This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially energy free which will decrease carbon production as well as allow to use the energy to capture carbon. Maybe we can get some nuclear fission or fusion breakthrough in the future but adding solar, wind and batteries as fast as possible should be the main focus for now.
there was a quote, and I can't remember exactly so I paraphrase: "the person who creates a new form of energy for the world, without creating an equivalent heatsink, would be history's greatest monster", although I suppose that is very perfect being the enemy of the good.
I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2.
Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process:
Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges.
As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon!
Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans.
But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible.
Not all life is connected to earths atmosphere. That that doomsday weapon is missing caves which contain multicellular life across geologic timescales. The ecosystems dependent on chemical synthesis at deep ocean vents would similarly be unaffected.
You might kill off plants though frozen seeds are viable for an extended period, but the incoming ice age is going to preserve aglee until atmospheric CO2 returns to normal even if we’re talking millions of years.
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
I wonder the same. This proposal sounds like it is leeching nutrients from the ground and storing it for a long time (on a scale of centuries in the proposal). How do these nutrients cycle back for growing the food that we need? Or, for that matter, for the next round of biomass to freeze?
Nice idea, but the climate crisis is not solved with technology (we already know and have everything we need) but by politics and changing our consumption habits.
People don’t want to change consumption habits and they aren’t going to vote for politicians who want to change consumption habits, so technology is the only hope.
I’m skimming through this and it feels like a well thought out research proposal with concrete next steps. My thermodynamics is too bad to comment on the approach but it looks cool. As long as setting up experiments for it is reasonable in cost, wouldn’t take too long to show results (before it’s too late for the planet), and can show that enough CO2 can be captured and long term costs make sense, then it sounds great! I hope some of the proposed next steps get funding.
Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.
The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization
Unfortunately the plan is very dangerous as tectonic activity has a tendency to release it plus any hurricane or monsoon or thaiphoon or such has a tendency to destroy the installation or worse, move it somewhere where it will do damage to the ecosystem.
Also, use solar and wind ships instead. We don't need to sink more nuclear material...
A structural question comes to mind, if the pipes are arrayed horizontally, how important is it to keep the pipes straight while they're being compressed by metric tons of biomass? Are they at risk of being squished closed? It's too late at night for me to ball park the pressures involved, but it'll be something like an extra atmosphere of pressure every 20 to 30 meters? This thing is over a hundred meters tall?
That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
I’d wager the furniture industry is currently responsible for a significant % of anual deforestation, which as far as I know isn’t regrowing fast enough.
An approach like this could benefit from crops which are not productive for humanity otherwise, but which grows much faster and eats CO2 cheaper than trees.
Does that mean “stop replanting forests?” Absolutely not.
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