This story was originally published in Wired, and is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. In a way, coal is solar powered. Millions of year ago, swamp plants absorbed the sun’s power, consuming carbon dioxide. Over geologic time, they accumulated and transformed into energy-dense rocks. Solar-powered fuel is, of course,
As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, Wired previously published this story, which is reproduced here.
In a way, coal is powered by solar energy. Marsh plants consumed carbon dioxide millions of years ago as they absorbed the sun’s energy. Over the course of geologic time, they perished, accumulated, and changed into energy-dense rock. Contrary to solar panels, this solar-powered fuel is obviously not clean because burning coal releases carbon back into the atmosphere, causing a rapid change in the climate.
But what if people were able to undo that process by producing their personal coal from plant waste and burying it under? Engineers can transform agricultural and other waste biomass into strong, focussed carbon using specialized heating chambers, which is the driving force behind a growing number of carbon projects. This carbon is naturally sequestered from the atmosphere and stored for ( ideally ) thousands of years, just like those ancient plants that captured CO2 and then turned it into coal.
The best location is really a coal mine that has been abandoned, sort of returning it to its original location.
It should go without saying that like” carbon removal” methods are in no way a replacement for lowering emissions and keeping the excess carbon out of the atmosphere in the first place. However, carbon removal was a hot topic at the COP28 yearly conference next month. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has insisted for years that we will need carbon removal in one way or another, particularly a variety of techniques working together, in order to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.
Biomass carbon removal and storage might be one of those methods, if scaled up in the upcoming years. To begin, you collect waste biomass, such as corn stalks, and cook it in a particular reactor using pyrolysis, which uses high heat and small oxygen. To remove the water content and transform the material into focused carbon, heat is used instead of burning it with fire. ( Note that this is different from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, where you grow crops specifically to burn to generate electricity by capturing the power plant’s emissions. )
According to Andrew Jones, CEO and co-founder of Carba, which uses the method to bury carbon, “it’s generally like heating it in a pizza oven without oxygen.” ” The ideal location is really an abandoned coal mine, sort of returning it to its original location.” In essence, we are backward coal mining.
The problem is that microbes enjoy chewing on decaying plant matter, releasing methane, an yet more powerful greenhouse gas, as well as carbon dioxide as a byproduct. In the Arctic, where permafrost is thawing and releasing old plant material for microbes to eat, this issue is particularly serious. However, the issue is much more directly related to large populations of people: agricultural waste, yard waste for landscaping, biomass from thinning forests ( to lessen the amount of flammable material and lower the risk of wildfires ), for matter is frequently left to rot, releasing carbon and aerosols that are harmful to human health and air quality.
The carbon that enters the ground does n’t become food because the reactor breaks down the carbohydrates that microbes love to make charcoal, so it persists. Paul Dauenhauer, senior adviser and cofounder of Carba and a chemical engineer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, says,” If you’re just burying carbohydrates, you always have this risk that you do n’t have it in the right conditions.” Therefore, it would be a loss of credibility if 10 %, 20 %, or 30 % of the material you bury ended up being degrading.
The process can be used pretty much anywhere because you do n’t even need an abandoned coal mine to get rid of the processed biomass; carba is already burying it in landfills. Every municipality has grass, tree clippings, wastepaper waste, and other similar items, according to Dauenhauer. You can even picture packaging facilities, where they have all the used cardboard. That includes both carbohydrate and cellulose as well.
Why not take advantage of this healthy process, which has been perfected over millions of years?
This type of carbon, known as biochar, which likewise enhances soils, is used in agricultural fields. Sanjai Parikh, who developed the Biochar Database, an open-access tool at UC Davis for those who make and use biochar, claims that in some circumstances, the substance can increase crop yields. Even though it is at the surface, it continues to sequester carbon, Parikh continues. ” We’re talking about stability of hundreds to thousands of years, but some of that biochar will degrade.”
In sandy soils, for example, where water tends to drain immediately then, the material even aids in water retention. According to Wendy Lu Maxwell-Barton, senior director of the International Biochar Initiative,” Biochar is a very, very porous material.” ” This is why biochar is such a remarkable soil amendment …it makes it more resistant to both flooding and drought conditions.”
According to Maxwell-Barton, biochar can even be measurable: With a certain amount of biomass, you produce an equivalent quantity of carbon to store in soils or underground. In fact, biochar makes up 90 % of the carbon removal market, where businesses pay to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
Alternately, restoring a complicated forest ecosystem makes it more difficult to quantify the precise amount of carbon you are sequestering. Not that people should n’t protect these habitats as well; “nature-based solutions” can reduce flooding, increase species, sequester carbon, and promote tourism. However, the terrible possibility is that a wildfire could obliterate an area of protected forest, returning carbon to the atmosphere. Potentially, burying carbon as charcoal will better protect it over time.
Researchers are turning waste biomass into liquid carbon—essentially, oil that they pump up into the ground rather than pumping the geological variety up—in addition to burying good carbon or sprinkling it on fields. According to Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of the carbon removal company Charm, “our top priority is to make barbecue sauce—or liquid smoke—and then inject it into aged oil wells.”
They also use pyrolysis, which produces both wet oil and strong charcoal for use in agriculture. That is transported to deserted wells and pumped beneath, where it solidifies. According to Reinhardt, there are 2 to 3 million end-of-life, abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States. It’s actually quite a problem because many of them leak fluid up to the surface and are methane emitters or inadequately sealed. Charm sequesters carbon and seals up wells that have been leaking greenhouse gases by pumping its biomass oil underground at these locations.
We could—or should, frankly—be doing more to reduce emissions in the first place, according to the main subtext.
Whatever the final result, biomass removal deftly sequesters and buryes carbon using nature’s personal photosynthesis. According to Columbia Business School climate economist Gernot Wagner,” The genius in this business model, in many ways, is letting nature do most of the work.” Why not take advantage of this healthy process, which has been refined over millions of years?
However, Wagner claims that things are actually more complicated. The prices of those fuels remain low because when fossil fuel companies extract coal or oil from the earth, they are tapping into vast deposits that are fairly simple to exploit on a budget. However, there is just a certain amount of biomass waste that can be found above ground and is found all over the world. ( Though each municipality could process its own biomass waste for storage, which is a potential strength of this type of carbon removal. ) According to Wagner,” the more demand there is for biochar, or for this kind of carbon removal technology, the more startups there are clamoring for the exact food waste, corn husk waste,” and so forth. ” Surprisingly, the prices rise more than fall.”
The “moral hazard,” according to Wagner, is the various potential problem: If humanity can remove carbon from the atmosphere, there will be less incentive to reduce emissions. There is also a ton of money to be made from fossil fuels, and oil companies like Occidental Petroleum are making significant investments in carbon removal technologies like clear air capture, which use machines to remove CO2 from the air. In this manner, they can continue drilling. According to Wagner, there is usually a moral hazard component. ” OK, well, we could—or should, frankly—be doing more to reduce emissions in the first place, as opposed to letting’s suck it back out after the fact,” is the big, big topic that runs through every one of these conversations about carbon removal.
According to Reinhardt of Charm, the carbon removal sector caters to businesses that are actively trying to reduce their emissions. According to Reinhardt,” If you look at who is buying removals, it’s companies that are currently doing a lot on the reduction side and are trying to zero-out the remainder.” Have you done everything you can to reduce? is the refrain that every startup in the carbon removal industry is singing. Okay, if you have, that’s fantastic. Let’s discuss how we can help you reach net zero.
In the end, it is abundantly obvious from science that humanity must find a way to remove more carbon from the sky in addition to reducing emissions. It wo n’t just be about relying on forests to capture carbon, improved rock weathering that reacts with atmospheric CO2, or buried biomass; it will also ideally involve a combination of the best natural and technological methods. According to Parikh,” We can have a lot of different strategies, and they can either be extremely engineered or very simple.” ” All of these tools must be developed so that we can use something to make a difference for each location and goal.” As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, Wired previously published this story, which is reproduced here. In a way, coal is powered by solar energy. Pond plants consumed carbon dioxide millions of years ago as they absorbed the sun’s energy. Over geologic time, they perished, accumulated, and changed into energy-dense rock. Of course, this solar-powered fuel is
This story was originally published in Wired, and is reproduced as part of Climate Desk’s collaboration. In a way, coal is solar powered. Millions of year ago, swamp plants absorbed the sun’s power, consuming carbon dioxide. Over geologic time, they accumulated and transformed into energy-dense rocks. Solar-powered fuel is, of course,
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2024/01/biomass-biochar-carbon-capture-storage-startups/
