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I was curious, so I did the math. Total worldwide carbon production is 38.2 billion tons per year. Cost to sequester a ton of carbon is between $30 and $150, d

I was curious, so I did the math. Total worldwide carbon production is 38.2 billion tons per year. Cost to sequester a ton of carbon is between $30 and $150, depending on who you ask and how you do it. Let's assume a middle of the road price of $90/ton. That's $3.438 trillion a year, or about $478 per person. This is roughly equal to the US yearly federal spending, or 3% of the world GDP. If you somehow pooled together all the world's billionaires and got them to contribute their annual income (roughly $600 billion a year, averaging the past 7 years) to the effort, you could eliminate roughly 20% of carbon produced in the world every year. ------------------------- Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear why finding new sequestration methods is incredibly important: if you can get the cost from $160 to $10 per ton, then suddenly all you'd need would be a coalition of half the world's billionaires to stop the main cause of global warming. Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc. ------------------------- Mostly off-topic: when I was looking at estimates of land size, apparently the amount the US has shrunk from 2007 to 2015 (14,000 km2; went from 9,161,120 km2 to 9,147,420 km2) [0] is roughly equivalent to half the area of the Netherlands. Wow. [0] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.K2 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.K2

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
You also have to remember the costs of capturing CO2, which is best done at the points of emission, and transporting the CO2 to the (usually far away) storage site. OTOH, the total cost (not just for sequestration) is about $100, maybe a bit more, in most estimates. For reference, a gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2, so $100/ton equals $1/gallon of gasoline. That's roughly what you'd have to increase gasoline price by to fund CO2 capture, transport and storage. (This neglects that the capture part is neigh-on impossible.) For electricity, to compensate for the average US CO2 emissions per kWh (~1.2 lbs/kWh), you'd have to increase the price by about 6 cents per kWh. To do CCS for both gasoline and electricity consumption, the average US family would have to pay (order of magnitude) 1000 x $1 + 12000 x $0.06 = $1720. That would compensate for about half the family's CO2 emissions. The remaining half is dominated by emissions from the food we eat, the stuff we buy and from having fun.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Edit: this should say $1720 per year.
chii 10y ago
> when trees die they release CO2 is that really true? If a tree died, i would assume the carbon is either buried, or otherwise remain solid, unless it's burnt.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Some of it is retained in the decayed remains (eventually soil) but much is released in the decay process.
  - pacaro 10y ago
    It's worth noting that the decay process takes about as long as the growth process for some trees. For example, a Douglas Fir might spend 600 years alive, and then be a Nurse Log for another 600 --- see http://www2.kuow.org/program.php?id=26100 http://www2.kuow.org/program.php?id=26100
- ilyagr 10y ago
  The CO2 is released when (and if) the tree rots.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Dead plant matter used to become coal. Dead plant matter today decomposes: "Based on a genetic analysis of mushroom fungi, it was proposed that large quantities of wood were buried during [the Carboniferous] period because animals and decomposing bacteria had not yet evolved enzymes that could effectively digest the resistant phenolic lignin polymers and waxy suberin polymers. They suggest that fungi that could break those substances down effectively only became dominant towards the end of the period, making subsequent coal formation much rarer." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous See Rocks and Coal
    - usrusr 10y ago
      Imagining a forest where dead trees never decompose is quite a mindbender. Certainly a better explanation for the presence of fossil fuels though than just a handwavey mention of geological timeframes.
nickhalfasleep 10y ago
This is reverse process of digging coal and sucking oil out of the earth. The problem is that we are now releasing it several orders of magnitude faster than it was put down. The Carboniferous period was a 60,000,000 years long and we will use them in much less than 600 years.
- infectoid 10y ago
  This is something that isn't often mentioned, but from what I understand this is actually kind of a one time deal with fossil fuels. I was under the assumption that the Earth is not likely to have another carboniferous period. The implication being that we have one good shot at solving civilisation. It just gets more difficult when we start to run out of fossil fuels. One of the reasons we don't see anything going on out there when we look up could very well be that most civilisations never properly make it off their planets. Can anyone else comment on this that might have better information than me?
  - nickhalfasleep 10y ago
    I think for this era, fungi and other consumers of decaying matter could not break down the cellulose walls of plant matter. Since then they did. It is interesting to imagine a species gaining sentience on a planet where there was no coal or oil to power from a wood-burning society of iron to steel and plastics.
    - Symmetry 10y ago
      I believe it was the lignin specifically which wouldn't decay in the Carboniferous period, leading to most of the fossil fuels around.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    I don't think that fossil fuel is the only way to bootstrap up to a high-energy, high-complexity civilization. Hydroelectric generation also yields the sort of dependable, concentrated energy source you need for industrial development, and it was first built with 19th century technology. The necessary 19th century precursor technologies (steel, concrete, wire...) could be manufactured with wood instead of coal. Reservoir-backed hydroelectric dams can also serve, effectively, as a giant battery when you start trying to introduce more abundant but less steady energy sources like wind and solar. The global potential of energy from hydroelectricity is only a small fraction of our current fossil-based consumption, though. And while wind and solar have potential resources far past fossil power, they can't expand as fast as fossils did historically. So the Fermi Paradox aspect might be that civilizations without fossils and without the self-control to limit reproduction are hobbled by cycles of Malthusian collapse. Or perhaps space-capable civilizations that didn't fall into the Malthusian boom-bust trap while still confined to one planet also don't go crazy with growth once they escape their gravity well, so they're out there but not leaving evidence dramatic enough to be seen by our current telescopes.
shalmanese 10y ago
> Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc. You misunderstand the purpose of trees. They're basically solar powered, organic carbon sequestration devices that happen to run for free. If we ever run out of space to plant trees, we can just cut some down, reduce it down to charcoal and bury it back into the ground which conveniently leaves a readily accessible fossil fuel source for our ancestors in the case of civilizational collapse. But we're still a long way away from running out of room to plant trees. We're still desperately trying to plant enough trees to stop the encroaching of the Sahara and there's vague, futuristic plans to try and turn the entire Sahara into a forest. Similarly, China is desperately planting trees to stop the encroachment of the Gobi.
- warent 10y ago
  Great perspective. I wasn't aware of the Gobi problem either
- dpark 10y ago
  Reducing trees to charcoal is not cost effective. It releases a ton of carbon dioxide by itself anyway. But it also doesn't make sense that we would plant trees, turn them into charcoal, and then bury that. This is insanely expensive and by the time you've got charcoal, you might as well burn that, too, rather than burying it and then digging up more coal to burn.
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    The whole reason we had the second stage of the Industrial Revolution is that if you use trees instead of mining then you're limited in energy by the acreage you can devote to trees and that goes down with extra farming as the population increases. To simplify horribly that's why the Ming iron industry with it's chain suspension bridges and so forth collapsed. If you're removing carbon from the air by burying trees then you'll only be able to sustain the energy intensity of civilization in the Britain of 1800, plus what we can get with renewables. What this new form of capture gives us is the ability to get rid of excess carbon without using huge amounts of arable land to do it.
perilunar 10y ago
> That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. Yes, that's the point. Plant trees, cut them down when mature and plant new ones. Use the harvested trees to make cross laminated timber and other engineered wood products and use these to replace concrete and steel (which also release CO2 during production). As long as the timber doesn't burn or rot the carbon is stored permanently.
petre 10y ago
Too for bad that for people in some poorer contries $478 is like many times their yearly income. But then again, their carbon footprint is most likely negligible. Why not just let nature do it's job? If too much CO2 will kill us, then it's a self regulating system. It happened before with the Azolla event. You get fewer humans, more plants, everything else gets a chance to die off or recover, maybe a new species takes over. Why bother with carbon sequestration?
- _petronius 10y ago
  Because people don't want to die in the ensuing conflicts over limited resources that climate change is going to bring? Because shrugging one's shoulders at the thought of widespread environmental collapse, starving populations, and the breakdown of ten thousand years of civilization is a horrible thought? Because as the droughts and famines kick in, the people that suffer the most and the most immediately for the first dozen years will be the poor and those in underdeveloped countries, while Silicon Valley programmers sip their Soylent and write comments on Hacker News like this one? Jesus, grow some empathy.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - petre 10y ago
    If the world's population continues to grow exponentially it's going to happen anyway with or without expensive carbon sequestration and silly offset schemes that never work. Rather than store carbon in solid form, which in fact plants (rainforest and such) already do anyway without the unecessary expense, why not close coal fired power stations and build nuclear? They're safer and the waste is negligible compared to coal and can be further reduced (breeder reactors, thorium cycle etc.). Burning coal also throws heavy metals (Mercury and Arsenic to name a few) and SO2/SO3 into the air. Carbon dioxide is the least of coal's problems because it can be fixed by plants or turn into bricks with additional expense.
woliveirajr 10y ago
Trees aren't a one-time deal. They will just release their carbon content back when they are burned or transformed in any other way that only the mineral content is left. Otherwise, paper still contains carbon. Coal (buried, not burned) contains carbon. Furniture, houses, anything you make with wood will be a way of storing carbon. You just also need to supply water and solar light. They will grow. Simple and efficient.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

You also have to remember the costs of capturing CO2, which is best done at the points of emission, and transporting the CO2 to the (usually far away) storage site. OTOH, the total cost (not just for sequestration) is about $100, maybe a bit more, in most estimates. For reference, a gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2, so $100/ton equals $1/gallon of gasoline. That's roughly what you'd have to increase gasoline price by to fund CO2 capture, transport and storage. (This neglects that the capture part is neigh-on impossible.) For electricity, to compensate for the average US CO2 emissions per kWh (~1.2 lbs/kWh), you'd have to increase the price by about 6 cents per kWh. To do CCS for both gasoline and electricity consumption, the average US family would have to pay (order of magnitude) 1000 x $1 + 12000 x $0.06 = $1720. That would compensate for about half the family's CO2 emissions. The remaining half is dominated by emissions from the food we eat, the stuff we buy and from having fun.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Edit: this should say $1720 per year.

chii 10y ago

> when trees die they release CO2 is that really true? If a tree died, i would assume the carbon is either buried, or otherwise remain solid, unless it's burnt.

ams6110 10y ago
Some of it is retained in the decayed remains (eventually soil) but much is released in the decay process.
- pacaro 10y ago
  It's worth noting that the decay process takes about as long as the growth process for some trees. For example, a Douglas Fir might spend 600 years alive, and then be a Nurse Log for another 600 --- see http://www2.kuow.org/program.php?id=26100 http://www2.kuow.org/program.php?id=26100
ilyagr 10y ago
The CO2 is released when (and if) the tree rots.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Dead plant matter used to become coal. Dead plant matter today decomposes: "Based on a genetic analysis of mushroom fungi, it was proposed that large quantities of wood were buried during [the Carboniferous] period because animals and decomposing bacteria had not yet evolved enzymes that could effectively digest the resistant phenolic lignin polymers and waxy suberin polymers. They suggest that fungi that could break those substances down effectively only became dominant towards the end of the period, making subsequent coal formation much rarer." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous See Rocks and Coal
  - usrusr 10y ago
    Imagining a forest where dead trees never decompose is quite a mindbender. Certainly a better explanation for the presence of fossil fuels though than just a handwavey mention of geological timeframes.

nickhalfasleep 10y ago

This is reverse process of digging coal and sucking oil out of the earth. The problem is that we are now releasing it several orders of magnitude faster than it was put down. The Carboniferous period was a 60,000,000 years long and we will use them in much less than 600 years.

infectoid 10y ago
This is something that isn't often mentioned, but from what I understand this is actually kind of a one time deal with fossil fuels. I was under the assumption that the Earth is not likely to have another carboniferous period. The implication being that we have one good shot at solving civilisation. It just gets more difficult when we start to run out of fossil fuels. One of the reasons we don't see anything going on out there when we look up could very well be that most civilisations never properly make it off their planets. Can anyone else comment on this that might have better information than me?
- nickhalfasleep 10y ago
  I think for this era, fungi and other consumers of decaying matter could not break down the cellulose walls of plant matter. Since then they did. It is interesting to imagine a species gaining sentience on a planet where there was no coal or oil to power from a wood-burning society of iron to steel and plastics.
  - Symmetry 10y ago
    I believe it was the lignin specifically which wouldn't decay in the Carboniferous period, leading to most of the fossil fuels around.
- philipkglass 10y ago
  I don't think that fossil fuel is the only way to bootstrap up to a high-energy, high-complexity civilization. Hydroelectric generation also yields the sort of dependable, concentrated energy source you need for industrial development, and it was first built with 19th century technology. The necessary 19th century precursor technologies (steel, concrete, wire...) could be manufactured with wood instead of coal. Reservoir-backed hydroelectric dams can also serve, effectively, as a giant battery when you start trying to introduce more abundant but less steady energy sources like wind and solar. The global potential of energy from hydroelectricity is only a small fraction of our current fossil-based consumption, though. And while wind and solar have potential resources far past fossil power, they can't expand as fast as fossils did historically. So the Fermi Paradox aspect might be that civilizations without fossils and without the self-control to limit reproduction are hobbled by cycles of Malthusian collapse. Or perhaps space-capable civilizations that didn't fall into the Malthusian boom-bust trap while still confined to one planet also don't go crazy with growth once they escape their gravity well, so they're out there but not leaving evidence dramatic enough to be seen by our current telescopes.

shalmanese 10y ago

> Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc. You misunderstand the purpose of trees. They're basically solar powered, organic carbon sequestration devices that happen to run for free. If we ever run out of space to plant trees, we can just cut some down, reduce it down to charcoal and bury it back into the ground which conveniently leaves a readily accessible fossil fuel source for our ancestors in the case of civilizational collapse. But we're still a long way away from running out of room to plant trees. We're still desperately trying to plant enough trees to stop the encroaching of the Sahara and there's vague, futuristic plans to try and turn the entire Sahara into a forest. Similarly, China is desperately planting trees to stop the encroachment of the Gobi.

warent 10y ago
Great perspective. I wasn't aware of the Gobi problem either
dpark 10y ago
Reducing trees to charcoal is not cost effective. It releases a ton of carbon dioxide by itself anyway. But it also doesn't make sense that we would plant trees, turn them into charcoal, and then bury that. This is insanely expensive and by the time you've got charcoal, you might as well burn that, too, rather than burying it and then digging up more coal to burn.
- Symmetry 10y ago
  The whole reason we had the second stage of the Industrial Revolution is that if you use trees instead of mining then you're limited in energy by the acreage you can devote to trees and that goes down with extra farming as the population increases. To simplify horribly that's why the Ming iron industry with it's chain suspension bridges and so forth collapsed. If you're removing carbon from the air by burying trees then you'll only be able to sustain the energy intensity of civilization in the Britain of 1800, plus what we can get with renewables. What this new form of capture gives us is the ability to get rid of excess carbon without using huge amounts of arable land to do it.

perilunar 10y ago

> That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. Yes, that's the point. Plant trees, cut them down when mature and plant new ones. Use the harvested trees to make cross laminated timber and other engineered wood products and use these to replace concrete and steel (which also release CO2 during production). As long as the timber doesn't burn or rot the carbon is stored permanently.

petre 10y ago

Too for bad that for people in some poorer contries $478 is like many times their yearly income. But then again, their carbon footprint is most likely negligible. Why not just let nature do it's job? If too much CO2 will kill us, then it's a self regulating system. It happened before with the Azolla event. You get fewer humans, more plants, everything else gets a chance to die off or recover, maybe a new species takes over. Why bother with carbon sequestration?

_petronius 10y ago
Because people don't want to die in the ensuing conflicts over limited resources that climate change is going to bring? Because shrugging one's shoulders at the thought of widespread environmental collapse, starving populations, and the breakdown of ten thousand years of civilization is a horrible thought? Because as the droughts and famines kick in, the people that suffer the most and the most immediately for the first dozen years will be the poor and those in underdeveloped countries, while Silicon Valley programmers sip their Soylent and write comments on Hacker News like this one? Jesus, grow some empathy.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- petre 10y ago
  If the world's population continues to grow exponentially it's going to happen anyway with or without expensive carbon sequestration and silly offset schemes that never work. Rather than store carbon in solid form, which in fact plants (rainforest and such) already do anyway without the unecessary expense, why not close coal fired power stations and build nuclear? They're safer and the waste is negligible compared to coal and can be further reduced (breeder reactors, thorium cycle etc.). Burning coal also throws heavy metals (Mercury and Arsenic to name a few) and SO2/SO3 into the air. Carbon dioxide is the least of coal's problems because it can be fixed by plants or turn into bricks with additional expense.

woliveirajr 10y ago

Trees aren't a one-time deal. They will just release their carbon content back when they are burned or transformed in any other way that only the mineral content is left. Otherwise, paper still contains carbon. Coal (buried, not burned) contains carbon. Furniture, houses, anything you make with wood will be a way of storing carbon. You just also need to supply water and solar light. They will grow. Simple and efficient.