Global warming strikes again...

[Broken_Erika]

Cars are not fun. Driving on the highway is not fun unless there's very little to no traffic, which is virtually never the case on I-95 (though it was for a glorious few months last year).

Highways ruin everything........

 

[Joij21]

Nobody wants to ride the rails because we don't have a proper rail network.

Please explain.

 

[Samson]

Figuring out how to make concrete without emitting a whole lot of carbon would be a good start.

I was just reading about a possible way to make concrete out of CO² (First paragraph, sorry, I only have the dead tree version):

Launched [March 2016], a pilot plant at the University of Newcastle near Sydney, Australia, will test the commercial potential of mineral carbonation, a process that forms stable materials by chemically binding CO2 to minerals containing calcium or magnesium. The plant will bind the gas into crushed serpentinite rocks to create magnesium carbonate, which can be used to produce cement, paving stones and plasterboard. The process happens naturally when rocks are gradually weathered by exposure to CO2 in the air. This helped cut the proportion of the gas in the ancient atmosphere to levels low enough for life to flourish, says Geoff Brent, senior scientist at Orica.​

 

[Lexicus]

I was just reading about a possible way to make concrete out of CO² (First paragraph, sorry, I only have the dead tree version):

Launched [March 2016], a pilot plant at the University of Newcastle near Sydney, Australia, will test the commercial potential of mineral carbonation, a process that forms stable materials by chemically binding CO2 to minerals containing calcium or magnesium. The plant will bind the gas into crushed serpentinite rocks to create magnesium carbonate, which can be used to produce cement, paving stones and plasterboard. The process happens naturally when rocks are gradually weathered by exposure to CO2 in the air. This helped cut the proportion of the gas in the ancient atmosphere to levels low enough for life to flourish, says Geoff Brent, senior scientist at Orica.​

This seems promising though the fact that they started five years ago and I haven't heard any more about it seems a bit ominous. Anyway, a lack of rock weathering caused by the hyper-aridity of the interior of Pangaea is believed to have contributed to a longer-scale (tens of millions of years) run-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, contributing to an unstable environment which was then just completely destroyed by the Permian-Triassic extinction (apparently caused by the Siberian Traps Large Igneous Province burning through layers of coal in the oceanic crust, releasing some 40,000 gigatons of CO2 in the process).

While we are unlikely to match the 40,000 gigatons number we are burning and releasing fossil carbon much faster than the volcano could. It doesn't feel good.

 

[Zardnaar]

NZ has no snakes. Sorta.....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...re-reptiles-washing-up-on-new-zealands-shores

They can survive an NZ summer in the north apparently.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Are they edible?

 

[Zardnaar]

No idea

 

[Michkov]

At least once

 

[Birdjaguar]

First rain in Greenland.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/19/weather/greenland-summit-rain-climate-change/index.html

 

[Edmund Ironside]

This Attorney Took On Chevron. Then Chevron-Linked Judges and Private Prosecutors Had Him Locked Up.

"“It’s scary going after a large corporation [and] it’s scary going after governments because they have so much power and so much influence that they can do a lot of damage to someone’s life,” Raveson said. “If the lawyers who bring [environmental justice cases like Donziger’s] are subject to biased determinations as to whether or not they should be punished … it’s going to have a deterrent effect on lawyers to bring these kinds of cases.”

Such a deterrence could have massive consequences for the climate, especially at a time when, as this week’s new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed, the world is barreling further toward climate catastrophe, a crisis that is driven in no small part by fossil fuel companies like Chevron. "

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/chevron-judge-loretta-preska-steven-donziger.html

 

[Samson]

Extinction rebellion were focused yesterday about banks that finance green house gas emissions. If you want to check your bank, and consider moving you may be interesting in a banking comparison site, Bank Green.

 

[Drakle]

It strikes me as being very likely about transportation and density. France, Italy, and the UK are smaller countries that will find it easier to rely on things like rail that are much less carbon intensive than cars and trucks. Now, I'm of course not claiming that it is impossible for the US, Canada, and Australia to develop rail infrastructure but it is more expensive to do this when your population is spread out as these countries' populations are. I know for a fact that transportation is the largest category of emissions in the US.

Australia is absolutely not sparse. A supermajority of our population lines in an urban belt along our Eastern coast, in our three biggest states, NSW, Victoria and Queensland. The largest remaining section is the capital cities of the other states. Very few people live in our rural areas, far fewer than in the US. Our rural areas are more similar to the American western states, than the Eastern coast. We have some okay railways in the city (which I luckily live near), but our politicians have stupidly stopped high-speed railways between the major cities. Sydney to Melbourne pre-COVID was in the top three busiest air routes in the world yet they say it isn't worth building.

It is a very big task, and that is part of why when "moderate" Senators claim Bernie Sanders' $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan is too expensive I become angry

Bernie claimed that he had 40 Senators behind a 6 Trillion plan, but he had to cut it down for the other ten. Some of the remaining Ten are untouchable, but some of the most likely ten are in Blue states.

To be clear, I'm hardly claiming that it is impossible to create a proper rail network in the US. But having less dense population makes a rail network more expensive. And my guess is that much of the difference in per capita emissions between the US and UK/France is because the US is so car-dependent, which is obviously not a simple function of density, but very much a political choice made by the US decades ago to have a car-dependent society.

The Northeast is denser than some Euro countries. Same for California. And density follows transport links.

 

[Lexicus]

Another reason I hadn't thought of that carbon offsets are a scam:
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/california-climate-change-crisis-wildfires-carbon-offset-pollution

 

[El_Machinae]

Any roots they laid will still be sequestered, plus the charcoal. On paper, offsets work just fine, but creating a sound regulatory system and market regarding them is why I long-ago decided the carbon tax was superior to the carbon credit system.

We still need to incentivize scrubbing

 

[Synobun]

So let's say Australia decided to declare it will spend government money to establish a nuclear power plant. We'll assume they use Jervis Bay, the site historically intended for the purpose, because like Guam or Washington DC, Jervis Bay isn't part of a state and is instead a non-state terrritory. That means the Commonwealth can make laws for it and it's where they have the best chance of doing something constitutionally valid. We'll assume objections to the heated water destroying a reasonably pristine local marine ecosystem are ignored, and we'll assume the NSW government doesn't sue to try to protect the local tourism industry over the border. So we're just talking construction costs.

We'll use Hinkley Point as a guide. It's a 3.2 gigawatt plant, so we'll assume that's what they want to build (the Jervis Bay proposal was 500 MW, but anyway). That's currently reported to cost about 20 billion pounds before you add the subsidies it'll get through a guaranteed sale price. The Pound is in the toilet now but historically it runs at about 2 AUD to 1 Pound (I think it's about $1.70 currently) and costs are probably higher in a country with no prior expertise anyway.

So for convenience we'll call it $40 billion Australian dollars to get 3.2 GW of shiny new fission generation capacity. That'll generate power nearly all the time, give or take faults, inadequate demand, and grid issues. The record capacity factor for nuclear power is about 92%, so we'll assume a 90% capacity factor. If you get power from a 3.2 GW plant 90% of the time that's about 22,500 GWh per year of delicious emissions free power, every year, once it starts generating.

How long will that take? As I said, nuclear plants can take ten years to get running. Hinkley Point was approved in 2010, a license granted in 2012, and is expected to be operational in 2025. That's 15 years total, but let's be generous and assume it takes ten years from today even though we'd be building a regulatory regime and expertise from scratch.So here's how that looks in annual GWh generation terms:

View attachment 500729

How much solar power does $40 billion get you? The cost per watt of getting a solar panel system installed on your roof is about $1.50 per watt for a 3 kW system, cheaper for larger ones, more expensive for smaller ones. Manufacturing costs are now like 50 cents per watt so a lot of the costs are actual installation. However we're probably looking at more than just household rooftops so let's look at bigger commercial scale systems where the average cost is about $1.20 per watt. However that excludes some extra site costs but includes the renewable energy certificate subsidy whose value depends on the market price of the certificates. But let's go with that $1.20 per watt figure.

For $40 billion, then, it's plausible to install 33 GW worth of solar panels. Australia installed 1.3 GW of solar power in 2017, but with larger projects should install about 3.5GW in 2018. So let's assume a 2.5 GW per year installation rate from a sustained rollout of different scale systems.

How much energy does a gigawatt of solar get you? It all depends on where they're installed and whatnot, as astute people are fond of pointing out, the sun doesn't always shine. The capacity factor of solar is much lower than nuclear power. Average daily production from a 1kW system might be about 4kWh which is well below the 24 kWh you could get if it generated all day. It's about a 16.6% capacity factor I think - roughly 1/6th.

View attachment 500728

At that rate, 2.5GW will give us 10 GWh per day or about 2650 GWh per year. A lot less than a nuclear power plant!

But that much keeps being added every year. Every year for 13 years in this plan we're adding 2.5 GW of solar panels, until we've added 33 GW at that cost of $40 billion by early in year 14. That means we've basically got all the solar up and running by the time the nuclear plant starts running (fingers crossed the nuclear plant is on time tho). Nuclear power keeps going at a constant rate, while the degradation rate of solar panels is about 0.5% of output per year for modern panels.

Putting the installation rate and degradation rates together, here's annual generation:

View attachment 500744

So spending $40 billion on solar gets a massive head start, but after many decades spending $40 billion nuclear might catch up if it doesn't get decommissioned. In that time though, we've obtained a massively higher volume of electricity from the panels, something which the nuclear power is never likely to catch up with. Here's cumulative lifetime output:

View attachment 500743

I should note I'm being very very generous in assuming the cost of the solar panels doesn't drop further in the next decade, but then on the other hand I also haven't added the cost of batteries which are in the early stages of totally changing how grids will work. Currently, at a household install, batteries will roughly double the cost per kW, but that's coming down fairly quickly, and as more householders go self-sufficient the actual need for grid power diminishes.

At utility scales, matching installations with storage 1:1 is much less of a concern given the grid has lots of participants. The balance of load is therefore partly or wholy met by other flexible sources in a price based centralised dispatch process, so you're looking at a smaller ratio of storage to installed generation (since the coal plant was closed, with up to 50% wind generation, South Australia's market fills the gaps with imports, gas and is starting down the battery storage path).

Australia's annual electricity consumption in the national grid covering 5 of 6 states is a bit under 200 TWh per year, so our solar panels in 13 years would be meeting 1/5th of that demand at a near-zero marginal cost. That will of course lead to significant shifts in the rest of the market. You'd probably see gas and hydro expanding or maintaining their market shares, at the expense of coal which is too fixed and inflexible to exploit the sporadic peak price periods created by intermittent renewable generation. The market opportunities for utility scale batteries would start to become very attractive.

But if the question is what use of a big clump of government funding gives you the most electricity to play with out of nuclear power and solar panels, then the smart spend is on the panels.

Rereading this thread (yeah...) and came across this. I want to highlight it again. Arwon did a fantastic smackdown of my argument.

 

[Arwon]

I should add that since I wrote that, solar share of generation (and wind) has accelerated at the expense of coal reasonably well:

Solar was at 3% in 2017 and is now at 9% for 2020, wind up from 5% to 9%, coal is down from 61% to 54%. Gas basically stable. Renewables 15% to 24%. So it's pretty decent movement in something as large as a continental electricity system in three years.

Electricity generation looks like probably the most solvable large sector of emissions at this point. Already well on its way.

 

[Samson]

Three lessons from Mirco$ofts carbon capture

1. The supply of solutions capable of removing and storing carbon viably is a tiny proportion of that needed to reach global net-zero emissions by 2050
   
   1. Microsoft received 189 proposals offering 154 megatonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) over the coming years, only 55 MtCO2 were available immediately, and a mere 2 MtCO2 met Microsoft’s criteria for high-quality CO2 removal.
2. The scarcity of proposals that met the companies’ criteria reflects a lack of standards and clear definitions
   
   1. Roughly one-fifth of proposals to Microsoft focused on avoiding new emissions, not on withdrawing CO2 from the atmosphere; these were rejected. Others lacked the technical information needed to ensure reliability. Indeed, there’s no standard way to measure, report and verify carbon removed.
3. Systems for accounting for carbon removal do not distinguish between short- and long-term forms of CO2 storage

 

[EnglishEdward]

..... layers of coal in the oceanic crust, releasing some 40,000 gigatons of CO2 in the process....

Strange, coal is a sedimentary rock, and it is not normally found in igneous rocks such as oceanic crust.

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

According to Wiki:

"The Siberian traps are underlain by the Tungus Syneclise, a large sedimentary basin containing thick sequences of Early-Mid Paleozoic aged carbonate and evaporite deposits, as well as Carboniferous-Permian aged coal bearing clastic rocks. When heated, such as by igneous intrusions, these rocks are capable of emitting large amounts of toxic and greenhouse gases."

 

[Birdjaguar]

Really good article about slowing or stopping planetary heat up. Paywalled

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-geoengineering.html?smid=url-share