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$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
- burgessaccount 5y agoWhy doesn’t he just use a few of his billions to build free renewable power plants? Emissions reduction, now, is so much more important than the possibility of carbon reduction in ten or fifteen years
- jdavis703 5y agoThe impact that even a billionaires could have is relatively trivial. The Green New Deal is estimated to cost trillions of dollars. Even if some of the proposed ideas are dubious, the amount of infrastructure needed is an order of magnitude more than what a billionaire can provide.
- burgessaccount 5y agoYeah, I mean the green new deal was like 75% not climate spending? And a billionaire does not need to tackle the whole problem, just make a dent? My main point was that we actually already have most of the technology needed to fight climate change, we just aren’t deploying it.
- zdragnar 5y agoBecause he has a one-off fortune that would require selling all of his investments to turn into cash. By 2050, all of the power plants he built would be just so much garbage in a landfill. Based on the growth projections of energy consumption, it wouldn't put a dent in the problem long term. By incentivizing economical carbon capture, he might be able to kick off a self-funding industry, which would be an important part of the long term set of solutions needed to address atmospheric carbon increases. He could also do other things like invest in some power plants too.
- burgessaccount 5y agoI partly agree - yes, individual people spending money is not a long-term solution. But we aren’t even in the stage of needing stable, long-term solutions - we need immediate, drastic, dramatic actions. And there are already strong incentives for carbon capture technology - it’s a big and growing market. The bigger bottleneck is not in capture innovations, but in emissions-reduction action, now, here, this decade. So, yeah, I mean, I get why he wouldn’t personally choose to do it that way, and I guess I’m excited about the prize? But man do I wish he would do more.
- liketochill 5y agoHe kind of has an interest in solar power
- giantg2 5y agoTime to quit my job and become an inventor (actually something I thought was a real thing when I was a kid). My idiot-layman brain says buy it from AirGas or capture from large emitters and pipe it into a geological structures like the do for storing helium. It could probably only get to gigatons if it's worldwide and we have enough geological structures capable of containing it.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoI thought the same thing as a child. Recently I realized that programming and making apps is like being an inventor. When I make applications for other people to use, is that not akin to making some kind of new machine or tool?
- ianlevesque 5y agoYeah, it's akin to it. In the won't help you get laid way.
- giantg2 5y agoI don't really see it the same way. I mean, as an independent project, maybe. Most of us are basically told what to build and largely how to build it too. Someone else invented it and we just build it - we're basically factory workers.
- defterGoose 5y agoNo, because the lynchpin of these physical technologies we need are going to be just that, physical. No amount of neural networking or cryptocurrency mining is going to be anything other than peripheral to the advancements based on basic research in physical science. If the solution to carbon capture comes from a company like Deepmind (ala protein folding), i'll eat my shoe.
- wyager 5y agoHow is the answer to “carbon removal” not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? It seems implausible to me that any chemical carbon extraction process has superior externalities to just planting more trees or something.
- krastanov 5y agoI do not have a complete well-sourced answer, but the common argument against your suggestion is that such a carbon sink would work for only a couple of decades until it reaches a steady state, and these couple of decades do not seem to be enough to make a dent. Also, it is difficult to plant trees in a desert. Also, algae blooms are dangerous for other life forms. However, there are some startups working with super-fast-growing (ugly) trees that are then used as construction material, which would be a longer-term-functioning sink. Not very clear whether that scales.
- nostromo 5y agoProductive forests in the US are a carbon sink. The trees grow. We cut them down. We make houses out of them, which are wrapped to prevent deterioration. The sunk carbon becomes our buildings. Other uses of the wood are also usually carbon sinks. Paper either gets recycled (the carbon is preserved) or it gets buried in a sealed landfill where is takes decades or longer to break down. It'd be cool to calculate how much carbon Weyerhaeuser sucks out of the atmosphere each year.
- soperj 5y agoWouldn't it break down into methane instead though? I doubt that building buildings are carbon neutral, let alone a carbon sink.
- krastanov 5y agoDried up wooden building material is pretty stable and a fairly common (even commercialized) suggestion for a carbon sink. If you let it rot/burn, then no, it is not a carbon sink.
- wedn3sday 5y agoHere's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the ground.
- knodi123 5y agoI can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at! But seriously, this is harder than it sounds. Unless you pay him to permanently sequester $100M of oil, I don't see how it would make a difference.
- lostlogin 5y agoI’ve seen this happen with farm subsidies in the UK where farmers were paid to leave the land alone. However the farmers would choose the crappiest sections to leave alone and production would be unchanged. Profit.
- AlexCoventry 5y agoHow would you cost-effectively enforce that commitment?
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
- newintellectual 5y ago25,000 years ago, CO2 levels stood at 180 ppm - the lowest in 4.7 billion years of earth's history. About 30 ppm above the level at which RuBisCo stops effectively working, which would bring a halt to most photosynthesis on earth. You can blindly accept dogma or you can think about the implications of that in light of fanatical calls to remove CO2 from the atmosphere - CO2 which has been steadily removed by long term geological processes, and which is now below the levels of over 99% of earth's history.
- re-al 5y agoWhy cant we just plant more trees? Or let the trees we have grow bigger, to soak up all that extra carbon?
- BitwiseFool 5y ago>"Why cant we just plant more trees?" We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cycles in nature. Trees just temporarily lock up carbon.
- nostromo 5y ago> those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Trees in forests are self-replicating. When one dies another grows in its place. Yes, this isn't the only solution, but it's certainly part of the solution.
- lend000 5y agoYes, but the point is that there is an upper limit to the contribution, and even reforesting unrealistically vast tracts of land does not make up for carbon extracted from deeper in the crust. Growing, cutting, and burying fast growing trees deep in the Earth, then replanting them, would not have that limit (although there would be other problems keeping the land fertile).
- nostromo 5y agoIf you wanted to keep sequestering after the forest matures, just bulldoze the forest ever few years and put the logs in a cave. You've accomplished everything other sequestration technology promises, but you've done so in a way that is environmentally friendly.
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- andyxor 5y agowith this money you can terraform Sahara desert by planting a billion trees
- baggy_trough 5y agoYou think you can get a tree planted and growing in the Sahara for a dime?
- neals 5y agoOne? No. A billion for 1 dime per tree? Maybe...
- awestroke 5y agoWhat is this species of tree that can grow without water or nutrients?
- Nydhal 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39QHprz-x8
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI knew this was already in progress but didn't realize how little funding it received. I think you're right, 100M could go a long way. > Seven countries of the Sahel region, an area located just south of the Sahara, therefore initiated a project that will see billions of trees planted across 11 countries by 2030 > A total of 20 countries pledged support to the Sahel countries for the mammoth project. The European Commission has already invested more than €7 million ( $7.5 million). > But according to the United Nations, the initiative has only reached 15% of its targets after just over a decade. "Progress is slow, but we have learned a lot along the way," said climate consultant Vivekananda. https://www.dw.com/en/what-happened-to-africas-ambitious-green-belt-project/a-53004690 https://www.dw.com/en/what-happened-to-africas-ambitious-gre...
- filleokus 5y agoI wonder how YC backed Prometheus Fuels will stack up. They claimed that they are able to sequester Co2 directly from the air for around 36 USD / ton [0]. If they truly can scale it at that price point, it seems very competitive. [0]: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/happy-earth-day-our-co2-dac-cost-is-worlds-lowest https://www.prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/happy-earth-day-...
- rmcginnis 5y agoFounder of Prometheus here - stay tuned for a relevant announcement tomorrow!
- typeformer 5y agoAre they really sequestering it? If I understand their tech correctly they are recycling it back into fuel which then gets burned and the CO2 goes back into the air? It’s a fascinating process but unlikely to undue our decades of harm.
- filleokus 5y agoYeah, that's how I understand it also. But they are talking about putting it in (plastic) goods "that store it forever". So I'm thinking that they could just solidify it somehow and bury it in the ground? Feels fairly cheap? But I'm not clear on wether their price point includes the revenue they get from selling the carbon (in the form of fuels or plastic)? I.e, does it cost them 36 USD, or 351 USD? [0] [0]: 36 USD + (1 tonne of Co2 / 19 lbs of Co2 per gallon of fuel) * 3 USD / gallon of fuel ≈ 36 + 105*3 = 351 USD. Makes a huge difference...
- nullstyle 5y agoIf you’re interested in a good starting place for carbon removal ideas, I highly recommend the Carbon Farming Solution: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-carbon-farming-solution/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-carbon-farming-solu...
- matusz 5y agoLots of similar questions here, good answers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWpFCjh0Fk (Sabine Hossenfelder)
- kisamoto 5y agoThere's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388.full https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388.ful...
- BartBoch 5y agoNot a solution, but still - check "Oxytree". It's a tree "farmed" in Europe, that was created in Spain. Within 6 years it grows to 16 meters. You can cut it almost completely, and it will regrow. You cut it then every 4 years. It will regrow multiple times. The tree as far as I know cannot re-plant itself (so its not invasive), and it absorbs up to 10 times more CO2 than regular trees. It's still young project, but more and more countries create plantations of it (also as a way of CO2 recapture).
- tekstar 5y agoAlso, planting trees sequesters co2 into the biosphere. That is not good enough, we need to be sequestering co2 into the geosphere if we want to remove it from the equation
- detritus 5y agoI'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere here already by someone, but I've always thought that converting felled 'sequestration stock' to bio-char and making terra preta out of it would be win-win-win, as it could then be used to improve desertified land. As much as CO2 emissions befear me, so too does increasingly poor topsoil, globally. - ed I'm not even sure we'd need to wait for trees to mature either - we just need work with whatever plant absorbs the most CO2. Perhaps algae, even?
- simon_000666 5y agoSo I’m thinking the same. Soil + Terra preta(charcoal + food waste) is the best way. There needs to be some kind of inverse Bitcoin - something where we incentivize large number of people to claim areas of land and terra Preta it up. The reward is some kind of token that can be exchanged for value. We can maybe use satellite imagery to identify which land has been converted. Someone has to be forming a team on this for the prize.
- knodi123 5y agoI wonder if there's any possibilities in engineering a quick-growing trash tree that would have a higher percentage of mineralization, or properties that facilitate quick pseudo-petrification, so that it can be embedded in concrete without worrying about rot. They would serve the same purpose as rebar, but with greater volume meaning less concrete needed. And it would be a near-permanent carbon sink.
- gruez 5y agoThat seems much more complicated than just planting some fast growing plant (eg. bamboo), converting it to charcoal, and burying it somewhere. That achieves the same carbon sequestration effect, without having to worry about petrification.
- axaxs 5y agoThis is exactly what I was thinking. Bamboo has to be one of the fastest growing therefore carbon sucking plants, right?
- ars 5y agoSwitchgrass is faster, and grows in more climates.
- knodi123 5y agoIt certainly is more complicated. The difference is that 1.) it attacks three different problem sources - the carbon already in the air, and the carbon generated by concrete production, and the carbon from steel production. Cement is responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions [1], and steel another 8% [2]. 2.) it offers profit incentives, since the people using the trees get a direct benefit (unlike people throwing biochar into an ocean trench). Any long-lasting solution to our carbon problem is going to have to find a way to exist on something other than direct carbon-dedicated subsidies. A self-sufficient business can survive shifting political winds much better than a literal money-sink. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844 [2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/metals-and-mining/our-insights/decarbonization-challenge-for-steel https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/metals-and-mining/our-in...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mchusma 5y agoElon is such an amazing force in the world. This prize is great, and overdue. Not surprised to see Elon involved.
- datameta 5y agoEverything he does is in some way to make the post-scarcity far future of The Culture more attainable. For all of his social flaws this thought alone gives him my deep respect. I don't think he is infallible but in my opinion a lot of attempts at character assassination don't truly understand the underlying purpose of why he does what he does. I still look at developments in his companies with a critical eye - for example neuralink is rather close to making me uncomfortable with how soon we may have commerically viable high-speed BMI. And then I remember all the medical good that can be done with it. I am wary of Starlink interfering with space observation and science, and yet I can think of all the good that can come from more minds having better access to humanity's greatest learning tool, the internet. He's not perfect, and I most certainly cannot defend the work ethic required of those employed under him. But if I were to have a chance to do it for a year, I would know the reasons I was going through it for.
- systemvoltage 5y ago"But he is manipulating the Crypto market" Good. If you invested without thinking into crypto, 100% full responsibility is on you. Elon is just a litmus test how fragile crypto currencies are and how they can be manipulated. Fully functional adults need to be a bit more cautious with their funds. We're not talking about people with mental issues here. Elon has got a shitty attitude regarding his popularity/celebrity status but the things he has done to improve the world dwarfs his misdeeds. For some reason public loves grocery-store aisle tabloids and Elon is no exception to this gossip. The tabloid now is in the form of Twitter.
- dumbfoundded 5y agoThe biggest problem with Elon and it's not just him or his fault is that the biggest barrier is our political systems. $100M is like a small city's annual budget. In Ashland, OR the city budget is $140M/year with about 20,000 residents. This prize is not going to solve anything. Even if Elon spent all of his money on this prize, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to how many resources our political systems control. As much as these well intentioned billionaires try, they're never going solve anything important.
- abeppu 5y agoThis sounds cool from a tech-nerd perspective, but of course it all is pretty futile if we don't get emissions under control. The video says 10 gigatons/yr by 2050. Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons. I.e. even if capture is successful, it needs to be accompanied by aggressive emissions reductions for us to even get to neutral, let alone reversing damage. I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expected marginal impact of funding this vs more on energy storage vs energy production. And perhaps capture/sequestration is under-explored. But I wonder what could be achieved with $100M of funds directed at research to intentionally changing and shifting culture towards consuming stuff with smaller footprints? Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly. For some, very small houses are becoming attractive. But so far this stuff mostly arises from ad-hoc marketing efforts around particular brands, products, influencers. What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable?
- lutorm 5y agoI think at this point emissions reductions is a matter of will, not technology. Rather than waiting for some technological magic bullet when it comes to emissions reductions, we need to take aggressive action. But we're going to need CCS technologies to start pulling the carbon back out if we want to avoid really bad outcomes, and those technologies are much less developed.
- kisamoto 5y agoUnderrated comment.
- abeppu 5y agoI agree that reducing emissions is about will, but I'm frightened that we seem not especially willful. And that does seem like a matter of culture, which could be changed. We just don't have a robust framework for deliberately creating those changes. We gave a portfolio of expensive one-offs.
- cjblomqvist 5y ago
- abathur 5y agoI don't mean to be a wet blanket (I imagine the prize will be a net good) but I want to talk into the void about something I've been befuddled by... I feel like I see/hear a lot of uncritical faith in (techno|market|competition)-solutions, with little discussion of what Nth-order effects may travel with those approaches. Just some scattered thoughts: - The best case for progress is probably technology that leads to profitable unsubsidized capture, but incremental technological progress may give the industry that springs up around it profit motives to overshoot. - Profitable capture would, if fossil-fuel producers get in on the action themselves, shift their break-even points around somewhat. - Even if this operates at a loss and depends on public funding, if the work is done by private industry and not the public sector, a few decades of capture may avert/blunt the crisis but leave us with yet another powerful lobby. It'll likely be flush with good-will and hard to regulate, let alone wind down once it has served its use. - As @knodi123 puts it: "I can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at!" If all of the operators depend on subsidy, there will be a decent incentive towards graft/corruption/fraud. There'll have to be some amount of administrative overhead going to verifying what is captured, that it isn't double-counted, that it actually gets sequestered, and so on. A deepening crisis could mean more of this money sloshing around and less will to build the compliance mechanisms that ensure it accomplishes the goal. Rampant graft could be enough to sink the program.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sauwan 5y agoWith the exception of the last item, these are all problems I would love to have considering our current situation. Graft and administrative burden is a real concern, though, although I don't think it should stop us from trying.
- abathur 5y agoFor sure. I don't see these as comprehensive, nor as reasons not to try (nor even think it'd be possible to stop others from trying them). But I worry that this path is already the one we're disposed to fail/default into, and that a rose-tinted view of it will only make it easier for other opportunities slip through our fingers while gobs of smart people focus on the technological half of the moon-shot. Put another way, the degree of optimism I hear on these approaches smells like the kind of hubris that causes people to lose races they think they've won.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rob_c 5y agoWhy not invest that directly in various different prototyped technologies already being developed for this _now_ to accelerate the process? It feels like offering free swimming floats to the first one who can swim out to get them.
- kisamoto 5y agoI don't think this prize disqualifies those right? It's looking for any scalable carbon removal technology
- rob_c 5y agoNo I don't think it does. (and for disclosure I'm unlikely to ever read the details enough to know for myself for certain) I just wish it was tiered such that proper seed money backs various alternatives and the best proven tech (not just the first) gets a big boost when attempting to scale. But not my millions to spend so I just hope it had a good impact.
- humbledrone 5y agoOffering a prize could potentially result in more than the prize value ($100M) being invested into those very technologies. As an example, we can look at the Netflix Prize [1], which was only $1M. But that $1M bought them way, way more than $1M worth of work: "over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets." It's hard to guess the value of having 20,000 teams working on the Netflix problem, but $1M invested directly by Netflix would probably only pay for 3-4 engineers for 1 year, so it seems like they got a lot of leverage out of that $1M. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize
- stanmancan 5y agoXPrizes are a BRILLIANT way to get a big multiplier on your investment. The price is $100 million. You might end up with 100 companies that all spend $10 million on research towards it. A $100 million prize resulted in at $1 billion worth of research.
- chris_overseas 5y agoI'm curious to hear what people here think of Project Vesta? https://www.projectvesta.org/ https://www.projectvesta.org/ (No affiliation, just intrigued by what they're promising)
- burgessaccount 5y agoI’m very excited about them as a possibility (I think there’s another thread about them on HN?) but so much is unproven. We have no idea how much carbon the sand will absorb, or how fast, or how much it might mess with oceans along the way (it could be a positive because it would help fix ocean acidification, but it is a major mineral and ph modification to a complex system). No solution is as good as emissions reductions
- kisamoto 5y agoOlivine has great potential (although it takes a while - up to 1000 years - to reach maximum sequestration). Project vesta tries to use the sea and waves to accelerate this process. It's a bit of an unproven experiment however it definitely has potential and needs supporting to prove the hypothesis and improve the method.
- tito 5y agoWe need 1000 shots on goal to get to gigaton scale carbon removal. Project Vesta builds on decades of academic research in olivine weathering that was itching for field trials and scale up. 999 more shots like this and we'll get there.
- floppiplopp 5y agoIt's one of the best options we know that could work. Basically grind up readily available basalt with technology we already have at scale and dump it into the oceans and onto agricultural soils - which is quite beneficial for soil structure, too. But I'm afraid it's not going to be sexy enough for technocratic phantasies and it cannot be monetized through some kind of futuristic looking devices.
- tt23523 5y agomost of the plans to sequester carbon in the ocean make me worry about how that would impact the broader ecosystem. As I understand it, it would change the chemistry of the ocean, which might trade one disaster for another. Not to mention ideally sequestration would last for millennia.
- topkai22 5y agoInteresting. The grand prize timeline is 4 years from now. That seems VERY fast. However, I like the aggressiveness- if this can produce viable demonstrations of the technology at anywhere near what the aformentioned Prometheus Fuels ($36/ton) claims, then that produces a huge line in the sand for policy makers on carbon pricing and mitigation. $36/ton would raise the price of gasoline about 36 cents. The cost to capture ALL 6.5B tons of US emissions would be about $236B per year, or 1.1% of GDP. I think even getting it down to a $100/ton would change the discussion. These are real, manageable numbers that should undermine opposition to mitigating climate change and get something resembling a carbon tax based on a feasible number. Policies like "A 39 cent/gallon tax on gasoline" is much more understandable and politically feasible then "you'll have to change everything you do." And then, once in place, we'll see the economic effects of taxing carbon accelerate movement away from carbon emitting solutions, which are already becoming non-competitive in many scenarios. None of this means we shouldn't do things SOONER, espicially since DACC might never get that cheap, but I like the way this XPrize has the potential to change people's political calculus. Sources: https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php#:~:text=Carbon%20Dioxide%20Emissions%20Coefficients%20by%20Fuel%20%20,%20%2078.79%20%2021%20more%20rows%20 https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php#:... https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks#:~:text=1%20In%202019%2C%20U.S.%20greenhouse%20gas%20emissions%20totaled,sector%29%20were%20nearly%2013%20percent%20below%202005%20levels https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas.... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
- spywaregorilla 5y agoIs that price net of the carbon put into the environment by he energy used by this tech?
- jandrewrogers 5y agoI am skeptical of the $36/ton claim. The elephant in the room is that most of the proposed process chemistry does not have the necessary scale. If I need a billion tons of mined mineral per year to make a dent -- the reality for many of these proposals -- and current global production is a few thousand tons, you have a serious practicality problem. Not only would you need to develop those mines and the corresponding power generation facilities to manufacture the chemicals (which is energy intensive), we may not have the necessary mineral reserves. Addressing these all require massive amounts of capital investment that are not included in the cost per ton of the process at current scales. Buying a liter of water has completely different economics than buying a trillion liters of the same water, and the cost is always calculated as if it was the former case. While recycling of reactant chemicals is always a part of these proposals, they are typically only ~90% efficient as designed (each marginal increase in recycling efficiency tends to be exponentially more expensive). At the scales involved, that requires billions of tons of reactants being produced that don't exist today. It would be the largest mining and chemical manufacturing endeavor ever undertaken on the planet, starting from zero.
- tito 5y agoFor startups going after Elon's prize, AirMiners partnered with XPRIZE and CDL to create the AirMiners Launchpad. Founders should check out https://launchpad.airminers.org/ https://launchpad.airminers.org/ Applications for Batch #2 close August 31st Also check out AirMiners, the hub for everything carbon removal at https://airminers.org/ https://airminers.org/ And those who are interested in a 5 week group discussion on carbon removal basics check out Boot Up: https://bootup.airminers.org/ https://bootup.airminers.org/
- m12k 5y agoIs there a job board on the AirMiners website or have you considered making one? My guess is there's a lot of people like myself who'd be very interested in helping out in this field, but have no tech idea of my own, and don't even know how or if my (software development) skills would even be useful. If you're able to attract entrepreneurs with ideas worth exploring, maybe also help them hold up their banners for others to flock to?
- tito 5y agoThat's helpful perspective, thanks! AirMiners has a #jobs channel on Slack that's one of the most popular. However because it's on Slack means it's limited to people who are part of the AirMiners community. Which would miss folks like you! I appreciate your perspective that someone with your background might not join AirMiners itself, but may be an excellent candidate for a job at a carbon removal company.
- tohmasu 5y agoI get the feeling there's a "snake eating its own tail" aspect here. Assuming carbon sequestration can be done at scale, it will likely require energy, maybe even a lot of energy. So where's this energy going to come from? Well... global energy demand is increasing as-is and the winners are: coal, oil and "natural" gas (which is a fossil fuel): https://www.statista.com/statistics/222066/projected-global-energy-consumption-by-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/222066/projected-global-... Even assuming the forecast 5x increase in "renewables*" (I can't find the double asterisk footnote) until 2050, it seems unreasonable that a ~250EJ "blue team" (hydro, nuclear, other renewables) could plug a ~500EJ hole created by the "red team" (coal, oil, fossil gas). We need a magnitude more clean power and all the wind, solar and wishful thinking in the world aren't going to cut it.
- dd36 5y agoNuclear.
- kisamoto 5y agoSolar can be used to a certain extent. And geo-thermal - that is currently being used in Iceland by Carbfix + Climeworks. Also worth noting that a lot of these technologies do thorough lifecycle analysis to make sure that despite the energy usage required they are still carbon negative.
- mbgerring 5y ago> Even assuming the forecast 5x increase in "renewables*" I don't know where these figures come from, but the IEA underestimating the deployment of renewable energy, as well as cost reductions, has become a running joke among people who model energy or study the electric grid. Renewable energy is a growing and profitable field, and if you're concerned about not having enough clean electricity to power carbon removal, there are many opportunities to work full time on expanding renewable energy.
- tohmasu 5y ago>> Even assuming the forecast 5x increase in "renewables*" > I don't know where these figures come from /../ There is a link to a well respected statistics site right above the line you are quoting, so if you don't know where the figures are coming from, that says a lot.
- pope_meat 5y agoThe average human is about 18% carbon. We could all be doing a little more to reduce our carbon content.
- z3ncyberpunk 5y agoHow about industrial institutions who are overwhelmingly responsible for the issue be made to pay up for r&d and clean it up instead of paying more money to put the burden others.
- tito 5y agoI'm curious what people here think about their own role in a prize like this. Are you interested in joining a team? Starting a company? Working on gigaton scale carbon removal? I've been working on carbon removal for the past few years, eager to help anyone who is considering actually making a leap into this industry for their own curiosity or even career. That said there are plenty of other massive juicy challenges facing the climate. Whatever you choose, good luck!
- lucb1e 5y ago> I've been working on carbon removal for the past few years How? And can I join?
- tito 5y agoThere's a 101 Guide listed on AirMiners (http://airminers.org http://airminers.org). You can also browse the startup index there to get inspired. One you go through that, there's a 5 week group discussion on carbon removal basics, check out AirMiners Boot Up: https://bootup.airminers.org/ https://bootup.airminers.org/
- paulcarroty 5y ago> I've been working on carbon removal for the past few years Great, guess you should tell more about your experience.
- tito 5y agoI've got a talk up here about my experience: https://www.ted.com/talks/tito_jankowski_take_carbon_out_of_the_air_and_make_useful_things_with_it/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/tito_jankowski_take_carbon_out_of_...
- kisamoto 5y agoI choose to help people support a portfolio of carbon removal at https://carbonremoved.com https://carbonremoved.com If you're working on carbon removal or want to support carbon removal please feel free to email me directly: ewan (at) above website
- _rpd 5y agoSee also http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
- newman555 5y agothis is super positive of course, but I wonder - will it matter if we achieve it, but don’t stop the destruction of the environment caused by animal agriculture and fishing?
- dbrueck 5y agoConservation efforts, curbing emissions, etc. - that's all good and has its place, but on its own it just doesn't seem feasible to motivate enough people for a long enough time to make enough of a difference. Reducing amount of CO2 we emit is good, finding a way to capture/convert released CO2 is better, but there is Bezos-level wealth waiting for the person who invents/discovers an actual use for it. I hope this X-prize helps encourage that style of thinking.
- cowvin 5y agoWhat we need is a cryptocurrency that is somehow mined by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.
- geogra4 5y agoI'm laughing but honest to god I think this could work...somehow.
- teachrdan 5y agoDiamondCoin: The world's first cryptocurrency based on Proof of Carbon.
- lovemenot 5y agoYes, this seems to have potential. The beauty of proof of work is the hashing algo is both 1) very hard to solve and 2) very easy to verify by anyone anywhere. Furthermore, 3) miners have a financial incentive to solve the algo and 4) They may do so in anyway they see fit. At a minimum a crypto-like solution should have these four properties. Now we already have a lot of unpaid CO2 miners (plants) doing it inefficiently, ad hoc and short-term. The first stage should be to allow these to opt in to get rewarded. Like you could mine bitcoin with spare CPU back in the day.
- lutorm 5y agoWhy not just turn CO2 into a currency directly then? Your "proof of work" is the CO2 you sequestrated and can sell to someone else.
- lovemenot 5y agoI think it's for the same reasons we tend to abstract currencies away from their underpinning scarce resources. Convenience, scale, efficiency. Most mining devices don't actually ever successfully win a single bitcoin. But they get paid pro rata for their contribution to the combined hashing power, which did. For miners in a pool hashing power is the saleable commodity. Perhaps this was the point you were making. Even if it didn't fulfill its potential (yet), we must remember what made bitcoin so special: eliminating the double-spend and central authority problems. How do you intend to sell your sequestered CO2 and prove that it's still yours to sell? This is all hypothetical anyway. To my knowledge there's no scheme that satisfies those criteria wrt proof of sequestration.
- viach 5y agoIncrease taxes for car owners globally, done.
- lovemenot 5y agoI agree with 80% of this. Just the last part is overreaching.
- Nydhal 5y agoThere's a few "Plants and trees won't do" comments here, which really misses the entire point of regenerative methods. Earth is an entire complex living system. Thinking of it as a simple chemical matter of CO2 is a very reductionist take. The point is to sequester carbon but ALSO trigger other cooling dynamics and reducing certain industrial practices that themselves release CO2. Too many engineers need to study complex systems and holistic approaches. The amount of patronizing makes me think of the fatal engineering flaw of "It can't be this simple".
- kevmo 5y agoHighly recommend Thinking in Systems or Limits to Growth, both by Donella Meadows.
- Fiahil 5y agoPlant and trees are definitely a very good solution. The real engineering challenge is really : 1. how to measure precisely how much carbon is in that tree and this other one here. 2. how to plant them efficiently so you can remove 1000T of co2 per year.
- omgwtfbbq 5y agoI think financially it's not reasonable and you can't actually get enough carbon back or enough cooling for it to work on its own. Part of the solution but no it really isn't that simple. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388.full https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388.ful...
- Aerroon 5y agoNevertheless, plants and trees won't do it. They grow pretty much everywhere already where they can. Nature is better at reclaiming those areas than we are - there are an estimated three trillion trees in the world. Then there's the problem that there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan. The reason it's important to keep saying this is that lots of people participate in these tree planting drives. They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem.
- m_herrlich 5y agoThis is literally how Snowpiercer begins
- daddylonglegs 5y agoMost types of carbon capture technology [1] being touted are credit cards for climate change: You burn enough fuel to generate 4MJ worth of heat... Your internal combustion engine generates 1MJ worth of mechanical effort from this... You use this to propel a 2 ton vehicle... Carrying 1 person... To take part in the rat race or indulge in some consumerism. [2] The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years where it heats the planet, trashes the ecosystem and likely feeds at least as many positive feedbacks as negative - amplifying the climate change effects. To capture this carbon you (your descendants) are going to have to: Put 4MJ of energy into the breaking the carbon-oxygen bonds... Which will take more than 4MJ of process energy and embodied energy in the capital plant... Once you have collected the diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere, which will not be free. Our 'plan' for dealing with climate change is that we hand a burning planet to our descendants to deal with, if we can stagger to hand-off without crashing the system first. Future generations will have to be far more responsible than us, for centuries, and imagining what they will have to say makes me squirm. [1] I am mildly optimistic about techniques that accelerate the weathering of (silicate?) rocks; and more trees will be nice. These technologies will be useful for the centuries of cleanup that will be needed, but cannot keep up with the huge rate of current emission. [2] Yes, much of our current consumption delivers real benefits to people's lives; but much (most) of it doesn't. The point of my analogy is that the sheer wastefulness of the present excess will be paid for in the future at far greater cost and is being spent on such trivial or actively harmful goals.
- gpt5 5y agoGenuine question - if CO2 half life in the atmosphere is less than 50 years, why are we so concerned about it? Wouldn’t the problem solve itself given that we are both reaching peak consumption of fossil fuels and that they are expected to deplete with the next century? In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?
- malloryerik 5y agoIt looks as though those numbers are mistaken. https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2008/02/26/ghg_lifetimes/ https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2008/02/26/ghg_lifetimes/
- aqme28 5y agoA lot of people saying "plant more trees" don't realize the scale of our carbon output. We release about 43 billion tons of CO2 in a year. A forest fire releases about 5-30 tons of CO2 per hectare. We're burning the equivalent of a forest the size of Africa every year.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoSo, anyone got any good ideas for accounting tricks that lets you credit coal power emissions into a year the rules don't check and win by making coal power carbon neutral on (biodegradable) paper?
- detritus 5y agoSoil. It's soil. Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it. Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta. I sort of made this post elsewhere here, I just wanted to repeat and focus on the soil angle. We have huge swathes of the globe that due to poor historical environmental conditions have poor soil, so not much can grow. Some have become desertified, perhaps some of which is our fault (eg. Mediterranean deforestation). If we add soil to these places, at least hardier plants can grow and we can expand the reach of our efforts. Strikes me that the most important thing is that plants can grow, and for that we need soil. Soil.
- Mizza 5y agoHave you done the math on that? It seems like it would take an awful lot of poop to counteract a coal fired power plant.
- detritus 5y agoA city such as London (where I'm at) generates about 3600 tonnes of wet mass poop a day. Thanks for making me work that out... . Given poop isn't even a main constituent ingredient in new soil, but rather forms the 'flavouring' for the development of the biological and mineral matter otherwise, I'd suggest a well-developed bio-recycling infrastructure could be quite productive. This isn't even factoring in food or farm waste, etc.
- wanderingmind 5y agoBut how do you move the wet waste from London to Mediterranean and Sahara. Also soil is one part of equation. Water is another. Poor soil results in poor vegetation that leads to poor rainfall and water sources. So soil also needs to be coupled with water increase. I think preservation is probably more feasible than rejuvenation. India for example is losing top soil at unprecedented rates that can have devastating consequences.
- highenergystar 5y agoIt seems like the only things that can 1. work at a planetary scale 2. mitigate our multi-year (and growing) emission problem 3. not on an energy flywheel (consume a significant amount of energy, mined resources or themselves emit significant waste heat) have to rely directly on solar energy (not intermediated by PV cell). To this end azolla ferns [1] and olivine weathering seem to be the most promising. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
- nathanvanfleet 5y ago> Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone. Yuge
- _samjarman 5y agoMusk's face on the first page, but also he probably has produced more CO2 with his crypto BS than Tesla has saved over its live span... [Happy to be wrong, but I'd be surprised]
- wanderingmind 5y agoThere seems to be no target beyond the amount of carbon to capture. Are they targeting for $ per tonne removal. Efficiency of removal? Climeworks already has technology that has removed more than 1000 tonnes of Carbon from atmosphere(0). Can we just give them the price? The trouble is cost. Climeworks estimates that at scale their tech would cost $500 - $600 per hour. Looks like this is still high and the current wisdom is that we need to bring it down to $100 per tonne from atmosphere. Also I think removing directly from power plant exhaust is probably a better approach that trying to shoot for a technology that sequesters from atmosphere. (0) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-business-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-busin...
- jtsiskin 5y agoThis is funny. There is one group of people pumping carbon out of the ground and burning it. Then there is another group of people capturing the carbon and putting it back into the ground. I'm picturing a power plant burning coal, then a windmill farm next to it powering a carbon removal process. I guess the potential power generation offset must be accounted for, even if in the solution it's coming from renewable resources. The solution really seems to be to burn less of it in the first place.
- Texasian 5y agoYeah, this is the carbon equivalent of trying to get abs by working out more without adjusting your diet.
- wpasc 5y agoDespite plenty of wasteful use of carbon, energy use largely correlates with reduction in extreme poverty, hunger, etc. Energy use is a requirement for most societies and for people to alleviate basic human needs. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be maximally efficient and renewable in our energy usage, but often times a reduction in energy usage requires a loss of functions that improve people's lives.
- kevinqi 5y agoThis seems easy to say, but how can small groups of people make actionable change on burning less fossil fuel? Will you protest outside coal plants? Cement plants? Steel plants? Stop flying in airplanes? Do you still use a car that burns gasoline? Will oil companies do the right thing and simply choose to make less money? I agree that not using fossil fuels is the most efficient method, but it's also not easy to take action on. We need to pursue every viable avenue in parallel, and carbon removal solutions are, if not particularly efficient yet, at least very actionable. And with R&D, perhaps they will become more efficient.
- endisneigh 5y agoI have absolutely no knowledge of physics or mechanical engineering. that being said, is it possible to just send up a vacuum into space with two very long and wide hoses and a solar panel into lower earth orbit and just have it literally suck out the carbon and blow it into space?
- Arubis 5y agoPutting aside whether this would be effective or a good idea: if you literally mean _carbon_, no, because it’s usually a solid.
- cotwomey 5y agoYou know, aside from the challenge of separating the carbon from other useful stuff in the atmosphere, like oxygen before you start sucking ... you'd need to suck those particles out incredibly far to escape earth's gravity. Easier to suck it just far enough to deposit the co2 on the moon and start creating an atmosphere there. But that would be a heck of a powerful vacuum.
- contingencies 5y agoWeen the world off the industrial agricultural complex, unseasonal consumption patterns, overconsumption of animal protein and the use of fossil fuels... concrete global regulatory steps would be antitrust and breakup of big-ag, big-food and big-energy... and cars.
- iancmceachern 5y agoHow do I find a team to join?
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoElon Musk appears to always think crazy big. This seems crazy small? Doesn't it seem that if you want serious teams / companies putting serious people on this for 4 years you need the prize to be $1 billion+? Google had 100's of highly paid engineers working on virtual reality for a few years. Amazon had/has 100's working on Alexa. That's 100's of millions per year in each case. To incentivize several teams of 10's or 100's of really solid engineers, there has to be a pretty crazy high payoff given the chances of failure. Elon how about a prize of $1 billion in Tesla stock?
- lovemenot 5y agoElon Musk has already amply demonstrated how he loves Mars. Now he is showing how much he hates Venus.
- statusanxiety 5y agoOne solution that I feel is regularly overlooked in these discussions is the establishment of kelp forests. Kelp grows at a far quicker rate than trees, requires no fresh water or land and has the added benefits of restoring marine ecosystems.
- kisamoto 5y agoKelp forests are also being worked on and are really interesting. As with all of these methods we have to make sure that creating an extraordinary amount of kelp and sinking it to the bottom of the ocean doesn't have any adverse side effects.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoWe need cheap, durable, power efficient VR technology and large quantities of cheap and high quality VR content, so that everyone stays home with the lights off
- rsingla 5y agoCan someone comment on the success of these sort of prize competitions? Particularly the success of xPrize.
- MichaelMoser123 5y agoi think the easiest way to win this price is to capture the exhaust gasses of coal power plants - this way you would have to process the least amount of input, as the stuff comes out in very concentrated form. Now the question would be where to take the electricity for the cleaning.
- justshowpost 5y agoIsn't this 2020 news?
- twoquestions 5y agoThe bigger trouble is going to be convincing people who want to deliberately accelerate climate change, either because it will hurt the people they hate, or can be used as casus belli for the next resource war. "The problem is too many people, luckily we have a solution!" and other horrifying shit like that. A bunch of people here are getting into the technological solutions to this problem, but I really think the even bigger challenge is the social/cultural barriers to implementing even a proven technology.
- admax88q 5y agoLot's of "just do this" comments in here. If its as easy as you think it is, then winning the grand prize should be pretty easy. Do the math, grab an investor and go get $100M. "Just plant trees." Okay do the math on how many trees you need. Figure out how your going to build a program to get that many trees planted. What incentives, partnership, funding do you need. How will it scale to the amount needed. What will the full lifecycle look like. "Just improve soil." Okay do the math on that. What's the timeframe for return on investment. What do the logistics look like for producing soil in huge quantities and deploying it where needed. How do we then use that soil to grow plants that sequester carbon. 90% of the comments in here are just the "middle-brow dismissal" of climate change of all things. As if we can "just do X" to solve it and everyone else is an idiot. It's a hard problem, especially because part of the problem is determining how to actually implement and incentivize the population to do it. You can't just ignore that part, or just throw up your hands "people are stupid so we're fucked." Solving the incentive problem is actually part of the problem. Any solution that ends with "people just need to learn to do/value X" is dead in the water. You can start with "people just need to learn to do/value X" but you need to end with a plan on how you will bring about that change in mentality/incentive.
- tito 5y agoAgree with this. It's a hard problem. Have an idea for something better? Heck yeah, let's figure out how to get you working on it! If folks want help getting started, there's no place better than AirMiners: http://airminers.org http://airminers.org Let's get to work.
- kingnothing 5y agoPay US politicians the $100M so they institute a true carbon tax. Let the industry sort out the details.