Uncharted Territories -- Conclusion...

[Philip Costa]

Scarce CO₂

But generating methane is only one way of using the carbon in the air as a resource. Any fuel can be formed with a similar approach. Farmers see it as a resource, both for nourishing land- and sea-based plants. There are probably many more uses.

The moment energy becomes cheap enough to allow reliable extraction of CO₂ from the atmosphere, people will use that source of carbon. And not all of it will be re-released into the atmosphere. As we saw in the Ocean Farming article, some of it will sink in the oceans¹³. Even today, 3% of methane is not burned, but used in other ways like plastics production, thus leaving the carbon cycle altogether… 

In the next few years, we won’t be able to scale this fast enough to make up for our CO₂ emissions. But at some point, all the fuels we use will come from the air, not the ground. Every year, we will sink CO₂ rather than emit it. Eventually¹⁴, we will deplete it to the extent that measures might be taken to prevent companies from sinking it, or to make them pay for the privilege.

Until then, we still need to reduce carbon emissions, sink carbon as fast as possible, and lower the temperature of the Earth until we get CO₂ back to reasonable levels. I’ll keep writing about this.

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In this week’s premium article we’re going to answer a question many of you asked me: What about hydrogen? This is especially relevant in the context of this article, because here we’re saying we should be producing methane. But for that, we need hydrogen. Wouldn’t it make sense to stop at hydrogen?

1

The best meta-analysis seems to be this.

2

Consider their color: Why are plants not black? Isn’t black the color that absorbs most light? They should be black to capture more energy! We didn’t know until recently. It turns out that plants don’t just optimize for peak light captured, but also variance. There’s usually plenty of light, so what they try to do is get a constant stream of energy, not one where they get huge peaks and valleys.

3

A bit like cow stomachs. Or, well, yours. And mine. True.

4

Which means halving every five years.

5

And throw away some more O₂

6

Water can even be extracted from the air at the same time with the concentrator, so no need to plug a water pipe here.

7

This is in cubic feet, but as you know this is a ridiculous measure, so we’re going to go for cubic meters. That requires me to do some math to translate all the k̶l̶i̶n̶g̶o̶n̶ imperial measures I found on the Internet, all for your simplicity and edification. You’re welcome.

8

The standard lifetime of a solar panel.

9

These are broad numbers. The point is not to get them exactly right, but to see how far we are from the ballpark. Because if they’re close, it’s just a matter of time for cost to drop enough to make this viable.

10

Again, with a 30-year payback, which is a lot. But this goes down fast when costs drop exponentially.

11

I will cover this in a future article.

12

 I discovered this while writing the space series, so I discussed it with him and when I saw the opportunity, I invested in the Seed Extension. He has not asked me to write this article, nor to help him in other ways. I did interview him for Uncharted Territories, and hope to release the interview at some point, but most of the insights have been incorporated across articles. I wrote the draft before I invested, and I like to put my money where my mouth is. I would have written the article as is even if I hadn’t invested.

13

For seaweed farmers for example.

14

Unclear what the timelines are, but if energy consumption from people keeps growing exponentially, the extraction of CO₂ might too. Exponential processes have the poor habit of becoming very sizable very fast. Casey Handmer’s feedback on this is that it would take a very long time for this to create any type of carbon scarcity in the air.

 


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