2. Using CO2 to make fuels is at its pilot stage. The way it works is actually standard high school chemistry (horrific flashback warning ?).
Fuels are hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are called hydrocarbons because they have hydrogen and carbon 🙂
CO2 has carbon, but not hydrogen. So if you add hydrogen to CO2, then you can get hydrocarbons (fuels).
Theoretically simple, right? And fuels don’t have to last for centuries (unlike CO2-based concretes) so testing and safety regulations can be looser.
But again you wonder, “What’s the catch???” ?
- The problem is that it takes a lot of energy to get hydrogen to make fuels. You usually have to split big molecules (like water or natural gas) into smaller hydrogen atoms using lots of electricity.
- Also, building new fuel refineries costs billions of dollars, just like concrete factories.
- But the biggest issue is that fuels release CO2 back into the atmosphere when they’re burned. We just don’t know how much yet, since the work in the industry is only at a pilot stage.
?: CO2-based fuels will create fewer emissions than fossil fuels, but will never be ‘carbon-negative’.
It’s kind of like you’re trying to help the tree branch by dulling the blades of the saw. But you’re not really stopping the crazy humans sawing away faster and faster each year ?
3. CO2 to grow food is at the very early pilot stage.
Now, I know what you’re thinking… “Uhhhh, hello? What about plants???”
Yes, using CO2 to grow plants gets us food. ? But plants use a lot of land, use a lot of water, grow slowly, and leave non-edible materials besides food. We want: “CO2 in, wait one week maximum, and get ONE food product as output.” I actually only know of three companies working on this.
They work by feeding CO2 to either A) micro-organisms in bioreactors or B) aquatic organisms like kelp/algae (little land or freshwater needed)! The food these approaches generate range from fishmeal (food for seafood ?), human protein-alternatives, or algae-based products.
I wish I could tell you what the upsides/downsides of this technology are, but it’s just SO early stage that there isn’t enough research about it out there. ?This is actually part of a big list of CCUS technologies where SO much more REPLICABLE research is needed…
?: There isn’t enough research to tell if CO2 utilisation for food production is feasible. Other big words with little research: biochar, enhanced weathering, and ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (details)
Existing Solution D: Jumble of complex monitoring research ?
Last, last existing solution! I promise ?
This one’s all about monitoring. And by monitoring, I mean measuring how you do X instead of just doing X. Monitoring is especially important for verifying CO2 is captured and stored.
And it’s hardest when this capture and storage happens over a large geographic area. (Ex: It’s hard to monitor a forest capturing CO2 vs. a capture unit at a power plant.) The reason for this is intuitive: it’s hard to install a sensor on every tree in a forest to measure how much CO2 it captures. Versus installing one sensor on a carbon capture unit in a factory smokestack.
Here are two approaches to fix this issue:
1. Remote forest monitoring is unlocking more possibilities than ever where it works! Basically, remote monitoring skips installing local sensors or having local workers check in on the health of individual trees. Instead, it uses satellite imaging data to monitor CO2 capture, forest growth, forest canopy density, and so on.
But you guessed it! There’s a catch…
Remote monitoring data isn’t available in many parts of the world. Especially for datatypes like LiDAR that are expensive to collect— in fact, the largest forestry databases don’t have ANY LiDAR data on Brazil: home to the largest forest on Earth. ?
But that’s not all…
Carbon capture monitoring processes have to be approved by either governments or ‘carbon offset market registries’. (People who let companies capture X tonnes of CO2 for $Y). BUT, carbon registries are global and only approve monitoring processes that work for ALL types of forest (2.5.1.5)
SO ?
- If there’s no data for a certain forest type in a certain location, you can’t create remote monitoring techniques for that forest.
- If a technique doesn’t work for all forests, that technique won’t be accepted by formal carbon registries.
- If that technique won’t be part of registries, these monitoring techniques have much lower adoption.
Still, maybe individual governments might decide to use these techniques via their own national laws? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
?: To scale, monitoring techniques must be standardised. To be standardised, they must work everywhere. A single inconvenient geographic location can mess that up.
It’s like we have an amazing guard dog that could alert us to any branch-sawing baddies! But we can’t use it because we don’t know if it can smell that one bit of bark on the end of the branch ?
2. Carbon storage monitoring is reducing manual tests that take a long time to run. It looks at a few key datapoints:
- Data about the underground well. For example, the temperature or pressure at the bottom of the well.
- Data about the CO2 in the underground well. Like monitoring if any CO2 is escaping from cracks in underground rock.
Both these types of data are hard to collect. To measure data at the bottom of a well, you have to put sensors hundreds of metres underground. As you can imagine, this is costly and hard to maintain. ? And monitoring CO2 already stored underground means we need to see through underground rock.
How do you see through rock? You don’t… you listen! Basically, you create acoustic vibrations that go through underground rock. These are created by slamming a big ram into the ground a bunch of times ?
I know… it sounds like a fun job!
But in reality, it’s pretty boring. Just a bunch of paperwork to get permission to buy expensive equipment. ? That’s why researchers are working on simplifying this process a lot! One of the biggest improvements is just permanently putting acoustic vibration-sensors underground. That way, they can be reused instead of getting a big smashy ram to slam the ground every time you want to run a test ?
Here’s a video with helpful visuals:
Researchers claim approaches like these can be up to 75% cheaper than traditional carbon storage monitoring! Still, this doesn’t address the largest costs of carbon storage (insurance costs and safety deposits).
Good job! You made it! ? I’ll stop with the existing solutions here. (Though you KNOW there are more out there that I’m cutting A) for time and B) because they involve intolerable levels of chemistry ?)
