Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.
Huge scale carbon sequestration is the only direct answer to the situation, anything else is just dealing with the symptoms or buying some time. It’s quite possible that even if we could drop to below 300ppm overnight we’d still have to ride out the climate inertia that’s already in play, big things don’t just stop on a dime.
The comments in this article list a lot of problems though, with the biggest one being the lack of any numbers to even evaluate anything. Can it scale? What’s the side effects of taking that biomass out of the cycle (and not just pure carbon blocks)? What’s the net energy usage per ton sequestered? What other finite resources will be needed instead of somewhere else?
I mean, sure…doing something is better than not, but only if it makes some difference. And I haven’t seen anything that begins to make a dent in the problem, especially when we aren’t even fixing the emissions themself, something we do have more control over. We should be doing everything that has a factor, but we’re so reluctant to change because we still think we have time to do it later.
Even at their price, it’s almost always cheaper to not emit in the first place. Once we’ve got emissions down near zero, tools like this can help to slowly get things back near where they were
Yes and get emissions down to zero needs to capture carbon at the emitters.
Can then be sequestrated. Or stored, a better term for large scale sequestration.
No, it means not burning stuff in the first place which is what’s far cheaper.
This is what utopia calls for.
But it will not happen anywhere near a timeline to conduct climate crisis changes.
Period.
Thats the same delusional argument as “take down half of humanity - problem solved”
Edit: it reads far more aggressive than I meant it. Ill apologize in advance.
I agree obsiously on the port if not burning stuff for nee things. But existing industry wont got away anytime soon.
The high cost of CCS means that almost all for-profit business faced with a choice between installing it and replacing their facilities with new ones which don’t burn stuff is going to end up doing the latter. There are a handful of exceptions where the high operating cost of CCS might make it worthwhile, but they’re a minority of what needs doing.
To be fair, there are things like concrete production where the process itself inherently produces large amounts of carbon where capture might help, but yes, in general if there is a choice between a process that produces carbon and a more expensive one that doesn’t the one that doesn’t will still be cheaper than capture.