Carbon capture technologies not yet mature for large-scale use, German gov says | Clean Energy Wire

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Andrew Lockley

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Feb 6, 2019, 6:56:25 PM2/6/19
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https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/carbon-capture-technologies-not-yet-mature-large-scale-use-german-gov-says

05 Feb 2019, 13:33
 

Carbon capture technologies not yet mature for large-scale use, German gov says

Clean Energy Wire

Technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are not yet technically mature enough to contribute to climate action, the German government has said in an answerto a parliamentary inquiry by the pro-business party FDP. There is “no sufficient knowledge base” to assess the usefulness of carbon removal technology, which is why Germany favoured emissions reduction and achieving negative emissions through “ecosystem-based approaches”. 
 The UN’s climate change panel (IPCC) considers so-called negative emissions necessary to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. Ccarbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies or by biological solutions, such as reforestation, are ways to achieve them.

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Adam Cherson

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Feb 7, 2019, 11:10:06 AM2/7/19
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While I don't want to venture too far into the internal politics of another country (my time would be better spent locally), there is truth in the statement of "no sufficient knowledge base". Of course it is also true that if the development of that base is not stimulated, or worse, arrested, then the field will remain immature for a long time. if not forever. Current analysis shows that emissions reductions and "ecosystem-based approaches" are not going to be sufficient nor rapid enough to fully address the problem, so therefore the field of CDR should and must be fomented intensively in any serious policy attempt to provide a satisfying remedy. Good day.......

Clive Elsworth

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Feb 7, 2019, 6:15:55 PM2/7/19
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Once again, not only does reforestation directly drawdown more CO2. Trees also provide natural rock weathering that provides alkalinity that runs off into the oceans, enabling them to absorb more CO2.

 

That still won’t be enough to halt Sea Level Rise though. The best tool for that appears to me to be Iron Salt Aerosol, with its promise of MCB from 0.05µm droplets. (The Twoomey effect makes brighter clouds from smaller droplets.)

 

In addition, an estimated quadrupling of the natural methane depletion rate is something I find hard to ignore: https://climategamechangers.org/game-changers/iron-salt-aerosol/technical_qa_atmosphere/

 

We welcome comments from MCB experts, as we would like to better quantify our MCB cooling estimates.

 

Clive Elsworth

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Eelco Rohling

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Feb 7, 2019, 7:08:48 PM2/7/19
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Dear Clive

Just to help you (and others) out of the dream that sea-level rise might be stoppable where it is now or even reversed. 
From all we can reconstruct, nothing we can do will halt sea-level rise on societally relevant timescales. It’s simply set to rise for a long time because we have already triggered the slow response of ice sheets and the delayed warming of the ocean. Whatever we do might (seen in the time-domain) slow the rise down a bit, or (seen in the vertical domain for a chosen timeslot) reduce the amplitude a bit. But rise it will, and a lot too, so long as climate stays out of radiative equilibrium. Equilibrium sea level for ~400 ppm CO2 can be read from Earth history to be +24 +7/−15 m above present at 68% confidence (http://www.highstand.org/erohling/Rohling-papers/2013-Foster-PNAS-with-Supplement.pdf).
Even if we brought the radiative balance tomorrow back tomorrow to the pre-industrial equivalent (either through carbon removal, or through aerosol management, or both) - and there is no chance that we could manage that - the past 200 years of forcing are already driving the slow feedbacks. All we might accomplish is to slow their direction of response and eventually (on equally long timescales, or even longer given that ice melt is a lot faster than ice growth) drive a reversing trend. It’s a multi-century game at best.

Cheers

Eelco
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Greg Rau

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Feb 7, 2019, 7:25:19 PM2/7/19
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Let's see if I have this correct (I can't read German): “ecosystem-based" CDR good, abiotic/technology-based CDR bad (until proven otherwise, and we're certainly not going to let that happen). 
That's very good news if in fact ecosystems can do all of the heavy lifting and in time, without impacting other ecosystem services. This might be possible if marine ecosystems were also considered, but that seems unlikely given Germany's past (political) experience with iron fertilization research. Unclear if abiotic enhanced weathering gets their stamp of approval (despite 4Byr knowledge base), but perhaps it could fly under the radar if paired with biology(?) Given that we've done no CDR of any kind at the required scales (i.e., "no sufficient knowledge base"), unclear why biology gets a free pass (but one can guess).
Greg

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Jim Baird

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Feb 7, 2019, 8:03:18 PM2/7/19
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My rebutal.

 

 

And here: https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/energy-greed-good

 

Though I agree the timescale will take about 3,250  years to convert the accumulated to useful work and then to radiate the waste heat of this consumption back to space.

image001.jpg

Eelco Rohling

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Feb 7, 2019, 8:47:01 PM2/7/19
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Good luck with that, Jim. The polar ice sheets are the real worry, not thermal expansion. We see massive increases in the mass-shedding in both polar regions.
And in the long term polar amplification is dominated by albedo changes, not by changes in heat advection.
Cheers
Eelco
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(Ocean & Climate Change)
2012 Australian Laureate Fellow
editor, Reviews of Geophysics
Research School of Earth Sciences
The Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia

Tel. Office: (+61) 2 612 53857

On 8 Feb 2019, at 12:03, Jim Baird <jim....@gwmitigation.com> wrote:

My rebutal.
<image001.jpg>

Andrew Lockley

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Feb 8, 2019, 7:57:43 AM2/8/19
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Cross posting as more SRM.

I've heard this "we can't do anything about SLR" argument before, but I'm not convinced. Ice sheets only care about temperature at the margins (ablation zone). The principle driver in the accumulation zone is precipitation. Is there a way to drive increased precip, using targeted MCB/CCT to enhance or redirect snow?

There's also a whole host of glacier arrest techniques, which can be used in isolation or parallel, to slow ablation. 

I've not seen any modelling of the above, but I suspect that we can do more than we currently think. 

Andrew 

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Douglas MacMartin

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Feb 8, 2019, 8:16:45 AM2/8/19
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Re MCB, the short answer is that we don’t know the extent to which it works in any useful sense of the word.  Definitely some meteorological conditions in which it increases albedo, definitely some in which it decreases albedo, but cloud-aerosol interactions are about the most uncertain aspect of the climate system, and without experiments to better constrain the cloud response, certainly can’t rely on it as a guaranteed solution.  (The obvious observation being that we ought to be conducting said experiments, and ought to have been doing so 10 years ago or more… I unfortunately don’t have a spare $10M or so lying around to fund that.)  I’ve pointed out before that we should REALLY hope that MCB doesn’t work well at all – because that means that the aerosol indirect effect is weak, and that means climate sensitivity may be on the lower end of the range.  MCB working really well implies that we’re currently getting a lot of cooling from existing aerosols that is masking out some of the warming from CO2…

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