global warming napkin math

[metalhead]

Time for some number crunching

I use a very simple case, because the numbers will be so staggering high, we can ignore details as the weight of the canister, the energy cost to freeze the CO2 to get it compact and the effect that if we would use a rocket, there is the drag energy of the atmosphere, and much of the energy used is to launch fuel up as well: we need a big first stage to get up a much smaller rocket with fuel, etc.
We ignore all these (big) ineffeciency effect as if we could launch from some supercannon at the himalaya those canisters into space.

Two cases both calculated for a 1 kilo load:
1. we launch a canister to 100 km height and give an additional blast for enough speed that keeps the canister into a 100 km high orbit
The potential energy needed is 967,000 joule, or rougly one million joules. This low amount I will ignore for the rest of the calc.
To stay in orbit at that 100 km, and not fall back, the canister needs to have an orbital speed of of 7.85 km/sec. The kinetic energy needed is 0.5*mv2, with m in kilo and v in m/sec, or 0.5*1*7,850*7,850 = 30,811,250 joules.
This needs roughly 31 million joules.
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/272-launching-satellites

However, we do not want to pile up a scrap yard of CO2 canisters, we do not want after a while a kind of outher atmosphere of CO2 around the Earth, we want to canisters shot to outher space.
To escape the gravitational field of the Earth, we need a speed higher than the escape velocity of the Earth, higher than 11.2 km/sec. By that the cannister, or better that CO2, will stay in our solar system as a gas.
How much energy will that cost ?
The kinetic energy needed is 0.5*mv2, with m in kilo and v in m/sec, or 0.5*1*11,200*11,200 = 62,720,000 joules. This needs 63 million joules.

With as conversion that 1 kWh is 3.6 million joules, that 63 million joules needed converts to 17.5 kWh needed to shoot 1 kilo CO2 to a solar orbit.

As such still meaningless numbers.
Giving some feel for that:
Assuming that 1 kWh would cost 10 cents, it would cost $1.75 per kilo, or $1,750 per ton, about tenfold as the middle cost estimate of $163 per ton to capture CO2 from the air with the devices of OP.
Taking that 5% of US GDP estimate of OP to capture all CO2 produced by the US, it would cost roughly 50% of US GDP to shoot the CO2 to solar orbit.

Yeah, I also badly overestimated the payload capacity of a reasonably sized rocket

However, it might prove a more reasonable thing to do if/when we ever bother to get a space elevator set up. Apparently even magnetic guns are incredibly costly to get stuff of any decent size launched at escape velocity.

 

[Live trash can]

I am simply an opponent of biofuel.
However, if electric airplanes are not economical feasible, and biofuel can allow us to keep on travelling by airplanes (with rather expensive biofuel), It makes sense.

So if we are able to produce biofuel cheaply and sustainably this could keep fossil cars and planes going. So "interestingly" it could mean we could have a hybrid fleet of vehicles, both fossil and biofueled, adding to the life span of conventional vehicles.

 

[civvver]

You've adopted the malignant thinking of the ultra wealthy, where profits are privatized and the costs to make those profits are spread to everyone else.

Q: How many power stations do you own? How many transportation fleets? How many oil companies? How many private jets? How many super yachts? How many cattle ranches? How many factories?

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions Here's a breakdown by the EPA. Unfortunately, it lumps together commercial & residential, but assuming those big NY skyscrapers produce 3 times as much greenhouse gasses as houses, we everyday Americans owe 3% of any tax increase, not the 100% that your figures use. Your $15,000 tax bill now shrinks to $450.

Well for sure, but I was just doing napkin math, not actual solutions. Just saying when an extreme solution you guys are tearing apart as impractical doesn't even seem that expensive, it makes me wonder why the simpler things aren't just being done already?

So, some of the back-of-the-envelope math.

The current externality cost of a marginal tonne is about $50 USD. By any metric, we shouldn't be paying over $200 to remove a tonne of carbon, except in the various experimental stages of working on the technology.

People think that 'planting trees' is cheaper. And it is. Even cheaper is 'use less'. There's nearly no technology or green initiative that can give as great returns as 'choose chicken over beef'. Do that. Get others to do it.

Time for a beef tax? Chicken is so cheap we eat it a lot more than beef as is. It's $2 a lb for chicken breast, $4 typically for ground beef and triple that for good cuts of steak.

I wonder why hydrogen isn't used.

I don't know about planes but I worked on data logging software for toyota's hydrogen fuel cell prototype fleet. This was over ten years ago. I think they ended up scrapping the program to invest in electric. I believe the issue was lack of infrastructure to refuel hydrogen, whereas we already have an electric grid. Even if you can make a hydrogen fueled car that's better and cheaper than electric no one will buy it if there aren't any fuel stations near your home.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well for sure, but I was just doing napkin math, not actual solutions. Just saying when an extreme solution you guys are tearing apart as impractical doesn't even seem that expensive, it makes me wonder why the simpler things aren't just being done already?

Simply put, the rightwing has chosen to coddle the denier base. For this reason, the rightwing hasn't really contributed much to the discussion. Your solution is too expensive, but nearly any discussion of solutions will be soundly rejected. Not on the math, because (sadly) the Centrist-right hasn't really been working on the math. They don't have ideas to test your ideas against.

I'm not being partisan. We've become a world where, if I know you position on gun rights I can then easily predict whether any proposal on climate change policy would be rejected; often successfully.

Time for a beef tax? Chicken is so cheap we eat it a lot more than beef as is. It's $2 a lb for chicken breast, $4 typically for ground beef and triple that for good cuts of steak.

A carbon tax would become a tax on beef, and it's a necessary development. But it won't be happening anytime soon, which is why people need to voluntarily shift now. The mere purchasing of the beef is destroying time-to-react. We know the politics will be too slow. It matters (a lot!) if you add your voice to ours on that front. But it will still be too slow. We need more time, and we need people to stop destroying the grace period we have.[/QUOTE]

 

[Hrothbern]

So if we are able to produce biofuel cheaply and sustainably this could keep fossil cars and planes going. So "interestingly" it could mean we could have a hybrid fleet of vehicles, both fossil and biofueled, adding to the life span of conventional vehicles.

Yes in general
To that adding of the life span of conventional vehicles: a car, like every product has an embodied energy content. Energy was needed to make it, from the base materials, to the processing, to the employees involved.
And that embodied energy has a carbon foorprint, the size depending on what kind of energy was used on average to build it.
IF I build now an electric car with an industry that is mainly fossil fueled and employees that have their personal carbon profile, that embodied energy of that car will have a high carbon foorprint.
=> A French car has a lower carbon footprint for its embodied energy than a German car (because ~40% of French energy, and a much higher % of French industrial energy is nuclear)
=> A traditional big US car, with much more weight, with employees with a much higher carbon footprint, will have lots of more embodied energy multiplied with a higher carbon footprint per energy unit used.

Meaning that just like there is a financial break even for when you replace your old car when the total cost of breakdown, repairs and petrol effeciency are getting high, and it pays to buy a new car....
there is also a carbon footprint break even for when you replace your old car.
In RL imo the fossil fuel car should be sold to someone who makes little kilometers per year, or become the second car for bringing the children to school and the shopping, until you cross the financial break even.

When I was involved in an environmental energy group as student, just after the Club of Rome report and the oilcrisis that started in 1973, we used lists of the Technical University of Delft in NL, that they used as standard to teach their engineering students to make full calculations: not only the strenght etc, and the financial cost estimate, but also the energy content. The same TU Delft that won 7 times the worldchampionship solar electrical cars in Australia.

Still
I am against bio-fuel as generic solution, as material for bulk power plants.
When tropical forest are chopped to create the areas to plant crops for biofuel (like Brazil), when top soil erosion is ruthlessy done for bio-fuel crops, when that is done to the benefit for trade, national current accountts, with the rich reaping the benefits, and we burn it in Europe in ordinary powerplants without CO2 capturing devices in the exhaust, just to meet a Paris Climate percentage on paper...... my stomach turns around.

EDIT
ohhh... I would not say that biofuel is really cheap when you wouldf calculate the full cost, but at that higher price it will have usefull niche and energy transition purposes.

 

[civvver]

Simply put, the rightwing has chosen to coddle the denier base. For this reason, the rightwing hasn't really contributed much to the discussion. Your solution is too expensive, but nearly any discussion of solutions will be soundly rejected. Not on the math, because (sadly) the Centrist-right hasn't really been working on the math. They don't have ideas to test your ideas against.

I'm not being partisan. We've become a world where, if I know you position on gun rights I can then easily predict whether any proposal on climate change policy would be rejected; often successfully.


A carbon tax would become a tax on beef, and it's a necessary development. But it won't be happening anytime soon, which is why people need to voluntarily shift now. The mere purchasing of the beef is destroying time-to-react. We know the politics will be too slow. It matters (a lot!) if you add your voice to ours on that front. But it will still be too slow. We need more time, and we need people to stop destroying the grace period we have.

[/QUOTE]

I guess I buck the trend. I'm all for stricter gun laws, but am also a climate denier

I just think the models change too much to be right all the time. I mean wasn't al gore telling us in the 90s that all the icecaps would melt by like 2005? Trying to predict what the world and weather will be in the next 100 years based off just a few years of data seems like a fallacy to me. But then you see stuff how like the top 5 hotter years on record all occurred in the last decade and you think there might be something to it. I'm just not sure.

However that doesn't mean I'm opposed to doing something. Clearly our world is changing, I just don't subscribe to the apocalyptic view of it and how man is to blame for all of it. However, why not hedge our bets? I don't believe strongly enough to reject sound, cost effective solutions. Fossil fuels will eventually run out and are kind of stupid for our economy and prop up monopolistic businesses and hold down legitimate research and development on alternatives. I would much rather drive an electric car, they are superior to gasoline in many ways other than range and size- cleaner, instant torque, can recharge at your house much more cheaply than buying gas at a station, quieter, won't give you carbon monoxide poisoning. The issue is price and capacity as no one makes a 3rd row all electric vehicle yet and even the small ones are prohibitively expensive, but that's due to scale and new tech. If more people bought them the cost per unit would go down and if we stopped suppressing research to prop up oil and dinosaur car companies we'd probably be somewhere with them now.

 

[brennan]

I just think the models change too much to be right all the time. I mean wasn't al gore telling us in the 90s that all the icecaps would melt by like 2005?

Is Al Gore 'the models'?

 

[El_Machinae]

I mean wasn't al gore telling us in the 90s that all the icecaps would melt by like 2005?

I don't know what Gore was saying in the 90s. He's not our spokesman or our oracle. There is also a lot of partisan spin around nearly everything he does. Examine the trendline on Arctic sea-ice since 1992 (when the Rio Summit expressed global concern about AGW). Regardless of the velocity, you know that AGW is causing a change. Some of those changes will make the world worse.

I don't believe strongly enough to reject sound, cost effective solutions.

There's nothing more Pascal's Wager on this front than costless shifts. You might not share my distress about Bangledeshi shoreline disappearing (and aquifers getting salted), but I know of no system where choosing beef over chicken helps clarify the issue faster.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Difference in style. I like to go to a "to what end" level of result, because people tend to just snooze through a quantitative argument. I think most people will get that no matter how much C and O we might have, using "shoot it into space and be rid of it" as a solution is inherently flawed. Of course, I have proposed shooting them all into the sun as a solution to the proliferation of stupid people, but that was hyperbole...at least nominally.

If we get tech to the point where we can trivially fling canisters of gas into space at a net benefit to the Earth's ecology the notion of global warming will likely be trivialized. I'd like to see it, but I'm not sure we will. Right now, simply attempting it would cause more harm than good by a wide margin.

Maybe we can aim the canisters at Mars or something.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

If we get tech to the point where we can trivially fling canisters of gas into space at a net benefit to the Earth's ecology the notion of global warming will likely be trivialized. I'd like to see it, but I'm not sure we will. Right now, simply attempting it would cause more harm than good by a wide margin.

Maybe we can aim the canisters at Mars or something.

Yeah, whichever argument you want to use, I'm hoping that pretty much everyone would agree that just using the OEM installed CO2 scrubber system is better than building a new one.

 

[Hrothbern]

If we get tech to the point where we can trivially fling canisters of gas into space at a net benefit to the Earth's ecology the notion of global warming will likely be trivialized. I'd like to see it, but I'm not sure we will. Right now, simply attempting it would cause more harm than good by a wide margin.

Maybe we can aim the canisters at Mars or something.

Techs solve everyting ???
Did you read my post with that calculation ?
Whether those canisters go in solar orbit or fall at Mars, you need to overcome the escape velocity of the Earth, needing a staggering amount of energy.

Techs do not help there.... because.... they cannot change the fundamental Laws of Physics

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Yeah, whichever argument you want to use, I'm hoping that pretty much everyone would agree that just using the OEM installed CO2 scrubber system is better than building a new one.

Most likely. I'd be going with OEM model unless/until we have a proven more efficient method.

Techs do not help there.... because.... they cannot change the fundamental Laws of Physics

I can at least conceive a scenario like "space elevator + energy less than 1/1000 the price of today". It's hard to imagine we'd have access to that before trivializing global warming though. Heck, that by itself would probably suffice.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Most likely. I'd be going with OEM model unless/until we have a proven more efficient method.

You need not only efficiency, but scale. On my ship we had two installed CO2 scrubbers. They were pretty efficient; well once the CO2 level got uncomfortably high anyway. But even if running one used less energy than a forest of trees that could remove a similar amount of CO2 from a similar amount of atmosphere in a similar amount of time that doesn't mean they would be practical to scale up into a replacement for millions of tons of live plants.

That's not really a good example either, because when we brought a scrubber on line the machinery watch would usually report "commenced carbonating the ocean," so that type of scrubber wouldn't work in a planet scale system and leads right back to the shooting canisters into space problem.

Yeah, OEM definitely seems like the way to go here.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You need not only efficiency, but scale. On my ship we had two installed CO2 scrubbers. They were pretty efficient; well once the CO2 level got uncomfortably high anyway. But even if running one used less energy than a forest of trees that could remove a similar amount of CO2 from a similar amount of atmosphere in a similar amount of time that doesn't mean they would be practical to scale up into a replacement for millions of tons of live plants.

That's not really a good example either, because when we brought a scrubber on line the machinery watch would usually report "commenced carbonating the ocean," so that type of scrubber wouldn't work in a planet scale system and leads right back to the shooting canisters into space problem.

Yeah, OEM definitely seems like the way to go here.

That doesn't sound *actually* more efficient to say the least. I was operating on assumption of scale when discussing efficiency. If it can't actually scrub noticeable quantities from the atmosphere efficiency doesn't matter very much in the context of this thread. I'm saying that anything we use other than OEM must outperform OEM, and AFAIK we don't have that capacity.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

That doesn't sound *actually* more efficient to say the least. I was operating on assumption of scale when discussing efficiency. If it can't actually scrub noticeable quantities from the atmosphere efficiency doesn't matter very much in the context of this thread. I'm saying that anything we use other than OEM must outperform OEM, and AFAIK we don't have that capacity.

I was already into it when the disposal issue came to mind. In the enclosed environment of a submarine where "overboard" was easily accessed and available in endless supply I thought our little scrubbers were pretty remarkable. They removed a lot of CO2 in fairly rapid fashion and ran on a reasonably small motor, which superficially said "efficient," but, yeah, only superficially. To compete with OEM our replacement equipment has to bind the carbon into something edible and release the oxygen, not just capture the CO2.

 

[Live trash can]

there is also a carbon footprint break even for when you replace your old car.
In RL imo the fossil fuel car should be sold to someone who makes little kilometers per year, or become the second car for bringing the children to school and the shopping, until you cross the financial break even.

You're not afraid of micro managing, now are you?

 

[metalhead]

Techs solve everyting ???
Did you read my post with that calculation ?
Whether those canisters go in solar orbit or fall at Mars, you need to overcome the escape velocity of the Earth, needing a staggering amount of energy.

Techs do not help there.... because.... they cannot change the fundamental Laws of Physics

A space elevator attached to a cable can run entirely off solar power to release payloads above LEO once it gets above ~40 km. The trick is developing a material strong enough to serve as the cable.

As to how much energy you spend developing and building the transports versus how much each is able to deliver into space before it is scrapped, I have no idea. Probably still not a viable solution for removing CO2, would be my guess.

 

[Silurian]

You're not afraid of micro managing, now are you?

If you put up the cost of running a fossil fuel car its second hand value will fall.

At the present fuel hungry cars lose value faster than more fuel efficient vehicles.
So people who do low mileage buy the cheaper car because they cost less to run if you include the capital value.

 

[Hrothbern]

A space elevator attached to a cable can run entirely off solar power to release payloads above LEO once it gets above ~40 km. The trick is developing a material strong enough to serve as the cable.

As to how much energy you spend developing and building the transports versus how much each is able to deliver into space before it is scrapped, I have no idea. Probably still not a viable solution for removing CO2, would be my guess.

If you look in my calc post, you can see that I ignored the energy cost to move the canister upward to that 100 km height (the potential energy was only 1 million joules).
A space elevator attached to a cable would indeed need only a little bit more than that 1 million joules.

But once you have your canister there, you still have to give it the escape velocity of the Earth to shoot it away from the Earth, which needs more than 60 million joules energy.

 

[Hrothbern]

You're not afraid of micro managing, now are you?

I had too many bosses that were micro-managing me and my reports
Though I do love numbers and I developed quite a number of reports and FC models. Overviews with easy mining down into the micro... my eyes were often close to rectangular from all the excel sheets.

My own style to my people was basically more the Italian style