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I work close to this space (I'm an algae cultivation technician), and this is the peace I have come to with it. Hope it helps. > ...a magic carbon-reducing inv

I work close to this space (I'm an algae cultivation technician), and this is the peace I have come to with it. Hope it helps. > ...a magic carbon-reducing invention is... unlikely (if unpredictable). The technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere isn't magic; you feed algae and you let them grow. There's work being done on piping flue gas from power plants through algae to scrub the carbon as it leaves. Even without scrubbing the flue gas, the only real problem with releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is when you dig it up from the ground first, and the technology for turning organic waste into natural gas is very mature. It is certainly too late to stop climate change, but it's not too late for us to survive climate change. We know how to make energy and chemicals from fresh biomass instead of ancient biomass transformed into petroleum (such as with pyrolysis), we can even sequester carbon while we do it (as biochar), but we don't necessarily know how to integrate all of the required technologies and some of them aren't ready for prime time (hydrothermal liquefaction and cellulosic ethanol come to mind). But research into things like algae cultivation and thermal processing of biomass has been going on since the 80s and the 40s, respectively, and they're actually fairly mature. The two biggest problems are managing massive amounts of complexity and the lack of political will around actually funding & fielding these solutions. If there were sufficient political will, the first problem would simply be a matter of time and money. Hope springs eternal because humans are not. We will begin in earnest to rework our global economy and to fix our environment when enough of the old guard have died that their viewpoint is no longer relevant. There's an adage which goes, "progress is made one funeral at a time." If they don't die quickly enough, our climate will collapse which should provide them with sufficient encouragement. It's not something to celebrate but it is something to reckon with. In short, our bed is made and we're going to lie in it. But tomorrow is a new day.

aoner 8y ago
I have been thinking about these problems for a long time and have some ideas regarding carbon sequestration (biochar), algea and a possible method that is profitable. Can I send you an email with some questions? You would help me out a lot!
amelius 8y ago
> lack of political will Why wouldn't emissions trading ([1]) solve this? If there is economic incentive to remove CO2, then why wouldn't it happen? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading
- pjc50 8y ago
  What's the economic incentive to build, enforce and pay for the emissions trading setup? Realistically if it works it will be at a huge cost to the oil-exporting countries of the world, so they're going to delay it as much as possible.
- Retric 8y ago
  Cap and trade gives highly valuable resources away for free. It hands them to industries who already heavily pollute and based on current usage patterns and adoption curves might slow down adoption of cleaner energy sources. Worse even talking about it directly slows clean tech as companies are better off waiting to get a larger amount of credits for free.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Are those two the biggest problems when it comes specifically to biomass? I hear biomass advocates all over the place saying they're the solution, saying: "we'll run entirely on carbon-neutral corn-derived ethanol and the poo from our vegan diets". Wow, that'd be great, but where are the numbers? Many of these claims go without physics-first principles and real numbers to back them up. For instance, using algae, we'd need an incredibly massive commitment of funds to install scrubbers on all the plants across the world. Even if we did that over the next 30-50 years, which we really can't yet because the tech isn't ready, even if a miracle occurred and we did that, that doesn't solve the existing CO2 heating the planet or the negative feedback loops. IMO, the real problem with biomass is the sheer scale of the energy system, it's far too large of an industrial base already for algae scrubbers to be effective. IMO, we need planet-cooling measures, increasing cloud cover, increasing albedo, somethjing to prevent heating and the vicious feedback loops in the arctic and elsewhere. Then, we also need to deal with the CO2, which will still be around even if we reduce insolation and heating. I don't know if algae or CCS or some other method will be used for that, but I see that as secondary to the "easier" cooling mechanisms.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  For waste-stream based fuels, consider first that the upper bound on potential is the incoming feedstock, that is, food, and nets to something like 25% of its energy potential. And the feedstock is bounded by net primary primary productivity, also referred to as the photosynthetic ceiling. It turns out that humans already lay claim to 20% of this. Replacing fossil fuels (a prerequisite to acheiving net zero emissions) would require another 20% of NPP, an unlikely scenario. Using crop yields and land area, one quickly realises that under all but the rosiest scenarios, more land is required for biomass fuel production than exists in major technological and industrial nations. So, no, biomass is not sufficient to sustain present per-capita energy use and populations. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...
  - aoner 8y ago
    you can also use the sea with wastewater as feedstock: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/index.html
snarf21 8y ago
I really appreciated your response. People keep saying humanity is going to go extinct and it seems like we have too much time and technology for that to happen. I still wonder if the thing we need even more than tech to reduce CO2 is agreements to stop and reverse population growth. I don't think Earth can sustainably support more than 4B people. It feels like we need as much time as possible to truly move to renewables but population explosion just reduces the time available.
- plankers 8y ago
  On the other hand, the more humans that exist, the more people are available to solve these problems (and solve them faster!)
Gravityloss 8y ago
So, you burn coal, then feed the CO2 to algae and together with solar energy, it binds it back to some relatively storable form. What's the quantitative difference compared to not building a coal plant, a coal mine, transportation network and the algae plant, and instead building solar panels and wind turbines and feeding the electricity to the grid?
- maxbond 8y ago
  I don't have numbers for you, and I don't buy "clean coal", but I would counter with this question; is it better to build a solar or wind farm, or to retrofit a coal fired power plant to burn algae? And then to recycle that carbon into more algae? Isn't that a kind of solar power plant? (Getting your hands of negatively-value nutrients in order to make the system work is left as an exercise. Or I just don't have all the answers.)

aoner 8y ago

I have been thinking about these problems for a long time and have some ideas regarding carbon sequestration (biochar), algea and a possible method that is profitable. Can I send you an email with some questions? You would help me out a lot!

amelius 8y ago

> lack of political will Why wouldn't emissions trading ([1]) solve this? If there is economic incentive to remove CO2, then why wouldn't it happen? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

pjc50 8y ago
What's the economic incentive to build, enforce and pay for the emissions trading setup? Realistically if it works it will be at a huge cost to the oil-exporting countries of the world, so they're going to delay it as much as possible.
Retric 8y ago
Cap and trade gives highly valuable resources away for free. It hands them to industries who already heavily pollute and based on current usage patterns and adoption curves might slow down adoption of cleaner energy sources. Worse even talking about it directly slows clean tech as companies are better off waiting to get a larger amount of credits for free.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Are those two the biggest problems when it comes specifically to biomass? I hear biomass advocates all over the place saying they're the solution, saying: "we'll run entirely on carbon-neutral corn-derived ethanol and the poo from our vegan diets". Wow, that'd be great, but where are the numbers? Many of these claims go without physics-first principles and real numbers to back them up. For instance, using algae, we'd need an incredibly massive commitment of funds to install scrubbers on all the plants across the world. Even if we did that over the next 30-50 years, which we really can't yet because the tech isn't ready, even if a miracle occurred and we did that, that doesn't solve the existing CO2 heating the planet or the negative feedback loops. IMO, the real problem with biomass is the sheer scale of the energy system, it's far too large of an industrial base already for algae scrubbers to be effective. IMO, we need planet-cooling measures, increasing cloud cover, increasing albedo, somethjing to prevent heating and the vicious feedback loops in the arctic and elsewhere. Then, we also need to deal with the CO2, which will still be around even if we reduce insolation and heating. I don't know if algae or CCS or some other method will be used for that, but I see that as secondary to the "easier" cooling mechanisms.

dredmorbius 8y ago
For waste-stream based fuels, consider first that the upper bound on potential is the incoming feedstock, that is, food, and nets to something like 25% of its energy potential. And the feedstock is bounded by net primary primary productivity, also referred to as the photosynthetic ceiling. It turns out that humans already lay claim to 20% of this. Replacing fossil fuels (a prerequisite to acheiving net zero emissions) would require another 20% of NPP, an unlikely scenario. Using crop yields and land area, one quickly realises that under all but the rosiest scenarios, more land is required for biomass fuel production than exists in major technological and industrial nations. So, no, biomass is not sufficient to sustain present per-capita energy use and populations. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...
- aoner 8y ago
  you can also use the sea with wastewater as feedstock: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/index.html

snarf21 8y ago

I really appreciated your response. People keep saying humanity is going to go extinct and it seems like we have too much time and technology for that to happen. I still wonder if the thing we need even more than tech to reduce CO2 is agreements to stop and reverse population growth. I don't think Earth can sustainably support more than 4B people. It feels like we need as much time as possible to truly move to renewables but population explosion just reduces the time available.

plankers 8y ago
On the other hand, the more humans that exist, the more people are available to solve these problems (and solve them faster!)

Gravityloss 8y ago

So, you burn coal, then feed the CO2 to algae and together with solar energy, it binds it back to some relatively storable form. What's the quantitative difference compared to not building a coal plant, a coal mine, transportation network and the algae plant, and instead building solar panels and wind turbines and feeding the electricity to the grid?

maxbond 8y ago
I don't have numbers for you, and I don't buy "clean coal", but I would counter with this question; is it better to build a solar or wind farm, or to retrofit a coal fired power plant to burn algae? And then to recycle that carbon into more algae? Isn't that a kind of solar power plant? (Getting your hands of negatively-value nutrients in order to make the system work is left as an exercise. Or I just don't have all the answers.)