Microsoft announces purchase of 315k tonnes of CO2 removal(heirloomcarbon.com) |
Microsoft announces purchase of 315k tonnes of CO2 removal(heirloomcarbon.com) |
Heirloom Carbon: Absorbing CO2 from the air using crushed rocks
Not familiar w/ the company or details in that space at the moment, but I am aware of the basic principles** apparently being used here. So, this seems somewhat more than the usual lip service, which is good to see.
* Along the lines of wonderous marketing phrases like "responsible corporate citizens" (or "stewardship") ... to replace actual concern for your community, one of the "efficiencies" brought to us by 'professionalizing' business management in the form of "MBAs" / burying real lives and consequences in Microsoft(R) Excel(TM) "spreadsheets"
** Punintentional ... bit oblique, but, some might enjoy
It's all green washing. Everyone, the rich especially, must dramatically reduce consumption and put our money towards regrowing/healing the green space.
1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-...
So, if any of those technologies were operating at scale, we could add a $2 / gallon tax to gasoline (or a similar upfront tax on new ICE engines, based on expected emissions), and then the transportation part of our economy would be carbon negative.
We could add similar taxes to things like concrete, and other greenhouse gas emitters.
This is all eminently doable, but it would hurt oil profits, so politicians and propagandists keep making sure it doesn’t happen. Private entities voluntarily funding actual carbon capture is the only feasible way to break the deadlock at this point (short of overthrowing ~ 100 governments at once).
Microsoft can fund this development it's much more difficult to make other people change their ways
I mean when you look at amount of CO2 emitted for planting/maintenance/harvest v.s. absorbed over the course of 10+ years?
If speed is what you're after, bamboo grows very quickly, consuming high levels of CO2, but also doesn't live that long, undoing that. Wetlands filled with peat are the absolute kings of storing CO2 (~3% of Earth's surface stores ~1/3 of CO2), but you can't artificially make them anywhere, and it would take hundreds of years before it becomes effective. Seaweed like kelp are also very effective at storing a lot of CO2, but organisms that feed on them cancel out the benefits. So, a properly designed[0] forest still wins.
What works better than planting is conserving, as in not draining swamplands, cutting down forests, and so on. Not because it's something we can't recreate, but because the sheer amount of time it took for such ecosystems to develop makes it much more effective than anything we'd plant today.
Which brings me to the best solution: not building anything on an empty patch of land, but to build around the existing ecosystems, essentially extending them. The ends of a forest aren't anywhere near as productive as their middle, so by extending the space around them you're extending that most productive middle. Another very effective method is re-connecting forests via corridors (tunneling roads or building wildlife crossings), allowing animals to roam between the two parts, which makes both parts healthier.
In summary, building trees is absolutely the best, but it's not just about planting them, it's about picking the best spots to do so.
[0] Not planting all the trees at once, the diversity of the trees planted, proper spacing, re-introducing animals so that the space below the trees thrives with vegetation, etc.
It'd make way more sense to first focus on decarbonizing our energy grid, before starting to spend 10+x more energy to recapture and push it back underground.
They've made electric cars mainstream
And how is that better than putting the money toward solar panels or other renewable energy sources?
Why is such technology important to invest in? Two main reasons: firstly it could very well be the most economical means to make certain carbon-emitting processes carbon neutral, for cases where there is not currently a good means to eliminate the carbon emissions. Think aircraft emissions, for example. Secondly, even if we completely eliminate net carbon emissions, global warming will still continue for a fair few decades, as the climate takes a long time to actually reach equilibrium. If we want to avoid that equilibrium being too hot, we will need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And while planting trees is generally a good thing, it's not really a feasible way to actually remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to make much of a dent (only growing new forests generally removes much carbon: mature forests are mostly carbon neutral, and the carbon capture process is slow). Technology like this, if it can be scaled and use renewable energy, has a chance of being able to make this difference (though the biggest question, apart from whether the technology can actually work, is who will pay for such removal, if it's not for carbon credits).
My sibling comment even argues for needing to invest in technologies for removing carbon from the air because we need a way to remove the CO2 that’s already up there.
I believe that putting this same money into building more renewables is better use for the money. We can worry about removing CO2 from the atmosphere once we stop dumping immense quantities of it.
That being said, this problem is as much economical as technical. Microsoft, want to help reduce CO2 levels? Spend this money on lobbing to introduce carbon prices, e.g. see Canada’s carbon tax or the EU carbon tax WITH a border adjustment.
Each cycle requires heating the calcium carbonate to almost 1000 °C in order to release the carbon dioxide and then you have a gas again, which you have to compress consuming even more energy and store somewhere. The calcium oxide that ends up in concrete would even permanently fixate the same amount of carbon dioxide as released during its production.
And that for 35 billion tons per year just to keep the carbon dioxide concentration constant before we can even start to actually take any carbon out of the atmosphere. Would it not make much more sense to use all that energy, which has to come from renewable sources, to replace some fossil energy?
And who will pay for this? Instead of burning X dollars of carbon and then paying probably roughly the same amount again to get the carbon pulled out of the atmosphere, would it not make more sense to just replace the fossil fuel with renewable energy. And sure, there are complications, availability, storage, and not all fossil fuels are easily replaceable with electricity.
And for scale, if you turn 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into dry ice, then you haven to safety get rid of 22 cubic kilometers of that stuff each year. Global oil production was 5 cubic kilometers in 2022.
What if people don't want to switch? They'll just elect someone who stops the progress.
The carbon capture doesn't require the cooperation of the public, except for funding.
but then
> doesn't require the cooperation of the public, except for funding
carbon capture require just as much cooperation. Just of a different form. There's no way around it, since the work to do capture does not directly produce a private benefit. You'd have to regulate it to make it work, for example, force a penalty for emitters that cost more than the capture.
This means you will already need to elect someone to propose and pass the legislation. In which case, those who would end up having to pay will simply elect the opposition.
What about the effect of making them feel good instead of actually making useful efforts, like working on reducing consumption?
We need to consume less, that's all. There is no silver bullet here.
So even with clean energy, unless you have a totally clean grid with significant surplus energy, you’d do better to use the energy to put into displacing fossil fuels, because with the same amount of energy, you’d stop more CO2 being produced than you could remove with it.
This argument only works if you want to reverse the entire process, turn the carbon dioxide back into something similar to oil or gas. If you would burn pure hydrocarbons with pure oxygen perfectly, it would be as simple as condensing the water in order to get pure carbon dioxide.
Working on carbon removal counting on the fact that someone will discover a clean energy that can actually compete with today's use of fossil fuels is close to 4D chess: we don't have that clean energy and it's pretty sure we won't have it in time. Therefore it is probably useless to throw tons of money on CO2 removal.
What is necessary, though, is to stop carbon emissions. We could throw money at isolating buildings, for instance.
The thing is that to reduce carbon emissions, we have to do less. And in a capitalist world, that's hard to accept. We need to change our model of society and accept that economical growth = CO2 emissions.
I'd do it if it was paying for trees and I actually believed that the payments results in more trees (which I am also skeptical about).
Not to say planting trees isn’t good in other ways, but we’ll definitely have to come up with more creative ideas for carbon capture and storage if we want to help climate change. Plus we just need to stop it at the source and keep advancing solar and battery tech.
For the vast majority of applications, it's cheaper to not emit in the first place, or capture the emissions during whatever process releases it, than capturing from the air.
However, just the greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere are more than sufficient to cause unacceptable climate impacts, and it will take centuries to get back the pre-industrial climate. As such, we will almost certainly want to artificially remove CO2 from the atmosphere - go "net negative" rather than "net zero".
We need to change society not only to stop increasing the emissions (because that's what's happening now), but dramatically reduce them. Also we need to change society to handle the impact of climate change as well as possible (but for sure climate will make our life more difficult).
Nothing is worth doing if we don't dramatically reduce our emissions. Whoever says "no but you see, I don't have to cut my emissions because I am working on CO2 removal" is lying to themselves.
Edit: it's direct air capture, it's not some shell game "offset" thing which is what I assumed, that's actually very interesting.
Everything big started small, and I for one am super pumped that Microsoft is doing this. It's genuine leadership on the most pressing issue that humanity faces.
From an article in late 2022, I found “Heirloom removes that CO2 by heating the limestone into a powder and stores the extracted CO2 underground” which leads me to believe this isn’t actually solving the problem, only sweeping it under the rug.
Capture it, then use it for other purposes, but don’t release it again and don’t bury it hoping our grandchildren’s grandchildren will know not to go digging there.
Carbon offset schemes that involve planting trees or, even worse, not chopping down trees, are notorious for the additionality problem. Much of the time, the payments are made to plant trees that would have been planted anyway.
The second problem that these schemes have is accurate measurement. This is particularly the case for "soil carbon" rather than forestry, but it's still true for forestry. All the incentives are to overestimate the amount of CO2 sequestered.
The third problem these schemes have is permanence on geological timescales. Let's say you buy land to regrow rainforest in a developing country. Then there's a coup and the new government decides that a quick buck flogging off the timber is more important than contracts signed under the old legal system?
Even if they did, where would you store the wood?
On one hand, this is good since those technologies are in desperate need of funding and scaling on the other hand, make no mistake: They're much too small and will need to improve from stone-age to modern age in just a few decades.
edit: typo
At some point we just have to accept the truth: we need to work on smart solutions to consume less. Note that I did not say "to make things more efficient", because rebound effects make us consume more. I said "consume less". And that is mostly not a technology problem, it is a society problem.
You'd want to stop burning the coal before you start to try and claw solid carbon back out.
The Silicon Valley way of "I will throw money at it and develop a product and a whole infrastructure that relies on the fact that some chemist will make a Nobel Prize in the meantime" is honestly a bit ridiculous to me.
It is like developing spaceships to send humanity on another planet without realizing that we need fundamentally new physics if we ever hope to reach even the next solar system 4.5 light-years away.
What's dangerous is that it convinces people that we are "on track" to do it. And actually we could not be further away: we miss fundamental science to go there. It's just that it's easier to do the engineering than to solve the fundamental science problem, and let's be honest, engineers love those problems.
Fission is really the only solution but even that is enormously expensive.
Yes! But not anywhere!
A good first step would be to realize that we need to consume less, and that technology will not save us: we have to change society in order to consume a lot less. Doesn't mean there are no interesting engineering problems there!
On top of that, some energy generation technologies (like solar) are ramping faster than Moore’s law used to. That means that non-peak energy production will no longer be scarce, so thermodynamic efficiency is a second-order effect.
In all likelihood, the most economic path forward probably involves simultaneously drawing down CO2 and also generating 5-10% of the energy we use from fossil fuels, 90-95% from renewables, and an additional 10-100% on carbon capture.
but clean energy isn't entirely fungible, and if you've got a context where it's abundant then it can make sense to use it for carbon removal. we just need to be careful that the carbon removal projects are only getting built in places where the energy would otherwise be wasted.
How is Heirloom doing it? Are they spending 250 kWh/ton for the extraction? They're reacting it with limestone, and it doesn't sound like that's taking a lot of energy.
I’d expect it’s the rock baking part that takes the most energy.
It's great to prototype capture... but the benefit is developing a technology that will mostly only be useful after largely decarbonizing the economy.
Earth slowly returns to equilibrium point well below current CO2 levels without our intervention and current levels aren’t so high as to be unlivable. So the only question we need to ask is if it’s easier to cut emissions or sequester them.
At the start, cutting is much easier. But each percent is harder to cut than the last. There is a point where cutting costs more than sequestering.
That isn't necessarily true. Solar panels are less than 5% of the price they were in 1990. Economies of scale reduce costs. There is a clear path to fully decarbonizing the power grid without raising energy costs using some combination of renewables and nuclear -- France has already done this. Nearly all of transportation and heating could be electrified.
You don't get into significantly higher costs until you get near the end. Biofuels would function for aviation but would raise the price if no one can come up with anything better. Cement emits CO2 and it's not currently obvious what to do about it. But if you would e.g. institute a carbon tax, it's not implausible that the market would find a more efficient alternative that isn't currently known.
It doesn't make sense to spend resources on capture until it costs less than the alternatives, and it's not implausible that it never will.
I can think of another. How do we get everyone to do the answer to your question?
I think it’s fine to identify what’s most efficient in a political vacuum, so long as we then address how we actually convince people to do it (lower consumption & emissions).
No
We don't really have to "figure out" biofuels. They exist and are only moderately more expensive than fossil fuels. Institute a carbon tax and planes would run on biofuels and have 20-50% higher fuel costs, possibly less if cheap renewables lower energy costs in general and thereby the production cost for biofuels. On top of that, if petroleum fuels were only being used for aviation they might have lower economies of scale and higher prices, making biofuels more competitive.
One of last big things we still need to figure out is what to do about cement. But even there half of the CO2 attributed to it is energy use rather than the chemical process, which could be switched away from fossil fuels. Then we could use less concrete and more wood or steel. Or someone might come up with a cost effective alternative to cement in concrete. The incentive to do all of these would exist with a carbon tax.
The market is going to do whatever is most cost effective, even if it's only more cost effective by a modest percentage. But then all you need is a modest percentage in carbon tax and you're done.
I wouldn't say that all of that 90% is equally easy. There are challenges that increase as more power is made from solar/wind, and there are different challenges to making enough nuclear.
That is the price of a ton of coal. Buy it from China BEFORE it gets burned and you have a sensible strategy.
Sucking it back from the atmosphere AFTER burning takes 10x more energy which is complete insanity. "Getting price down" and "when it scales" is an utter misunderstanding of the situation. Scale doesn't defeat the laws of physics.
No politics or logistics can change laws of physics. Burning coal with hand and capturing it with the other at 10x the cost just doesn't make sense, neither from the engineering perspective nor from the economical.
Even if India and China triple that, we’re still coming out ahead by focusing on the reduction of fossil fuels for power generation, international transport, and heating buildings.
And then that money funds more mines to get coal out of the ground faster.
> Sucking it back from the atmosphere AFTER burning takes 10x more energy which is complete insanity.
Part of the plan needs to be capture at power plants. Another part of the plan needs to be heavy taxes for releasing CO2. If someone needs the convenience for some use case, let them pay the capture price.
You realize that this makes power plants energy-negative?
Clearly at least one of these is wrong, because we can't simultaneously have a big surplus and have to reduce consumption, so which one is it?
If e.g. smelters still need to use coal, then an energy surplus doesn't help them. If carbon capture is expensive even with virtually free power due to wages and infrastructure, the capture cost was reflected in the price of steel, and demand for steel is elastic, then we'd both capture more carbon and reduce steel consumption.
The vast majority of carbon-intensive goods are related to energy production. Even when people talk about things like transportation and agriculture and construction, a major proportion of their CO2 emissions are from burning fuel.
> If e.g. smelters still need to use coal, then an energy surplus doesn't help them.
Smelters are using coal for heat. Burning it directly on site is more efficient than burning it in a power plant, losing most of the heat to conversion inefficiency, losing some of the electricity to distribution and then turning what's left back into heat.
If you had cheap electricity that didn't come from burning coal they could just use electric heat. At which point there would be no need to reduce steel consumption.
Electricity infrastructure used to be defined by the factories that run from (say) 9AM to 5PM. The grid has to be sized mostly for their needs, and baseload power (fossil, atomic, hydro) are sized for it, This is slow and costly to spin up and down. You see this reflected in things like utility "time of use" plans, where they offer you dirt-cheap energy at 2AM if you're willing to pay a penalty at 3PM. They'd love for you to sop up the glut by running a Bitcoin miner or chilling your house to 15C overnight.
Renewables move on a dime by comparison. If we need n GW of power at the peak time of 5PM, depending on the yield factors of local solar/wind/tidal/etc, we may end up with an infrastructure that generates 3n or 5n at other times of day. A lot of thinking has gone to batteries/molten salt/pumped hydro as ways we can store that surplus for later needs, but we can also direct the glut into processes that are energy-intensive and only economically viable in a power-too-cheap-to-meter scenario.
The CO2 scrubbers could be a viable sink for that excess power once we've got enough grid-scale storage.
We already have storage technologies that could compete with present-day energy prices if charging them was near-free. They're currently not competitive because it isn't, but in your scenario during off-peak it would be. So why would anybody have to reduce consumption then? Buy a battery, charge it when power is dirt cheap and use as much as you do now for no more than you pay now.
It is though, because the 80th percent isn't any harder than the 5th percent, and may even be easier because when you're just starting out you don't have economies of scale.
You don't get to the hard part until you're almost entirely done and only left with the few outliers that are unusual and expensive to address.
> I wouldn't say that all of that 90% is equally easy.
That's true, but it could just as well be because they get easier.
Getting a new nuclear reactor design through the NRC is a massive ordeal, but once you have you can build an unlimited number of them without having to do it again.
> There are challenges that increase as more power is made from solar/wind, and there are different challenges to making enough nuclear.
As an absolute baseline we could replace the entire grid with nuclear. This is a known technology. If we wanted to we could build a thousand more reactors using known designs that are already in use and it would work. France has basically done this; they have a 70% nuclear grid and most of the rest is hydro and renewables. Their energy costs are below the EU average.
The only reason to do something else is if the other thing costs less. Newer reactor designs or regulatory reform could lower the cost relative to existing nuclear reactors. Using new renewable infrastructure to charge electric vehicles is an obvious fit because they have built-in storage. Solar aligns well with air conditioning load. If economies of scale lower the cost of storage technologies it could allow for more renewables and less nuclear. But these are all things that could make the price lower rather than higher.
So no, it's still an energy-bound problem and we still burn coal to get energy.
The company that Microsoft is buying capture from is using lots of energy to remove CO2 from rocks, but that's because they're working to pull more CO2 from normal air. When you have an exhaust pipe it's already concentrated and you can separate it out much more easily.
Injecting CO2 into rocks "all by itself" is extremely slow because it's exothermic and because surface of rocks is too small. You need to crush the rocks (energy) and heat them up (energy).
That's not fast enough and also risks making the ocean too acidic.
> Injecting CO2 into rocks "all by itself" is extremely slow
By injection I meant injection. Drilling a deep hole and pushing the CO2 out the other end.
Only the reaction happens by itself.
With the right structure underground the CO2 can spread over an enormous surface area at a high concentration that promotes reactions. But even if it that takes too long, each well doesn't need to operate forever.