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February 9, 2007

Cash for Climate Change Cessation Concepts

Forget grant money, scientists now have some monetary incentives to help solve the problem of how to manage the massive amounts of carbon emissions we humans spew into the atmosphere every year. Now, a rich Brit has thrown down the greenhouse gas gauntlet in hopes of helping encourage research towards solutions to the climate conundrum facing the world today

British tycoon Sir Richard Branson on Friday announced a $25 million prize for a way to extract a billion tons or more of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

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The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years — with $5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining $20 million at the end.

More At: MSNBC: $25 million climate prize offered by Branson

According to Wikipedia, the major culprits of the man-made greenhouse gases breakdown as follows: 72% carbon dioxide, 18% methane, 9% nitrous oxide and 1% other gases. So it makes sense that the challenge targets the carbon dioxide - its the largest problem, and so it should have the biggest "bang" for the buck, if you will.

The carbon dioxide comes from a wide variety of sources – construction and power stations being some of worst. Your average 1000 megawatt coal-fired power station produces around 6 million tons of CO2 per year. The methane and nitrous oxides are primarily due to ag byproducts, fossil fuel processing, waste treatment and disposal, and land use and biomass burning. You can see more of the greenhouse gas breakdown here.

Sinks: Carbon Down The Drain

According to the contest, though, it appears they're looking for ideas for extracting some of the existing high levels of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Carbon sinks are natural or artificial ways of absorbing or removing carbon from the atmosphere. The natural methods involve oceans, forests, and soil. Other ways include pumping the carbon dioxide into naturally occurring underground storage areas.

Ocean Sinks

It's a very good thing that oceans cover 71% of our Earth's surface, because it makes up the largest active carbon sink on the planet. Currently, about a third of manmade emissions are entering the oceans.

Most of the carbon dioxide dissolves, but large growths or blooms of plankton also consume additional quantities. These tiny plants consume significant quantities of CO2 via photosynthesis. Adding plankton-friendly plant food, in the form of iron, may encourage more plankton to grow. According to Wikipedia, a test in 2002 in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica suggests that between 10,000 and 100,000 carbon atoms are sunk for each iron atom added to the water.

Forcefully injecting large quantities CO2 into the oceans to neutralize it might work. The solubility of carbon dioxide is a higher in colder seawater. However, while most CO2 would dissolve, it could react with the water to form carbonic acid which could have disastrous environmental effects.

Forest Sinks

Forests are the most well known consumers of carbon dioxide - photosynthesis not only takes CO2 from the air, but produces the oxygen we breathe. Even better, young and growing forests act as more efficient sinks compared to mature forests and bogs, whose natural rotting materials may produce some carbon dioxide. Keeping forests growing larger and more dense is a good way to keep forests consuming more CO2 than they produce.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (of the Dept of Energy), building materials and operations (the energy required to operate residential, commercial, and industrial buildings plus to create building materials like carpet, tile, glass, and concrete) make up more than half of man-made CO2 emissions.

Topsoil

Topsoil has the highest concentration of organic carbon matter in the Earth’s soil, so it makes sense that this is where most plant root systems suck their nutrients from.

The organic matter (humus) in soil has more carbon than that in vegetation and the atmosphere combined. Humus accumulates below about 25 degrees centigrade, otherwise it will be oxidized. Warm climates like the tropics have very thin soils, whereas places like the grasslands contribute humus mostly with their complex root systems, where organic carbon can remain stable for a long time under the ground. Grassland ecosystems are very much under threat. As we convert these regions to farm and ranchlands, we turn up massive root systems. The carbonic organic matter quickly oxidizes and enters the atmosphere.

What about Containment?

So what to do with the billion tons of excess carbon dioxide we suck out of the atmosphere each year?

One promising technique is geo-storage or storing the gas directly in the earth. We don’t even have to excavate because we can use existing structures like oil fields and coal seams. In fact, for the past three decades, oil companies have been injecting CO2 into dwindling oil fields to improve the recovery of oil. The oil recovered by these efforts helps to offset the costs of pumping the CO2 in. An oilfield in Saskatchewan is currently conducting a project in CO2 containment and a natural gas platform in the North Sea has been skimming the carbon dioxide out of the gas and storing it geologically, supposedly reducing their CO2 emissions by almost a million tones a year with relatively low operating costs. Coal seams are also a potential storage facility because the carbon dioxide gets absorbed into the coal and produces methane. The proceeds from the methane could also be used to help support this containment system.

To support the containment of carbon within the soil, we need to encourage farming and ranching methods than enhance the carbon within the soil instead of release it. Many of these practices are being used more widely in organic farming. For example, only 5% of farming in the United States uses no-till and residue mulching. Grazing management to preserve grasslands, conversion of farmland to ranchland and crop rotation are also carbon-friendly practices.

Rethinking Our Disposable Nature

We love to dispose of things rather than fix them. We like everything to be new, new, new! One way to contain carbon generated by forests is to recycle wood (and other products that require carbon emissions to create) instead of discarding them. Burning carbon-rich wood returns its carbon to the air – a ton of dry wood equates to about 1.8 tons of CO2. So by this math, 555,555,556 dry tons of high quality wood recycling would offset about a billion tons of CO2.

How Many Houses?

Ok, so this is way oversimplified, but how many houses make 555,555,556 dry tons?

Well, the first thing we need to know is how much does a house weigh, if we assume that all the weight could be made from recycled materials instead of new building material?

According to the Seattle Times, a typical house weighs about 155,000 pounds. So by our math, we need about…3585 houses worth of material recycled – that’s about the same size as the town of Norwich, Vermont. Also, if we were to include the concrete foundation, then we only need half that many (about the size of Vinalhaven, a little town on an island off the coast of Maine).

Posted by sorsha at February 9, 2007 4:14 PM