Twenty five years ago, on this day, March 8th, 1999, an “audacious” idea is unleashed on the world…
Klaus Lackner posits Direct Air Capture 24th Annual Technical Conference on coal Utilization & Fuel Systems, March 8-11, 1999 Clearwater, Florida
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 367.4ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that for the previous 10 years, technology types had been thinking about carbon capture and storage as a technofix for the socio-technical problem of greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric concentrations increasing. And all sorts of ideas had been put forward, mostly around making coal burning more “efficient”, getting more bang for the buck, decreasing the intensity. And along comes the idea of direct air capture.
What I think we can learn from this is that ideas which seem very new often usually have a long pre-history. It’s worth knowing that, at least at outline level, so that you will not be so easily seduced by shiny promises.
What happened next DAC really stayed on the backburner for about another 15 years. From about the 2015 Paris Agreement onwards, people start paying money and pretending to take it seriously. We’re just not going to do DAC at the scale that would require; it’s insane. It’s just another dream of technosalvation.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
On this day, October 6 in 2005, 17 years after the World Coal body said the greenhouse effect was greatly exaggerated, some people meet in Cambridge to discuss “carbon capture and storage”
This paper summarises the key points from a discussion meeting held at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, on Thursday 6 October 2005. The meeting was held in response to the UK Government Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into carbon capture and storage.
“VIABILITY OF CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE (CCS) AS A CARBON ABATEMENT TECHNOLOGY FOR THE UK: FEASIBILITY AND COSTS”
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 377.19ppm. At time of writing it was 421ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this – the Department of Trade and Industry had just published its “Carbon Abatement Technologies Strategy,” and carbon capture and storage was in the mix… The recent G7 meeting had also hyped it. BP was saying it could do this on its Peterhead facility. It’s all gonna happen, right?
Why this matters.
Technologies go through a long ‘incubation’ period. Lots of workshops, seminars etc. By this time, CCS had already been talked about for a long time…
What happened next?
BP pulled out of the first CCS project in the UK in early 2007. In late 2007 the government announced a competition. That didn’t end well. They announced another. That ended very badly indeed. Third time lucky?
On this day, July 18, in 1979, Senator Abraham Ribicoff asked for some advice about “synfuels.”
The context was, the Carter Administration, desperate to reduce US dependency on problematic Middle Eastern Oil (not the dictatorships – that’s fine – it’s the interruptions to supply that’s the problem) was proposing an expensive crash program to develop synthetic fuels (synfuels). These would be incredibly energy intensive to produce… Not everyone was convinced this was a good idea…
“In 1979 [Gordon] MacDonald wrote an article for the Washington Post arguing that subsidizing synthetic fuels, as proposed by the Carter administration, would be a mistake. He pointed out that synthetic fuels would produce even more CO2 than the current U.S. mix of fossil fuels. The article drew the attention of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), who had recently been warned about the issue by West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt” (Nierenberg et al. 2010: 324)
“Although many complex factors affect the climate, it is generally thought that the result of continued carbon dioxide production will be a warming of the atmosphere “that will probably be conspicuous within the next 20 years,” the report said. “If the trend is allowed to continue, climatic zones will shift and agriculture will be displaced.”
Gordon J. MacDonald, environmental studies professor ad Dartmouth College, who is one of the authors said in an interview that large-scale use of synthetic fuels — made from coal or oil shale — could cut the time involved by half.
“We should start seeing the effect in 1990 without synthetic fuels. . . . but if you use them, the effect would be much more pronounced by 1990,” he said.
Actually, unless I am missing something, Nierenberg et al. have got this wrong – and they don’t actually cite the “article in the Washington Post,” which is pretty poor form.
What Ribicoff appears to be responding to are articles in the Post and the Times about an actual report. This was to the Council on Environmental Quality. And it isn’t just Macdonald – “ the other authors of the report were George M. Woodwell, director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory; Roger Revelle, a member of the National Academy of Sciences; and Charles David Keeling, professor of Oceanography of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography” (Shabecoff, 1979).
ANYWAY, that was the 11th, and this blog post is about the 18th. And here we are –
“One incident provides a small example of the work that the Academy does outside the formal structure of reports and out of public view. On July 18, 1979, even as the Charney panel was gathering at Woods Hole, the Academy’s president, Philip Handler, got a call from Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The Senator was cosponsoring a bill on synfuels, and he wanted to know the implications of greenhouse warming. Handler went to the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, and the very next day, it produced a statement on carbon dioxide and energy policy. The statement confirmed that global warming could be a problem. The statement told Senator Ribicoff that the massive expenditures required to create a national synthetic fuels capability should not commit the nation to large-scale dependence on coal for the indefinite future. This is the first time that an Academy group issued a specific policy recommendation, ambiguous although it may be, related to global warming. Olson 2014 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4077050/
Why this matters.
We. Knew. Never forget, we knew.
What happened next?
Synfuels got killed off by Reagan, along with a lot of good stuff. And we had to wait until 1988 to wake up. A decade lost (but then, we would have pissed it against the wall, I guess).
References:
Nierenberg, N. Tshinkel, W. and Tshinkel, V. (2010) Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, Number 3, pps. 318–349. [online here]
Olson, S. (2014) The National Academy of Sciences at 150. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24; 111(Suppl 2): 9327–9364.
On this day, June 25, across 6 years, we can watch a technology emerge from obscurity (see June 4 for how an issue goes through an arc).
Carbon capture and storage is the proposal to stop carbon dioxide molecules, released when you burn a hydrocarbon (oil, coal or gas), from getting into the atmosphere. I could go on, but I won’t…
On this day in 2002 the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) held an “ Improved Oil Recovery” Research Seminar.
Then, a year later the US, EU, 12 countries agreed to develop carbon capture technologies” – the grandly named “Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum” became a thing.
Then, five years after that, with CCS very high up the agenda in the UK, a Shell-sponsored CCS supplement turned up in the Guardian containing 14-articles, all focusing on CCS. Page 234 of Mander et al (2013)
Why this matters.
Technologies build up a head of, erm, steam. Or they don’t. It takes time for things to emerge. Then they work, or they don’t, or they do something else.
What happened next?
CCS? It went away. Then it came back, as fantasies do.
On this day (May 2nd) in 2012 the UK government announced a “Carbon Capture andStorage” Cost Reduction Taskforce which would
“to advise the government and industry on the steps needed to reduce the cost of CCS, so that it could compete with other low carbon technologies in the 2020s.” (see also this press release).
CCS has long been the get-out-of-jail-free card for industry (esp oil and gas) and a lot of time and money has been spent on it. But it still ain’t here. Maybe this time will be different…
Why this matters
We need to remember that these salvationary technologies have fallen over repeatedly, and ask ourselves “gee, maybe we could focus on, you know, just using hella lot less energy?”
What happened next
CCS fell over, got picked up and dusted off, and is again flavour of the month.
On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“
The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.
The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”
“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”
What happened next
Is there any CCS?
Why this matters.
We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting. There is trouble ahead.
On this day, 64 years ago the New York Times had a front page story with the title “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — A special advisory committee recommended to President Eisenhower today an expanded and vigorous Government research program into how to control or modify the world’s weather
This was of course peak-Cold War. A few months previously the Russians, having captured better Nazi rocket scientists than the Americans had managed to paperclip, had aput a small metal ball into orbit, causing panic and despair.
Given the general paranoia and offense to the Uncle Sam’s amour propre, it’s surprising we didn’t end up with a “cloud gap” to match the illusory-but-useful bomber gap and missile gap…
Why this matters: we need to remember that the early history of understanding the climate is wrapped up in military needs (think about the British Navy and the Met Office) and computational models – see Edwards, 2010). It’s all part of the whole “give me absolute control over every living soul” thing that is steadily dooming us.
There is a strand of conspiratorial thinking, and fiction, which has ‘weather wars’ successfully being fought (I have a bunch of these novels, and should write about them. They’re fun, while bonkers).
What happened next? The IGY yielded a great findings (though the Pentagon briefly baulked at continuing to fund the C02 measures on Mauna Loa – that’s for another time). Weather modification experiments continued, but came up against the limits of human power.
