Or for Ocean Macroalgal Afforestation (OMA)?
No new power plants. Those not running on natural gas can retrofit to biomethane. Land vehicles can run on bio-methane with rapidly improving nanotechnology more-gas-at-less-pressure tanks. Or land, water, and air vehicles can run on gas-to-liquid fuels. Buildings can keep using biomethane as now or for co-generation fuel cells. Plastics and chemicals can be made from biomethane.
Cheap (from fracking) natural gas is causing the necessary expansion of natural gas infrastructure as we speak.
Switching from coal, oil, and natural gas to biomethane is not a switch when compared to switching to wind, solar PV, geothermal, tides, etc. With the necessary scale of OMA and it's long-term sustainability (for paying back investments) the economics of transporting the ocean production of biomethane should be less a concern than transporting natural gas from the rapidly depleting production of fractured shale plays.
Mark
---------- Original Message --------
Subject: [geo] Those darn wedges
From: "Rau, Greg" <r...@llnl.gov>
Date: Fri, January 11, 2013 10:56 am
To: "geoengineering@googlegroups.com" <geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
--Anyone for GE? - Greg
Environmental Research Letters Volume 8 Number 1Steven J Davis et al 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 011001 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/011001Rethinking wedges
OPEN ACCESSSteven J Davis1,2, Long Cao2,3, Ken Caldeira2 and Martin I Hoffert4Show affiliations1 Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
2 Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
3 Department of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310027, People's Republic of China
4 Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA
AbstractStabilizing CO2 emissions at current levels for fifty years is not consistent with either an atmospheric CO2 concentration below 500 ppm or global temperature increases below 2 °C. Accepting these targets, solving the climate problem requires that emissions peak and decline in the next few decades, and ultimately fall to near zero. Phasing out emissions over 50 years could be achieved by deploying on the order of 19 'wedges', each of which ramps up linearly over a period of 50 years to ultimately avoid 1 GtC y−1 of CO2 emissions. But this level of mitigation will require affordable carbon-free energy systems to be deployed at the scale of tens of terawatts. Any hope for such fundamental and disruptive transformation of the global energy system depends upon coordinated efforts to innovate, plan, and deploy new transportation and energy systems that can provide affordable energy at this scale without emitting CO2 to the atmosphere.
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