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Tidal Pump

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Robert Tulip

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Tidal Pump

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The tidal pump is a proposal I have submitted to the MIT Climate Collaboration Energy-Water Nexus Challenge, as a first step to enable commercial implementation of global carbon dioxide removal as a practical method to stabilise the climate.

The Tidal Pump, now at proof of concept, aims to shift large volumes of liquid in the ocean at lowest possible cost using new technology.

The judges have described the proposal as "technically very interesting indeed", and have selected it as a semi-finalist.

Here are links to my response to Judge's Comments.

I would welcome comment or suggestions.
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Re: Tidal Pump

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Congratulations on the positive comments. I hope this sparks some interest and you gain collaborators.
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Interbane wrote:Congratulations on the positive comments. I hope this sparks some interest and you gain collaborators.
Thanks Interbane. Here are the MIT Judge Comments
Semi-Finalist Evaluation
Judges' Ratings (out of 5)
• Novelty: 3
• Feasibility: 3.8
• Impact: 4.3
• Presentation: 4.6

Judges' Comments
SUBJECT: Your proposal has been selected as a Climate CoLab Semi-Finalist!

Proposal: Tidal Pump
Contest: Energy-Water Nexus

Congratulations! Your proposal submitted to the Energy-Water Nexus contest has been selected to advance to the Semi-Finalists round.
You will be able to revise your proposal and add new collaborators if you wish, from July 1st until July 14, 2015 at 23:59pm Eastern Time.
Judges' feedback are posted under the "Evaluation" tab of your proposal and below. Please incorporate this feedback in your revisions, or your proposal may not be advanced to the Finalists round. We ask you to also summarize the changes that you made in the comment section of the Evaluation tab.
At the revision deadline listed below, your proposal will be locked and considered in final form. The Judges will undergo another round of evaluation to ensure that Semi-Finalist proposals have addressed the feedback given, and select which proposals will continue to the Finalists round. Finalists are eligible for the contest’s Judges Choice award, as well as for public voting to select the contest’s Popular Choice award.
Thank you for your great work and again, congratulations!

2015 Climate CoLab Judges


This proposal does a good job of presenting immediate actions that can be taken in regards to the energy-water nexus challenges. Overall, the proposal is very well formulated and key challenges well described. The end product focuses on using locally provided energy to generate the end products. Technically, what is being proposed here is very interesting indeed.

It would be helpful to see a diagram of the actual pump being proposed here. There can be more discussion about the issues and challenges that come with deep ocean processing of algae. This proposal is also lacking a conversation about the political or policy challenges that this project could face. More thought should be given about the location and implementation of this proposal. There are several factors to consider that should be fleshed out. Some include the benefits of using this pump in open water vs. a more controlled body of water, the environmental impact this may have on sea life or others (both good and bad). The issue of commercial viability is discussed, but this portion of the proposal can be cleaned up a bit. More details are needed regarding other pragmatic solutions that might alleviate the issue of commercial viability. There was far too much extraneous material in this one. The proposal needs to focus on the idea and how it would work as the technical aspects were unclear. The linkages to climate benefits from using the proposed technology need to be strengthened.
And here are the diagrams I have posted.

Image

Image
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Re: Tidal Pump

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How do you perform maintenance on the bladder if need be, when it's at the bottom of the ocean? What if you had a tether attached to the weight, and the bladder was near the surface? The weighted end could be attached to the top of the sandwich bellows, and the buoyed end could be attached to the bottom of the sandwich bellows. The bladder would obviously be in the middle of the bellows.

I know nothing about the rest of the design or anything. Just putting some thought into it in case I can help somehow. I like it.
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Interbane wrote:How do you perform maintenance on the bladder if need be, when it's at the bottom of the ocean?
If the inlet valve is closed on a rising tide, then the empty bladder can simply be winched to the surface for maintenance or replacement. I would expect to use materials robust enough not to spring a leak for ten years. Minor maintenance could use submersible robots. This method is only suitable on the continental shelf, not the abyssal plains which are most of the world ocean. Average ocean depth is four kilometres, but this system would only deploy in waters of up to 0.5 km deep, although it could use pipes at the edge of the continental shelf to raise nutrient rich water from much deeper as part of the algae production system.
Interbane wrote: What if you had a tether attached to the weight, and the bladder was near the surface? The weighted end could be attached to the top of the sandwich bellows, and the buoyed end could be attached to the bottom of the sandwich bellows. The bladder would obviously be in the middle of the bellows.
Sorry Interbane, you are making me feel like I imagine some readers feel when they read my concept here, rather bewildered. The bladder only works by being squeezed between the weight and the ocean floor to close, and then by the weight being lifted by the float to open. Your ideas are quite different from that and I don’t understand what you mean.

Here is a discussion from another board.
Wouldn't there be a turbine in your system? I can see the advantage of not having an open turbine, but not much more than that.
No, there is no turbine. It is straight displacement of liquid into a pipe.
If I did my math right, the displacement of a float the size of a supertanker will generate a bit more than 50kWh per foot of tide. Or about 10kW of power spread out for rising and dropping tides. (140M lbs displacement converted from foot pounds to watts)
That doesn't sound like much to me.
Lets check your calculation. Assume a supertanker is about 3 hectares (six acres) in size. Per foot of tide (or 0.3 metres) the displacement of the bladder in this example is about ten megalitres (~=acre feet) per tide. To lift one ML one metre requires 9.81 MJ of energy (source), or 2.7 kwH.

Therefore your figure here suggests this tidal pump would only lift the 10 ML by one inch, which is obviously trivial, and seems to me to be understating the physics by orders of magnitude.

My modelling rather suggests the entire 10 ML could be pushed into pipes which would fill whether they were horizontal or vertical, since the pressure inside and outside the pipe under the sea is the same. The distance of pumping would only be a function of the diameter of the pipe, friction etc, and the ability of the float to lift the weight.

Assuming the weight in my model is ten thousand tonnes, in your tanker-size example it would fully displace the water in the bladder beneath it on each falling tide, less friction. The question then is what size of buoyant pontoon is needed to lift a weight of 10,000 tonnes with a tide without sinking at all. The model I imagine is a floating bag of fresh water containing large sealed tanks of air.

ausmarinescience.com/marine-science-bas ... anography/ has a map of Australian tides showing that the proposed deployment location on the North West Shelf has a tidal range about 15 times greater than this one foot example.
I I am still concerned that in deep ocean tidal movement is sideways and not vertically. If in deep ocean you propose to anchor something to the bottom then the sideways motion could be used to pump water but I fear your vertical motion proposal will only work in coastal waters.
Good point. This system is relevant to continental shelf locations, not to the abyssal plains. The length of the anchor line would not be worth it for very deep waters and might not work at great depth due to stretching.

A map of world tides at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#/media/File: ... ituent.jpg shows that there are substantial coastal areas with high tidal range where use of vertical water motion as described in my proposal should be a cost-effective pumping method. Horizontal currents obviously have a lot of energy, but it looks to me that a turbine to harness this work would be more expensive and complicated. Such a turbine could well be a useful way to augment the main vertical motion system though.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Jul 08, 2015 3:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Tidal Pump

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Robert wrote:The bladder only works by being squeezed between the weight and the ocean floor to close, and then by the weight being lifted by the float to open. Your ideas are quite different from that and I don’t understand what you mean.
I meant the same thing more or less, but with the bladder near the ocean surface. Instead of a weight, you have an anchor. The anchor holds the top of the bladder(it would need to be rigid) from rising at all, by a tether that runs up through the middle. The float squeezes the bladder when it rises, by lifting up on the bottom(it would need to be rigid) as it pulls upward on a tether that runs down through the middle. Like an accordion rather than a whoopee cushion. Same pumping action, though the place where the tethers pass each other would need a bushing, so it would have a touch higher complexity. More parts to fail, but perhaps easier to maintain. The bladder could be a hundred meters from the surface, and the setup could work even with horizontal tidal movement.

Again, I'm just throwing thoughts out there in case it might spark an idea. I think what you're trying to achieve is great.
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Re: Tidal Pump

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I have revised my proposal in response to a range of expert comments.

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans ... Id/1320162
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Re: Tidal Pump

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I am in discussion about this proposal on two discussion boards, the Science and Technology board of the Cosmoquest Astronomy Forum, and the Google Geoengineering Group. Here is my latest response on the Google Group. Link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... ymKJrwbWaI

From: Robert Tulip
To: John Nissen
Cc: [email protected]; Michael Hayes; Richard Harley; Shane Bond>
Sent: Friday, 17 July 2015, 11:20
Subject: Re: [geo] Tidal Pump
John Nissen wrote : “Hi Robert, I'm sorry I've only just read the description [1], because I immediately jumped to the conclusion that its significance was as a champion for the use of algae for serious CDR, with potential to draw down more CO2 than being emitted while 'only' using one or two percent of the planet's ocean area. The pump itself is almost a distraction!”
RT: Many thanks John for your comments here. You are correct that the Tidal Pump is almost a distraction. I have focused on it in order to suggest a tangible incremental practical step towards the big idea of ocean based algae production to remove carbon dioxide. I met Australia’s CSIRO national algae biofuel experts, and this proof of initial technology concept approach was the process they suggested, which I agree with. Even if tidal pumping proves to be only part of the picture, I hope it kickstarts discussion of how large scale ocean based algae production can become possible using a range of pumping and other methods.
JN: “However Robert appears to want to take the CO2 from concentrated sources, such as coal-fired power stations, and use the algae to turn the CO2 into something else. Thus it is the carbon capture part of CCS and of commercial interest to FF companies. But it does not have a net effect of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere, as required both for reducing global warming and staying reasonably below the 2 degree C so-called safe limit, touted by IPCC, and for reducing ocean acidification.”
RT: In fact the main concentrated source that I suggest is the Gorgon Liquefied Natural Gas project which plans to geosequester 3000 tonnes of CO2 every day as part of its $50 billion investment, which is Australia’s biggest ever project. My reason for taking this approach is that if algae biofuel can be made profitable for the fossil fuel industry, it will present a critical path towards scaling up the technology to mine carbon from the air and sea.
JN: “I found this altercation between Michael Hayes and Robert in the comment section [2] particular illuminating: RT: Yes, I would love to see coal burning become ecologically sustainable through High Efficiency Low Emission technology linked to ocean based algae biofuel production to recycle all its produced carbon. We do have to massively raise the bar, as Michael puts it, to exclude all denialism and develop technology to make energy production ecologically sustainable. MH: “As to the end strategy of bringing the FF industry to the wonderfully idealistic paradigm shift of "turning their commercial interests, resources and skills to advantage for new sustainable technology.": There simply is no plausible indication within this proposal that Mr. Tulip's patented marine bag/tidal pump technologies, nor the stated end strategy can, nor will ever, cause, compel or lead the FF industry into a new 'kinder' profit motive.””
RT: Thanks John for drawing attention to this debate. I find it interesting that Michael links to NASA research on offshore membranes (OMEGA) but argues that use of plastic bags at sea is impractical. This is clearly a question in need of much more research. My suggestion of public private partnership is obviously one that will rankle with the more left wing end of the climate science community, but as noted above in my comments about Gorgon, I think it is the only way to achieve rapid results at scale. My perception is that debate on these topics often involves many unstated assumptions, which I suggest should be brought into the open.
JN: “I am all for algae to drawdown CO2, but they must take the CO2 out of the atmosphere (or out of solution in water) directly rather than from a concentrated source. And, if they also produce an edible end-product (e.g. fish) or can be converted to a soil improver (e.g. biochar), so much the better for feeding the world! Cheers, John [1] http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans ... Id/1320162 [2] http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans ... b/COMMENTS
RT: You are jumping to the end goal while ignoring the need for a practical way to get from here to there. Algae technology has to grow in stages, funded by commercial profit. That means use of concentrated sources. I had a similarly lively debate on that issue with an algae scientist who maintained that cost of and access to CO2 was a primary constraint. My point is that the scale of the Gorgon geosequestration plan provides an abundant free source of concentrated CO2, linked to strong capacity and incentives. Link to HELE coal plants is a possible subsequent step, as are direct air capture, etc. Coal and gas will be big whatever we do, and we should look to removing their waste carbon from the air and sea at point of emission by reprocessing into useful products using algae.
Thanks again and best regards
Robert Tulip
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Re: Tidal Pump

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Robert Tulip wrote:
have revised my proposal in response to a range of expert comments.

http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans ... Id/1320162
Good work here RT, Your proposal presents a reasonable process approach toward the cost to benefit of carbon farming.
I could only imagine the excitement of carrying a project of this nature from the desk to the field, you certainly have your work cut out for you and your team.
I agree that the FF industry may not appear on the surface to be overly enthusiastic with lets say cleaning up their own act, but they none the less are doing their own research into CC&S, Your proposal of a partnership with that very important industry is fundamental to the success of the overall challenge you've set before yourself.
I'm including a link here to an article from powermag.com discussing Saskatchewan Power powermag.com/canadas-saskpower-opens-ca ... -facility/ that demonstrates the desire of the FF industry to be proactive where environmental issues are a concern.
Cost is of course a primary driver with any innovation, The very fact that you have indicated in your proposal a partnership with some globe leading Gas Companies indicates the recognition within those industries toward balance sheet potentials of algae farming.
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My proposal has advanced to the finals of the MIT competition!
Please log in and vote for it here, your vote makes a big difference.
Taylor wrote:Good work here RT, Your proposal presents a reasonable process approach toward the cost to benefit of carbon farming.
Thanks Taylor, your phrase ‘carbon farming’ is not one that I had thought of, since I view the goal of extracting carbon from the air more as ‘carbon mining’. But that itself illustrates how language carries associations, with farming having a better image than mining. I view mining as a positive, since it is the basis for all metal technology and the greatest source of wealth, enabling agriculture to convert from subsistence to modern industrial scale and freeing people from toil and poverty and risk.
Taylor wrote: I could only imagine the excitement of carrying a project of this nature from the desk to the field, you certainly have your work cut out for you and your team.
Yes, this is shaping as a very exciting and transformational project, as can be seen from this picture of what it might involve
Image
Here are the judges’ comments:
CoLab wrote:Judges' Comments
SUBJECT: Your proposal has been selected as a Finalist! Congratulations! Your proposal in the Energy-Water Nexus contest has been selected to advance to the Finalists round. Be proud of your accomplishment – more than 350 proposals were submitted and only a very small number have been advanced through these two rounds of judging. As a Finalist, your proposal is eligible for the contest’s Judges Choice award, as well as the contest’s Popular Choice award, which is determined by public voting. All winners will be announced the week after the voting period ends, on September 12, 2015 at midnight Eastern Time. Both Judges Choice and Popular Choice will receive a special invitation to attend selected sessions at MIT’s SOLVE conference and present their proposals before key constituents in a workshop the next day, where a $10,000 Grand Prize will be awarded. A few select Climate CoLab winners will join distinguished SOLVE attendees in a highly collaborative problem-solving session. Some contests have additional prizes given by the contest sponsor.
We have attached the final judging comments below. Thank you for your work on this very important issue. We’re proud of your proposal, and we hope that you are too. Again, congratulations!

2015 Climate CoLab Judges

Combining ocean energy with algae production is an interesting topic. This revised proposal incorporates the judge comments well and brings forth an intelligible process for which algae farming can lead to a significantly positive impact on our environment. This proposal recognized the issue regarding commercial viability and does a good job at presenting possible solutions to that issue. The end product focus and using locally provided energy to generate the end products are welcome considerations.

Scaling this technology would appear to be a large challenge. More can be said though about commercial viability than what was presented. While it was noted that several entities will need to partner up in order to make this project more feasible, specifics would have been welcomed. For example, Australia was mentioned as a possible location for this project. What entities in Australia would help further this proposal? Any possible policy concerns for the Australian people/government? What possible scientific entity in Australia or elsewhere would take charge of the testing of the pump? I believe some of the portions of this proposal were too broad and specific mentions of groups or financiers would have made this proposal stronger. Think: who would have a legitimate stake in a project like this? Also, more discussion about the impact or safeguards for the pump in deep ocean waters would have been welcomed. What safeguards would be in place to present boats or sea life or people from interfering with the pump or being harmed by it. I understand that more research and tests need to be done, but there seems to be no mention of this in the proposal.
Taylor wrote: I agree that the FF industry may not appear on the surface to be overly enthusiastic with lets say cleaning up their own act, but they none the less are doing their own research into CC&S, Your proposal of a partnership with that very important industry is fundamental to the success of the overall challenge you've set before yourself.
I don’t think that carbon capture and storage makes any sense unless we split the CO2 molecule with a project on a scale of the Manhattan Project that split the atom 70 years ago, but in a way that works with nature rather than against it. ‘Splitting the molecule’ means converting CO2 into hydrocarbons and other valuable commodities, which means finding the energy to do that. As the judges said, combining ocean energy with algae production is an interesting topic.

The energy and resource industries have big problems with their social licence to operate, and even their commercial feasibility once climate externalities are factored in. Sanitation wasn’t solved by making people shit less, and nor will climate be fixed by making people use less energy, including fossil energy. We need a way to clean up the waste at the end of the pipe and turn it back into something valuable. That is entirely technically possible, so the energy industries can emulate Apple rather than Kodak.
Taylor wrote: Cost is of course a primary driver with any innovation, The very fact that you have indicated in your proposal a partnership with some globe leading Gas Companies indicates the recognition within those industries toward balance sheet potentials of algae farming.
I have not actually had any direct recent contact with gas companies, and I take the view that I still need to get my ideas very clear before such discussions would be ready to occur.

Here is a rather long comment I recently wrote which touches on some of the cost analysis questions.

Carbon Dioxide as Third Way
Noah Deich has drawn attention to Dr Tim Flannery’s excellent New York Times article, A ‘Third Way’ to Fight Climate Change, published on 23 July 2015, through a thoughtful response. I have followed Dr Flannery’s work for more than two decades and consider him to be among the most brilliant people alive, although I respectfully disagree with some conclusions in this article.

Dr Flannery notes that thinking on options for dealing with climate change is dominated by proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through a global agreement, and also to a lesser extent by proposals to increase albedo. In this extremely valuable and pioneering article Dr Flannery then defines a “third way” between these options which he says “is almost entirely neglected in political negotiations and public debate. It involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it or using it to create things we need.” Dr Flannery prophesies that Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) “will become a major focus of activity.”
The strategic complexity in Dr Flannery’s argument about CDR is seen in his conclusion that “it is critical that the main focus of the Paris meeting remain on reducing the burning of fossil fuels. There is therefore a moral hazard in urging action on the third way.” This ‘moral hazard’ argument, albeit caveated by Dr Flannery’s next point that there is also moral hazard in not proceeding, is that CDR reduces the incentive to reduce emissions, and may therefore endanger the path to climate stability. I explain here my view that this widespread opinion that CDR is dangerous is empirically false and strategically wrong.
CDR as a ‘third way’ is also discussed in the current US National Research Council Paper, linked in Noah Deich’s response, titled Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration. The NRC paper refers to climate mitigation and adaptation as first and second ways. But as Noah points out, CDR can in fact be a primary way to both mitigate and adapt by reducing climate impacts and enabling social change. Indeed, CDR has a far more practical theory of change than conventional proposed climate responses. My view, which provides the lens through which I analyse Dr Flannery’s argument, is that CDR through large scale ocean based algae production is the best way to mine carbon from the air, aiming for most of the mined carbon to be temporarily stored in the deep sea for later use. Rather than the language of “removal”, I prefer to speak in positive terms about carbon mining, viewing carbon as a valuable asset rather than a harmful waste product.
Dr Flannery notes that the carbon content of anthropogenic emissions is 10 gigatons (GT) per year. Putting this in context, the 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere weighs three trillion tonnes and contains 800 GT of carbon at molecular proportion of 12/44. The stable level of CO2 over the last ten thousand years was 280 ppm, about 30% or 245 GT of carbon less than now. We have to mine and store all this excess carbon to stabilise the climate. Mining a net 25 GT of carbon from the air each year for ten years would restore climate stability by removing this excess 30% that human industry has added.
One way to conceptualise this scale is to consider GT-size containers of carbon stored in the deep ocean, at water depth of around five kilometres. A cylinder of 1.2 kilometre diameter and one kilometre height contains a billion cubic metres, which as water weighs a gigaton. Depending on its form, one GT of carbon is around this cubic kilometre (teralitre) order of magnitude.
If CO2 can be converted to stable useful forms of carbon via algae, only a tiny fraction of the vast empty abyssal plains of the world ocean would be needed as storage sites for all the carbon we have shifted out of the crust since the industrial revolution. There is plenty of space at sea for such a scale of operation. The ocean is on average four kilometres deep and is 361 million square kilometres in size. Submerged containers can be made of plastic, supported by the surrounding water. Building 50 such teralitre size carbon containers each year would enable business-as-usual by the fossil fuel industry while achieving climate stability within a decade from commencement, privately funded. And all that carbon would be banked in useful form as a long term real store of value.
Dr Flannery puts CDR in the context of the international climate change conference in Paris, whose goal is to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2° C. He notes that this political process holds little prospect of success. It is obviously true that emission reduction alone has no prospect of delivering climate stability since it only slows the speed at which things get worse. Unfortunately, for reasons raised later in Tim’s essay, this basic fact regarding the uselessness of emission reduction cannot cut through climate politics due to a pervasive failure of quantitative thinking. If the emission reduction targets at the Paris conference aimed to reduce carbon growth by 20%, around two billion tonnes per year, that would still mean adding 8 GT to an already dangerous mix. That 2 GT emission reduction scale is less than 10% of the need, which is to mine 25 GT of carbon from the air every year. Further, the Paris process has no prospect of success because the major premise of its theory of change is the need for conflict with existing energy systems. Emission reduction is nowhere near the scale needed for climate stability, produces needless rancour and uncertainty, and in fact is a distraction from the real climate agenda of carbon mining.
Dr Flannery then misstates the scale of the CDR challenge, calling “removing a gigaton a task of planetary proportions.” The planetary task is to remove 30% of the carbon in the air, but the gigaton scale mentioned here by Tim is only 0.4% of the required planetary scale of 245 GT. Mining one GT is a task of teralitre proportions, which strictly speaking is actually far smaller than planetary scale. The ocean holds 1.3 billion GT of water, so Tim’s ‘planetary’ scale here is too small by nine orders of magnitude, just considering the volume of the ocean.
He gives the example of planting enough trees to capture a single GT of atmospheric carbon in forests as big as New York State every year. This point simply shows that growing trees can only ever be a marginal activity for carbon mining at planetary scale, which requires annual removal of up to 50 GT. Much bigger and faster methods are needed than forestry.
The ocean is more than twice as big as the land, covering 71% of the planet, and has vast unused areas, with the growing ocean desert regions now more than seven times the size of the USA 48 states. Algae grows a hundred times faster than trees and could be bred to grow even faster. Algae superiority to forests on land as an industrial carbon sink is a no-brainer.
Unlike existing biofuels, algae at sea does not take up space that has a better use. Algae production has co-benefits of generating fishery production, protecting the biodiversity of coral reefs and other endangered ecosystems by removing acid, heat and nutrient from the water, delivering useful carbon-based commodities, and presenting a rapid path to climate stability through profitable abatement. Growing algae in industrial factories at sea would be ecologically safe and beneficial. Such farms could be sunk temporarily during storms, and any released algae caused by damage such as lightning strikes would simply be eaten by the ocean food chain. The material used to build algae farms would be sourced from their own product, and would itself serve as a carbon sink, so can be made thick enough to be robust at sea.
Dr Flannery notes that CDR using either plants or chemicals faces limits of available space and energy. However, the biosphere limit of industrial scale production of microalgae at sea is vast. Consider the hypothetical yield target of algae producing a tonne of dry matter (50% carbon) per hectare per day, a conceivable yield if varieties suited to an enclosed high CO2 environment can be cultivated. The area required to mine 25 GT of carbon each year at this hypothetical high productivity is only 0.4% of the world ocean.
Dr Flannery mentions biochar (charcoal fertilizer) as a method whereby “much of the carbon content is stabilized for storage”, an industry he says is now “less than 1,000 tons … each year.” Biochar could be one of the best carbon sequestration methods, as a major use of processed algae for fertilizer. He mentions a claim (by Ocean Foresters) “that covering 9 percent of the oceans with seaweed farms would capture the equivalent of all of humanity’s current carbon emissions”, but offers the cautions that “despite the fact that China already has more than 500 square kilometers of kelp farms, there is no proof that [global scaleup] is possible. And just where all of that captured carbon might be stored remains a problem.” This 9% figure is based on macroalgae, whereas microalgae grown in transparent plastic photobioreactor ponds is far more efficient. Once the Chinese put their minds to piping all their emissions from High Efficiency Low Emission Coal Fired Power Stations into algae farms at sea, these problems of scale will be rapidly solved, while also removing the health scourge of urban air pollution.
Of course there is no proof that growing algae at large scale at sea is possible, since no one has tried. That is like saying in 1903 that there was no proof a heavier-than-air vehicle could fly. We are at the Kitty Hawk stage with algae. The exponential speed of technological progress means algae yield of a dry tonne per hectare per day could be delivered within a decade, an amount 50 times the cited seaweed kelp study. The captured algae could be piped to the abyssal plains of the world ocean for container storage and later reused for a wide range of stable commodities such as bitumen, plastic and biochar, as well as food and fuel and fisheries, using exciting new technologies such as hydrothermal liquefaction. The emerging high carbon economy offers prospect of universal abundance and stability.
In his excellent tour of the CDR horizon, Dr Flannery then mentions the range of chemical methods of capturing CO2, noting that in the cement industry alone “around a gigaton of carbon could be captured per year.” Other new technologies he mentions include olivine, direct air capture (artificial trees), and ways to transform CO2 into plastics or hydrocarbons. All these carbon mining methods should be the subject of large scale commercial research and development, and if proven profitable and safe, deployment.
The point about the 1 GT scale of the cement industry is important to help us appreciate the task at hand. For comparison, if road building materials could hypothetically use one tonne of mined carbon per linear metre in bitumen, the ten gigatonnes of carbon emitted each year would be enough to tar ten million kilometres of road. But that massive length of hypothetical roading illustrates Dr Flannery’s next point, “where to put the stupendous volumes of carbon or CO2 they would capture.”
I completely disagree with the agenda of geological storage. CO2 geosequestration is useless as a method to stabilise the climate, little more than an expensive stopgap. Bulk CO2 is worthless except for its contained carbon, which can be separated using solar energy to grow algae. The oxygen has to be stripped off the carbon molecule and replaced with hydrogen, as can be done most easily through algae production, in order to make carbon storage viable commercially. As hydrocarbon, world strategic algae biofuel reserves would require building of about 50 containers per year, each a cubic kilometre in size, something that could be technically feasible at the bottom of the sea.
Dr Flannery notes the high costs and early stage of carbon storage proposals. Algae conversion of CO2 to other products could turn carbon storage from a cost to a benefit, as a source of profit, making these costs of existing sequestration methods irrelevant.
Dr Flannery now gets to the political point flagged above, his demand that people burn less oil, coal and gas, saying “It is critical that the main focus of the Paris meeting remain on reducing the burning of fossil fuels.” The likelihood of reducing fossil emissions is small, given the economic drivers for fossil fuel expansion, the relative power imbalance between science and commerce in politics, and the failure of emission reduction advocates to deliver a coherent theory of change. Far from being a “critical” factor, as Dr Flannery asserts, reducing emissions should rather be viewed as an obsolete goal that should be dethroned from its leading place in climate politics. Dr Flannery, with most of the climate movement, is just wrong in his next assertion: “There is therefore a moral hazard in urging action on the third way.” Changing the emission debate is not a risk, it is an essential task and opportunity. The real “moral hazard” in this debate is that emission reduction advocates will hold the world hostage to an unfeasible strategy for climate stability. Dr Flannery gets it completely right when he then qualifies his concern by making the key argument that deserves to be the Paris podium banner: “Knowing how long it takes to get new technologies to scale, and how soon we are likely to need them, there is also a moral hazard in ignoring the urgent need for immediate investment.”
Climate stability can only be achieved through large scale mining of carbon from air and sea. The starting point should be converting carbon from concentrated sources such as the CO2 co-produced with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). This initial goal will establish a critical path to develop technology for extracting carbon profitably from ambient air. Rather than geosequestering the CO2 from LNG, as now planned at projects such as Gorgon at the scale of 3000 tonnes of carbon per day, this CO2 should form the initial feedstock for a big new carbon industry. We need to abandon the language of a low carbon economy and decarbonisation, and instead look to how carbon can be managed through new technology. Sanitation was not delivered by reducing defecation, and nor can climate stability be achieved through emission reduction. The task is to convert the waste into income.
Dr Flannery says “a reasonable assumption” would aim to mine 40% of current emissions each year by 2050. That is not a reasonable assumption, it is hopelessly pessimistic and a basis for high risk of crossing dangerous climate thresholds. We need far more ambitious targets on the scale of 40 GT per year, ten times the amount Dr Flannery nominates, and twice as fast.
I came across Dr Flannery’s article courtesy of Noah Deich, who is the top world thinker on CDR. I conclude these comments by responding to Noah’s questions about the “third way” framing of the debate. I respectfully disagree with Noah’s attempt to position CDR within the existing mitigation paradigm, since the ambitions for CDR should totally recast the mitigation agenda.
‘Third Way’ thinking has a difficult political history. It enabled Tony Blair to rule Britain for a decade, by using the instrument of the political left (the Labour Party) to deliver the objective of the political right (economic growth). A comparable mixing of categories is essential to the recasting of climate politics, especially if CDR combines ability to continue business-as-usual in fossil fuels with a rapid and feasible method to deliver climate stability. That would use the instruments of the right to deliver the goals of the left. Such a mix undercuts Noah’s key point, that we should not be “painting carbon removal as an alternative to GHG emission abatement.” CDR on annual scale of 25 GT is vastly bigger than emissions, and would enable business-as-usual in coal, gas and oil, while putting these industries on a path to technological market transformation.
Carbon mining cuts the ground from the climate goal of decarbonisation. It is a new paradigm. The main target should be to mine 25 GT of carbon from air and sea every year. Emission reduction targets should be abandoned, except in the case of piping emissions to algae farms instead of releasing them to the air. Noah speculates that a third way frame for debate could mean “policymakers might see carbon removal as a distraction to prolong business-as-usual production of GHG emissions, which it clearly is not.” This term “clearly” is a triumph of politics over evidence. We should prolong business-as-usual as the main way to deliver universal abundance through electricity and cars, and to get the resources, skills, capital, will and dynamism of the established energy industry on side with carbon mining. Climate stability can only be delivered in the real economic and political and social and environmental context of the free market, not as a conflicting narrative.
Noah’s goal, to “encourage deeper emission reduction pledges than would otherwise occur” is actually useless and even harmful, putting tokenism in the place of action. Governments have injected themselves into the centre of the climate debate with their mirage-like promises. The real results will be delivered from private investment and capitalist know-how, working in partnership with government regulators. Governments should get out of the way and facilitate private delivery of carbon mining by the energy industry.
While suggesting a different path for CDR, I see Tim Flannery and Noah Deich as visionary leaders for our planetary predicament, and warmly welcome their contributions to this central global debate. My views and calculations here are solely my own, and are offered in a purely contestable spirit of evidence-based logic, targeted to mobilise public private partnership for rapid progress towards climate stability.
Robert Tulip
International Energy and Resources Taskforce
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Australian Government
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Thu Aug 06, 2015 7:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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