RE: _[geo]_Does_CDR_provide_“moral_hazard”_for_av oiding_deep_decarbonization_of_our_economy?_|_Everything_and _the_Carbon_Sink

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 08:09:49 -0800

Robert,

Great arguments for countries to adopt simple carbon fees on both domestic fossil fuels and imports of fuel and the carbon footprint of imported goods.

Minor edit - We don't want to stash whole algae at the bottom of the ocean in plastic bags.  At full scale, the algae would also be storing over 10 times the global production of fertilizer nitrogen (ammonia and nitrite) plus similar proportions of other nutrients needed to keep growing algae.  Better to separate the carbon and the nutrients out of the algae.  Use some carbon to replace fossil fuels.  Store some carbon.  Recover all the nutrients to grow more algae.  For quick high-volume carbon storage, it is hard to beat storing CO2-hydrate in plastic bags on the seafloor.  During the few thousand year life of the appropriate geosynthetic membranes, we react the CO2 with silicate minerals for more permanent storage or recover the carbon for other uses.

Mark 

Mark E. Capron, PE
Ventura, California
www.PODenergy.org


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re:_[geo]_Does_CDR_provide_“moral_hazard”_for_av
oiding_deep_decarbonization_of_our_economy?_|_Everything_and
_the_Carbon_Sink
From: "'Robert Tulip' via geoengineering"
<geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sat, November 01, 2014 11:45 pm
To: "gh...@sbcglobal.net" <gh...@sbcglobal.net>, geoengineering
<geoengineering@googlegroups.com>

The 'decarbonisation' theme discussed by Noah Deich has become a central concept in advocacy for emission reduction, but in my view it is not a good way to understand the CDR agenda.  And the 'moral hazard' of CDR can more usefully be framed as a moral opportunity.

The central problem of global warming is summarized in the McKibben Stock Price Problem (link).  This is the fact, as noted by leading climate scientist Bill McKibben, that the stock prices of leading energy companies all factor in plans to move enough carbon from the crust to the atmosphere to cook the planet, without any remediation strategy.  This is not possible, because the business as usual scenario would lead the world economy to collapse before the ecosystems collapse.
 
Climate stability is a prerequisite for economic stability. The solutions to deliver climate stability are either to either move less carbon into the air (reduce emissions) or stabilise it once it is moved (Carbon Dioxide Removal).  Current plans to move carbon without stabilising it are not possible due to the constraints of physics.  And Solar Radiation Management is more an emergency tourniquet than a climate solution.
 
Reducing emissions is the primary focus of global warming politics, supporting the premise of decarbonisation of the economy.  But emission reduction faces massive, apparently insurmountable, problems, seen in the steady 2.5 ppm per decade acceleration of the CO2 emission increase rate.  The economic incentives to burn coal and gas and oil are more powerful than the political incentives to switch to sustainable energy. And in any case, emission reduction still assumes ongoing increase in CO2 level in the air.  Ongoing increase should be unacceptable, because we need to drive CO2 levels down through negative emissions. 
 
Political agreements around emission targets are useless, essentially serving as a cover for failure of will and vision.  The political targets of ongoing warming build in massive danger of phase shift from the stable Holocene climate pattern that has prevailed for the ten thousand years of the growth of human civilization on our planet.  The implication is that there must be a technological focus on CDR, or we cook.  An end to Holocene stability is an unacceptable risk with a planetary population of ten billion people, given the likelihood it brings of conflict and collapse of civilization and loss of biodiversity.
 
In London in 1850, the problem of cholera was solved by pumping sewage out of the city.  Global warming is like a cholera epidemic for the twenty first century.  We need new sanitarians to work out how to pump carbon out of the air to solve the problem of global warming.  Funding that process means establishing economic and scalable methods to convert the harmful extra CO2 into useful forms.  That means finding practical commercial uses for more than ten billion tonnes of carbon every year.  The only way to do that, in my view, is to apply solar and ocean energy to grow algae on industrial scale.
 
This call to focus on algae as a useful form of carbon requires understanding of the distinction between carbon storage and carbon utilization.  Storing CO2 through geosequestration is not an economic contribution to stopping global warming.  Carbon stored as CO2 has no value, except to help pump up more fossil fuels.  But if CO2 is converted to algae, and the algae is then held in large fabric bags at the bottom of the sea, we have an enduring resource, a carbon bank. 
 
The ocean is a perpetual motion machine driven by earth’s orbital dynamics.  1.3 billion cubic kilometers (teralitres) of water move up and down by about half a meter each tide on average.  Tapping a fraction of this energy source for pumping should be a primary objective for an algae production and CDR system. Such a system would not decarbonise the economy, but would enable a massive increase in the practical use of carbon.  We can apply ingenuity and know-how to create innovative new methods to make good use of carbon stored as algae for infrastructure, energy and food.  An industrial production system that is largely automated, and that uses oceanic energy to manufacture its own replication resources, can become profitable.  Against this objective, ideas about prices on carbon, and the strategic model of decarbonisation, are not helpful.  We need a new integrated economic and ecological paradigm with a focus on mining more carbon than we emit.
 
The stock prices of energy majors can remain realistic only if their factored carbon reserves can be stabilised once they are burnt into the air.  It is therefore possible to work in cooperation with the fossil fuel industry to stabilise the global climate., turning their commercial resources and skills to advantage for new sustainable technology.  Decarbonisation wrongly poses the question in terms of conflict rather than cooperation.  CDR is a moral opportunity, not a moral hazard. The focus should be to mine the produced CO2 out of the air and sea and turn it into useful commodities. 
 
Robert Tulip

Disclaimer: My comments here are made in my personal capacity and do not represent official views of the Australian Government.

From: Greg Rau <gh...@sbcglobal.net>
To: "andrew.lock...@gmail.com" <andrew.lock...@gmail.com>; geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2014, 5:15
Subject: Re: [geo] Does CDR provide “moral hazard” for avoiding deep decarbonization of our economy? | Everything and the Carbon Sink

I'd be a little careful about the argument made here that CDR will continue to be too expensive to seriously compete with emission reduction. As I've said before (OK, like a broken record), some 18 GT of CO2/yr are currently being removed from the atmosphere via natural CDR, enough to actually seasonally reverse air CO2 growth, and enough to save the planet from a more rapid climate catastrophe.  And did I say for a cost of $0.00? Is it really unthinkable that we could very cost-competitively up this CDR quantity while we also strive to reduce emissions?  And, shouldn't this natural CDR, rather than way too expensive BECCS, be the poster child for what is possible?
As the article in effect concludes, isn't there is a moral hazard in continuing to think that emissions reduction will solve the problem singlehandedly and in time, and therefore why wait to seriously evaluate CDR ideas and potential?
Greg



From: Andrew Lockley <andrew.lock...@gmail.com>
To: geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2014 2:14 AM
Subject: [geo] Does CDR provide “moral hazard” for avoiding deep decarbonization of our economy? | Everything and the Carbon Sink

Poster's note : see images on Web
Everything and the Carbon Sink
Noah Deich's blog on all things Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
Does CDR provide “moral hazard” for avoiding deep decarbonization of our economy?
OCTOBER 24, 2014
No. But the fact that some environmentalists question the value of developing Carbon Dioxide Removal (“CDR”) approaches for this very reason merits greater analysis. The “moral hazard” argument against CDR goes something like this: CDR could be a “Trojan horse” that fossil fuel interests will use to delay rapid decarbonization of the economy, as these fossil interests could use the prospect of cost-effective, proven, scaleable CDR technologies as an excuse for continuing to burn fossil fuels today (on the grounds that at some point in the future we’ll have the CDR techniques to remove these present-day emissions).The key problem with this “moral hazard” argument is the hypothesis that “cost-effective, proven, scaleable CDR solutions” are poised to proliferate at greater rates than GHG emission mitigation technologies (such as renewable energy and energy efficiency) that are required to decarbonize our economy. Today, CDR solutions remain largely in their infancy. Installed bio-CCS plants can be counted on one hand, for example, and not a single commercial-scale Direct Air Capture project has been built to date. Renewable energy, however, has had a considerable head start on CDR technologies on reducing costs. Take solar PV systems as an example. As the chart below shows, solar PV panels have dropped in cost from over $75/W to under $0.75/W over the past four decades.
This cost reduction in the price of solar PV panels happens to be exactly what economic theory would predict. Learning curve models show that that costs of energy technologies come down in a predictable fashion as cumulative installed capacity increases. The graph below shows learning curve estimates for a range of energy technologies.
So what does this mean for the “moral hazard” argument against developing CDR solutions?
For this “moral hazard” argument to be valid, we would have to believe that CDR approaches will be able to not only catch up to other renewable technologies in cost within a short-time frame, but then continue to reduce costs more quickly. Otherwise, renewable technologies will continue their inevitable march down their cost curve, and will continue displacing fossil sources in our energy mix.
Suggesting that CDR approaches will outpace other decarbonization technologies doesn’t seem particularly plausible. This is because the technologies that have the “steepest” learning curves are usually those that can be manufactured and installed in assembly-line type manners (like solar PV panels or fuel cells, for example). Most CDR technologies do not fit this mold — for example, large scale bio-CCS projects frequently require many bespoke designs to fit particular plants/geographies. Direct air capture and small-scale biochar pyrolyzers fit this assembly-line model better, but there is no reason to expect these technologies to come down cost curves more quickly than their renewable complementors.In fact, this learning curve analysis would suggest that CDR faces the opposite of a “moral hazard” problem — because CDR remains so far behind other renewable technologies, we will keep building more and more renewables and neglect to develop CDR, which will seem expensive by comparison. Neglecting CDR in this fashion would be fine if we didn’t need negative emissions as a society. But if we find that negative emissions are necessary in a few decades, and we haven’t started developing CDR technologies? Then we are like to find that the initial CDR deployments are incredibly expensive and thus not politically viable. So there is a strong argument to be made for us to start developing CDR technologiestoday alongside renewable energy technologies, so that if/when we need to start removing carbon from the atmosphere, we have a suite of viable solutions to do so.
In conclusion, it’s simply not worth worrying about a “moral hazard” problem that we won’t have for at least decades, and are most likely to never have all — especially when the problems of not developing CDR solutions today could be much more severe.
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