Sucking up greenhouse gases to prevent climate change
Plus, the bug apocalypse, using hair to fight oil spills, and kites that generate electricity
I’ll cut straight to the chase. We have a very narrow window to slow down climate change.
The world's remaining carbon budget is around 510 gigatons of CO2. That's it. We're currently releasing 59 gigatons per year.
Here's the math on current emissions:
+24 gigatons - energy
+12 gigatons - industry
+9 gigatons - agriculture
+8 gigatons - transportation
+6 gigatons - nature
= 59 gigatons per year.
The world is going to miss the chance to keep rising temperatures limited to the Paris target of 1.5 degree C by 2030. That's only eight years.
In a conference call on Monday, Diána Ürge-Vorsatz, vice-chair of the IPCC working group that drafted a 3000-page report on what needs to be done to prevent climate change said, “Carbon dioxide removal is essential to achieve net zero.”
This is an admission of collective failure. We’ve known about the causes of climate change for decades now, but have failed to act. But it’s too late to turn back the clock on carbon dioxide we shouldn’t have emitted years ago when we knew better. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage will be necessary to meet the Paris targets of a maximum of 1.5-2.0 degrees C of warming.
Can we just suck greenhouse gases out of the environment to prevent a climate crisis?
Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered.
On Wednesday April 20, from 6-7 pm (Indian time) I’ll be moderating a session with Prof. Vikram Vishal of IIT-Bombay who will be talking about how carbon capture, utilization, and storage fit in to India’s net zero goals.
I’m incredibly excited and hope you can join. You can find details and register for free here.
If you want a brief article on details of carbon capture I’d like to direct you to the column I wrote for Hindustan Times a few days ago here. There’s a lot of information here, but here are some of the main points.
There isn't a single situation where it costs less in terms of money and energy to pull carbon dioxide than it does to prevent emitting it in the first place. But we will still need to figure out how to remove CO2 at scale because there's so much we emitted (and are emitting).
Point capture is the process by which you pull out carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks burning fossil fuels. It's already being put to use. Direct air capture is vacuuming up air and filtering out carbon dioxide and is still early stages. However this is about to change.
The good news is that the chemistry of sucking up carbon dioxide from the air is really basic high-school chemistry. But thermodynamics is not your friend. Pulling carbon dioxide from air is like running the burning of fossil fuels in reverse. Lots of energy required, and it’s a costly process so far. That’s partly because the amount of CO2, while rising is still low.
Carbon dioxide still only makes up only a fraction of air. Direct air capture plants run huge fans that suck in a lot of air and force it onto liquid or solid contactors that filter out carbon dioxide. Then, carbon dioxide is removed from the filters so they can be used again. A massive amount of energy is required to run the fans and to regenerate the materials for reuse. Passive flow of air would draw less energy, but it would be too slow to capture sufficient carbon dioxide to make a big dent.
What do we do with the CO2 we’ve pulled out of the air?
Capturing carbon dioxide is only half the battle since it needs to be concentrated and put to some industrial use or geologically stored somewhere where it can’t escape back into the atmosphere.
There still isn't much demand for products made from CO2 because it is cheaper to use fresh fossil fuels but that could soon change. Nature has just published a very good report on this topic.
Another place we could shove millions of tons of CO2 is underground or underwater in depleted oil and gas fields. There's a tax credit for companies in the US that runs at about $50 per ton of CO2 captured, but there should also be some form of a carbon tax also. The price point for adoption of direct air capture is probably going to be around <$100 per ton of CO2 (it is achievable at scale).
The U.S. will spend $3.5B on CO2 removal by direct air capture technologies at scale.
In fact, from startups to established companies, climatech is big business.
Last year, Larry Fink, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, predicted that addressing the climate crisis would become the next big business opportunity. “It is my belief that the next 1,000 unicorns — companies that have a market valuation over a billion dollars — won’t be a search engine, won’t be a media company, they’ll be businesses developing green hydrogen, green agriculture, green steel and green cement,” said Fink.
I’ll be sure to keep you posted on any new developments.
Where have all the insects gone?
Now, for something different and alarming. We have witnessed a 75% decline in insect numbers in the past 50 years. With pesticide use, habitat destruction, and climate change, insect losses will only accelerate
My column this week in Hindustan Times is about this topic.
Insects represent the greatest diversity of animals.
Of 2.5 million species of plants and animals, around 40% are insects. 400,000 beetle species have been described, but there are many more. In fact, there may be a new species of beetle waiting to be discovered in your garden.
Three months ago, the world lost EO Wilson, one of the world’s leading biologists. Wilson was an expert on sociobiology and ants, and a champion of biodiversity. In 2016, Wilson wrote the book, Half Earth: The Struggle to Save the Rest of Life. The book has served as a rallying cry for conservationists to preserve more of the planet. It is unfortunate but true that a human-driven sixth mass extinction is occurring on earth right now. It is possible that the earth contains tens of millions of different species of plants and animals of which, one million or more are faced with extinction.
When most people think of preserving animals, they think of large animals like tigers and pandas. When they imagine bringing back extinct species, they think of mammoths or perhaps some species of dinosaur. Insects do not captivate the imagination of most people in positive ways.
In Bengal, farmers have resorted to hand pollinating squash plants. In much of China, there are no insect pollinators left. Bee colonies have collapsed globally. Populations of the monarch butterfly are dwindling in North America.
Without insects, the world will lose a sizeable number of flowers and important crop plants. There will be no chilli peppers, cucumbers, pumpkins, coffee, tomatoes, or chocolate.
To learn more about this topic I recommend reading Prof. Dave Goulson’s amazing new book, Silent Earth.
Using hair to soak up oil spills.
This story is a bit insane. In 1989, a Phil McCrory, a barber in Alabama was looking at images of oil-soaked otters after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and his attention shifted to hair. 95% of his garbage was hair. How good was hair at picking up oil?
Incredibly good, as it turns out. Clean hair picks up anywhere from three to nines times its weight in oil.
The next part of the story is another weird coincidence. McCrory's hair salon was near the Ames NASA research center. In fact, many of his customers worked for NASA. So they performed experiments on human hair first by bunching up human hair and then creating hair mats.
Also, as you know from your lifelong experience, oil doesn't enter the hair follicle but coats the surface. What we scientists call adsorption. Anyway, McCrory got in touch with an engineering professor at Texas A&M and they ran more experiments on the properties of human hair. He's got a couple of patents and has licensed out his technology. Hair mats are used to fertilize plants and work well to clean up oil spills. They can be cleaned up and reused multiple times, though they've never been deployed for that purpose large scale.
Hairmatmakers have been installed in Brazil, Chile, Japan, Finland and some other countries. Another purpose of hairmats is to prevent oil spills from cars and trucks from getting into stormwater drains.
There’s one downside though. Once hair soaks up oil, it gets weighed down and can be difficult to remove and clean up for reuse.
What else I’ve read:
Here’s a wonderful article on using kites to generate electricity.
This is probably the best Q&A on the latest IPCC report.
Saul Griffith’s Electrify is a provocative book that I enjoyed reading. I don’t agree with everything he’s written here, but perhaps that a discussion for another newsletter or column. ;)
Endnotes…
A note that the audiobook of COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction is now available. Thanks for your support of the book.
There’s a famous exchange between G.B. Shaw and Winston Churchill that I’d like to end on.
“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one."
— George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)
"Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one."
— Churchill's response
If you cannot not possibly read my first book, I hope you read the second, if there is one.
Stay well!
Anirban