Direct carbon capture from water, not air

From New Atlas

The oceans soak up enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, and MIT researchers say they've developed a way of releasing and capturing it that uses far less energy than direct air capture – with some other environmental benefits to boot.

Pulling greenhouse gases out of water is an odd-sounding idea, but the oceans are the planet's number one carbon sink, and direct air carbon capture has pretty serious problems: it costs a lot, and uses a lot of energy. According to IEA figures from 2022, even the more efficient air capture technologies require about 6.6 gigajoules of energy, or 1.83 megawatt-hours per ton of carbon dioxide captured.

Most of that energy isn't used to directly separate the CO2 from the air, it's in heat energy to keep the absorbers at operating temperatures, or electrical energy used to compress large amounts of air to the point where the capture operation can be done efficiently. But either way, the costs are out of control, with 2030 price estimates per ton ranging between US$300-$1,000. According to Statista, there's not a nation on Earth currently willing to tax carbon emitters even half of the lower estimate; first-placed Uruguay taxes it at US$137/ton. Direct air capture is not going to work as a business unless its costs come way down.

It turns out there's another option: seawater. As atmospheric carbon concentrations rise, carbon dioxide begins to dissolve into seawater. The ocean currently soaks up some 30-40% of all humanity's annual carbon emissions, and maintains a constant free exchange with the air. Suck the carbon out of the seawater, and it'll suck more out of the air to re-balance the concentrations. Best of all, the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is more than 100 times greater than in air.

Previous research teams have managed to release CO2 from seawater and capture it, but their methods have required expensive membranes and a constant supply of chemicals to keep the reactions going. MIT's team, on the other hand, has announced the successful testing of a system that uses neither, and requires vastly less energy than air capture methods.

In the new system, seawater is passed through two chambers. The first uses reactive electrodes to release protons into the seawater, which acidifies the water, turning dissolved inorganic bicarbonates into carbon dioxide gas, which bubbles out and is collected using a vacuum. Then the water's pushed through to a second set of cells with a reversed voltage, calling those protons back in and turning the acidic water back to alkaline before releasing it back into the sea. Periodically, when the active electrode is depleted of protons, the polarity of the voltage is reversed, and the same reaction continues with water flowing in the opposite direction.

In a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science, the team says its technique requires an energy input of 122 kJ/mol, equating by our math to 0.77 mWh per ton. And the team is confident it can do even better: "Though our base energy consumption of 122 kJ/mol-CO2 is a record-low," reads the study, "it may still be substantially decreased towards the thermodynamic limit of 32 kJ/mol-CO2."

The team projects an optimized cost around US$56 per ton of CO2 captured – although it's not fair to compare that directly against full-system direct air capture costs. The study cautions that this does not include vacuum degassing, filtration and "auxiliary costs outside of the electrochemical system" – analyses of which will have to be done separately. Some of these, however, could potentially be mitigated by integrating the carbon capture units in with other facilities, for example desalination plants, which are already processing large volumes of seawater.

There are some other benefits too; increased carbon buildup in the ocean over recent years has already caused problems with acidification, threatening coral reefs and shellfish. The alkaline output of this process, if directed where it's needed, could help redress the balance.

The team has a practical demonstration project planned for sometime in the next two years, and says there are plenty of things that still need work. For one, the researchers would love to be able to separate the gas out without a vacuum system. And mineral precipitates are fouling the electrodes on the alkalinization side, so there's plenty of progress yet to be made.

The study is open access in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Let's start with the cow

From a tweet thread by Tony Seba

Let me start with #insulin. In the 1970s, insulin was extracted from the pancreas of animals. In the 1980s, @Genentech, working with Eli Lilly (@LillyPad), developed insulin using a new technology that I call #PrecisionFermentation. It wasn’t animal insulin. It was human insulin.

The mainstream would say: “health care is slow, it can’t be disrupted.” Well, here’s the S-curve of #PrecisionFermentation human insulin. Human insulin disrupted animal insulin in about 13 years.









#PrecisionFermentation is a concept that I coined in my  @rethink_x report ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture’ with @CatherineTubb in September 2019.

Think about beer #fermentation. You take a microorganism (a yeast) and feed it sugar, wheat, nitrogen.. and out comes beer.

The difference with #PrecisionFermentation: you genetically modify the yeast, so it can produce the ingredient you want. In this case, a #protein.

The #protein itself cannot be #GeneticallyModified. The yeast is, but there’s no genetic material in proteins. None. Anyone who tells you “#GMOprotein” is lying to you. Proteins have exactly no generic material.

How is #PrecisionFermentation going to disrupt #milk? — Milk is almost 90% water. 3.3% of milk is #proteins, and that is the commercially valuable part of #dairy. So, essentially, you disrupt 3% of that milk bottle and the entire dairy industry is gone.

The #PrecisionFermentation disruption of #dairy is a #B2B ingredient #disruption. No consumer behavior change is needed. All the industry needs to do is disrupt protein shakes, protein bars etc. and ⅓ of #dairy industry revenues go away.

This technology has existed for 40 years and they’ve gone through an incredible capability cost curve. #PrecisionFermentation dairy proteins are already in the market (cheese, chocolate, ice cream etc). This is not in the future. This is now.

To give you an idea of the cost curve of #PrecisionFermentation, between 2000 and 2020, the cost per kilo/pound went down by about 10,000x in 20 years from ~$1m to ~$100. That cost curve makes #MooresLaw (computing) look like a straight line into the future.




Over the next ten years, we’re going to experience the #disruption of #food and #agriculture. And I am going to focus on the cow.

Because the cow is — by far — the most inefficient food production technology on the planet.

Every #animal that we use for #livestock is going to be #disrupted. If the cost curve keeps improving the way it has over the last few decades, the cost-per-kilo of #PrecisionFermentation proteins will reach price parity with the cow by ~2025. That’s only three years away.

We know that in #food and #ingredients, #disruptions happen quickly and they happen as S-curves. Think about Pepsi and Coca Cola. In the 1980s, in the United States, they went from all cane sugar to all corn-based sugar in only four years.

This is not a “veggie revolution”.  What is happening today is the ‘Second Domestication of Plants and Animals’. We’re going from domesticating large organisms — cow sheep horse chicken — to microorganisms as a source of food.

#PrecisionFermentation proteins are 5-100x more resource-efficient than the cow. #PFproteins, casein and whey, can be made today using 100x less land than the cow. Think about it. 100x less land.

An Israeli company called @Remilk_Foods announced that they’re going to open the world’s largest facility to create cow-free milk in Denmark. They’re going to make the dairy equivalent of 50,000 cows on 750,000 sq-ft = a standard industrial-size facility. A fermentation farm.

Canada’s dairy industry has about 1 million cows (whole country). Take 20 @Remilk_Foods facilities, i.e. #PrecisionFermentation farms, and they could produce the equivalent of 1m cows. This would take 344 acres and disrupt the whole dairy industry in Canada. That’s it. Gone!

How quickly is this going to happen? — The CEO of @Remilk_Foods says they can produce dairy as cheap as animal protein by 2024, which is within the cost curve that I published 3 years ago. That’s only 3 years away, not 20 or 30 as the mainstream would suggest. We need to prepare.

#FermentationFarms are the new #FoodFarms where we are going to create our proteins. New business model innovations and possibilities will open up, in this case, for example: #FoodAsSoftware.

The #proteins we eat today come from just a few #plants and #animals that we domesticated thousands of years ago. 12 plants and 5 animals account for 75% of food. There are millions of plants & animals on Earth. There’s a huge possibility space out there. #PrecisionFermentation

With #FoodAsSoftware and #PrecisionFermentation, we can make proteins from any animal, from any plant, at speed and scale. The number of possible #proteins mathematically is infinite. I did the numbers. It is larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

And it’s not just about the cow. It’s not even about food. #PrecisionFermentation is disruptive across many sectors. It’s being used for #cosmetics. #Collagen, for instance. #HumanCollagen is being made with precision fermentation. Today!

#SweetProteins are going to be so disruptive! One of those proteins — #brazzein — is ~1000x sweeter than cane sugar. 1 pound of brazzein can sweeten the equivalent of 1000 pounds of sugar. Think about that! Without the #insulin reaction.

The magic #ingredient that makes  @ImpossibleFoods’ meat smell and taste like meat is #heme. Heme is only 2% of their burgers. Think about how  @generalelectric got disrupted with only 2% market penetration of solar, wind & batteries (#SWB). Same thing is happening with #meat.

And you may think: “will this fly in x” or “will they eat it in #Texas?” — Yes, they will. I was at the airport in #Houston, and sure enough, they’re selling #ImpossibleNachos & #ImpossibleQuesadillas. And the menu doesn’t even say it’s vegetarian.








This is not just the #disruption of the cow. This is the disruption of all food that comes from animals: pork, fish eggs etc. All of them can be, and will be, disrupted by #PrecisionFermentation and #FoodAsSoftware.

I expect three phases in the “#Disruption of #Food & #Agriculture”. What we’re undergoing now is the first phase, which is #ingredients, #B2B etc.

The second phase, which starts around 2024, is more complex proteins & meats that will be made with #PrecisionFermentation, and later, #CellularAgriculture.

I expect that the animal extraction industry, the livestock-as-food industry, will be gone by 2035. It’s pretty much over. I expect the dairy industry to be bankrupt by 2030 — that’s less than 10 years away — and the whole livestock industry by 2035.

That doesn’t mean you can’t eat a cow after 2035. You can, but it’s going to be a little bit like the horse and the car. You can still ride horses, but it’s not a mainstream form of transportation, and it’s very expensive. Eating cows will be just like owning a horse today


For those of you who think Tony Seba's views are way out there .... you're wrong. He has consistently called it right for at least a decade. He understands that new technologies grow *exponentially*, not linearly.  And given how high emissions from beef, mutton and other meats are, this could save the world.  Because if we're all eating vat meat and vat eggs and drinking vat milk, then all that land freed up by ending animal husbandry will be able to revert to forest.  And that will be the most powerful carbon capture and storage process we could have.

The ill-fated Petra Nova carbon capture project

Source: ResearchGate

From IEEFA

NRG Energy Inc. just sold its 50 percent stake in the world’s largest carbon capture plant for only about $3.6 million, less than a half-percent of the Texas project’s roughly $1 billion construction costs. The sale leaves JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. as the sole owner of the 240-MW coal-fired Petra Nova power plant.

S&P Market Intelligence described the deal as “a setback for supporters of carbon-capture projects at existing fossil fuel plants.” It is far more.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sank $195 million into the carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant, hoping to demonstrate the potential for the technology to counteract greenhouse gas emissions of coal plants. The NRG fire sale of its half of the project is a declaration that the taxpayer investment was a technological failure and a financial loss.

The U.S. government needs to ask hard questions about investing more taxpayer dollars in CCS for coal plants. The CCS technology used in the Petra Nova project was not new. The DOE called it “proven.” But it did not work as well as promised. Other CCS projects attempted at power plants have failed, as well.

The Petra Nova facility began operations in 2017. The CCS equipment was installed to capture CO2 from a slipstream of the W.A. Parish Unit 8’s flue gas. The captured CO2 traveled via 80-mile pipeline to an oilfield near Houston for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations to increase extraction. Petra Nova’s target CCS capture rate was 90 percent. NRG claims it met the target.

But Petra Nova’s owners have never provided the actual data behind that claim. Emissions data for Parish Unit 8 reported to the EPA suggests the actual CO2 capture rate was substantially lower than 90%, perhaps as low as 65% to 70%. And the average capture rate does not include emissions from the gas-fired combustion turbine used to power the facility. Adding those emissions lowers the overall on-site capture rate to perhaps as low as 55% to 58%.

Petra Nova also was expected to be in operation some 85% of the time but failed to meet its target because so many technical problems and so much downtime were experienced—not just in the CCS facility and in Parish Unit 8, but also in the CO2 pipeline and the oilfield where the captured CO2 was injected. Similar problems can be expected to affect any carbon capture project, especially at an aging coal plant.

The unit was taken offline in May 2020 and remains down. JX Nippon now says it anticipates bringing Petra Nova back online in the second quarter of 2023 but has not provided an exact schedule or cost estimate.

Methane emissions from the mining of coal, which have received too little attention to date, also weren’t reported. Using the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station as an example, IEEFA found that even if a CCS system could achieve 95 percent capture rate from the plant—which based on IEEFA’s research is not at all likely—taking the coal mining methane emissions into account would drop the actual capture rate to 72 percent.

IEEFA observed in a 2020 report that NRG Energy recorded three impairment charges related to the plant and to Petra Nova Parish Holdings, a subsidiary. The charges, recorded in 2016, 2017 and 2019, totaled $310 million. NRG Energy had written off essentially all its investment in the project. This is striking, given that Petra Nova not only benefitted from the U.S. Energy Department’s $195 million grant but also had received $250 million in concessionary lending from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Mizuho Bank, Ltd.

The actual costs of carbon capture at Petra Nova have never been officially released. An assistant DOE secretary for fossil energy said at a June 2020 webinar that the cost of carbon capture would need to drop by half, to $30 per metric ton, to be commercially viable. Since Petra Nova was the department’s flagship carbon capture project at the time, the comment may be an indication that the cost of carbon capture may have been $60 per ton, but it is not clear. Also, the figure did not include the costs to compress the CO2 for pipeline transport, or the pipeline transport and underground injection costs.

Southern Co.’s Kemper CCS project was designed to gasify lignite (a soft coal formed from peat) and capture the carbon before combustion. The cost initially was estimated at $3 billion, but it ballooned to $7.5 billion. Also, the project’s coal gasification process did not operate reliably during pre-operational testing, and the CCS capture portion of the project was scrapped. The unit now runs solely on natural gas with no CO2 controls.

IEEFA’s recent review of carbon capture efforts in other countries found similar problems abound. It concluded that using carbon capture to extend the life of fossil fuels power plants is a significant financial and technical risk.

Recommendation: Stop taking U.S. taxpayers for a ride on a CCS money guzzler

The U.S. government must sharply scrutinize all claims made by applicants for federal dollars to promote CCS technology. IEEFA research indicates that the technology is far from proven. Claims of high capture rates are meaningless when:The claimed high capture rates for CCS have not been sustained on an annual and multi-year basis;
The data needed to verify Petra Nova’s claim of a 90% capture rate at any point has not been made public;
The technology does not capture all air pollution emission streams from the site;
The upstream extraction or mining emissions are not taken into account; and
The downstream emissions from the plant and from the use of captured CO2 for EOR are not considered.

Given the amount of funds involved and the exposure of taxpayer dollars to risk, the U.S. government must implement robust due diligence and get beyond the advertising hype to the actual facts about carbon capture technology. It should not tolerate any more wasteful Petra Nova debacles.

Moxie makes oxygen on Mars

From The Guardian

An instrument the size of a lunchbox has been successfully generating breathable oxygen on Mars, doing the work of a small tree.

Since February last year the Mars oxygen in-situ resource utilisation experiment, or Moxie, has been successfully making oxygen from the red planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

Researchers suggest a scaled-up version of Moxie could be sent to Mars, to continuously produce oxygen at the rate of several hundred trees, ahead of humans going to the planet.

Moxie touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover mission.

In a study researchers report that by the end of 2021 Moxie was able to produce oxygen on seven experimental runs, in a variety of atmospheric conditions, including during the day and night, and through different Martian seasons.

In each run it reached its goal of producing 6g of oxygen per hour – similar to the rate of a modest tree on Earth.

It is hoped that at full capacity the system could generate enough oxygen to sustain humans once they arrive on Mars, and fuel a rocket to return humans to Earth.

Moxie deputy principal investigator Jeffrey Hoffman, a professor of the practice in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said: “This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planetary body, and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission.”

The current version of the instrument is small by design in order to fit aboard the Perseverance rover, and is built to run for short periods. A full-scale oxygen factory would include larger units that would ideally run continuously.

So far, Moxie has shown that it can make oxygen at almost any time of the Martian day and year.

Michael Hecht, principal investigator of the Moxie mission at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, said: “The only thing we have not demonstrated is running at dawn or dusk, when the temperature is changing substantially.

“We do have an ace up our sleeve that will let us do that, and once we test that in the lab, we can reach that last milestone to show we can really run any time.”

If the system can operate successfully despite repeatedly turning on and off, this would suggest a full-scale system, designed to run continuously, could do so for thousands of hours.

Hoffman said: “To support a human mission to Mars, we have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth, like computers, spacesuits, and habitats.

“But dumb old oxygen? If you can make it there, go for it – you’re way ahead of the game.”

The findings are published in the journal Science Advances.

Since 'Moxie' is producing oxygen from carbon dioxide, could it be used to reduce CO2 in our own atmosphere? 

The miracle tree to feed the world & slash emissions

From Canary Media

Feeding the world without frying the world would be a miraculous achievement. Somehow, we’d need to grow far more food with far less environmental impact while using far less land. We’d also need to grow far more trees, so we could store more carbon on earth and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Well, a miracle has arrived.

It’s called pongamia, an ordinary-looking tropical tree with agricultural superpowers. It produces beans packed with protein and oil much like soybeans, except it has the potential to produce much more nutrition per acre than soybeans. It’s hardy enough to grow on just about any land, no matter how degraded, without any pesticides or irrigation. It not only removes carbon from the atmosphere, which combats climate change, but it also sucks nitrogen out of the air, so it usually doesn’t need fertilizer that accelerates climate change.


In other words, it’s a dream crop for a hot and hungry planet that’s running out of fertile farmland and fresh water while choking on pollution from agrochemicals. At a time when modern farming is under attack for poisoning and depleting soils, pongamia can stabilize and restore soils. At a time when the food system generates one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, growing pongamia cuts emissions, sequestering about 5 tons of carbon per acre per year.

Basically, pongamia is an answered prayer for the planet in vegetative form — a reforestation crop that can replace deforestation crops like soy and palm oil without diesel tractors or chemicals or even added water. It’s a self-sufficient, heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant, jungle-tough badass of a tree that can produce monster yields on marginal land on a warming planet.

It may sound surprising that after growing wild for thousands of years throughout South Asia and Australia, pongamia is only now being domesticated and reinvented as a super-crop in the United States. But if we’re going to reduce agricultural emissions by 75 percent by 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris accord, while increasing agricultural production by 50 percent to feed 10 billion people, we’re going to need some surprises.

You probably haven’t heard of pongamia before, which is probably a giveaway that it hasn’t yet transformed the global agricultural sector, and that this column won’t be uninterrupted good news. The world is currently mired in a food crisis, created by horrific droughts in Africa and elsewhere as well as the war in Ukraine, and pongamia obviously hasn’t saved the day.

But the crop itself really is as cool and miraculous as it sounds. It really could help feed and heal the world. And the story of Terviva, the Oakland-based company that’s trying to bring pongamia to the masses, is a cool and miraculous story.

So let’s do the good news first.

Pongamia is not a new tree or a rare tree. It was cited for its healing properties in ancient Ayurvedic texts, and while it’s still most common in India, it can now be found all over the world, including in a park near my Miami home. It’s got a broad canopy, an extensive root network, and pretty white and pink flowers that bloom in the spring, so it’s often planted in yards or parking lots as an ornamental, windbreak or shade tree. Its oil, also known as karanja, is used in India as a natural lubricant, varnish and lamp oil. Pongamia seeds also produce the active ingredient in the antifungal remedies you can buy at CVS.

But plant guides warn that pongamia’s seeds have a ​“bitter taste and disagreeable aroma,” with some guides suggesting they’re poisonous, which explains why they’ve never caught on as animal feed or human food. And that explains why pongamia was never cultivated as a crop before a University of California, Berkeley business student named Naveen Sikka visited central India in the spring of 2009, to see if the tree could produce sustainable biofuel.

At the time, the U.S. and European Union had ambitious new biofuel mandates, and investors were blasting money into the space; the oil giant BP had just made a massive investment in a bioenergy research center at Berkeley. Sikka knew biofuels had one serious downside: Using good farmland to grow energy instead of food leads to the clearing of natural carbon sinks to create more farmland to replace that food. But when he saw pongamia flourishing in rocky soils in India’s arid badlands, he saw a unique opportunity to grow renewable fuel on low-quality land so that it wouldn’t compete with the food supply or drive deforestation.

Sikka’s idea when he founded Terviva was to create a genetic library of pongamia traits, a kind of arboreal 23andMe, then breed the superstar trees that could create the most fuel on the worst land. The biofuels market tanked while he was still fundraising, and Terviva had several near-death experiences as it burned through cash, but miracles soon began to happen.

The first miracle was the de-bittering of pongamia. Sikka had hoped it could be made palatable, at least for cattle, though he feared that would require nasty chemical solvents unfit for human consumption. He was stunned when his team figured out a way to do it with a solvent already consumed by quite a few humans: alcohol.

That’s when Terviva began to pivot from fuel toward its current mission of ​“planting millions of trees to feed billions of people.” As a child, Sikka regularly visited relatives in India, and after college, he worked for the U.S. State Department in West Africa, so he had witnessed the developing world’s desperate need for protein and vegetable oil firsthand. Now he had a way to grow a lot without using any productive land.

The problem was finding someone to do the growing, because farmers are notoriously reluctant to gamble on untested crops, especially tree crops that take four years to yield their first harvest. Farmers are only willing to take a risk like that when they are, as Sikka puts it, ​“totally fucked,” which brings us to Terviva’s second miracle: A bacterial disease began wiping out Florida’s citrus trees, inspiring some totally fucked farmers to take a chance on pongamia on a few of their worst tracts of land.

So far, pongamia has lived up to its billing, producing yields comparable to Midwestern soybeans in much poorer soil with virtually no chemicals or added water. In test fields, some trees are producing yields four to 10 times higher than soybean fields. Pongamia is basically vertical soy, except it doesn’t need to be plowed or sprayed or irrigated. It simply converts sunlight, air and rain into protein and oil — plus an extract from the de-bittering process that Terviva has successfully patented as a bio-fungicide. And the field results should only improve with experience and advanced breeding of the superstars from the test fields.

Terviva has now raised more than $100 million, hired more than 100 employees, sequenced the entire pongamia genome, and built a solid reputation as an ag-tech startup. Ultimately, though, Sikka is building a food company, which is why he’s so excited about miracle number three: De-bittered pongamia oil turned out to be a golden-colored substitute for olive oil. A glowing analysis by the food consultancy Mattson found it produced an ​“indulgent mouthfeel” reminiscent of foods fried in butter. Pongamia also has enormous potential as a protein for plant-based milks and meats, as it contains all nine essential amino acids.

The food giant Danone is now partnering with Terviva to develop pongamia as a climate-friendly, climate-resilient, ​“regenerative,” non-GMO alternative to soy and palm oil, which are increasingly unpopular with consumers who care about sustainability. The first products featuring Terviva’s newly branded ​“Ponova oil” could hit the market early next year.

“The universe has smiled at us so often. We’ve had so many strokes of dumb luck to get where we are,” Sikka says.

“And we still haven’t made a dent.”

You knew the bad news was coming eventually. After 12 years of miracles, Terviva now has 1,500 acres of pongamia in the ground. But around the world, there are about 300 million acres of soy in the ground. Sikka had hoped farmers would rush to pongamia once the Florida experiment proved the concept, but that has not happened. The world finally has a high-yield, low-impact crop that can grow almost anywhere, and it’s still a rounding error, barely a blip on the global landscape.

“It just shows how hard it is to change agriculture,” Sikka says. ​“It takes forever, even when everything goes right.”

The thing is, agriculture does need to change for the earth to remain hospitable to humans, and forever is too long to wait.

Sikka continues to hope that more farmers will embrace pongamia. He also hopes that institutional investors with deeper pockets and greater risk tolerance than farmers will finance much larger projects to plant tens of thousands of acres of pongamia. But since hope is not a business plan, Sikka has figured out a way to generate revenue and start selling ingredients without reshaping the agricultural landscape. There are already over 1 million tons of pongamia seeds on trees growing wild in India, and Terviva is now paying impoverished villagers to pick them.

It’s a complex undertaking, requiring delicate negotiations with village elders, direct payments through mobile phones, and sophisticated geolocation technology to trace the seeds. But it’s already produced 5,000 tons of beans, enough to take Ponova oil to market, while injecting $2 million into impoverished rural areas. Sikka believes India can be an economic engine for Terviva, and vice versa. He also believes pongamia could inspire the Danones of the world to invest in other exotic tree crops indigenous to the global South, from ramon seeds to croton nuts to Bambara beans.

Again, though, Terviva’s 5,000 tons are a pittance compared to the world’s 350 million tons of soybeans, and $2 million barely counts as a drop in the $200 billion global cooking-oil bucket. Unfortunately, the problem of feeding the world without frying the world is an almost indescribably gigantic problem.

By 2050, the agricultural sector will have to produce a couple billion additional tons of food each year without clearing any additional forests. That will require dramatic changes on the demand side, like wasting less food, eating less beef and using less good land to grow biofuels. It will also require dramatic changes on the supply side, like higher crop and livestock yields, more resilience to a warmer world, fewer emissions from fertilizer and manure, and less chemical and mechanical degradation of soils.

Pongamia checks a bunch of those boxes, but not at a large enough scale to matter much yet. One lesson of its miracles is that it will take a lot more miracles to transform global agriculture.

The carbon offset scam

This very interesting video from Deutsche Welle, Germany's equivalent of the BBC (don't worry, it's in English) explains what carbon offsets are, and how many of them are scams.  For example, you buy a carbon offset which funds protection of a natural forest.  And 10 years later the forest has been cleared.   Does the offset scheme get its money back?  Fat chance.  Or a planted forest gets burnt down, and all the embedded carbon is re-released into the atmosphere.   Or offset money is used to build new wind and solar farms, but they were going to be built anyway.  Something like 85-90% of offsets actually do not reduce emissions at all.

But some are good.  The rewilding of marshland that the video starts off with is a real offset.  The scheme in Iceland for turning carbon into rock is real:  carbon dioxide is permanently removed from the atmosphere.  But most are fake.

The video concludes with 3 useful points.  First, if it's a real carbon offset, it'll prolly be expensive.  Second, we will need real carbon offsets in the future to keep temperatures from rising past 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Third, we can't offset our way to zero emissions.  We have to actually cut emissions, by replacing petrol/diesel cars and light trucks with EVs; by switching to renewables electricity generation; and by using green hydrogen or methane in industrial processes. 

World's fastest carbon capture system

 From New Atlas

As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, it won’t be enough to simply curb our emissions – we’ll need to actively remove some of what we’ve already released. In a new advance, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new compound that can reportedly remove carbon dioxide from ambient air with 99 percent efficiency and at least twice as fast as existing systems.

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies usually remove carbon dioxide by piping air or exhaust through some kind of filter or catalyst, including magnetic sponges, zeolite foam or materials made of clay or coffee grounds. Others bubble the air through a liquid, which can either absorb the CO2 or cause it to separate out into solid crystals or flakes.

The new compound falls into that last category, which are known as liquid-solid phase separation systems. While studying a series of liquid amine compounds, the Tokyo Metro team discovered one, called isophorone diamine (IPDA), was particularly effective at capturing carbon dioxide.

In tests, the team found that IPDA was able to remove more than 99 percent of CO2 from air with a concentration of 400 parts per million (ppm) – about the level currently in the atmosphere. This process also happened much faster than other carbon capture techniques, removing 201 millimoles of CO2 per hour, per mole of the compound. That’s at least twice as fast as other DAC lab systems, and far faster than the leading artificial leaf device.

The pollutant separated out into flakes of a solid carbamic acid material, which could be removed from the liquid relatively easily. If need be, it can be converted back into gaseous CO2 by heating it to 60 °C (140 °F), which also releases the original liquid IPDA ready for reuse. Whether the carbon is kept as a solid or a gas, it can then be stored or reused in industrial or chemical processes.

The new system shows promise but, of course, there’s always the question of scale. Humanity belches about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, and the world’s largest direct air capture plant currently removes about 4,000 tons a year. It feels a little like bailing water out of a sinking ship with a shot glass.

But still, every glass helps, and the more technologies we have at our disposal for this huge job, the better. And there’s reason for optimism too, as the US Department of Energy has recently announced US$3.5 billion in funding for DAC hubs. Hopefully this kind of attention will encourage some of the more out-there experiments, like using high-altitude balloons or big ponds of algae.

The researchers on the new study are now working on improving the system and investigating how the captured carbon could best be used.

The research was published in the journal ACS Environmental Au.

Source: Tokyo Metropolitan University via Eurekalert

(Source)

English farmers to use biochar to bury CO2

 From New Scientist

Farmers in England are starting to bury a charcoal-like material in their fields to see if it could offer a new large-scale way of putting the brakes on climate change.

Biochar is the carbon-rich material left over from burning wood and other biomass at high temperatures in an oxygen-free environment. Most of its use today is at the small scale, such as gardeners using it as a fertiliser.

However, a team led by Colin Snape at the University of Nottingham, UK, has started burying up to 200 tonnes of biochar in fields to gauge if it could help meet the UK’s net-zero goal by removing millions of tonnes of carbond dioxide from the atmosphere. It is the biggest biochar trial yet in the UK, and one of several CO2 removal ideas in a £31.5 million research programme, including scattering rock dust on fields and planting more trees.

“The key thing is that all of these greenhouse gas removal technologies, we need to test their viability. We need to figure out how big a slice of the pie biochar is. It’s about not putting all our eggs into one basket, of one magical technology that will save us,” says Genevieve Hodgins, who is managing the biochar project.

Around 15 tonnes of biochar is in the ground already, and more farmers are being recruited across the Midlands region of England this spring and summer to begin widespread burials this autumn. Beyond tackling climate change, a big attraction for farmers is that research indicates biochar can improve soil health, which is in a parlous state in England.

The project will measure how soil health changes over time, including the health of earthworms, as well how it affects crop yield and crop health compared with control plots. Some of the biochar will also be buried on land where tree-planting is planned, in order to see how it affects tree growth. Because the forested areas aren’t used to produce food for human consumption, far more biochar can be put in the ground there: Snape estimates about 50 to 100 tonnes per hectare compared with 10 tonnes for arable land.

Snape says that if the idea were scaled up for widespread deployment across the UK, the biochar would preferably be made from dried-out food waste and waste products from sawmills. However, to ease regulatory approvals by the UK Environment Agency for their trials, the researchers are using biochar made from virgin wood for now, mostly from one producer in Derby.

For the purposes of locking away carbon, that virgin wood would ideally have other uses, such as making timber-framed buildings, which the UK government’s climate advisers say should become more prevalent. Hodgins is looking at alternatives for making biochar, including coconut husks from Germany.

The project should give us a better idea of just how much CO2 biochar can remove. Snape thinks the approach could one day store a “few million” of the 130 million tonnes a year [in the UK] that the Royal Society calculates will need to be removed by 2050. First results may come in autumn 2023, potentially offering new insights into how permanent the removals are by showing how much microbes degrade the biochar.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2321288-farmers-in-england-will-bury-burnt-wood-in-fields-to-capture-co2/#ixzz7V3EUxF7J

Biochar, charcoal produced from agricultural waste products, before it is applied to soil

Matthew Bentley/Alamy

Multi-billion project to kickstart carbon capture

 From CNN

The US Department of Energy is announcing a massive investment in direct air carbon removal projects, in hopes of kickstarting an industry that energy experts say is critical to getting the country's planet-warming emissions under control.

Direct air carbon removal projects are like giant vacuum cleaners that suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away. They use chemicals to remove the gas from the air and store it in rocks deep underground or put it to use in materials like concrete.

Nature can do this on its own -- forests, bogs and oceans all suck carbon out of the atmosphere -- but not nearly fast enough to keep pace with human fossil fuel emissions. Experts tell CNN these giant, carbon-removing machines are the next frontier to bring CO2 levels down.

The Department of Energy on Thursday is releasing a notice of intent for developers for four direct air capture hubs -- each capable of removing over a million tons of CO2 per year -- using $3.5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law. Removing 1 million tons of CO2 per year is equivalent to taking around 200,000 gas-powered cars off the road.

"The UN's latest climate report made clear that removing legacy carbon pollution from the air through direct air capture and safely storing it is an essential weapon in our fight against the climate crisis," Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. Granholm said the infrastructure law funding "will not only make our carbon-free future a reality but will help position the U.S. as a net-zero leader."

Department officials say the notice, which was shared first with CNN, is a crucial step in building this industry in the US.

"For us to get to millions of tons [removed from the air] per year through these demonstrations will be critical," said Jen Wilcox, principal deputy assistant secretary in DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

President Joe Biden is targeting net-zero carbon emissions in the US by 2050, but experts say that isn't achievable by simply transitioning from fossil fuel energy to renewables -- the country must also actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because of how much it has already emitted.

Direct air removal "is a suite of tech and strategies to get to this multi-gigaton carbon removal scale we need to get to in roughly 25-30 years," said John Larsen, a partner at the nonpartisan firm Rhodium Group.

The US needs to decarbonize and to dramatically scale up direct air removal, Larsen said, to the point that these machines can remove not millions but billions of tons of CO2 per year. A billion tons of CO2 removed in a year would be equivalent to taking over 215 million vehicles off the road.

Climeworks' direct air removal project in Iceland is the largest, according to the company, removing about 10 metric tons of CO2 every day -- about the same amount of carbon that 500 trees could remove in a year.

The US hubs envisioned by DOE will be much larger. Humans have not yet built a megaton-sized direct air removal system, Larsen said, and DOE's hubs are an important first step to both dramatically scale these projects up and to find out what works and what doesn't.

"What you're really building is an entire carbon removal industry," Larsen said. "The chances of getting to gigaton scale go down dramatically if we don't start this decade. It's way, way harder."

The momentum is growing quickly for direct air removal. Before 2018, the amount of money going to these projects in the US was miniscule -- about $11 million per year. The $3.5 billion Congress recently passed for carbon removal, as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, is a significant increase in funding.

"There's a huge emphasis around carbon removal as a critical tool that needs to be scaled up today," Wilcox said. "We're definitely going to see the needle move in this space over the next 5-10 years."

DOE said it wants to see applications from different regions in the US that can demonstrate a high potential for carbon sequestration, can be scaled up even further and can create long-lasting jobs. It's also looking for applications from fossil fuel communities or communities with industrial capacity.

DOE officials are also aiming to create hubs that are themselves carbon neutral. For instance, the Iceland project runs on clean geothermal energy.

"Thinking about places where you're going to integrate these with other decarbonization efforts are really important," said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, an organization focused on carbon removal. "We want to see these powered by zero-carbon energy, by renewables. It's essential for climate that this does not slow down or delay mitigation in any way."

Separately, DOE announced nearly $25 million for six new clean hydrogen projects in several states, including a new hydrogen production plant that captures 90 to 99% of its CO2 emissions, and new research on hydrogen fuels.

[I've talked about this before]

The Climeworks carbon dioxide removal site in Iceland.

Fake whale poo and decarbonisation

 From The Guardian

Scientists and engineers have pumped 300 litres of simulated whale poo into the ocean off Sydney as part of efforts to snag a share of Elon Musk’s US$100m prize for capturing and storing carbon.

The team, known as WhaleX, carried out its first open-ocean experiment on Sunday about eight kilometres off Port Botany in New South Wales after gaining clearance from the federal government.

The 12-strong team are racing to carry out a follow-up experiment using up to 2000 litres of the simulated poo – a mix of nitrogen, phosphorus and trace elements – before the end of January.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Musk announced in February he was funding a US$100m competition through the XPrize Foundation to find methods that could safely capture and store carbon dioxide at a scale of a billion tonnes or more a year.

Musk said at the time the competition was not “theoretical” but was looking for teams that could “build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level.”

WhaleX registered for the four-year competition and will send a report before February hoping to be selected for one of up to 15 “milestone” prizes of U$1m each.

Whale faeces is known as an ocean fertiliser and a food for phytoplankton. When phytoplankton grow and multiply, they absorb carbon. When they die, they sink to the ocean floor taking much of the carbon with them.

Dr Edwina Tanner, a climate scientist who is leading the WhaleX project, and colleagues said they targeted a 225sq km area off Port Botany where their previous water sampling had shown a deficiency in nutrients.

From a small boat, the team aerated the formulation with a gel made from seaweed and mixed that with a dye so they could see from a drone how it dispersed.

The formulation, manufactured as an aqua food by a fertiliser company in regional New South Wales, was formulated to match the deficiencies in nutrients in the area where the trial was carried out.

The amount released was about the equivalent of a Humpback whale doing two poos, Tanner said. To be successful, she said the aqua food mix needs to stay in the top 20 to 30m for at least a day.

“It was incredible. The food stayed buoyant and well within the trial zone location,” Tanner said.

The team thinks the experiment, which was to test the method used to disperse the formulation and to see how buoyant it was, will have sequestered about two tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Tanner said “a lot of science” would need to be done to make sure the approach is not damaging the marine environment, but she said as it closely mimicked a process that has been happening for millions of years “we’re confident we can do this safely.”

A further trial is being planned before the end of January and will see up to 2000 litres dispersed from a larger boat in the same area of ocean.

If scaled up, WhaleX would fall into a broad category of carbon reduction efforts known as negative emissions technologies – an approach where more CO2 is sequestered than is used during the process.

WhaleX is looking along whale migration routes for suitable sites for further trials, including near Morocco, Oman and Kenya. An area off Western Australia over the north-west shelf has also been selected.

Managing director of Ocean Nourishment Corporation (ONC) and one of the partners in the project, John Ridley, said work would continue even if it was not successful in the XPrize competition.

He said the process was currently costing about $25 to $30 to sequester a tonne of carbon dioxide.  [This suggests the minimum necessary carbon price to lead to de-carbonisation]

He said investors were being attracted to it because of the potential scale and, he said, it could store carbon securely and for longer than some land-based methods. ONC was actively speaking with more than 10 investor groups from Europe and Australia.

He said the world’s climate crisis was pushing the planet close to “several dangerous tipping points”.

“We need emissions reductions and carbon removal and we have to escalate both of those really fast, almost at military scale.”

This month the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report summarising the potential risks and benefits of a range of supposed ocean-based methods to remove and store CO2.

The report said there was medium to high confidence that adding nutrients to the ocean to promote phytoplankton growth could be “effective and scalable”.

There was less confidence about the potential environmental risks of the method on a very large scale, but the report said “there are deep-ocean impacts and concern for undesirable geochemical and ecological consequences.”

The report added: “No matter what the impact of [ocean fertilisation] on the deep sea, it should be noted that what deliberate and large-scale [ocean fertilisation] would do is essentially speed up the natural processes that are already happening, under any current scenario of enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere.”

A department of agriculture, water and the environment spokesperson said it was aware of the WhaleX project and the department had confirmed the experiment could go ahead without the need for any permit.

A statement said the WhaleX trials were “considered to be genuine scientific research” under the London Protocol that covers dumping at sea as it was considered a “placement” of materials.

The statement said: “For future trials involving larger volumes of material, the department has advised WhaleX that additional information would be required for the department to determine whether the activity could still be defined as ‘genuine scientific research’ under the London protocol.”

“If the department considers that future trials are of a scale that cannot be considered to be genuine scientific research, the activity would be considered as dumping under the sea dumping Act.”

The spokesperson said the government did not have any policies on ocean fertilisation that would regulate future large scale activities.

But the spokesperson also said: “However, work is under way with reference to Australia’s obligations under the London protocol to consider ocean fertilisation as a future regulatory area.”

In November, teams of Australian university students at Monash University, the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania each won a $250,000 prize in the competition for proposed carbon projects. Judges were looking for student projects that would make them “competitive applicants” in the overall competition.

After four years XPrize judges will pick one U$50m grand prize winner and a U$30m prize to go be shared among up to three runners up.

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.

Ocean geo-engineering

Naturally, the ppl who brought you fossil fuels and the climate emergency, are in favour of geo-engineering, which will take the carbon dioxide they've put into the atmosphere out again.  Presumably, taxpayers will pay for geo-engineering while oil and coal companies pocket the profits made from fossil fuels.  The trouble is, geo-engineering risks being some airy-fairy pious notion which is really about fossil fuel companies trying to postpone zero- carbon.  The unproven geo-engineering techniques put forward may persuade some that the need to slash emissions is reduced, thus in fact slowing our transition to zero carbon.

In reality, though, we will surely need it, because the world is very unlikely to cut emissions enough to avoid a 1.7 degree rise in global temperatures, and we still run a very serious risk of 2 degrees.   Negative emissions will help undo any 'overshoot' which happens.  The question of who will pay for it remains.   You can depend on it: oil and coal companies and those who made money from pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will not be putting up their hands.

From The Guardian:

Tom Green has a plan to tackle climate change. The British biologist and director of the charity Project Vesta wants to turn a trillion tonnes of CO2 into rock, and sink it to the bottom of the sea.

Green admits the idea is “audacious”. It would involve locking away atmospheric carbon by dropping pea-coloured sand into the ocean. The sand is made of ground olivine – an abundant volcanic rock, known to jewellers as peridot – and, if Green’s calculations are correct, depositing it offshore on 2% of the world’s coastlines would capture 100% of total global annual carbon emissions.

The plan relies on a natural process called weathering. “Weathering has been working on the planet for billions of years,” says Green, a graduate of Harvard Business School who runs Project Vesta from San Francisco. “When rain falls on volcanic rocks, they dissolve a little in the water, causing a chemical reaction that uses carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon ends up in the ocean, where it’s used by marine-calcifying organisms like corals and shell-making animals, whose skeletons and shells sink to the bottom of the ocean as sediment and eventually become limestone.”

Olivine weathers easily, and allowing ocean currents to churn it up, says Green, “will make it dissolve much more quickly, to happen on a human-relevant timescale”. It is not a rare mineral: there are beaches in the Galápagos Islands and in Hawaii that are green with olivine-rich sand.

The idea of using the sea to absorb excess carbon is not far-fetched, says Green. Ocean water can hold 150 times more CO2 than air, per unit of volume. “The ocean has already taken up about 30% of the excess carbon dioxide that we’ve emitted as a society,” he says. He and his colleagues are gearing up to test their process in two similar Caribbean coves, one acting as an untouched “control” in the experiment.

There remain many unknowns. Would such an intervention work? Who gets to decide if it should go ahead? Could there be side-effects? It is complex chemistry, and the natural process of weathering would be accelerated to an unnatural pace. Our understanding of the workings of the ocean is a mere drop in the proverbial. But with our race to mend the planet having taken on Sisyphean overtones, there is still hope that the vast, churning seas can be our lifeline.

Increasing carbon capture naturally on land – by planting trees, for example – will not remove enough CO2 to halt global heating. Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University and author of A Farewell to Ice, says: “If you want to get rid of the industrial emissions from Europe, you’d have to turn Europe into one big primeval forest. It works, but it’s not good enough alone.”

There are many ingenious ideas being discussed. Coastlines could be rewilded with underwater forests of kelp or seagrass, surface water cooled by generating air bubbles to whoosh cold water up from the deep, and marine clouds sprayed with seawater to reflect more heat from the sun.

As the UK prepares to host the UN Climate Change Conference (Cop26) in November, dozens of these projects are being trialled. Most rely on the ocean’s many natural balance-restoring processes: enhancing them to help slow cooling, to lock away carbon, to protect Arctic ice or even to reduce the threat of hurricanes.

Gaurav Sant, director of the UCLA Institute for Carbon Management, [talks about]  another concept, which he is helping to develop just a few hundred miles down the coast from Green, where UCLA engineers have developed a machine that mimics how seashells form. Called a flow reactor, the machine sucks seawater in, and an electrical charge makes it alkaline, which triggers the CO2 to react with the seawater’s magnesium and calcium, producing limestone and magnesite (like forming shells). The water then flows out and, depleted of its captured CO2, is ready to take up more. A byproduct of this process – hydrogen – can be extracted for fuel.

It’s a similar concept to weathering olivine in the ocean, and Sant’s plan is for initial small studies before a gradual scaling up. The team aims to remove between 10 and 20 gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, starting in 2050.

Sant says it will be a huge challenge to build a system large enough – and then to build thousands more. “Anyone saying ‘we’re going to do this in five years’, is greatly underestimating the challenge,” he says. “We’re talking about an enormous enterprise, the size and scale of which humanity has not seen before.”

Volcanic olivine, which Project Vesta is trialling as a way to capture carbon absorbed in oceans.