Tag Archives: carbon dioxide removal (CDR)

Taming the Apocalypse Horsemen: Steel Cement Chemicals

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Heavy industry has long seemed irredeemably carbon-intensive. Reducing iron ore to make steel, heating limestone to produce cement and using steam to crack hydrocarbons into their component molecules all require a lot of energy. On top of that, the chemical processes involved give off lots of additional carbon dioxide. Cutting all those emissions, experts believed, was either technically unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.

Both the economics and the technology are at last looking more favorable. Europe is introducing tougher emissions targets, carbon prices are rising and consumers are showing a greater willingness to pay more for greener products. Several European countries have crafted strategies for hydrogen, the most promising replacement for fossil fuels in many industrial processes. Germany is launching the Hydrogen Intermediary Network Company, a global trading hub for hydrogen and hydrogen-derived products. Most important, low-carbon technologies are finally coming of age. The need for many companies to replenish their ageing assets offers a “fast-forward mechanism”, says Per-Anders Enkvist of Material Economics…Decarbonising industry has turned from mission impossible to “mission possible”, says Adair Turner of the Energy Transitions Commission, a think-tank.

In July 2022 the board of Salzgitter, a German steel company, gave the nod to a €723m project called SALCOS that will swap its conventional blast furnaces for direct-reduction plants by 2033 (it will use some natural gas until it can secure enough hydrogen). Other big European steel producers, including ArcelorMittal and Thyssenkrupp, have similar plans.

HeidelbergCement, the world’s fourth-largest manufacturer of the cement has launched half a dozen low-carbon projects in Europe. They include a carbon capture storage (CCS) facility in the Norwegian city of Brevik and the world’s first carbon-neutral cement plant on the Swedish island of Gotland…The chemicals industry faces the biggest challenge. Although powering steam crackers with electricity instead of natural gas is straightforward in principle, it is no cakewalk in practice, given the limited supply of low-carbon electricity. Moreover, the chemicals business breathes hydrocarbons, from which many of its 30,000 or so products are derived. Even so, it is not giving up. BASF, a chemicals colossus, is working with two rivals, SABIC and Linde, to develop an electrically heated steam cracker for its town-sized factory in Ludwigshafen. It wants to make its site in Antwerp net-zero by 2030. 

A few dozen pilot projects—even large ones—do not amount to a green transition. The hard part is scaling them up.  However, the first movers will be able to  set the standards and grabbing a slice of potentially lucrative businesses such as software to control hydrogen- and steelmaking equipment. 

Excerpts from Green-dustrialization, Economist, Sept. 24, 2022

A Breach Too Far: 413 PPM

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The abundance of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere once again reached a new record in 2021, with the annual rate of increase above the 2011-2020 average. That trend has continued in 2021, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

Concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas, reached 413.2 parts per million in 2020 and is 149% of the pre-industrial level. Methane (CH4) is 262% and nitrous oxide (N2O)  is 123% of the levels in 1750 when human activities started disrupting Earth’s natural equilibrium.

Roughly half of the CO2 emitted by human activities today remains in the atmosphere. The other half is taken up by oceans and land ecosystems. The Bulletin flagged concern that the ability of land ecosystems and oceans to act as “sinks” may become less effective in future, thus reducing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide and act as a buffer against larger temperature increase…Such changes are already happening, for example, transition of the part of Amazonia from a carbon sink to a carbon source. 

The Bulletin shows that from 1990 to 2020, radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – by long-lived greenhouse gases increased by 47%, with CO2 accounting for about 80% of this increase…The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere breached the milestone of 400 parts per million in 2015. And just five years later, it exceeded 413 ppm. 

“Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer. The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now. But there weren’t 7.8 billion people then,” said Prof. Taalas.

Excerpt from Greenhouse Gas Bulletin: Another Year Another Record, WMO, Oct. 25, 2021

How to Suck Carbon and Convert it to Rocks

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The Orca carbon-capture plant, just outside Reykjavik in Iceland, has switched on its fans and began sucking carbon dioxide from the air since September 2021. The sound was subtle—a bit like a gurgling stream. But the plant’s creators hope it will mark a big shift in humanity’s interaction with the climate. Orca is, for now, the largest installation in the infant “direct air capture” industry, which aims to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. When sealed underground such CO2 counts as “negative emissions”—an essential but underdeveloped method for tackling global warming.

Thus, the full operation extracts CO2 from air and turns it to rock. Trials have shown that Icelandic basalts can sequester CO2 in solid rock within two years. Power comes from a nearby geothermal power station….One catch is volume. Orca will capture 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, out of around 35bn tonnes produced by burning fossil fuels. Another is cost. It costs Orca somewhere between $600-800 to sequester one tonne of carbon dioxide, and the firm sells offset packages online for around $1,200 per tonne. The company thinks it can cut costs ten-fold through economies of scale. But there appears to be no shortage of customers willing to pay the current, elevated price. Even as Orca’s fans revved up, roughly two-thirds of its lifetime offering of carbon removals had already been sold. Clients include corporations seeking to offset a portion of their emissions, such as Microsoft, Swiss Re as well as over 8,000 private individuals.

Climeworks is not alone in having spotted the opportunity. Using different chemistry, Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company, is gearing up to switch on its own carbon-scrubbing facilities. It will take more than these pioneer engineers and financiers to build a gigatonne-sized industry. But the fans are turning. 

Excerpts from Removing carbon dioxide from the air: The world’s biggest carbon-removal plant switches on, Economist, Sept. 18, 2021

The $22 Trillion Global Carbon Market

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Two of the world’s biggest oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell  and BP already have significant carbon-emissions trading arms, thanks to a relatively well-developed carbon market in Europe. Big carbon emitters such as steel producers receive emission allowances, and can buy more to stay under European emissions guidelines. Companies that fall below those limits can sell their excess carbon-emissions allowances.

Carbon traders get in the middle of those transactions, seeking to profit from even small moves in the price of carbon and sometimes betting on the direction of prices. The value of the world’s carbon markets—including Europe and smaller markets in places such as California and New Zealand—grew 23% last year to €238 billion, equivalent to $281 billion.

That is small compared with the world’s multitrillion-dollar oil markets and to other heavily traded energy markets, such as natural gas or electricity. But growth potential exists, the industry says. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, estimates a global carbon market could be worth $22 trillion by 2050… An experienced carbon trader’s base salary can be roughly $150,000 to $200,000, although a lot of compensation occurs via bonuses, traders said…. BP’s overall annual trading profits were between $3.5 billion and $4 billion during the past two years, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Excerpts from Sarah McFarlane, Energy Traders See Big Money in Carbon-Emissions Markets, WSJ, Sept. 9, 2021

Dumping Carbon in the Seabed

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Oil companies have for decades made money by extracting carbon from the ground. Now they are trying to make money putting it back. Energy giants such as Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell are pushing carbon capture and storage (CCS)—where carbon is gathered and buried underground—as part of a drive to reduce both their own and their customers’ emissions. Executives say the service could become a new source of income when the industry is grappling with how to adapt to a lower-carbon economy.

Oil companies have long captured carbon from their operations, albeit mostly to produce more oil. Now they want to retool that skill as a service they can sell to heavy-polluting industries like cement and steel, burying their carbon in the ground indefinitely for a fee, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. Yet critics question the environmental benefits and high cost of such projects.

In 2021, Shell, Total and Equinor launched a joint venture to store carbon in a rock formation thousands of feet beneath the seabed off the coast of Norway. The state-backed Northern Lights project is set to be the first time companies outside the oil industry will be able to pay to have their carbon gathered and stored. Most carbon-storage projects rely on government funding. Norway is covering about 80% of the $1.6 billion cost of the Northern Lights project, with the rest split equally between Shell, Equinor and Total.

Exxon has said it plans to form a new business unit to commercialize carbon capture and storage, forecasting it could become a $2 trillion market by 2040. Chevron has formed partnerships on storage projects, while BP is codeveloping storage projects in the U.K. and Australia. Oil executives’ sales pitch to carbon-intensive companies: We will provide your energy, then take back the carbon to minimize your footprint. Carbon capture and storage iss becoming a business rather than just a solution. 

The U.S. offers companies a tax credit of as much as $50 a metric ton of carbon captured, while the U.K., Norway and Australia have collectively committed billions of dollars of funding for carbon-capture projects. But There are  concerns about whether storage sites could leak carbon. In Europe, public resistance to land-based storage has led to the use of aquifers and depleted gas fields in the North Sea….In the Norway project, carbon will be transported by ship around the bottom of the country before being pumped offshore via a 68-mile pipeline and then injected into an aquifer under the seabed. BP is working on a similar concept for a project it will operate in northeast England, where carbon will be collected from a gas-power plant and various industrial sites, then stored under the North Sea. “We’ll capture the carbon, we’ll take it offshore, we’ll stuff it underground,” BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney recently said of the project. “Taking the carbon back is what I like to describe it as.”

Excerpts from Sarah McFarlane, Oil Giants Turn to Carbon Storage, Apr. 20, 2021

How Mining Waste Can Help us Deal with Climate Change

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Every year, mining and industrial activity generates billions of tons of slurries, gravel, and other wastes that have a high pH.

These alkaline wastes, which sit either behind fragile dams or heaped in massive piles, present a threat to people and ecosystems. But these wastes could also help the world avert climate disaster. Reacting these wastes with carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air solidifies them and makes them easier to handle.

At the same time, carrying out this type of an operation on a global scale could trap between 310 million to 4 billion tons of CO2 annually, according to recent surveys. That could provide the world with a much needed means of lowering atmospheric CO2.

But there are major hurdles. Governments will need to offer incentives for mineralization on the massive scale needed to make a dent in atmospheric carbon. And engineers will need to figure out how to harness the wastes while preventing the release of heavy metals and radioactivity locked in the material…

If regulators verified mines and other alkaline waste producers as CO2 sequestration sites…incentives would skyrocket, companies could claim tax benefits, and industry might start to tackle climate change on the grand scale that’s necessary.

Excerpt from Robert F. Service, The Carbon Vault, Science, Sept. 4, 2020

Climate Change Unlikely to Kill Amazon Rainforest

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The current Earth system models used for climate predictions show that the Amazon rainforest is very sensitive to water stress. Since the air in the future is predicted to get warmer and drier with climate change, translating to increased water stress, this could have large implications not just for the forest’s survival, but also for its storage of CO2. If the forest is not able to survive in its current capacity, climate change could greatly accelerate.

Columbia Engineering researchers decided to investigate whether this was true, whether these forests are really as sensitive to water stress as what the models have been showing. In a study published in Science Advances, they report their discovery that these models have been largely over-estimating water stress in tropical forests.

The team found that, while models show that increases in air dryness greatly diminish photosynthesis rates in certain regions of the Amazon rainforest, the observational data results show the opposite: in certain very wet regions, the forests instead even increase photosynthesis rates in response to drier air…[In fact] As the trees become stressed, they generate more efficient leaves that can more than compensate for water stress.”…

“So much of the scientific research coming out these days is that with climate change, our current ecosystems might not be able to survive, potentially leading to the acceleration of global warming due to feedbacks,” Gentine added. “It was nice to see that maybe some of our estimates of approaching mortality in the Amazon rainforest may not be quite as dire as we previously thought.”

Excerpts from Some Amazon Rainforest Regions More Resistant to Climate Change than Previously Thought, Columbia Engineering, Nov. 20, 2020

The Privilege of Polluting v. Decarbonization

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The Paris climate agreement of 2015 calls for the Earth’s temperature to increase by no more than 2°C over pre-industrial levels, and ideally by as little as 1.5°C. Already, temperatures are 1°C above the pre-industrial, and they continue to climb, driven for the most part by CO2 emissions of 43bn tonnes a year. To stand a good chance of scraping under the 2°C target, let alone the 1.5°C target, just by curtailing greenhouse-gas emissions would require cuts far more stringent than the large emitting nations are currently offering.

Recognising this, the agreement envisages a future in which, as well as hugely reducing the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere, nations also take a fair bit out. Scenarios looked at by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last year required between 100bn and 1trn tonnes of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere by the end of the century if the Paris goals were to be reached; the median value was 730bn tonnes–that is, more than ten years of global emissions…

If you increase the amount of vegetation on the planet, you can suck down a certain amount of the excess CO2 from the atmosphere. Growing forests, or improving farmland, is often a good idea for other reasons, and can certainly store some carbon. But it is not a particularly reliable way of doing so. Forests can be cut back down, or burned—and they might also die off if, overall, mitigation efforts fail to keep the climate cool enough for their liking. …But the biggest problem with using new or restored forests as carbon stores is how big they have to be to make a serious difference. The area covered by new or restored forests in some of the ipcc scenarios was the size of Russia. And even such a heroic effort would only absorb on the order of 200bn tonnes of CO2 ; less than many consider necessary.

The world has about 2,500 coal-fired power stations, and thousands more gas-fired stations, steel plants, cement works and other installations that produce industrial amounts of CO2. Just 19 of them offer some level of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), according to the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCSI), an advocacy group. All told, roughly 40m tonnes of CO2 are being captured from industrial sources every year—around 0.1% of emissions.

Why so little? There are no fundamental technological hurdles; but the heavy industrial kit needed to do CCS at scale costs a lot. If CO2 emitters had to pay for the privilege of emitting to the tune, say, of $100 a tonne, there would be a lot more interest in the technology, which would bring down its cost. In the absence of such a price, there are very few incentives or penalties to encourage such investment. The greens who lobby for action on the climate do not, for the most part, want to support CCS. They see it as a way for fossil-fuel companies to seem to be part of the solution while staying in business, a prospect they hate. Electricity generators have seen the remarkable drop in the price of wind and solar and invested accordingly.

Equinor, formerly Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, has long pumped CO2 into a spent field in the North Sea, both to prove the technology and to avoid the stiff carbon tax which Norway levies on emissions from the hydrocarbon industry. As a condition on its lease to develop the Gorgon natural-gas field off the coast of Australia, Chevron was required to strip the CO2 out of the gas and store it. The resultant project is, at 4m tonnes a year, bigger than any other not used for EOR. But at the same time, what the Gorgon project stores in a year, the world emits in an hour.

In Europe, the idea has caught on that the costs of operating big CO2 reservoirs like Gorgon’s will need to be shared between many carbon sources. This is prompting a trend towards clusters that could share the storage infrastructure. Equinor, Shell and Total, two more oil companies, are proposing to turn CCS into a service industry in Norway. For a fee they will collect CO2 from its producers and ship it to Bergen before pushing it out through a pipeline to offshore injection points. In September Equinor announced that it had seven potential customers, including Air Liquide, an industrial-gas provider, and ArcelorMittal, a steelmaker.

Similar projects for filling up the emptied gasfields of the North Sea are seeking government support in the Netherlands, where Rotterdam’s port authority is championing the idea, and in Britain, where the main movers are heavy industries in the north, including Drax.

The European Union has also recently announced financial support for CCS, in the form of a roughly €10bn innovation fund aimed at CC S, renewables and energy storage. The fund’s purpose is not to decarbonise fossil-fuel energy, but rather to focus on CCS development for the difficult-to-decarbonise industries such as steel and cement.

Excerpts from, The Chronic Complexity of Carbon Capture, Economist, Dec. 7, 2019

Don’t Cut that Tree!

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A revolutionary new approach to measuring changes in forest carbon density has helped scientists determine that the tropics now emit more carbon than they capture, countering their role as a net carbon “sink.”*

“These findings provide the world with a wakeup call on forests,” said scientist Alessandro Baccini, the report’s lead author….Forests are the only carbon capture and storage ‘technology’ we have in our grasp that is safe, proven, inexpensive, immediately available at scale, and capable of providing beneficial ripple effects—from regulating rainfall patterns to providing livelihoods to indigenous communities.”

Using 12 years (2003-2014) of satellite imagery, laser remote sensing technology and field measurements, Baccini and his team were able to capture losses in forest carbon from wholesale deforestation as well as from more difficult-to-measure fine-scale degradation and disturbance …from smallholder farmers removing individual trees for fuel wood. These losses can be relatively small in any one place, but added up across large areas they become considerable.

[T] he researchers discovered that tropics represent a net source of carbon to the atmosphere — about 425 teragrams of carbon annually – which is more than the annual emissions from all cars and trucks in the United States.

Excerpts from New approach to measuring forest carbon density shows tropics now emit more carbon than they capture, Woods Hole Research Institute Press Release, Sept. 28, 2017

*Tropical forests are a net carbon source based on aboveground measurements of gain and loss by A. Baccini et al., Science, Sept. 28, 2017

Weather Modification and the CIA

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image from wikipedia

According to US website ‘Mother Jones’ the CIA is helping fund a study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that will investigate whether humans could use geoengineering – which is defined as deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system – to stop climate change.The NAS website describes the study as an investigation into “a limited number of proposed geoengineering techniques, including examples of both solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) techniques.”  The purpose of this is to comment “generally on the potential impacts of deploying these technologies, including possible environmental, economic, and national security concerns”, the website claims.  Solar radiation management (SRM) is a theoretical branch of geoengineering which moots the idea of reflecting sunlight in an attempt to block infrared radiation and halt rising temperatures.

The cost of the project is reported to be $630,000, which NAS is splitting with the CIA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA reports say.  A reference on the NAS website to “the US intelligence community” funding the project refers to the CIA, an NAS spokesman claimed.

Much speculation has surrounded claims that the US government has long been involved in types of weather manipulation, including a much-discussed attempt to cloud-seed – the process of dispersing substances into the air to create cloud condensation or ice nuclei and subsequently rain or snow – during the Vietnam war.

It was also widely reported that the Chinese government seeded clouds ahead of the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony to create a downpour elsewhere and keep the stadium dry by firing iodide crystals into rain clouds over Beijing.

Weather manipulation was most recently in the news after claims by some American commentators that devastating tornadoes in Oklahoma, along with other extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, were created by the US government using the Haarp antenna farm in Alaska.

CIA backs $630,000 study into how to control global weather through geoengineering,The Independent, July 21, 2013