Lets Make Carbon Removal Easy
Lets Make Carbon Removal Easy
Returning the world to pre-industrial CO2 levels is likely cheaper than you think.
Climate change is a real risk. You can debate 1% chance of being really bad or 99% chance of being really bad but honestly, it doesn't matter too much about whether we should do something. I support preventing a 1 in 100 of the apocalypse. It does dictate the scale of the effort though.
So far, most of the effort tends to focus on austerity measures and non-technical solutions to the problem. For example, the UN recently projected about $3T per year to fix climate change. (1)
At this scale, it requires:
International effort
Rich countries carrying the load
Severely impacting the global economy (the US spending $1T would be enormously damaging)
It’s basically an “anti-technology” story
This doesn't sound like something that will work unless it's really the apocalypse.
However, it's probably possible to fix climate change at 1/10th the cost, within the range for the US or China to unilaterally solve if needed.
Keys to Fixing Climate Change:
Reduce the cost of clean power. The only viable options are geothermal, wind, solar, fission (traditional nuclear), and fusion (advanced nuclear). I won’t talk about this much here in this blog post, but it is critical.
Make CO2-free options better & cheaper than alternatives. Tesla and Impossible burgers are good examples of this technique.
Carbon Capture - If we make it cheap to remove carbon, we can take care of the problem without austerity.
While a lot of people are right to point out it is more energy intensive to prevent carbon than remove it. This is why the focus is so much on taxes and guilt to try and make people consume less. I believe the taxes and guilt strategy is actually counterproductive. They are politically difficult and so distasteful that people naturally fight against the idea that there is any problem at all. Even if they believe there is a problem, if they think the solution is horrible, it will make them inclined to do nothing.
Reducing the Cost of Clean Electricity Production
I will save most of this for a different blog post, but moving to clean electricity production is almost entirely a matter of willpower. It involves essentially the following items:
Investing in increasing the use of geothermal work for both electricity and heating/cooling. It is an excellent option in many circumstances.
Continue the pace with wind and solar energy.
Quickly rolling out nuclear fission, which is already incredibly safe and it can be very inexpensive. France moved to mostly nuclear power in about 15 years using 1970s technology. There is no technological reason we can’t have better, safer nuclear fission providing the majority of the baseline power in 20 years.
Investing in nuclear fusion research. This has large upside potential and enables things like widespread carbon removal efforts.
Investing in energy storage. Storage helps solve peak load problems.
Of these items, nuclear fission is the most obvious thing that on the margin we could be doing and aren’t.
Making Carbon-Free an Easy Decision
Tech has the opportunity to make each sector better/cheaper and emit less carbon, with no tradeoffs.
The biggest categories of CO2 emissions (2) are:
28% of CO2 is from Transportation (mostly cars/trucks)
27% from electricity.
10% from agriculture (mostly meat production).
12% from heating.
The absolute best thing for reducing carbon is to make carbon-free options better than the alternative carbon-emitting option. Tesla is perhaps the most obvious example. They made a car that is widely regarded as the best car, so people adopt it.
Impossible burger is attempting to do a similar thing by making meat alternatives that are cheaper and tastier than the original products. If they accomplish this, then we should expect meat consumption to fall.
There are newer heating products that are simply better, such as advanced heat pumps and geothermal heating/cooling. These allow much more efficient operation, providing comfort at cost savings.
Dollar-for-dollar, if you can create a better carbon-free option, that is going to be the best possible use of a dollar to reduce global carbon emissions. It is scalable, with zero tradeoffs.
Beyond that, carbon capture is the next best thing to invest incremental dollars is carbon capture.
Carbon Capture
Current estimates are that we emit 40 gigatons (40 billion tons) of CO2 per year into the atmosphere. Currently, it’s about $152 per ton, so it would cost about 6 trillion dollars per year to become “carbon neutral” globally. This means removing as much carbon as we emit each year. The global GDP is $80T per year, so to do this would be about 8% of global GDP. So even today, if we scaled up our carbon removal at these prices we could become carbon neutral. If we believed there was an immediate existential threat to do so, we could do it. But 8% of GDP is a ton, and would cause a lot of suffering to accomplish. This puts some of this crisis in perspective. Excess CO2 is not likely to doom the planet. However, even if we wanted to do this, we lack scaled-up operations and global coordination to accomplish it today. We need carbon removal to scale at lower cost.
With a 10x improvement it would be about $15 per ton to remove carbon. This makes the cost to remove 40 gigatons about $600B. This is expensive but possible for China and the US to do on their own without any cooperation. It represents about 12% of the US government's annual budget. There is no particular reason to believe we can’t get to at least $10 per ton, or less than 0.5% of global GDP, or perhaps even to $3 per ton. At $3 per ton, capturing all carbon would be about $100B per year, an amount the US regularly spends on a variety of programs. So how do we get carbon removal scaled up and at least 10x lower cost? Just keep scaling.
Costs for large manufacturing-like processes almost always go down with scale. For physical goods, these are typically considered economies of scale. These economies are driven by learned improvements in manufacturing processes, technological improvements, as well as shared costs for many functions (like accountants, managers, etc). "Swanson's law" is a term for this trend in this effect in solar, which describes the steady drop in cost for solar energy over time. There has been a 20% cost reduction for every 2x in solar cumulative production (not annual production), in a trend going back decades.
Following this logic, you can map out where we are today to where we need to be. For this model, I assumed that we have removed 1 million tons of CO2 to date. This seems conservative, but I couldn’t find accurate data on this. From there, we can extrapolate to see how prices change, and the cost to get there.
Swanson’s law, and the progression of solar, is a good proxy for the progress for large manufacturing processes like carbon capture. It shows a clear roadmap towards $10 per ton carbon capture, and beyond.
The way I see this playing out is in 3 phases:
Phase 1: Heavy R&D - At this phase, it’s all about trying things. I expect us to take about $5B-$10B per year in carbon capture for about 10 years to get carbon capture to about $30/ton.
Phase 2: Early scale - In this phase, you can really start to spend about $100B per year to get the cost to the $10/ton range. This would extract about 10 gigatons per year or about 25% of output.
Phase 3: Net Negative - In this phase, we can expect large-scale operations to be running. If we can get carbon costs to $3/ton, then spending about $200B per year would extract about 2 years of carbon.
What is remarkable about this path, is that it is so much cheaper than the UN’s estimated $3T per year. In fact, it may be a $3T lifetime cost to make climate change “not a big deal”, with carbon removal. It will likely cost about $10T total to restore the earth to its pre-industrial carbon levels. It is not something we can just cut a check for today and solve, it takes a lot of time, effort, and engineering. But we can and will solve it.
Our learnings from carbon renewal will also help us understand how to do more climate engineering projects, an important part of journeying to space. This may make this whole project something that is not only a cost, but rather an investment we may use many times across the galaxy.
Climate change is a risk, but it is a risk that we can solve with minimal tradeoffs if we are smart about it. There is reason to be optimistic.
Footnotes:
(1) https://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/articles/thanks-to-past-inertia-it-will-now-cost-between-1-6-and-3-8-trillion-per-year-to-fix-the-climate-mess
(2) https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Here are some articles I found interesting and related (I don’t agree with everything here but they are good reads):
(a) https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/11/27/carbon-dioxide-removal-climate-change/#:~:text=Direct%20air%20capture%20started%20out,removing%20CO2%20from%20the%20air.
(b) https://stripe.com/climate