Why isn't there more talk on carbon sequestration?

[Nathan McCorkle]

I hear about climate change or global warming weekly or daily
sometimes, but I never hear about carbon sequestration. Even if it
wasn't solar powered, there's still excess capacity on the electric
grid at night. Heck I don't even hear about soil-building
farming/livestock-pasturing techniques.

Forget bitcoin, I want to make some carbon credits!

--
-Nathan

[Simon Quellen Field]

Come to California then... we have them.

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[Ian Jessup]

LOL, because carbon sequestration is a terrible energy intensive process that only a madman would pursue.

Pardon my abrupt dismissal.  But it's a bad idea.  And I don't believe in giving bad ideas any validation.

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Finis Coronat Opus! - "The End Crowns The Work!"

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Ian Jessup <wrath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> LOL, because carbon sequestration is a terrible energy intensive process
> that only a madman would pursue.
>
> Pardon my abrupt dismissal. But it's a bad idea. And I don't believe in
> giving bad ideas any validation.
>

Isn't it just recycling? Carbon is a currency, I can burn it, I can
eat it... but not in CO2 form.

[Ian Jessup]

Sequestration isn't recycling.  It's the idea of storing it in a way that isn't harmful to the environment.  CO2 being an incredibly low-energy form of carbon, it would require more energy to sequester than the potential energy you'd store via sequestration.  Thermodynamically, it isn't energetically favorable or beneficial to attempt to sequester it.  If it could be actually recycled in a large scale process the way plants and marine microorganisms do, then it would be energetically favorable.  In other words, to sequester carbon you'd expend more energy and producing more carbon than you'd be able to sequester.  Result: Net gain in carbon.

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[Sebastian Cocioba]

Better photosynthesis through synthetic rubisco constructs. Better plants, less carbon, happier planet. Mad? I think not. So much funding is invested in making natures crappy workhorse protein a bit better at its job. Side effects may include increased atmo O2 levels, decrease in atmo carbon dioxide, rampant weeds through horizontal transfer, etc. You win some you lose some.

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[Ian Jessup]

Again.  Not carbon sequestration.  Photosynthesis, whether biological or synthetic, is NOT sequestration.  It is a recycling process whether naturally involved in the ecological carbon cycle, or synthetic mimicry/participation.  Sequestration is STORAGE.

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[Nathan McCorkle]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Ian Jessup <wrath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Again. Not carbon sequestration. Photosynthesis, whether biological or
> synthetic, is NOT sequestration. It is a recycling process whether
> naturally involved in the ecological carbon cycle, or synthetic
> mimicry/participation. Sequestration is STORAGE.

You have stopped being scientific. We waste thermodynamic energy every
time we recharge our cell phones or laptops, the molecule that
participates doesn't matter, carbon isn't any different.

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Apr 3, 2014 12:41 PM, "Nathan McCorkle" <nmz...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Ian Jessup <wrath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Again.  Not carbon sequestration.  Photosynthesis, whether biological or
> > synthetic, is NOT sequestration.  It is a recycling process whether
> > naturally involved in the ecological carbon cycle, or synthetic
> > mimicry/participation.  Sequestration is STORAGE.
>
> You have stopped being scientific.

Correction, you are not being scientific.

[Simon Quellen Field]

At the risk of quoting The Princess Bride, I don't think that word means what you think it means.

The sequestration plants currently in use collect carbon dioxide at the source (coal fired power plants) and inject it into wells for storage. Even the ones using wells deep enough for the compound to be supercritical liquid use far less power than the coal plant gets from burning the carbon. Other plants inject the compound as a gas into shallower aquifers, which cuts costs both in compression and in pipeline building, since many of the plants sit on top of aquifers anyway.

Other approaches are to store it as biomass in soils.

Producing carbon dioxide only at night and storing until there is excess electricity in the daytime from solar plants to reform it into liquid fuels to burn at night is a form of CCS that could be used to solve energy balance problems. It is easier to store hydrogen by binding it to carbon dioxide than to liquefy it. That fuel could also be used for long haul trucking, where batteries are less practical.

In previous epochs of high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, mountain building and the subsequent weathering eventually took it out of the air through reactions with soil minerals. When we make concrete, we are recycling that old carbon back into the air. Carbon capture and storage is certainly storage. But it does not say anything about the duration of that storage. Sequestration is just a word that means "to set apart". A jury is not sequestered forever -- that fate is reserved for certain others in the courtroom.

What is your argument for how storing it in the air is thermodynamically positive, but storing it in compressed form in natural gas wells is not? I am not saying you are wrong, I'm just asking you to show your work.

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[John Griessen]

On 04/03/2014 02:41 PM, Nathan McCorkle wrote:
>> Photosynthesis, whether biological or
>> >synthetic, is NOT sequestration. It is a recycling process whether
>> >naturally involved in the ecological carbon cycle, or synthetic
>> >mimicry/participation. Sequestration is STORAGE.
> You have stopped being scientific. We waste thermodynamic energy every
> time we recharge our cell phones or laptops, the molecule that
> participates doesn't matter, carbon isn't any different.

I think maybe he was not talking science or whole world accounting a la Bucky, just politics
of "credits", which Tesla can earn by producing cars, but you probably
would have a hard time documenting, validating and taking to the bank.

On 04/03/2014 02:57 PM, Simon Quellen Field wrote:> What is your argument for how storing it in the air is thermodynamically

positive, but storing it in compressed form in natural
> gas wells is not? I am not saying you are wrong, I'm just asking you to show your work.
>

I've heard about this. Does expending energy and money to pump CO2 into holes in the ground
make some kind of economic sense?

[Simon Quellen Field]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 3:10 PM, John Griessen <jo...@industromatic.com> wrote:

I've heard about this.  Does expending energy and money to pump CO2 into holes in the ground
make some kind of economic sense?

One can put a value on pollution. That's what carbon credits are all about. It worked for acid rain. Pollution credits were how we got sulfur scrubbers installed on all those power plants.

We could simply ban using any fossil fuel at all. And keep forming new governments every time it is attempted. Mitigating the harm allows them to stay in business, since the business no longer causes harm. There is an economic cost to mitigating the harm, which makes fossil fuels less competitive with clean alternatives, which helps promote those alternatives.

In the end, energy costs more for a while, which can cause economic slumps. But the cost of the pollution goes away, or at least is accounted for. If the cost of using fossil fuels is losing coastal cities and island nations, causing mass extinctions, losing farm productivity, dislocating populations, acidifying the oceans, and a long list of others, it isn't an economic slump, it is a long term investment.

Allowing carbon dioxide to pollute the global commons has an economic cost that is currently not being paid by the polluters. Rather than charge them for the actual costs, make them stop polluting. Collecting and storing the pollution is one way to do that, and we can leave it up to the polluters to find a way to make that work for them economically.

[Matt Lawes]

How much shall we charge each ruminant for farting methane (more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) into the atmosphere.

Obviously when 'enslaved' as a farm animal the cruel overlord rancher/farmer can be billed, but what about the bison in Yellowstone (maybe they have sovereign immunity if Government owned?) And all those deer.....

Theater of the absurd can easily overtake us.... thanks All Gore.

>matt

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID

Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com> wrote:

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[Simon Quellen Field]

:-)

It's only absurd when you take it to absurd lengths.

<absurd>

The deer in my backyard did not cause the problem. We did. Us old farts, that is. We're leaving it to you young folks as a parting gift. Navigable Arctic, beautiful Amazon deserts, the Miami scuba diving park, Lake Louisiana-Mississippi, the warm vast pastures of Greenland, a Pacific without all those bothersome traffic impediments.

I won't see 2100. I'll bet its real nice.

</absurd>

On the serious side, geometry makes global warming interesting. Currently most of the worlds food production happens in the mid-latitudes. Below them is desert (Mexico, Arizona, the Sahara, Central Australia, etc.). As the latitudes where crops grow most efficiently move towards the poles, there is less land to grow them on, because we live on a sphere. With an estimated 11 billion people living on the planet by 2100 (1.57 times as many people as today), and a 40% drop in the land available for farming, food production will have to be much more efficient.

Wheat currently turns 1% of the sunlight energy it gets into consumable calories. Sugarcane turns 8% of received energy into calories. Some of you might want to think about how to get those efficient photosynthesis pathways into wheat and other crop plants.

I'd do it, but us old folks have orders to report to the Soylent Green factory, input gate.

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[Patrik D'haeseleer]

I keep telling people at the Dept. of Energy that trying to pull CO2 out of the air is horribly expensive. The more dense the carbon you can capture, the more affordable it becomes - so capturing CO2 from a power station smoke stack is far more effective. 

By extension, by far the absolutely best form of carbon sequestration is to take coal and put it underground!

Not everyone at DOE can laugh at that joke. It's got too much truth to it...

Patrik

[Cathal Garvey]

You're putting a lot of data into this conversation Simon! :)

On the photosynthesis note, before anyone thinks it's as trivial as
injecting a few pathways: there's a lot of tissue structure behind the
more advanced forms of photosynthesis, where plants segregate parts of
the carbon fixing and photosynthetic cycles from one another.

Given that one of the biggest limiting factors to photosynthesis after
energetic capture (efficiency of turning sunlight into ATP, splitting
water in the process) is carbon fixing in an oxygen-rich environment,
separating the energy capture (which churns out O2) and C-fixing parts
(which is poisoned by CO2) makes perfect sense.

But, it's the sort of thing that's hard for us to do at present.
However, as we get better at such structural stuff, there's plenty of
improvement to be added here. For example, another oxygen-sensitive
capture operation, Nitrogen fixation, has lead to an innovative solution
from legumes; they use leghaemoglobin to bind oxygen and prevent it from
reaching the root nodules that capture nitrogen. Could that approach be
useful for capturing CO2? Maybe!

Bacteria also fix carbon at times, using carboxysomes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboxysome
There's probably a lot we can learn from their approach that could be
applied in plants, too. They have a huge surface:volume ratio compared
to plants, so their scope for compartmentalising CO2 fixation from
oxygen is much lower. They've probably found a few bright hacks to
achieve this differently, which we could hack into plants.

All in all, big scope for improving plant photosynthesis. And even a 1%
increase would be incredibly dramatic, if you could funnel all that
surplus energy to food-producing organs in the plant.

On 04/04/14 01:44, Simon Quellen Field wrote:
> :-)
> It's only absurd when you take it to absurd lengths.
>
> <absurd>
> The deer in my backyard did not cause the problem. We did. Us old farts,
> that is. We're leaving it to you young folks as a parting gift. Navigable
> Arctic, beautiful Amazon deserts, the Miami scuba diving park, Lake
> Louisiana-Mississippi, the warm vast pastures of Greenland, a Pacific
> without all those bothersome traffic impediments.
>
> I won't see 2100. I'll bet its real nice.
> </absurd>
>
> On the serious side, geometry makes global warming interesting. Currently
> most of the worlds food production happens in the mid-latitudes. Below them
> is desert (Mexico, Arizona, the Sahara, Central Australia, etc.). As the
> latitudes where crops grow most efficiently move towards the poles, there
> is less land to grow them on, because we live on a sphere. With an
> estimated 11 billion people living on the planet by

> 2100<https://www.google.com/search?q=population+in+2100&oq=population+in+2100&aqs=chrome..69i57.3956j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8>(1.57

> times as many people as today), and a 40% drop in the land available
> for farming, food production will have to be much more efficient.
>
> Wheat currently turns 1% of the sunlight energy it gets into consumable
> calories. Sugarcane turns 8% of received energy into

> calories<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency>.

> Some of you might want to think about how to get those efficient
> photosynthesis pathways into wheat and other crop plants.
>
> I'd do it, but us old folks have orders to report to the Soylent Green
> factory, input gate.
>
>
> -----
> Get a free science project every week! "http://scitoys.com/newsletter.html"
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Matt Lawes <ma...@insysx.com> wrote:
>
>> How much shall we charge each ruminant for farting methane (more potent
>> greenhouse gas than CO2) into the atmosphere.
>> Obviously when 'enslaved' as a farm animal the cruel overlord
>> rancher/farmer can be billed, but what about the bison in Yellowstone
>> (maybe they have sovereign immunity if Government owned?) And all those
>> deer.....
>> Theater of the absurd can easily overtake us.... thanks All Gore.
>>> matt
>>

>> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*

>> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/CAA0yOM5KmjzMwfskdcG61A99b_zAX%2B0kOC6aK8tN3iVGgqgV5w%40mail.gmail.com<https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/CAA0yOM5KmjzMwfskdcG61A99b_zAX%2B0kOC6aK8tN3iVGgqgV5w%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
>> .

>>
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[Simon Quellen Field]

Work the problem backwards. Instead of trying to put sugarcane pathways into wheat, why not make sugarcane seeds produce gluten and more starch, and make the plants grow in more varied climates? Who wouldn't want to eat sugarwheat? It does its own marketing. :-)

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[John Griessen]

On 04/04/2014 10:40 AM, Simon Quellen Field wrote:
> Who wouldn't want to eat sugarwheat? It does its own marketing. :-)
>

You lateral thinker you!

[Nathan McCorkle]

Look the NY Times even says photosynthesis is a form of carbon
storage, now that a media outlet has been quoted it must be believed!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/science/lofty-ambitions-for-cross-laminated-timber-panels.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Talking of laminated wooden panels made from German farmed Spruce:

"Moreover, the buildings have a low carbon footprint: Because trees
remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, the
carbon stored in all those panels helps offset the greenhouse gases
released in making and hauling the other building materials and in the
actual construction."

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[Cathal Garvey]

Even better; by displacing concrete as a building material, you're
offsetting all the CO2 involved in making concrete, and sweated by
concrete over its lifespan.

Hint; that's a HUGE amount of CO2. If ever building something, don't use
concrete, please. Come to Ireland and learn to make Cob. ;)