Turning CO2 to rock

Before and after: porous basalt (left) and basalt with mineralised CO2 within its pores (Source: BBC)

 I wrote a piece about this 5 years ago, when it was all still being tested.  And now it's up and running.   Of course, 4000 tonnes a year is very little.  Australia emits 16.8 tonnes a year per person.  So this project removes the annual emissions of about 240 Ozzies―but our total population is ±25 million.   It would be far more cost-effective to cut our emissions by replacing our coal power stations with renewables and our petrol/diesel car and lorry fleet with EVs.    

However, it's instructive to consider the economics of the project.  Iceland is part of the EU emissions trading scheme.  Currently, the price of carbon in the EU is Euro62, which is about US$73.   This article gives the cost of the CarbFix process per tonne of CO2 as US$30.  And because this involves negative emissions, the company would receive the carbon price instead of paying for it.  Or, to put it differently, they would be able to sell the permits created by their negative emissions to companies needing  permits for their positive emissions.  In other words, it would be economical to scale it up to compensate for the 35 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted each year globally.   But, and this is crucial, if we had a carbon price globally, then emissions would plunge, and the negative emissions required to stabilise the world's temperature would be much less as well as being profitable.

Will we get a global carbon price?  The odds are improving.  The EU intends to add a carbon tax to imports from countries which don't have one.  So a price on carbon is likely to become the norm, around the world.  It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that we will only be able to prevent a 2 degrees rise in temperature if we get a carbon tax.

Most CCS (carbon capture and storage) projects are nonsensical.  They would add something like $50 per MWh to the cost of electricity generated by coal, which is already struggling to stay competitive with renewables.  New-build coal is already 2-3 times as expensive as new-build wind and solar; worse, existing, fully depreciated and paid-off coal power stations produce electricity at the same or higher cost than electricity from new-build wind and solar.  CCS would just make coal even more uneconomic.  Yet we may, by 2030, need the kind of CCS developed by CarbFix to "unwind" some of the emissions we will make over the next decades.  And a carbon price would make that feasible.

See also Negative Emissions

From The Guardian

The world’s largest plant designed to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into rock has started running, the companies behind the project said on Wednesday.

The plant, named Orca after the Icelandic word “orka” meaning “energy”, consists of four units, each made up of two metal boxes that look like shipping containers.

Constructed by Switzerland’s Climeworks and Iceland’s Carbfix, when operating at capacity the plant will draw 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air every year, according to the companies.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, that equates to the emissions from about 870 cars. The plant cost between US$10 and 15m to build, Bloomberg reported.

To collect the carbon dioxide, the plant uses fans to draw air into a collector, which has a filter material inside.

Once the filter material is filled with CO2, the collector is closed and the temperature is raised to release the CO2 from the material, after which the highly concentrated gas can be collected.

The CO2 is then mixed with the water before being injected at a depth of 1,000 metres into the nearby basalt rock where it is mineralised.

Proponents of so-called carbon capture and storage believe these technologies can become a major tool in the fight against climate change.

Critics however argue that the technology is still prohibitively expensive and might take decades to operate at scale.

Iceland is proof vaccines work

 From Business Insider

The COVID-19 situation in Iceland is proof that vaccines work, a leading US infectious-disease expert said.

Iceland reported 2,847 new infections over the past month, mostly from the highly infectious Delta variant and mostly in fully vaccinated people, official statistics indicated. This is the highest number of new infections in a month since the start of the pandemic, but vaccines appear to be doing their job. The vast majority of new infections are mild at worst.

Of the 1,239 Icelanders who were recorded as having COVID-19 on Sunday, 3% were in the hospital, data showed.

The country hasn’t recorded a single COVID-19 death since May 25, government statistics and Oxford University’s Our World in Data indicated.

Carlos del Rio, a distinguished professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory School of Medicine, tweeted on Sunday that “Iceland proves vaccines work.”

Brandon Guthrie, an epidemiologist and global health professor at the University of Washington, told The Washington Post that “having few deaths or severe cases of illness in the context of large surges should absolutely be seen as at least a partial victory.”

Iceland ranks fourth in the world in vaccination rollout, having fully vaccinated 70.6% of its population. The three countries with higher vaccine rates are Malta (80.5%), United Arab Emirates (73.7%), and Singapore (73.1%).

For comparison, 50.7% of Americans are fully vaccinated, the CDC found. The world average is 23.6%.

Worst case sea-level rise now very likely

 From Inside Climate News

From the polar caps to the glaciers of Europe, Asia and South America, global warming is melting the planet’s ice faster than ever and speeding the inundation of the world’s coastlines.

New research shows the annual melt rate grew from 0.8 trillion tons in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons by 2017, and has accelerated most in the places with the most ice—the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves and sheets.

Those massive systems of land and sea-based ice are melting as fast as the worst-case climate scenarios in major global climate reports, said Thomas Slater, a co-author of the new study in The Cryosphere that measured the meltdown from 1994 to 2017, which covers a timespan when every decade was warmer than the previous one and also includes the 20 warmest years on record.

It’s one of the first studies to gather estimates for all the planet’s ice, except permafrost. Previous research has typically focused on single elements of the cryosphere, like glaciers, sea ice or ice shelves, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, who was not involved in the new study.

Slater said that evaluating the data didn’t numb him to the staggering amount of ice that melted during the study period, describing it as a mountain towering higher than Mount Everest and covering Manhattan—enough to raise global sea level 1.4 inches in 23 years.

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” he said. “Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.” 

Sea level has gone up about eight or nine inches since 1880. It’s likely to rise at least 12 inches, and could rise by as much as 8.2 feet by 2100, according to recent estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates a rise of between two and three feet by 2100 if global warming is kept well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), or three to five feet if temperatures rise past that.

Getting the projections right is critical because, by some estimates, every centimeter of sea level rise threatens to displace about 1 million people from low-lying towns and croplands. For cities near sea level, knowing whether the ocean will rise two feet or five feet is literally a billion dollar question, and in worse case scenarios, a matter of survival and dislocation.

Various studies show an “acceleration in sea level rise the last five years or so, from about 1.2 inches per decade, to a rate of 1.9 inches per decade,” Mottram said. “We know it does vary a lot from year to year and things like El Niño, or if Greenland has a warm summer, can have an effect. But the deeper ocean is also getting warmer and that continues to add thermal expansion too. So sea level rise will continue for centuries.”

The Jökulsárlón glacial lake is seen in Iceland in 2015. New research shows that Earth's ice is melting faster than ever. The annual melt rate grew from 0.8 trillion tons in the 1990s to 1.3 trillion tons by 2017. Credit: Bob Berwyn

Iceland's glacier melt

Some amazing images from the BBC of the retreat of Iceland's glaciers over the last 30 years.

Hoffellsjökull glacier, 1982

2017

Lots of other comparisons in the article.