https://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-01-06/environmental-outlook-a-new-push-for-carbon-removal
THE DIANE REHM SHOW Wednesday, Jan 06 2016 • 11 a.m. (ET)Environmental Outlook: A New Push For Carbon Removal Environmental Outlook: A New Push For Carbon Removal The Canadian company Carbon Engineering has a design for using giant fans to collect air and "scrub" it of carbon dioxide. CARBON ENGINEERING Last month’s climate agreement in Paris set the goal of keeping global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius. Most climate scientists say meeting this challenge won’t be possible with cutting emissions alone – that in the not-too-distant future we will have to remove carbon from the atmosphere to avoid the more devastating effects of climate change. Thoughts on how to do this range from the low tech – plant more trees – to the very high tech – suck the gas directly from the air and store it underground. For this month’s Environmental Outlook: the future of carbon removal Guests Noah Deich executive director, The Center for Carbon Removal Thomas Armstrong president, Madison River Group; former executive director of the United States Global Change Research Program within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Jane Long retired associate director for energy and environment, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory David Keith professor of applied physics and public policy, Harvard University; president, Carbon Engineering Transcript 11:06:53 MS. DIANE REHMThanks for joining us. I'm Diane Rehm. Last month, in Paris, world leaders pledged to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. The final agreement also described the need for greenhouse gas sinks or methods of removing carbon already in the atmosphere. This is the latest acknowledgement that simply decreasing output won't prevent devastating climate change. 11:07:24 MS. DIANE REHMFor this month's Environmental Outlook, the future of carbon removal. Here in the studio, Thomas Armstrong of the Madison River Group, a science policy consulting firm. From a studio in Berkeley, California, Jane Long, former associate director of energy and environment at Livermore National Laboratory and also Noah Diech of the Center For Carbon Removal. 11:07:52 MS. DIANE REHMI do invite you, as always, to be part of the program. Give us a call at 800-433-8850. Send us an email to [email protected]. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter. And thank you all for joining us. 11:08:12 MR. THOMAS ARMSTRONGThank you. 11:08:13 MS. JANE LONGThanks. 11:08:14 MR. NOAH DIECHThank you. 11:08:15 REHMGood to see you all. Noah, I know that your company is very, very focused on carbon removal. You must be very interested in what happened in Paris. Tell me what you believe were the most important factors related to carbon removal coming from those talks. 11:08:49 DIECHSure. So when I was in Paris, I think the most exciting thing to me was the headline of the goal that was set by the 195 countries who agreed to the Paris Agreement of not just aiming to keep climate change below 2C above preindustrial levels, but to aspire to go much below that and really aim for 1.5C, which I think the scientific literature is increasingly certain is what the real threshold for save climate change really is. 11:09:24 DIECHAnd this is a really important acknowledgement by leaders across the world that our response has to be very aggressive to climate change. 11:09:34 REHMAnd to you, Jane, how important do you believe the idea of carbon removal technologies are going to be in this whole effort to make sure to stay at or below 2 degrees Celsius in the atmosphere? 11:09:59 LONGWell, Diane, you know, the United Nations sponsors a group, the IPCC, to assess all the literature on climate change and to come up with projections from that literature about what's going to happen. And for the first time -- they do this every few years and for the first time, the assessments about what's going to happen in the future show that it's really not possible to, according to these models, not possible to stay below 2 degrees, not to mention 1.5 degrees without some kind of intervention in the climate, in other words, taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 11:10:37 LONGSo I think recognition of that fact in this Paris talks was very influential and is probably one of the most important things to come out of these assessments in a very long time. 11:10:49 REHMSo Jane, what you're saying is the idea of planting more trees or simply lowering emissions is just not going to do it. 11:11:01 LONGWell, lowering emissions was never going to do it. It's stopping emissions is what's going to do it because one of the most important facts about climate change is that pretty much all of the carbon dioxide that you put in the atmosphere either goes in the ocean or stays there. Some of it is taken up by plants, but basically, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to grow as long as you keep emitting. 11:11:28 LONGAnd so the problem gets larger as long as you keep emitting. So it's really stopping emissions. And then, all that stuff we've put up there since the 18th century is still there, still causing climate change and that's where we have to do something about it. 11:11:42 REHMThomas Armstrong, I know that you are the former executive director of the White House office of science and technology policies U.S. Global Change Research Program. You helped to create President Obama's climate change plan. Was there any mention then of carbon removal? Why or why not? 11:12:15 ARMSTRONGWell, Diane, the plan really focuses on being proactive on trying to reduce emissions, the first step as both Noah and Jane said, towards being successful in dealing with climate change. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which I was the executive director of, has a strategic plan and ironically it, right now, is in the process of being publically reviewed for revision. 11:12:40 ARMSTRONGAnd it does discuss in there carbon removal and climate engineering and the need for more research on both understanding what are the interdependencies of removing carbon across different fiscal and biological chemical parameters, but also what can we do beyond just removing carbon today moving into the future and realizing that this problem, as Noah said time and time again to many of us, that this is a gigaton problem. 11:13:10 ARMSTRONGThis is a problem of finding ways to deal with -- at the scale of the problem, removing gigatons of carbon. And just to put that into perspective, a gigaton of something is the weight of elephants, trunk to tail, from here to the moon and halfway back again. That's one gigaton. So we're talking about a lot of carbon that has to be removed and our program did start to deal with the issue of how do we do this in a scientifically viable and safe and effective way. 11:13:41 REHMHelp me to understand the moral hazard question involved here. 11:13:47 ARMSTRONGWell, I think everybody can chime in on this, but let me just tell you, from my perspective, part of the moral hazard and that is it's akin to a football game. That is, at the beginning of the game, you're very conservative and you have a very conservative approach because the risks are low, but as the game goes on and your team is down on the scoreboard, your propensity for taking a Hail Mary pass or onside kick, something risky, increases dramatically because you've waited so long in order to fulfill your game plan. 11:14:15 ARMSTRONGAnd I think that's part of the problem we're faced today is that we're looking into trying to do things in an engineering fashion regarding removing carbon before scientifically we may really understand the system thoroughly and all its interdependencies. And frankly, Diane, I think the problem is we're worried about doing something or implementing something that may have unintended consequences that are as big as the problem we're trying to fix. 11:14:39 REHMNoah Diech. 11:14:41 DIECHYeah. Diane, I would add that right now it's the new year. Many of us are making resolutions, some of us, to lose weight. And I think when you think about losing weight, your doctor says, you go on a diet and you exercise. And I think very analogously, the IPCC that Jane has mentioned has said, the planet needs to stop emissions and enhance carbon sinks. And it's not an either/or. You don't diet until you can't diet anymore and then start exercising. You do both and you ramp up both slowly. 11:15:13 DIECHAnd I think what we're realizing now is that there's another side of these equation, that we can't just cut emissions, that we need to figure out new strategies and that's what this idea of enhancing carbon sinks really is. 11:15:24 REHMSomebody's got to explain to me exactly what a carbon sink is. 11:15:32 LONGA carbon sink is when you take the carbon out of the atmosphere and you put it someplace that it's no longer in the atmosphere. So for example, if you grow a plant, it takes carbon dioxide out of the air and then if you allow that plant to grow and it dies and it begins to decay, that decay process, it becomes a carbon source. It emits carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. If you filter carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then you pump it into an old oil and gas reservoir and put it underground where it can't get into the air, then that oil and gas reservoir becomes a carbon sink. 11:16:14 REHMBut that's what... 11:16:14 LONGAnyplace that takes it up. 11:16:16 REHMIsn't that what you're worried about, Thomas? 11:16:19 ARMSTRONGYeah. And I want to be very clear that I completely agree with what Noah and Jane said before. We need to have a multifold strategy for dealing with this problem. It's very clear -- and I was one of the co-leads of the U.S. delegation to IPCC for working group 2 where we dealt with this issue. It's very clear from the science now that just dealing with emissions and the reduction, even the outright total reduction of emissions is not going to get us to a solution at 2 degrees C, let alone 1.5 degrees C. 11:16:48 ARMSTRONGBut I think that the issue we face here is first, understanding what are the technologies out there that will actually help us to remove gigatons of carbon from the active part of the system and being part of the sink means being inactive. It means you're no longer able to interact with the system, be it in geologic substrate, the deep part of the ocean, whatever it may be. So you're right, Diane. I think the dilemma here is making sure that we really have a scientific -- clear scientific understanding about the technologies before we implement them. 11:17:22 REHMAnd what could be the outcome of these huge carbon sinks? 11:17:29 ARMSTRONGSure, sure. I mean, you know, we've talked about geologic sequestration or geologic carbon capture storage for years and Department of Energy, the U.S. Geological Survey have been working on these things for a long time. As a geologist, I can tell you that some people's idea of a sealed sink is different than others and we just need to be clear that in the timeframe we're talking about that these things really do serve as sinks. 11:17:55 REHMThomas Armstrong, he's president of the Madison River Group. Short break here. After that break, we'll talk further, take your calls. Stay with us. 11:20:01 REHMAnd welcome back. We're talking about carbon removal from the atmosphere, discussion certainly at the Paris Climate Change Summit. And here is our first email from Lloyd in Winterville, North Carolina. He puts it flat out there. Is carbon capture real? It has seemed like fusion reactors, it's the future and always will be. Even more cynically, says Lloyd, it seems like a move to distract. Keep burning because eventually because eventually we will suck it all back and put carbon in the closet. And what do you think of that, Noah? 11:20:57 MR. NOAH DEICHWell, so I think that we certainly have actual carbon capture projects today. You can go put on a hard hat and go see projects that are taking carbon out of flu gas streams and power plants, even directly out of the air in some pilot facilities. So this technology works. The question is will anyone will pay for it. And I think that's the... 11:21:21 REHMHow expensive is it? 11:21:23 DEICHIt really depends on what your source is. Right now we're doing first-of-a-kind projects. So many of these projects cost a lot of money. There's a project in Mississippi at the Kemper Coal Power Plant that's cost over $5 billion to build just a single carbon capture installation. So projects like that make the price tag sound very, very high. But I think it's really important to keep in mind that if you looked at solar power just 30 years ago, the cost of those projects were 100 times or even greater what they are today. 11:22:06 DEICHAnd what we saw with solar simply has not happened with carbon capture, where we've built projects, and we've provided incentives for industry to learn how to do these effectively. And I think it's not just carbon capture on fossil energy but carbon capture on renewable energy, either through biomass or through direct air capture, as well. We simply have not seen enough projects to understand how much it will really cost. 11:22:34 REHMAnd Jane, here's a question for you from Vicky in Dallas, Texas. She says, geological carbon sequestration, have we learned nothing from burying hydraulic fracturing waste? 11:22:53 LONGWell, hydraulic fracturing waste is actually not a bad analogy for some of the issues that take place in storing carbon dioxide in the geological formations underground. What happens when you pump waste or pump any fluid, and in the case of carbon dioxide you compress it until it's a fluid to put it underground, what happens when you do that is if you keep pumping it underground, you increase the pressure underground, and that can open faults and allow them to slip and cause an earthquake. 11:23:26 LONGBut the fact is that when you set up a carbon sequestration project, you wouldn't do it in a way that would cause that problem. First of all, you need to characterize the geologic system carefully to understand that you're not near earthquake faults, and you need to control the pressures. And one way to control the pressures is to pump water out of the formations at the same time that you're pumping carbon dioxide into the formations. So this is not an unsolvable problem. It does requirement management, and one of the highlights of this whole problem is that we are talking about learning how to manage better, and that's the critical issue. 11:24:03 LONGWe can't just do these things willy-nilly, and clearly, for example, disposal of oil field waste, waste waters coming up with the oil in Oklahoma, has been causing earthquakes because people have been injecting it near faults, and we shouldn't be doing that. 11:24:20 REHMAnd the question is how clearly those faults can be identified before you even begin such a project. I mean, there are literally hundreds of earthquakes going on in Oklahoma, where in the past there have been four or maybe five a year, and now already hundreds. 11:24:45 ARMSTRONGIronically a lot of those earthquakes or small disharmonic tremors are being caused by either the injection of fluids into the substrate or their removal through, you know, what we call human-induced or anthropogenic processes. So there's sort of an irony there. But the point is still well taken, and I think again Jane described this very effectively, that at the end of the day, the science needs to be done, and we're not doing this in a willy-nilly fashion. We're trying to understand and control the environment while we conduct these experiments. 11:25:16 ARMSTRONGAs Noah said, there's a lot of implementation already going on across the country. I think carbon capture is a proven technique, a proven implementation. The question is can you get enough out, or can you get enough into the ground to make it really tractable. And second, a problem that we've dealt with when I was at U.S. Geological Survey, is can you also transport the carbon to the place where you can actually put it in the ground because where you emit the carbon isn't the same place as where you might effectively store it. 11:25:48 REHMDo you have to solidify that carbon before you can transport and store it? 11:25:55 ARMSTRONGI don't really know the details, to be honest with you. I know that it's usually done in a fluid, and Jane may know more of the details, having worked on this before. But typically it's injected as a fluid back into the substrate. 11:26:09 LONGBut you're... 11:26:09 REHMAnd go ahead, Jane. 11:26:12 LONGBut your emailer, you know, is correct that this is an issue, and the question is really, when we start to think about the scale of this problem, where we have essentially -- Tom talked about the elephants on the way to the moon, well, that was one gigaton. We've emitted and more or less have to deal with something like 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. And so you're really talking about first of all not making that problem bigger, so you want to stop emitting, and then secondly getting rid of the problem that we're -- we've already bought. 11:26:50 LONGSo it's not quite like the football game we bought -- we bought a bad score, I guess maybe is the way to put it. But we -- you know, so if you think, well, maybe over some period like 100 or 200 years, we're going to be wanting to get rid of that pollution we already have in the atmosphere, then we're talking about, you know, doing tens of gigatons every year, pulling out tens of gigatons every year. And that is -- that's not going to be solved by any one technique. I just want to re-emphasize this. 11:27:23 LONGSo for example in geologic storage, we have a lot of depleted oil reservoirs, and they're under-pressured because we took the oil out. And so we could put a lot of carbon dioxide in there, and maybe for the next few decades it could be a really, really good solution to help us move along. But maybe geologic storage to solve this whole problem is not the answer. So there -- but what's really important about that part of the topic is that it's not enough to take it out of the atmosphere. You have to put it someplace. And if we can't put it underground, we've got to start thinking about where else we can put it, and that is -- that's a research question of just absolute importance, where can it go and not get back into the atmosphere. 11:28:09 REHMAnd? 11:28:10 DEICHAnd I think that's the piece that actually has the most traction, especially in Paris and associated conversations, which is how do we put carbon back in soils and in forests and in ecosystems that our modern, industrial, agricultural system actually emits a lot of carbon itself. This isn't just an energy sector problem. So how do we start to think about the myriad new techniques that we can encourage farmers to use across the globe to start to build up those soil carbon stocks, which certainly aren't as secure as deep underground storage, but they can provide us with an important buffer, and they can remain in the soil for decades, if not centuries, too, which will be incredibly important because this is an all-of-the-above type of challenge. 11:29:02 REHMI guess my question would be, what about the potential of volatility to that much stored carbon dioxide? Are there concerns about that, Thomas? 11:29:17 ARMSTRONGSure, there are always concerns about the volatility of something that you put into the ground that wasn't there before. 11:29:23 REHMExactly. 11:29:24 ARMSTRONGIt's really taking an equilibrium environment and providing disequilibrium to the system. But... 11:29:32 REHMI would put it more simply, messing with nature. 11:29:37 ARMSTRONGWell, we already messed with nature. As Jane said, we've got a lot of catching up to do. We were given a 30 -- the other team was given a 35-point spot over us in this football game, and we've got a long ways to go. But I would say on the volatility issue, like any other issue regarding the science, that this is exactly why we need to conduct the science. Every geologic environment is different and unique in its own way. So there's no one size fits all. We really need to understand, very systematically, what we're doing with this carbon, where it's going to be stored. 11:30:09 ARMSTRONGAnd I agree with what Noah said. It's got to be a multi-path portfolio. There's no one silver bullet in this. It's got to be all these different technologies working together. 11:30:18 REHMAll right, and joining us now is David Keith. He's professor of applied physics at Harvard. He's president of Carbon Engineering, a start-up company developing industrial-scale technologies for direct air capture of CO2. David Keith, welcome. 11:30:42 MR. DAVID KEITHHi there, thanks for having me. 11:30:44 REHMTell us about your company and exactly -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
