Like the Space Elevator, I am a little fuzzy on the science of this:
Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide generated by power plants and factories could play an important role in limiting global warming caused by humans, says an international climate research group associated with the United Nations.
In a new report the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says doing so could cut the cost of stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere as much as 30 percent compared with other options, like switching to cleaner technologies.
Altogether, sequestering carbon dioxide could eventually account for slightly more than half of what is needed to prevent dangerous concentrations in the atmosphere, says the report, which was released on Monday and is online at www.ipcc.ch.
But the report cautions that while the method is cheaper than others, it would significantly raise the cost of electricity for many years. For that reason, several authors and United Nations officials said, it is unlikely that the technique will be adopted voluntarily by industries in wealthy countries.
So they will capture it, pipe it somewhere, and store it in big tanks and wells forever?
Mr Furious
You’ve just stumbled into the briliant solution to all of our problems, John. It’s perfect! Once they finish the space elevator, they’ll just shoot the stuff into outer space…
Slartibartfast
I hope Mr Furious wasn’t Mr Serious about that last. Yes, John, carbon sequestration is one of those things being considered. Hopefully it’ll be stored in some easily accessible form so that it can be released when the glaciers come.
Cyrus
I don’t know how this particular system works, but “capturing and storing carbon…” is exactly what every organism on earth does. (Except for the visitors from Betelguese.) The more carbon goes into trees and grass and people, the less there is to go into the upper atmosphere.
I assume this plan is very different from just “plant a tree” – partly because if the solution was that simple, I hope it would have been done a long time ago – but CO2 isn’t harmful itself, only when it gets between us and the sun, so dissolving it in a liquid or pumping it into the ground seems like a good idea at first glance.
Clever
CO2 Applications
Here’s a good one:
And lasers!
There’s enough uses for CO2 that they wouldn’t just store it all. Still, even the stuff I’ve put forth leaves [literally] tons unaccounted for. And as far as capturing it, I’ll leave that to the engineers…
Paul L.
My stupid pie in the sky suggestion.
Create giant airtight hydroponic greenhouses to convert back it to oxygen.
Someone shoot this down with how this is unfeasible.
demimondian
Actually, it is a good idea in this case. The power plant generates carbon dioxide — you know, the stuff which we’re trying to avoid adding to the atmosphere? The thing which is clever about this particular application is that instead of just storing the junk in cannisters, the power plant operators inject it into an active oil and field field to improve recovery rates. Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is usually a good thing.
Slartibartfast
And then when those trees and people die, the decomposing organic matter converts back to CO2. So, what we need is immortal trees and people?
You’ve just created a giant greenhouse to avoid the giant greenhouse effect. I just know there’s something wrong with that…
ppGaz
Let’s hear more about the “raise the cost of electricity” part. How much?
When you live in a desert that is inhabitable only when there is ample electricity, you care about such things.
They’ll have to pry our air conditioners from our hot, dead fingers.
Apologies to Charlton Heston.
Mark
Put it in big tanks, shoot them to Mars, wait for Mars to go though “global warming,” and then colonize Mars.
It really is that simple, John.
[/sarcasm]
wilson
Supposing it gets sequestered. How do we know it will stay underground? Color me skeptical.
I want to hear about a) changing it into oxygen and carbon (with carbon recycled into building materials for the space elevator or what have you) or c) adding hydrogen and creating plastics, etc. Maybe neither is practical now.
I also note the problem with controlling sources – what about mobile sources of CO2 (jets, cars, trucks, ships) which spew C02?
I suppose one could use hydrogen to fuel cars, ships and trucks.
Aircraft might need to be replaced to some degree by high-speed trains, if one got serious about controlling CO2.
Hard to visualize jets with big tanks of hydrogen, nuclear fuel sources, or anything other than jet fuel.
Wrye
Not all sequestering schemes are created equal, sadly. The problem, say, with just pumping it all in the ocean is that on the scales we’re talking about it risks turning the ocean acidic.
On the other hand, this isn’t plutonium: you don’t have to store Co2 indefinitely, the key is to just to keep it out of the atmospheric system and rerelease it gradually. For example, once fossil fuels have been nearly depleted, say.
Collection of Co2 makes a great deal of sense, though, and this is why the argument for battery-driven electric cars is a good one: by powering the cars with power from a central plant rather than a million combustion engines, you may burn the same amount of fossil fuels–but you do so in a single location, where the emissions can (theoretically) be dealt with.
JPS
Wilson:
“I want to hear about a) changing [CO2] into oxygen and carbon (with carbon recycled into building materials for the space elevator or what have you) or c) adding hydrogen and creating plastics, etc. Maybe neither is practical now.”
Your comment warms my heart, because changing CO2, chemically, into more useful compounds is a big part of what I do for a living. I find it more attractive fundamentally than just burying the stuff.
Here’s the problem: The energy has to come from somewhere. If we get out energy by making CO2 (which is why we make so damn much of it), then turning it back into something useful is usually going to require putting in energy. That’s a little depressing to CO2 chemists, because whatever elegant reaction you invent, if you look at the big picture you probably haven’t taken any CO2 out of the world: someone had to generate at least as much elsewhere. (Keep that in mind for hydrogen: Right now, generating hydrogen industrially liberates a LOT of CO2.)
It’s still an important goal, I think, but ultimately it’s only part of the solution; there would also have to be a shift away from fossil fuels as the big energy source. That’s a long way off, so sequestration is a good way to stall for time.
John:
“pipe it somewhere, and store it in big tanks and wells forever?”
Was anyone else curious how big the tanks would need to be? For the fun of it I ran the numbers–if you wanted to store this year’s man-made CO2 emissions, you’d need a cube 1.6 miles on a side. I know it’s a big planet, but geez that starts to pile up after awhile.
Northman
I’m also a bit fuzzy on the science on this one, but so far as I’m aware, the best natural way to get rid of CO2 is coral, which locks the CO2 into limestone, which isn’t exactly immortal, but should last for quite some time.
Coral reefs can be started artificially, something to do with sinking old ships, but I have no idea about how much CO2 they could handle. You also would have to deal with other pollution problems that are killing off the existing coral reefs.
DougJ
Have you been reading John Tierney’s columns?
Buckaroo
Ummm, because plants release CO2 and take in oxygen when photosynthesis is inactive (nighttime)?
Some of the CO2 is stored in the bulk of the plant but not enough to really be as effective as other means of CO2 scrubbing.
Tim F
You’re right on that ocean photosynthesis drives the global carbon balance (relatively-speaking, terrestrial plants have a minimal effect) but you are off the mark with coral reefs. Coral is an animal, not a plant, and the entire system produces net carbon. You need the little single-celled critters that live in the surface layer of the ocean to crank their production up a notch. We can do that, for example tiny amounts of dissolved iron can spike huge amounts of growth in certain oceans, but we have a poor understanding of what happens next.
About sequestering you can color me skeptical. If we could render CO2 into a room temperature solid and build affordable housing out of it, ok I might go along with that. Burying it underground won’t put away nearly enough to make an impact and stuffing it into the deep ocean is even worse.
The real answer is to burn less carbon. Do the painful adjustments now, while we have a choice. Ha ha, just kidding. Good luck making that happen.
Off Colfax
Actually, under controlled conditions, the decay of biological matter creates quite a few more percentage points of methane (CH4) than carbon dioxide. And methane is used in fuel sources around the world, including being part of the natural gas used by many of us in the US to heat our homes. Heck, we even have cars that run off this fuel!
So in creating this controlled condition (which is little more than the correct amounts of pressure, humidity, and air), we can use decaying biomass to create more methane for uses private and public. Certainly some of the CO2 created from this will escape into the atmosphere. Yet to offset that, the conversion of methane to energy produces a lower percentage of CO2 than other fossil fuels.
Certainly sounds like a good trade-off to me. As well as possibly a profitable business concept, looking at today’s prices for natural gas and using the creation of biodiesel as a model.
Bob Munck
Ah, but you can combine the Space Elevator with the need to get rid of excess carbon. After all, carbon nanotubes are carbon. Just make a big SE out of a uniform CNT cable about 150,000 km long; it won’t need a counterweight because there’s enough mass of the SE itself far enough above GEO to generate a net UP force, pulling cable up from the anchor.
Now start manufacturing CNT at the anchor with carbon wrung out of the atmosphere. Add it to the bottom of the SE, playing it out. Have a little machine out at 150,000 km that climbs the SE (toward Earth) and snips off sections of the cable behind it. They’ll be slung far, far away from Earth, never to be seen again. The carbon is being pulled up and flung away by the Earth’s rotation, so there’s no cost involved in getting it into space. Every once in awhile, hang a bucket of radioactive waste on the cable at the bottom, so it’s eventually thrown away as well.
Sinequanon
Although this is an interesting idea, I’m not sure it is a good idea. I’ve done a fast early morning scan of the actual report and storage is a big problem not unlike nuclear waste (although that is seriously toxic and deadly). Injection into water sources is seriously problematic – such as wells and the ocean itself. The IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage states:
A report came out in France last week stating trees were emitting more CO2 – it struck me as funny. That is because we cut all the trees down, the major producer of oxygen. SO, plant more trees! When the supply of trees are limited, its like a glut in the trees system and it has to be released. Therefore there is too much CO2 and not enough trees to absorb it and produce oxygen. Simplistic, but it makes my point.
Sinequanon
BTW: This is an EXCELLENT conversation all the way around!