Varin's Blog

As I talked about in my last blog, in order to go carbon neutral we need to plant a LOT of trees (specifically ~1.607 trillion). I decided to put a spin on two important pieces of data from it by making them interactive. Here, we have some adjustable values that when adjusted produce different results, so you can see what different plans of action we'd need to take in different scenarios. The first of these shows how many trees we'd need to plant based on different amounts of carbon that we emit annually.

The controls are simple: click and hold the blue underlined value in the middle column, then while still holding down your mouse, move it left or right to decrease and increase the value. (Many thanks to Bret Victor for his inspiring work and for the Tangle library, which I have used here.)

Trees, of course, require space to plant. We need quite a lot of land area in order to plant a lot of them. So, the next analysis would be one that shows how much area we need to plant trees based on how many trees we're planting and how much space we give each tree.

The controls are the same as before.

For reference, the land area of the United States is about 9 million square kilometers. If we used 25 million square kilometers of space to plant these trees, we'd need to dedicate an area more than the size of the entirety of the USA and Russia to planting trees! That would be just shy of the land area taken up by all of North America!

Now, recently a lot of new technology has been invented that provide man-made ways of carbon capture. So, these should be easier to get our hands on since we can make them ourselves. The question is, are these methods more efficient than trees?

The first of these methods are called liquid solvents, and are a class of molecule called amine. Amines are built from the chemical compound ammonia, whose formula is NH₃. There are 4 main types of amines we will be discussing: monoethanolamine (C₂H₇NO, aka MEA), methyl diethanolamine (C₅H₁₃NO₂, aka MDEA), diethanolamine (C₄H₁₁NO₂, aka DEA), and diglycolamine (same formula as DEA, aka DGA). The only difference between DGA and DEA is how the atoms in each molecule of them are arranged. Now, it takes one molecule of each of these amines to capture one molecule of carbon dioxide (whose formula is CO₂). So, we can get the atomic weight of each molecule of these amines and compare it to the atomic weight of each molecule of carbon dioxide.

Here is the analysis we have for solvents based on this info:

"Carbon" is bolded and underlined in the previous analysis because it is different from "carbon dioxide," which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Carbon is an element found in the molecule carbon dioxide. In a carbon dioxide molecule, carbon makes up around 27% of the mass of a carbon dioxide molecule. This is important because one molecule of each of these amines binds to one molecule of carbon dioxide, and the unit our slider measures our yearly emissions in is tons of carbon, so this alters the calculation a bit.

Also, take these numbers with a grain of salt. They only work in aqueous solutions, which means that they have to be mixed with water in order to work. Also, in those aqueous solutions, it's easily possible for carbon to miss the amine entirely while passing through a tank of amine. So, the amounts of various amines given here will not be as effective as they actually should be.

Now, with the numbers above being immensely high, and with the other footnotes I added to it, the battle against climate change may seem lost. However, there is one other new technological development that I have to cover. These are called Direct Air Capture facilities, which I'll refer to as DAC facilities. There are two major companies working on advancing DAC technology: Climeworks, which is based in Switzerland, and Carbon Engineering, which is based in Canada. Let's begin with Climeworks:

Climeworks was founded in 2009 by two college students who developed their first DAC technology two years earlier. Since 2017, they have built 15 plants across Europe, with their biggest one nicknamed "Orca" opening in Iceland on September 8th, 2021. Orca absorbs 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (again, this is carbon dioxide, not carbon) annually. While this definitely brings us closer than we ever have been to solving the issue that is climate change, we still need a lot of these facilities to make a reasonable dent in the problem, which you will see in the analyses below.

Carbon Engineering was also founded in 2009, except in Calgary, Canada. It has since moved to Squamish, British Columbia, where it has built its first DAC facility. Now, they have goals to begin constructing a facility in the Permian Basin in Texas this year, with help of the company 1PointFive, that will absorb 1 million US tons of carbon dioxide annually! Again, this will be a massive step towards solving the problem that is climate change, but we will still need a lot of these facilities to make a dent in the problem.

Based on the given info, here is the first analysis for Climeworks' Orca:

Here is the same analysis for Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive's planned facility in Texas:

Again, carbon and carbon dioxide are bolded to highlight the same thing I mentioned after the solvent analysis. Another thing to note is that the number for how much carbon dioxide Orca absorbs annually is in metric tons, whereas we've usually been using US tons and our final result from the calculation in the analysis is in US tons. By the way, we do use US tons like usual for Carbon Engineering's facility analysis.

Here is our last analysis (which, sadly, isn't interactive):

One other important aspect of the mechanism in Climeworks' Orca is that the facility stores captured carbon deep underground, where it reacts with basalt rock under the volcanic soil of Iceland and forms various types of minerals. However, this then brings up the question of whether we have enough space underground (or anywhere at all) to store all of this carbon. So, let's begin the calculations to figure this out:

The density of carbon in it's amorphous form is 1.9 g/cm³. "Amorphous" just means raw carbon which hasn't been given a definite shape, which is the state extracted carbon will be in after it's extracted from the air. Now, the volume of Lake Superior is 2,903 cubic miles, or roughly 12,000 cubic kilometers. We can then use conversion factors between units of volume and mass to get the volume of carbon in tons per cubic mile, a better unit for our current numbers that we have. This gets us roughly 8.7 gigatons per cubic mile. Doing some more calculations, we find that each year, we emit enough carbon to fill up roughly 1.08 cubic miles. This means that it would take roughly 2,700 years to fill up the entirety of Lake Superior with our carbon emissions!

Now, this is absolutely not a call to action to begin filling up our lakes with carbon; that is extremely destructive to the environment and ecosystem of those lakes, and there are definitely better places to put it. However, there are definitely places which we can fill up with our carbon emissions that are underground. For example, assuming we begin to slowly phase out the usage of fossil fuels and coal soon, we can fill up abandoned fracking wells and coal mines with the carbon, sending the carbon right back to where it originated from.

So, technologies do exist that allow us to combat climate change more efficiently than we ever could. However, our annual emissions are still increasing. As a result, with every passing day it becomes harder to combat climate change assuming we continue to do as little as we are about it. This blog should have proven that technologies do exist that can effectively combat climate change, so we need them NOW. Reversing climate change is possible, but we need to further improve this technology, begin mass producing it, and most of all, governments worldwide must start facilitating the rollout of these technologies.