7 Ways To Pull Carbon From The Atmosphere | Random Thursday

this video is supported by brilliant on january 21st elon musk put out a tweet saying that he's going to donate 100 million dollars to the best carbon capture technology and like a lot of elon's tweets it generated equal amounts of speculation and snark hey elon have you ever heard of a tree no where's my hundred million dollars [Laughter] oh you you know i've been following carbon capture technology for quite some time now and every time it comes up somebody makes a joke to that extent and they all think they're the first ones to say it look if you want to make the argument that we need to be planting trees then yes absolutely great trees are awesome we do need to be doing that we need to make up for the trees that we've cut down but we've done a lot more than just cut down trees we've actually spent the last century digging up millions of years of dead trees and burning those and putting that up into the atmosphere while cutting down millions of acres of carbon sequestering trees if we're going to bring our atmosphere anywhere close to pre-industrial levels we need to be doing more than that a lot more and fast which is why elon is partnering up with the x prize foundation to help develop better carbon capture technology according to the xprize website the objective of this xprize is to inspire and help scale efficient solutions to collectively achieve the 10 gigaton per year carbon removal target by 2050 to help fight climate change and restore the earth's carbon balance teams can submit entries across natural engineered and hybrid solutions and judges will evaluate the teams based on four basic criteria to make sure the ideas are scalable and sustainable and 50 of the prize money will go to the winner the rest will be divided up amongst the runners-up finalists and student scholarships so this is being called the carbon removal x prize but this is not the first x prize i've done that's focused on carbon capture the carbon x prize is a competition that's currently ongoing and the goal of that one is to find uses for carbon basically to create a value around carbon that would incentivize people to capture it this new competition is going to go through 2025 and it's going to start on earth day which is april 22nd so with all that in mind i thought this would be the perfect time to finally pull the trigger on this topic and talk about all the various different ways that we can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere the pros and cons of each and why like it or not this absolutely has to be part of our climate change solution [Music] in july of 2020 a study was published in the journal nature climate change where researchers did a study of people's opinions on carbon capture technology the opinions were not great they did the survey in the us and the united kingdom because we're both countries with highly industrialized economies and they chose a thousand people from six different communities a rural area a medium-sized college town and a big city in both countries they found that less than 10 of people claimed to know a great deal or a fair amount about carbon capture and that their skepticism fell mostly into two camps one is about people who are worried about the environmental effects of uh well basically geoengineering you know what if we go too far what are the where the other problems that this could cause that kind of thing this was the smaller of the concerns the far bigger concern was that focusing on carbon capture would basically reduce interest in lowering emissions that it would give people permission to go ahead and emit more carbon dioxide basically and this comes up a lot when talking about carbon capture it's pretty much the main argument against it so i wanted to kind of start by addressing that concern i think a lot of this comes from the fact that ccs or carbon capture and sequestration is something that's been advocated by the fossil fuel industry for a while now don't get me wrong they're not exactly psyched about spending billions of dollars to update all their facilities but if it came between that and having to pay a carbon tax then that's probably what they would rather do so for them yes it is absolutely a play to just keep burning more fossil fuels plus their efforts are kind of half-assed the technology that they use is not very efficient and doesn't actually capture that much carbon and as i talked about in the previous video they often use this carbon dioxide to pump into the ground and get more oil out of it oil that they would then burn and put back up into the atmosphere and for these reasons yes 100 i totally get the skepticism and it is well earned but we've kind of passed the point where this is really even an option anymore like even if the world went 100 carbon neutral tomorrow and we could just snap our finger and make that happen we would still need to pull a lot of co2 out of the atmosphere to return to pre-industrial levels not to mention the feedback loops that we've already put into motion that by themselves are going to continue to warm the planet for decades including the release of methane from thawing permafrost and and the thawing arctic you know lowering the albedo and we are nowhere near being emission-free right now in fact there's some industries like the airline industry that we don't even have the technology to replace fossil fuels yet so for me this argument it all comes down to two main points number one in no way is carbon capture a replacement for lowering emissions and number two if we are ever going to get to carbon neutral we have to do both you know there's a kind of what about ism that always comes up around this whenever you mention carbon capture or people like yeah what about windmills what about clean energy and stuff and it's like yes that tube all of that we have to be doing all the things what team am i on i am on team all the things actually you know what this whole argument makes me think of the debate around sex ed like i'm not sure if this is even still a thing but when i was in school and aids was the scariest thing in the world at the time there was this whole debate around whether or not they should teach you know safe sex to kids in schools because the people against it would argue that well that just gives them permission to have sex but i was always like but if the goal is to prevent the spread of disease and to stop teen pregnancy and the studies show that teaching safe sex is the best way to do that then i mean what do you really care about the results of the behavior you know i guess carbon capture is kind of like the condom of the energy industry if you put it that way of course that would make the carbon so unless we want the fossil fuel industry spewing their carbon all over our faces i guess we need to get serious about carbon capture all right so let's talk about all the various ways that we can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere we can start with the more natural and biological options and then get into more technology-based ones later on and since we already brought up trees why not start there now despite my rant earlier about people always bringing up planting trees let me state unambiguously yes trees are awesome and we need to be planting more of them but is planting trees enough to actually fix the problem like is that even possible well a study from 2019 set out to answer that question it was led by john francois bastine of eth zurich in switzerland and his team used satellite data to measure forest cover around the world and created a model for estimating the potential of earth's forests basically starting by asking how many trees the earth can actually support how many trees we could possibly plant and their model predicted that the earth could support another 900 million hectares of forest which is about 25 more than what it's got right now and then by doing that we could capture about 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide reducing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide by about 25 percent that would negate about half of all carbon dioxide emissions since 1960 or would make us carbon neutral for about the next 20 years at our current rate so yeah planting trees could get us to carbon neutral for the next 20 years that is significant it is a lot of trees though like half a trillion trees a billion hectares is about the size of the united states just nothing but trees according to sasan sachi a senior scientist at jpl quote planting a billion hectares of trees won't be easy if we follow the paper's recommendations it could take between one and two thousand years and even if we could just snap our finger and plant all the trees today it would still take the better part of a century for those trees to reach maturity and then there's some more intangible issues around it like how all that extra forest would affect the planet's albedo tree canopies are generally darker than the ground below trees also produce water vapor through evapotranspiration which water vapor can increase the temperature of the atmosphere between those two things you can actually see a warming effect in the near term and then there's just a simple issue that forests require water and in a lot of places they need that water for agriculture to feed the people living there and this is why deforestation is happening in the first place people aren't just cutting down trees for exercise they're doing it because they need that land for for food and for housing for the people that are living there and this has gone up dramatically in the last 50 years the numbers are actually quite staggering according to the un's food and agriculture organization about 7.3 million hectares of forest are lost every year roughly half of earth's tropical forests have already been cleared and in the continental united states 90 of indigenous forests have been removed since 1600 so yes we need to be planting trees if for no other reason then we have a lot of catching up to do but even if trees are being cleared for farming there are some farming practices that can sequester carbon as well so back in the early 1930s we were already struggling with the great depression which was compounded by the problem of the dust bowl basically destructive farming practices that stripped the topsoil across the united states and combined with a historic drought in 1933 led to entire swaths of the country basically being turned into a desert over 100 million acres of soil was just swept off the ground in giant dust storms that drove millions of farmers to bankruptcy and in many ways we're still recovering from it to this day but this led to new farming practices like rotating crops and farm subsidies to allow farmers to let the soil rest between harvests and rebuild that topsoil i bring that up to show that farming practices have been successfully used to prevent environmental collapse in the past and we may need to do that again and one of those methods is cover crops cover crops are crops that are planted just to improve the soil they aren't anything that you would harvest and then sell they serve a lot of purposes including slowing erosion improving soil health enhancing water availability smothering weeds help control pests and diseases and increases biodiversity and it turns out sequester carbon which itself is good for the soil according to the institute of agriculture and natural resources at the university of nebraska quote soil carbon accumulation promotes aggregation of soil particles soil water retention microbial activity nutrient cycling and other key soil processes enhancing overall soil fertility and productivity all of which boosts crop yields and improves the farm's bottom line they basically work by pulling in co2 through photosynthesis and then they lock that carbon away in their roots and then when the plants die their biomass gets fed into the soil which puts all kinds of good stuff in there including carbon but kind of like the trees we're starting from behind here research has shown that intensely managed soils have actually lost 50 to 70 percent of their carbon over the years the good news is that agricultural soils are the largest terrestrial carbon sink that we have that could possibly sink 1500 gigatons of carbon so yeah there's a lot of research going into this again trying to balance the resources going into the cover crops versus what you get out of them that's always going to be an issue but there are some other farming practices that can boost this even further so there's this thing called rock weathering it's basically carbon dioxide and water reacting with silicate rocks to form a bicarbonate rock this bicarbonate rock builds up in the earth's crust and then over millions of years as the tectonic activity shifts the plates around it then gets reintroduced into the atmosphere by volcanism this is known as the carbonate silicate cycle well enhanced rock weathering basically uses this phenomenon to work kind of the same way as the cover crops except instead of plants pulling the carbon down into the soil it's basalt basalt also known as basalt the idea is you take basalt which is a silicate rock grind it down into a dust and then spread it out over the fields and then well that that's it that's all it is the basalt dust then pulls carbon dioxide out of the air sequesters it into the ground that also gets used by the plants this approach was studied by david bierling a bio geochemist at the university of sheffield and they estimated that doing this would remove between 0.5 billion and 2 billion tons of co2 from the air each year offsetting emissions from around 500 coal-fired power plants and they've actually carried out some field trials on this that seemed to bear out the modeling removing co2 by 40 percent there are of course wait for it some caveats first of all like any of the solutions here in order to scale it up for it to be effective it's going to be a monumental challenge plus we don't really know the long-term effects of this kind of altering the geochemical cycle could have especially as it starts to get washed into rivers and oceans although the study did say that it could have a positive effect in the ocean because it could counter the acidification that's been happening because of the co2 being captured into the water so it could be positive at first but we still don't know the long-term effects of this plus the mining and pulverizing and transporting while that basalt rock is going to be really energy intensive and not cheap either it's estimated that it might cost between 80 and 180 dollars per ton of co2 that's captured although the boost in crop yields might make it worth it to the farmers but ultimately it will be up to the farmers to make this happen this is their land and their livelihoods so the incentives are going to have to be compelling for them to adopt them and you know it's going to have to be site-specific farmers in different places have different needs it'll probably be a tough sell whether we're talking about cover crops or basalt spreading but you know we've done it before maybe we can do it again now on the topic of rock weathering there are some other applications that take advantage of this mineralization technique that are worth talking about there are methods that involve pumping alkaline spring water to the surface and the silicate minerals that are naturally in that water can just absorb the co2 out of the atmosphere some ideas involve pumping air over mine tailings that are high in silicate material mine tailings are basically the leftover throwaway stuff that usually comes out of mining and when we talk about pumping co2 into the ground a big part of that is pumping it into places where it could you know turn into carbonite and mineralize in the ground so carbon mineralization is a big part of a lot of our carbon storage solutions including something that will come up later i did a video a while back about algae biofuels and about how we can basically take the algae biomass and speed up the process that we use to make the fuels that we use today all that depends on algae's ability to manipulate carbon through photosynthesis in other words pull carbon from the air now while using algae to make biofuels plays a small part in reducing our emissions it can also be used as a carbon sink and this might be a good time to talk about the elephant in the room so so far in this video i've only talked about land-based solutions but the earth is 70 water so really ocean-based concepts might be the most effective now the ocean already absorbs a massive amount of co2 in fact one third of our emissions eventually wind up in the ocean but this is another problem carbon dioxide is water soluble meaning it mixes with water to create carbonic acid and this is why a glass of water has been left out sitting you know for a day or so kind of starts to taste weird this lower ph level is leading to ocean acidification which is doing things like bleaching coral reefs and making it so that oysters and other shellfish can't make their shells but the ocean is also home to algae and seaweed which have enormous carbon sink potential some ideas floating around see what i did there include basically seeding the ocean with algae and and seaweed blooms and maybe even using a technique like the basalt technique that i was talking about earlier on the crops you know basically alkaline minerals that could affect the ph balance in the oceans now the good thing about algae and seaweed versus say trees is they can spread out and cover a larger surface area basically pulling in more carbon and then eventually sinking down to the ocean floor now this is rife with issues and affects wildlife in ways that we can't be sure of right now but algae can be used in more controlled applications as well in fact it's been estimated that algae when used in ai-powered bioreactors is up to 400 times more efficient than a tree at removing co2 from the atmosphere and this algae has a host of uses that can replace fossil fuels not just with with fuel production and whatnot but it can also be made into polymer materials like plastics that can lock away that carbon into the stuff that we use now all of that is of course contingent on the cost of algae-made products being as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuel made products which were a long way from that but there's research going into it now one more ocean-based solution that might be kind of controversial is deep ocean sequestration this is in a lot of ways like the mineralization technique that i was talking about earlier except being pumped into rocks is being pumped into the ocean but way way way down in the ocean because while the top kilometer of surface ocean has seen its co2 concentrations rising the same isn't true for deep ocean water so the idea is if you pump co2 either in liquid or gaseous form the pressure down there will cause it to dissolve really quickly and this increases the density of the water and then it sinks down to the ocean floor effectively you're creating co2 lakes at the bottom of the ocean now this is really more of a carbon storage solution than a carbon capture solution but since we were already talking about ocean stuff i thought it was worth mentioning now so far we've talked about natural and biological solutions for locking away carbon and this was a very high level overview and there's a lot that i couldn't get to and didn't talk about and there's probably some stuff that i missed if there is and there's something that you want to bring to the table talk about it down in the comments below but now let's talk about the real room splitter the more technology-based solutions around carbon capture so i talked about carbon capture in a previous video a while back but simply put is basically like a giant vacuum cleaner that pulls in air and traps the co2 now there's a few different ways of doing this in a few different companies that pioneered this effort carbon engineering based out of british columbia uses a solution of hydroxide to grab onto the co2 and then it has to be heated to high temperatures to release a co2 for storage their business model relies on selling the co2 to make new products the most profitable being synthetic jet fuel so again more carbon neutral than carbon negative of course if other less burny products are made that would lock it away for good climax based out of switzerland takes a different approach their process uses a mean absorbance in small modular reactors that cost a bit more right now but it's thought that the potential savings down the road could be higher the idea is that the modular design could make them cheaper to produce when scaled up and it requires lower temperatures so waste heat could be used in the process this seems to be a similar model being followed by another company called global thermostat who want to partner up with industrial plants and use their waste heat to capture carbon out of the air and then offset that plant's emissions now both of these methods are tried and tested technology which is a good thing but the downside is that they do take a lot of energy in fact some estimates have said that by the year 2100 for it to be an effective mitigation technique it would require about a quarter of the world's energy production obviously that's a problem but there is a new method out of mit called the electro swing adsorption technique no it's not named after the musical style which there are worse things no it was developed by the post doxa hog boskian while working on his phd with guidance by alan hatton the professor of chemical engineering in 2019. and before i describe this just let me say i love this i i love everything about this it's basically a kind of battery featuring a stack of electrode plates that are coated with a compound called polyanthroquinone which is composited with carbon nanotubes and these plates when you run an electric charge over them they have a natural affinity for carbon dioxide that attract carbon dioxide molecules to the plates so you introduce an electric current to the plates run air through it and the carbon dioxide in the air sticks to the plates like a magnet once that cycle is over it turns off the electric charge or swings the electricity to an uncharged state if you will and the co2 molecules flow free it then pumps the co2 out to do with that what you will it can work in low and high concentrations so it can clean exhaust flues or just pull the co2 out of the air it works at room temperature and uses very little energy the authors of the paper point out that in some soda bottling plants you know they use co2 to put the fizz into the water they often burn fossil fuels in order to get co2 to do that this could take the place of that and the same is true for farmers that use carbon dioxide to put into their greenhouses to feed their plants this device this battery could just pull the co2 out of the air and just put it right into those plants bottling plants and plant plants so far they've been able to get it up to seven thousand cycles with about a thirty percent loss in efficiency but they think they can get that up to twenty thousand or even 50 000 cycles now obviously it's still early for this technology and i don't know what kind of costs are involved uh whenever you start talking about nano technology that seems to be pretty expensive so we'll see but there's a lot that i like about this technology and i look forward to hearing more about it in the future now all these solutions can of course apply to ccs the carbon capture and sequestration i was talking about earlier which is obviously controversial this is you know any any technology that can pull co2 out of the air can be applied to smoke stacks and power generation plants to pull it out of the air there too though i have to say i don't really consider ccs to be a part of this particular conversation because i'm talking about pulling carbon out of the air and ccs is really more about mitigating the amount of emissions that are coming out of plants so it's really more of a carbon reduction technique more than a carbon removal technique with one exception there is one type of ccs that does have a net negative carbon footprint an seo bccs biomass with carbon capture and sequestration now earlier i was talking about trees and cover crops and seaweed and algae those are all biomass that pull carbon out of the air and then either go into the soil or get sunk down to the bottom of the ocean but something else that you can do with it is burn it biomass energy is basically burning biomass to create electricity if you've ever put wood in a fireplace and burned it then you have used biomass to heat your home basically if you use that heat to boil water to turn a steam turbine to create electricity that's biomass energy so biomass basically works the same as coal different efficiencies and whatnot but it's the same idea but biomass is considered somewhat carbon neutral because the carbon that you're putting in the atmosphere by burning it was carbon that was recently pulled out of the atmosphere by the biomass that you're burning but if you capture that carbon and prevent it from going back up into the atmosphere that's carbon negative my friend biomass is generally burned in the form of wood pellets that are often made from sawmill dust and leftover waste from tree clearing now biomass is actually fairly controversial because depending on how you do it it can be actually more energy intensive and maybe even put more co2 into the atmosphere than coal and that's partly because of the effort that it takes to produce and transport the pellets but also biomass just doesn't burn as easily and as efficiently as coal does so you have to burn a whole lot more of it to get the same amount of energy out of it as you do coal so the environmentally friendliness of bccs relies a lot more on the ccs part of that equation and many of these procedures are still woefully inadequate but there are advocates working on the efficiency of biomass and other options that are being worked on that include using bacteria to decompose the biomass and then create gases that can be used speaking of making things out of things our last one involves carbon absorbing construction materials that was a segue worthy of olf when i was talking about carbon mineralization earlier i said that there was one more option that i would be bringing up well here it is the concrete industry is actually one of the world's worst emitters of co2 into the atmosphere they make up eight percent of all carbon emissions if it were a country it would be the third worst country in the world now keep using the word concrete it's actually the cement that's the problem and i will admit that in the past i've interchangeably used the words concrete and cement but those are actually two different things concrete as a building material is a mix of sand gravel water and a cement binder that binder that we use in most modern concrete is often called portland cement now it's been around for a couple hundred years now and it involves roasting limestone and clay in an oven and then grinding it into a powder that powder is then mixed with iron ore or ash and spun it giant kills and up to 1450 degrees celsius enabling a chemical process called calcination which creates calcium oxide and co2 ultimately this creates marble-sized gray balls known as clinker so it's not only hugely energy-intensive but the process itself creates co2 now there are a ton of ideas that are being put forward out there to try to cut down on this including just ccs just like from a coal plant but others are focusing on creating entirely new construction materials that just work differently alternative cement if you will there are companies working on new types of cement that either use co2 as a binding agent in the cement or are made out of silicate materials that can capture co2 from the atmosphere using that mineralization technique imagine if new buildings were built with a type of material that actually pulled co2 out of the atmosphere to cure it or to make it stronger or give it better insulation properties a company called carbon cure is working on this with backing from bill gates to pump co2 into their concrete where it mineralizes and stays locked in there forever so instead of pumping co2 into the ground we could just pump it into the buildings that we live in i mean imagine if you combine this with that mit capture device that i was talking about before you could just have it right there on site it pulls the co2 in you pump that into the cement it goes up into a building just all in one this is really exciting stuff this is still new technology i'm not sure about the economics behind it obviously that needs to be improved before it can be adopted around the world but it's got a lot of potential and it's just one of many opportunities to create a carbon market which brings me back to the x prize the carbon x prize competition was centered specifically on creating uses for co2 that would incentivize people to capture it out of the air and then sell it to create a value around it create a market around carbon like imagine that mit idea or something even better could be sold as a box that you could just put on the side of your house or something and it could just capture co2 and collect it into compressed air tanks and then once a month or so a company will come by and pick up those tanks and replace it with a new one an empty one carry it away and you just get a check for it i'd sign up for that i mean maybe instead of mining bitcoin the next big mining opportunity is mining the sky with this new carbon removal x prize we might be able to do that someday and i think it's pretty cool i think with both of these competitions are kind of hitting the problem from both sides now this was again was just a very high level overview there's a lot of nuances and details that got left out the devil is in the details as we all know so feel free to pick them apart down in the comments below but i want to reiterate none of these ideas are meant to single-handedly shoulder the burden of removing carbon from the atmosphere and none of them are meant to negate the need to reduce emissions okay this is this is all the things we got to do all the things from where i'm standing we don't have the luxury of being choosy at this point if there's something that can make a difference it's on the table hashtag team all the things but talk below about what team you're on and on the flip side of the equation if you want to know more about reducing the amount of emissions going up you want to learn more about solar energy then i can highly recommend the solar energy course on brilliant how exactly a bunch 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helping me support a team and just forming an awesome community i love some of the conversations that go on there there's some new people that i got to murder their names real quick we've got michael kozarik who actually uh upgraded his uh his thing he's been around for a long time thank you michael florian gerhardt's jim tare yvonne acevedo daniel tokyo explorer ryan klein slightly nerdy uh corey ratchik cam nescon apocalypse cow welcome back uh dakota r johnson jerky pasila corey goss caveman barbecue swagger buns love it jen's christian hoose uh joshua merchant and mark behringer thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos and just join an awesome community as well as exclusive live streams all kinds of fun stuff you can go to patreon.comanswerjoe please do like and share this video if you liked it only if you liked it and if this is your first time here um google says to watch this you wouldn't want to let google down or any of the videos on the 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 561,283

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, carbon sequestration, carbon capture, direct air capture, cover crops, enhanced rock weathering, elon musk, algae carbon removal, climate change

Id: 2J05vC3umE0

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021