
Despite President Obama’s push to rein in emissions from power plants across the United States, coal is not going away anytime soon. The administration expects coal will still produce nearly a third of the nation’s electricity in 2030, down from about 40 percent today, even if Mr. Obama’s plan survives the political onslaught against it.
Despite the fact that the impacts of manmade climate change are already being felt and that failure to mitigate these effects by lessening fossil fuel CO2 emissions could result in dire consequences, policies enacted to reduce these emissions have been grossly insufficient. While there is no one silver bullet to "solve" climate change, many technologically feasible solutions exist that together can work to close the carbon loop and account for net zero carbon emissions.
Though still nascent, and requiring more research and development, direct air capture, a technology that extracts CO2 from ambient air, represents an option to be technologically optimistic. It is economically viable in several areas and can permit negative emissions to eventually stabilize atmospheric concentrations. However, as this technology scales up from demonstrations to pilot scale to commercialization, the deployment is not without risks and challenges that could delay or distract from its use as an effective means to manage our carbon footprint. While current support for the pioneers in this industry comes from private and philanthropic investment, below are 10 reasons why policy makers should take direct air capture seriously.
1. Direct air capture represents a technological fix to climate change
Is geoengineering the key to solving the global climate change problem? That’s the kind of question that evokes a knee-jerk reaction from those who consider it, including me. I believe we’re already doing enough geoengineering on the planet, albeit unplanned and perhaps unintended. For me, geoengineering like the kind environmental engineer David Keith speaks of in the TED Talk video below, is a fool’s errand.
Keith, who has done extensive research into geoengineering, doesn’t necessarily disagree. But he does caution that to make an informed and morally justified decision about whether to employ it or not requires a more nuanced approach in how we think about it.
[W]e have no non-radical solutions left to deal with climate change… either we face a radical climate catastrophe or we must radically shift our economy and modes of social organisation away from the current fossil fuel economy
That was the message given by David Spratt, author of Climate Code Red, and Ian Dunlop, who formerly chaired the Australian Coal Association but has since become a climate activist, at the Breakthrough 2014, National Climate Restoration Forum, last month in Melbourne, reported by Green Left Weekly.
One source of radical solutions is the growing geoengineering industry. Recently proposed methods for the sequestering of carbon dioxide include ants, iron sulfate and artificial trees .
Debate continues about when and how geoengineering might ever be deployed. Amongst environmentalists, support for geoengineering methods is low. Green Left Weekly explains:
as Clive Hamilton describes in his book Earthmasters, geoengineering technologies are supported by leading climate denial organisations and by the fossil fuel industry. This is because they seem to offer a way that fossil fuel use can continue unabated. The side effects of these technologies could be brutal: for example, severe drought in Africa and Asia. Moreover, if spraying was stopped, temperatures would rise rapidly, leading to even more devastating impacts.
Will regulation help? Green Left Weekly argues that governments have been unable to regulate fossil fuel industries effectively, and that they will be unlikely to succeed more here.
It is fruitful to look at comparisons with human genetic or biological modification, or human bioengineering.
Both are complex systems affecting life processes. There has been considerable debate and reflection on human bioengineering, human bioenhancement or genetic selection. Could the results of this reflection be of use in considering the ethics of geoengineering?
1. Geoengineering is already occurring
2. The treatment-enhancement distinction is unhelpful
3. Non-identity of future generations makes selection, not enhancement, a precautionary approach
4. Justice is a major ethical principle
5. Objectivity if unavoidable
Research into ways to engineer the Earth’s climate as a last-ditch response to global warming will be rendered “unviable” if the associated ethical issues are not tackled first, a leading environmental philosopher has warned.
Prof Stephen Gardiner, of the University of Washington, Seattle, told the Guardian that so-called geoengineering risked making problems worse for future generations.
Gardiner was in Sydney for a two-day symposium that aimed to grapple with the moral and ethical consequences of geoengineering, also known as climate modification.
Later this year, the United States’ National Academy of Sciences is due to publish a key report into the “technical feasibility” of a number of proposed geoengineering methods, which fall into two categories.
Pilot Project to Test the Climate Change Benefits of Biochar, is an add-on component to an on-going Strategic Program for Climate Resilience (SPCR) project, Mainstreaming Climate Risk Management in Development, lead by the Asian Development Bank. The objective of the biochar project is to pilot-test, in three agro-ecological zones of Nepal, biochar production as a climate change adapting soil amendment, carbon sequestration method, and rural energy source in Nepal. Biochar is a stable form of charcoal produced from heating natural organic materials (agricultural waste, woodchips, manure) in a high temperature, low oxygen process known as pyrolysis. Biochar is said to have multiple benefits, both in terms of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. The aim is to test and demonstrate these benefits in Nepal.
Ants can speed up mineral reactions that capture atmospheric carbon dioxide so dramatically that they could one day be enlisted in the fight against climate change.
Using ants to help capture CO2 and help fight global warming stems from a study Dorn published recently in Geology linking ants to the acceleration of natural carbon dioxide absorption in rock by up to 335 times, compared with absorption in ant-free areas.
Responding to the study, David Schwartzman, emeritus professor of biogeochemistry at Howard University who reviewed but was not a part of the research, said that encouraging ant colonization “will be important in carbon sequestration” from the atmosphere.
Of course, both he and Dorn note, the ants themselves may not always be necessary once researchers learn more about how the insects promote carbon sequestration. “I don’t know if you can just have massive ant colonies hanging around a power plant. But if we know what particular secretion of an ant gland is doing this trick, or combinations of secretions,” Dorn says, then those substances could potentially be produced in quantity.
The Royal Society of London, the world's oldest scientific publisher, has unveiled a proposal to create the first serious framework for future geoengineering experiments.
It's a sign that what are still considered drastic and risky measures to combat climate change, like artificially injecting tiny particles into the Earth's atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, are drifting further into the purview of mainstream science. The august scientific body has issued a call to create "an open and transparent review process that ensures such experiments have the necessary social license to operate."
Professor Steve Rayner, the co-director of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme, released what's been christened the 'Berlin Declaration', at the world's first major climate engineering conference currently underway in Germany. Rayner issued a call for amendments from the conference's attendees, which includes top climate scientists, policymakers, and geoengineering scholars.
The draft, in its current iteration, states that "New technologies have the potential to provide significant benefits to society, but they can also be controversial. Indeed the controversies surrounding new technologies have often led to a backlash against their development, as has been seen in the fields of genetically modified organisms and nuclear power." You can read the full draft here—it was distributed at the Climate Engineering Conference in Berlin, where I'll be reporting from all week.
It's specifically focused on a subset of geoengineering projects called solar radiation management, which also includes proposals to brighten clouds over the ocean and to send tiny mirrors into orbit to deflect sunlight. The grander geoengineering projects, which fall into this category, have inspired comparisons to schemes befitting Dr. Evil.
In his recent interview with Allan Savory, the high profile biologist and farmer who argues that properly managing grazing animals can counter climate chaos, George Monbiot reasonably asks for proof. Where I believe he strays into the unreasonable, is in asserting that there is none.
Savory’s argument, which counters popular conceptions, is that more livestock rather than fewer can help save the planet through a concept he calls “holistic management.” In brief, he contends that grazing livestock can reverse desertification and restore carbon to the soil, enhancing its biodiversity and countering climate change. Monbiot claims that this approach doesn’t work and in fact does more harm than good. But his assertions skip over the science and on the ground evidence that say otherwise.
Richard Teague, a range scientist from Texas A&M University, presented in favour of Savory’s theory at the recent Putting Grasslands to Work conference in London. Teague’s research is finding significant soil carbon sequestration from holistic range management practices.
Soil scientist, Dr Elaine Ingham, a microbiologist and until recently chief scientist at Rodale Institute, described how healthy soil, the underpinning of civilization throughout history, is created in interaction between grazing animals and soil microbiology. Peer-reviewed research from Rodale has shown how regenerative agriculture can sequester more carbon than humans are now emitting. Scientists, as well as dozens of farmers, ranchers and pastoralists from around the world, describe how they are increasing the health of their land, the carrying capacity of it, its biodiversity, and its profitability, all while preserving their culture and traditions.
How much carbon can be sequestered in properly managed grasslands and how fast? We don’t know, but we do know that massive carbon reserves were present in the ten-foot thick black soil of the historic grasslands of the Great Plains of the US. We know that the globe’s grasslands are the second largest store of naturally sequestered carbon after the oceans. They got that way by co-evolving with pre-industrial grazing practices: sufficient herds of native graziers, dense packed by healthy populations of predators.
According to a Friday piece on Motherboard, a group of scientists gathered at a geoengineering conference. Two rather radical ideas were proposed to deal with global warming, a theory advanced that human caused CO2 emissions are causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise. The ideas are based on the use of space based lasers, similar to those that were once proposed by President Ronald Reagan as part of his SDI program to provide a shield against Soviet nuclear missile attack.
One idea is to use a space based laser to create clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. The notion that lasers can create water droplets that in turn can form clouds has been tested in the laboratory. The formation of more clouds would help to reflex sunlight away from the Earth’s surface and thus cool the planet.
The other idea is to use lasers directly to blast greenhouse gases floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus eliminating them directly. This would constitute a brute force method of eliminating greenhouse gasses once they are emitted. One problem is that they might not be in sufficient concentrations to be dealt with effectively in this fashion.One idea is to use a space based laser to create clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere. The notion that lasers can create water droplets that in turn can form clouds has been tested in the laboratory. The formation of more clouds would help to reflex sunlight away from the Earth’s surface and thus cool the planet.
The other idea is to use lasers directly to blast greenhouse gases floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus eliminating them directly. This would constitute a brute force method of eliminating greenhouse gasses once they are emitted. One problem is that they might not be in sufficient concentrations to be dealt with effectively in this fashion.
Direct air capture (DAC) is the scooping of carbon from the sky. Unlike traditional carbon capture and storage, DAC doesn't try to simply capture carbon from chimneys and factory flues; instead it scoops carbon directly from the atmosphere, no intermediate steps necessary. Better yet, the most sophisticated DAC plants don't even need much electricity to function—they run on excess heat produced by other industrial processes. The temperatures needed to capture a ton of atmospheric carbon dioxide are "less than what is needed to boil your cup of tea," says Graciela Chichilnisky, founder of direct air capture company Global Thermostat.
The CO2 removed from the air by plants like Chichilnisky's has a variety of applications: It can be frozen into dry ice, introduced to greenhouses as plant food, used to carbonate beverages and even injected into oil wells in a process known as "enhanced oil recovery."
"A lot of demand for CO2 is unmet," says Chichilnisky. "In fact there's a market for it that exceeds one trillion dollars per year."
Companies like Chichilnisky's want to profit from this unmet demand, an aggressive example of doing well while doing good. Global Thermostat's pilot plant at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, has been profitable since construction finished, says Chichilnisky: The cost of producing compressed carbon dioxide via direct air capture is "minuscule" compared to compressed CO2's sale price. Now she wants to build plants elsewhere, using the excess heat from power plants and foundries. "If the technology shows the way to be profitable is by cleaning up the atmosphere then this will be the strongest motivation for the world to attack climate change."
So can DAC save the world? Not quite yet.
It was a great story, writes Andrew Lockley - scientists signing up to a 'Berlin Declaration' imposing an effective 'test ban' on outdoor geoengineering experiments. Except there was no declaration, and scientists never agreed to it. The world's media got it completely wrong, yet the mud will stick - and may cause severe harm in the fight against climate change.
The Climate Engineering Conference 2014 (CEC-14) was recently held to discuss technologies for deliberately counteracting climate change.
These include Solar Radiation Management (SRM), for example, adding sulphates to the stratosphere like a volcano, to reflect sunlight; and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) techniques - such as planting new forests to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere.
These technologies would allow us to exercise a degree of direct control over the climate. Unsurprisingly, the potential exercise of this God-like power is highly controversial.
Wally Broeker, the first person to alert the world to global warming, has called for atmospheric CO2 to be captured and stored underground. He says that carbon capture, combined with limits on fossil fuel emissions, is the best way to avoid global warming getting out of control over the next fifty years. Professor Broeker (Columbia University, New York) made the call during his presentation to the International Carbon Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where 150 scientists are meeting to discuss carbon capture and storage.
He was presenting an analysis which showed that the world has been cooling very slowly, over the last 51 million years, but that human activity is causing a rise in temperature which will lead to problems over the next 100,000 years.
"We have painted ourselves into a tight corner. We can't reduce our reliance of fossil fuels quickly enough, so we need to look at alternatives.
"One of the best ways to deal with this is likely to be carbon capture -- in other words, putting the carbon back where it came from, underground. There has been great progress in capturing carbon from industrial processes, but to really make a difference we need to begin to capture atmospheric CO2. Ideally, we could reach a stage where we could control the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, like you control your central heating. Continually increasing CO2 levels means that we will need to actively manage CO2 levels in the environment, not just stop more being produced. The technology is proven, it just needs to be brought to a stage where it can be implemented."
I am writing this from inside a factory, and what I am looking at will change the world.
I am looking out onto a large factory floor; the drone of machines is relatively loud, but soothing, and each person here is wearing a hard hat and safety glasses.
About 15 ft from where I am writing is Isaac, our operations manager. Isaac is standing next to our plastic pellet production line, which he has been overseeing for the past seven hours. What does this line do? On a relatively automated basis, it produces a continuous stream of plastic pellets, and feeds those pellets into large storage boxes. Boxes and boxes of pellets. Isaac is looking down into a box of newly made pellets for inspection. They are still warm from processing, and nearly all identical in size and shape. He has done a terrific job today: hundreds of pounds of plastic made in one shift, almost no losses.
To the untrained eye, this is a plastic production factory. If you look inside any one of the many bags, barrels or sacks in the factory, you will see what look and feel like plastic pellets. If you mould parts from those pellets, as we have many times today, you can create a shape or part that is as strong as any plastic part you have touched before.
But if you take a closer look, what you will see is something different. Inside these boxes are plastic pellets, meaning they can be heated and formed into shapes. But there is something very different about them. While most plastic is made from oil or other fossil fuels, for the first time, this plastic is made by pulling carbon out of air. This is not just plastic: this is carbon-negative plastic ‒ plastic that actually reduces the concentration of carbon in the air ‒ and this is the beginning of something important.
Climate geoengineering uses technology to temporarily reduce the effects of climate change by reflecting a small portion of sunlight back to space. As recently reported in Environmental Research Letters, an international team of scientists led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers used the output from climate models to evaluate which regions of the globe might be made "better" or "worse" by such geoengineering.
Researchers from across the United States as well as Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Japan, and Norway used the output from 12 climate models that form part of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, which seeks to understand the climate effects of geoengineering. These models represent different aspects of climate physics in slightly different ways. In the current study, scientists analyzed the simulated amount of geoengineering that would restore temperature and precipitation in 22 populated world regions to preindustrial values without making the climate of any region much worse off.
Climate researchers around the world will continue studying both climate change and the potential impacts of intervening through geoengineering so that governments can make informed decisions about the different options that can be used to address climate change.
Researchers in Japan have engineered a membrane with advanced features capable of removing harmful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Their findings, published in the British journal Nature Communications, may one day contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions and cleaner skies.
Greenhouse gases, originating from industrial processes and the burning of fossil fuels, blanket the earth and are the culprits behind current global warming woes. The most abundant among them is carbon dioxide, which made up 84% of the United State's greenhouse gases in 2012, and can linger in Earth's atmosphere for up to thousands of years.
Countries all over the world are looking to reduce their carbon dioxide footprint. However, carbon dioxide is essentially a waste product with little immediate commercial value and large treatment costs. Therefore, new low-cost technologies are sorely needed to incentivize greenhouse gas capture by industry.
Easan Sivaniah—an associate professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS)—led an international team of researchers from iCeMS and the University of Cambridge to create an advanced membrane capable of rapidly separating gases.
The membrane they worked on, referred to as PIM-1, is "typically embedded with a network of channels and cavities less than 2 nm in diameter that can trap gases of interest once they enter," said Qilei Song, who was involved in the study. "The only problem is that their intrinsic properties make them rather flimsy and their starting selectivity is weak."
To overcome PIM-1's weaknesses, Sivaniah's team heated PIM-1 at temperatures ranging from 120 to 450 °C in the presence of oxygen, a process referred to as thermal oxidation. "Oxygen, under high temperatures, chemically reacts with PIM-1 to reinforce the strength of channels while controlling the size of so-called gate openings leading into the cavities, which allows for higher selectivity," said Song.
The global aviation industry accounted for 12% of all transportation-related emissions in 2013. That statistic has pushed The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA ) to rally the industry around new efficiency and sustainability efforts. But what if airplanes carrying payloads inspired by volcanoes held the key to stopping global climate change in its tracks? One pioneering scientist not only thinks it's possible, but given the plan's relatively low annual price tag of just $10 billion, thinks there's a chance that a country -- or perhaps an industry or individual company -- will attempt the geoengineering project in our lifetime.
How would it work?
Atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira took an interest to geoengineering, or planet hacking, well before any other climate scientist would dare associate themselves with such crazy ideas. Caldeira began much the same way, actually, only taking the field on to disprove its feasibility. However, no matter how many variables he included in his models, they were all proven to be quite realistic. Fourteen years later those crazy ideas have formed into a buzzing field littered with well-respected climate scientists.
Humans cannot control volcanos (yet), but we can produce massive quantities of pure sulfate aerosols and deposit them into the stratosphere with high-altitude airplanes or balloons. The idea sounds a bit wild, but it's quite plausible. Several studies have estimated that the costs to deploy 1-5 million MT of aerosols 18-30 kilometers above the surface would range from $5 billion to $10 billion annually. That's much cheaper than the $2 trillion estimated annual price tag for efforts aimed at halving carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
New high-altitude airplanes would have to be created, but companies dedicated to the Industrial Internet of Things (powered by drones and automation) could design systems capable of taking off, depositing material, landing, refueling, and monitoring progress without much human interaction. General Electric Company (NYSE: GE ) believes that the Industrial Internet could add $10 trillion to $15 trillion to the global economy by 2035 and is putting its money where its mouth is right now. Perhaps solar geoengineering will make its way into the innovative company's portfolio sooner rather than later.
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