German-American-Israeli trilateral symposium “Energy Solutions”, October 11 – 12, 2023
www.leopoldina.org/energy-solutions
Organizers: the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
00:02:20 Jennifer Wilcox, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington D.C.
00:21:24 Gideon Friedman, Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, Jerusalem
00:44:58 Niklas von der Aßen, RWTH Aachen University
01:02:21 Kira Rehfeld, University of Tübingen
01:20:27 Discussion; Chair: Granger Morgan, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
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We’re going to talk today about negative emissions and a few other things to remain below 2 de Centigrade by 2100 most projections argue that the world will need to find a way to achieve negative emissions in addition to cutting back substantially on um emissions from uh all various economic activities that
That uh take place around the world uh actually the nationalis have run three consensus studies in this general area general for Wilcox who will hear from in a few minutes um was a key author of the uh study on the left I was also a member
Of that panel and then there was a specific study a few years later on negative emissions and also relevant but not really about negative emissions is U uh a recent uh consensus report from the Academy’s on carbon dioxide utilization markets and infrastructure uh here are the uh uh
Strategies that were explored in the academy study on negative emissions Jennifer’s going to make some uh passing comments to some of them so I wanted you just to at least know that they’ll be in the slides when they’re distributed and the report has also estimated the current costs and
Capabilities of U uh each of those strategies Jennifer is on the faculty at uh uh the University of Pennsylvania but she’s on leave now serving uh in the US Department of energy and because we were concerned that the US government might might be shutting down uh we instead arranged for her
To uh record a video and which she will uh and we’ll play that now and then we’ll have three live remarks and I will wrap up with a final uh set of comments at the end so hello thank you for having me today and apologies that I can’t be
There in person uh excited to talk to you about carbon dioxide uh removal and also the work that we’re doing uh at Department of energy I wanted to start out with looking at what is the role of carbon removal in achieving Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions uh so as you
Know the United States and the Biden Harris Administration uh set a number of climate goals um one being achieving Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and so the question is you know what are the different uh actions that we need to take in order to reach
Uh Net Zero by mident century and what is the role of carbon dioxide removal in achieving that zero and so highlighting in red some of the the carbon management uh aspects of the portfolio and more specifically too to think about carbon removal and its role recognizing that
There’s going to be emissions that are truly truly hard to decarbonize and that carbon removal is going to be a strategy for us to achieve Net Zero by counterbalancing those truly hard to remove um emissions the other piece that’s important to recognize is that when we think about carbon management or
Point source capture from um individual emission sources and we think about engineered approaches to removal like direct air capture that the overlap is is that we have to somehow also manage the CO2 Downstream and the um method of of dealing with that that scales with the size of the emissions on the order
Of gigatons is really geologic storage of CO2 and so there is a little bit of overlap uh in in regards to Downstream management of CO2 when it comes to um methods that are avoiding emissions from entering the atmosphere and methods that are removing CO2 from the accumulated
Pool in the atmosphere uh a good resource is the CDR primer um which a group of 40 researchers from North America and also across Europe um published back in 2021 and in chapter one uh we have this image that’s showing it’s really about responsible way of thinking about carbon
Removal not being there to allow us to overshoot not being there to Simply offset emissions that we have Technologies to decarbonize today but really being there in a responsible um way of thinking about counterbalancing hard to decarbonized sectors and so this should never be seen as a means to
Continue emitting at the rate that we’re emitting today we still need to in parallel um advance and rapidly Advance deep decarbonization methods in addition to scaling up CDR uh at the end of the day we’re still going to need on the order of gigatons of CDR we’re on the
Scale of say thousands of CDR removed if you think about kind of engineered approaches um and we need to somehow increase that by six zeros in less than 30 years and so we if we don’t start today we’ll never have this tool in time and uh also in office of fossil energy
And carbon management at the department of energy in April 20122 we published our strategic vision and this is an image from that um from that publication and so what we’re showing here is on the right hand side is doing that bottomup calculation to understand what are the emissions that
Truly are difficult to decarbonize and when you think about the United States emissions it’s on average about six gigatons of CO2 each year um you know and distributed in different down different sectors these are the sectors that are truly hard to decarbonize so when we think about agricultural sectors
And and methane emissions or n2o emissions from agriculture when we think about Long Haul Trucking and you think about Aviation where biofuels are only going to play um you know a portion of that and in shipping as well and also residual emissions if we’re looking at the power sector and our method are
Capturing 95% CO2 there’s that 5% that’s going to be emitted we look at supply chain leakage and Emissions associated with oil and gas production and methane even if it’s leak tight there’s going to be residual emissions and when you add all of this up it adds up to about just
Roughly a gigaton of CO2 and so it’s we have to scale up to the gigaton scale no matter what and it’s a portfolio Solutions and we kind of list those on the left hand side from biological approaches to CD R to chemical approaches mineral approaches and also
Ocean uh CDR and so I’m going to talk a little bit uh about the efforts at Department of energy we’re investing across broadly across the space and so I had the opportunity to be on the Committees of two National Academy of Sciences reports uh one on what we call
Climate intervention trying to replace the term GE engineering um which we you know really consider geoengineering as being being like the other knob that one can turn so changing the reflectivity of the earth uh where carbon removal is is is quite different and the impacts of each of those turning each of those
Knobs is quite different uh and so um we wanted to kind of come up with a broader term that was inclusive of both uh so we came up with climate intervention in this we really just kind of laid out what each of the approaches are what the
Potential impacts could be and then we followed up with another report that really was a blueprint print for the government of there are these different approaches and how can we invest in kind of first of a kind and what technologies um across the entire portfolio and really assigning responsibilities across the US
Government from the Department of energy um to EPA to um you know all of the different aspects and so when we when I started uh in January uh just day one of the administration as a political appointee I took that blueprint and really thought about you know how can we
Invest and so we had a number of earthshot initiatives uh in the department of energy and one is specifically on the carbon negative shot and so here we’re investing in the entire portfolio um From Oceans to Bo Coastal Blue carbon to uh looking at accelerating chemical weathering of rocks um engineered approaches like
Direct airc cap capture uh biological approaches like improved Forest management increasing carbon storage in soils and really just looking at the entire portfolio the goal at the end of the day is how can we invest such that we can get to from thousands of tons of durable carbon storage today to millions
Of tons over the next decade and if we make those Investments can we bring down the cost Point down to $100 per net metric ton uh of CO2 and so really investing in all of these approaches and this is a joint effort through um Broadley Department of energy my office but also
RP um Energy Efficiency and renewable energies and and just really a a concerted effort to um look at how can we you know many many of us are focusing on the technical aspects of carbon removal and thinking about the price point the cost of it being quite high
And thinking about the nature-based as being just a little bit you know not as costly but at the end of the day if we have to also develop the hardware the sensing uh the measurement technologies that are coupled to um those nature-based approaches you know it it’s
Still a question of how much that will cost when you couple the nature-based approaches to the quantification devices that are required to have monitoring reporting and verification and so that we can start to actually compare the impact of these approaches on some kind of Level Playing Field and so a lot of
The work that we’re doing At Doe is investing in um that Hardware the technology so that a soils project for agriculture and a forest project those applicants at the end of the day those stakeholders will have the tools available to be able to quantify the additional carbon that’s removed um and
So all of these projects are kind of at different stages in terms of the broader portfolio uh we have the opportunity in the United States um with through the bipartisan infrastructure law which is12 billion across all carbon management over the next five years including um a significant amount of money for the
First of a Kind direct air capture hubs and I’ll talk a little bit about that in a moment we also have the inflation reduction act which is really the tax credits and we have 45 Q um in this case what that’s doing is just it’s additive
And so if you have a firstof aind demonstration funded through the bipar infrastructure law and the government’s paying up to 50% of the capital investment of that project you can also stack with it um the inflation reduction act 45 Q credits which is $180 per ton of CO2 for direct air
Capture and we’ve also reduced the minimum project size through this is to a, tons of CO2 um durably removed and we just made an announcement recently uh where we have roughly a hundred million that we’re investing in concept studies through front-end engineering design studies um through a number of different um technological
Approaches or engineered approaches to direct air capture and funded uh firstof a-kind two um Hub um projects as well uh and that’s 1.2 billion dollar so 100 million for the concept studies and the feed studies and 1.2 um for the direct air capture hubs and the goal for those
Direct air capture hubs um is to uh scale up to 1 million tons of CO2 removal per year at the end of the day Congress is asking us to fund four at a total of $3.5 billion and so when you look at the selections made for concept through
Frontend engineering design you can see that they span across the United States which is really exciting um and also span different types of Technologies and so we’re looking at approaches that are strictly you know where 100% electrons are fed into the process we’re looking at approaches where it’s a combination
Of heat and power so thermal energy electric energy going into processes um you know and it also depends on as you design a technology you’re thinking about citing it it depends on what are the low carbon energy resources regionally available to you do you have stranded electrons do you have thermal
Energy and what is the quality of heat of that energy you know some of the approaches require a thousand degrees C um in order to regenerate the material to produce a high Purity stream of CO2 some more of the the solid sorbent based Technologies only require 100 degrees C
Heat and so couple well for instance with geothermal where you’re not having to choose between um energy production or direct air capture you can actually co-optim optimize both and so looking at a variety of energy resources combined with different Technologies uh all across the United States and really from
The concept all the way through the front engineering frontend engineering design which is the first step before actually carrying out a demonstration and so really what we’re trying to do with these Investments is meet industry where they’re at today meet the Technologies where they’re at so that we
Can have a robust pipeline so that when we go to fund the next two direct air capture demonstrations we have a a broad portfolio to choose from and so this is a little bit more detail about the two um direct air capture Hub projects that we’re investing in um one is the
Technology providers carbon engineering um you know and the other one is clim works and so one is a a liquid solvent carbon engineering is a liquid solvent based approach you know where at the end of the day they’re producing um a carbonate material that they have to really heat to high temperatures in
Order order to regenerate and climbworks is using an Aman um based solid sorbent and can use a lower quality of heat both have pren cons of course and uh one is cited in Louisiana and the other one in Texas the other thing that’s important to mention about this is they have to
Have that CO2 offtake and so each of these projects is coupled to um CO2 sequestration and um and and that’s an important concept too that I mentioned earlier and so dedicated carbon storage and that is in collaboration doe with the Environmental Protection Agency that works to um permit the class six Wells
For for deep CO2 injection and so with that I want to just briefly mention um our carbon Safe program and so this walks um you know folks through the different processes if they have formations for deep CO2 injection we start with funding just the characterization of the reservoir to be
Able to understand whether or not it’s suitable for deep injection of CO2 and then phase two is complex the complex feasibility uh characterization and permitting and finally phase four is the construction of the well and the classic permit and so we have this in place we have through the bipartisan
Infrastructure law $2.5 billion doar to invest over the next 5 years and to build out the capacity of 65 million tons of CO2 injection per year across the United States and we’ve started to fund projects already uh at the different phases that you can see here
On the map and um and so it’s pretty exciting uh that we’re starting to just really build out the capacity which is really the offtake of CO2 and as I mentioned is critical for for the engineered based approaches to carbon removals to have that Downstream carbon management uh we’re also investing of
Course as I mentioned through the carbon negative shot through base Appropriations you know also looking at ocean carbon removal we have eight projects that we’re funding so far really at the early stages and focused on abiotic ocean-based carbon removal so thinking about alkalinity enhancement of oceans being able to understand too if
There can be Regional um impacts associated with reducing ocean acidification uh and then we’re also looking at direct air capture couple to products and in this case um these are at best neutral not considered carbon removal since you’re then combusting often times or using the chemicals or
Fuels and re-emitting the CO2 in the atmosphere but if the hydrogen source is biomass and in your production of the hydrogen you are storing the carbon that’s deep underground that’s produced in that hydrogen has a negative carbon intensity Associated it there is the possibility of making chemicals and
Fuels that are carbon negative if the hydrogen has a carbon negative um footprint and the CO2 is sourced from the air and so that’s pretty interesting too and with that thank you so much again uh for having me um virtually and uh and wish I could be there and enjoy
Enjoy the rest of the workshop thank you microphone since Jennifer said a fair number of things about uh deep geologic sequestration I wanted just to take three minutes before we move on to the other uh parts of this session some years ago a number of us uh
Figured out that at least in the US where uh ownership of the deep subservice is not State controlled but is essentially different state to state that the that the US needed a coherent approach to uh managing uh sequestration in the Deep uh uh geology and we ran a a
Fairly large project involving not just technical people but lawyers and Regulatory people and produced actually at the end of the document a 50-page draft Bill not with the sense that anybody on the hill was going to actually pick it up and pass it but that it would least you know be
Grist for cutting and pasting to do something but decarbonization wasn’t high on the political agenda a decade ago so nothing much happened and instead under the authority to protect groundwater EPA developed rules for something called class six injection Wells that Jennifer mentioned and the results in an awkward state byst state
System that while it’s better than nothing doesn’t systematically address key issues such as liability and long-term stewardship approval of new wells has been very slow since the class 6 rule was promulgated in 2010 the US EPA has approved only six permits although there are a number of more in the pipelines
And with a do student named Emy Moore and U Valerie down here at the other end of the table we’ve just completed a study of how long it’s likely to take to develop permit and start operations for a sequestration well I’m going to show you just a couple of slides to to to
Give you that answer the way we’ve done this is by identifying six clearance points that one needs to get through in order to get to the point of developing a well and then for each of those clearance points Emmy has elicited probability distributions from three experts so here are uh box plots showing
The amount of time these experts thought it would take to get past each clearance point you can see that there’s not great consensus about some of them and then you do a stochastic simulation in order to estimate the overall time to completion and you find that there’s a
95% chance that it’s going to take at least least 5 years there’s a 5% chance it could take well over 10 years the US is talking about decarbonizing the electricity system by 2035 this is a serious problem and so one of the things we are working on now
Is trying to figure out some strategies that could safely speed the process I won’t read them since time is short uh but we can move on now uh to the first presentation uh by Gideon 3 uh from the ministry of energy and infrastructure at uh at Jerusalem Israel
The chief scientist unit has several roles we basically see ourselves as leading innovation in both in Te in the technical sense but also in let’s say procedural sense The Waiting procedures so uh we are part of the ministry let’s say long-term policy setting group U also midterm with we participated in the
2030 uh plan for the uh Ministry for U uh going into renewable energy primary and emission reductions for 2050 uh we are pushing innovation in the energy and water markets H we are supporting as I said we are a funding agency so we are supporting entrepreneurship from academic research
Through early stage startups and pilots and demonstration so we have three main support programs for for these two steps along the R&D process and uh we are trying to improve the procedures for Innovation and trying to remove obstacles where possible and and invent new procedures that are hopefully
Easier I do want to emphasize the importance of investing in our because sometimes it’s not so clear certainly from our perspective in the government we have to work very hard to get the funds and I hope that the participants in this conference who are mostly getting the
Grants and so I I I basically want to show my appreciation H for H for your work and and every every unit of investment that we put in R&D this is the research or actually two researches that were done in Israel for how much each unit of investment actually increases the GDP uh
Later on so we get for investment in Hightech we would get between 4.7 and 5.5 on the left hand side units of increased G GDP and generally the energy Market is considered to be mixed mixed traditional because it’s infrastructure infrastructure field although I believe we are moving more
And more toward the Hightech Mi Hightech type of things as as the digitalization is is penetrating more and more even this infrastructure field H so it’s every every dollar that’s invested in R&D is really really beneficial um as an example for our own Investments I point out two numbers H so
If we invested in the industrial sector industrial R&D about 200 million shekels over the eight years between 22 2012 and 2020 ER followup private investment in in some of the companies that we supported in earlier stages summed up to about 20 400 2.4 billion shekels which is a factor of 12
To to our investment and is very impressive and another um way to measure that I tried last year I said okay let’s do it year by year I said okay how much did we invest in 2022 we invested about 117 million Shekel in R&D in total not only industrial also academic and um
Again what was the private investment during that year alone uh in uh companies mostly companies that we invested in the past and uh for that specific year only uh it was 586 million shekel so it’s a five factor of five on that H so I I believe our investment is
Very uh very effective these are logos of companies that were um able to to go uh for an IPO and we invested in the past in them I would say that this field of energy and water the infrastructure field it’s very difficult to get private funding for the reasons that I show here
Mostly um one one thing is it takes a very very long time to get from the the from the idea stage to an actual product 10 years and more we see even more you know 12 and 15 years from the stage of the idea to actual product very long
Time which most investors will not consider reasonable H in many cases the investment is very high at the later stages in the um in the proof in the field proof of the technology where actual big infrastructure is required the investment is very high and the risk is still not negligible so it’s difficult
To get private money there and uh finally the return on investment is quite low because this is a regulated area and generally the margins in this in energy and water are not so high so it’s not um not possible to make a big big return and also the situation
Of winner Tak all is not does not actually exist like in Hightech sometimes happens because most countries want their infrastructure to be with at least a national color so in you know a foreign company with the technology cannot own H the facilities by itself um so again this is a deterrent to invest
Investors H that’s why government has to step in and and intervene I would say this is a distribution of how we uh last two years split our funding between academic research and uh the rest we see that most of the investment goes to academic research and Pilots I said
Pilots are expensive in this area and we also and the academic Investments that we do are High We Believe H we really believe that we have to put a lot most of the almost most of the money that academic research because that’s where the Innovation the basic Innovation
Comes from and and it’s all deep innov the technology is deep requires deep research it’s not an idea that something can someone sorry can come up with and hope solve a problem this is and most problems require a really deep deep understanding of the issues and and research and we
Also established two research institutes uh uh joint government academic uh project on storage energy storage electrochemical energy storage and the other one on Fusion will not deal with that um let’s let me skip that I just this slide shows that the basic of what we want to do is to remove
CO2 and in Israel the the dominance of the electricity Market is very pronounced uh which is a little different than the rest of the world and our industrial sector is small so really we concentrate in the mitigation sector on the electricity and transport and and less on the industry at this stage of
Course as we progress toward 2050 and we need to get to reach the zero Target then we will tackle the later the problems the more difficult problems uh I will emphasize that our challenges are significant as a country uh the great issue was mentioned in the previous session in Israel it’s
Not at least as difficult as was thought in the previous session we currently have a 3 to4 jig trans grid power capacity and we need about four times that so not wise mentioned before we have four we need four times and Israel is more densely populated than most countries H it looks almost
Impossible and storage we also need to uh increase it by a factor about 100 from what we have today to 2050 because our renewable energy is solar and requires a lot of storage and we don’t have wind H land requirements in a small country is also difficult for solar
Energy so all of this together is is a great challenge which we are just at the beginning of the tackling uh carbon capture is as you can see here on this left bottom left hand side will be needed clearly and we are also putting some effort starting to put some effort
On on checking this and I will concentrate on that let let me skip um uh this one slide so I will now go into um the carbon capture and storage description of what we are doing right now H we are establishing uh in collaboration with Israeli Geological
Survey what we call an energy wing and this Wing will concentrate its work on ener on it and issues related to energy and the most prominent one is underground storage so this has been in the work for quite some sometime it’s going slower than what I would like but
It’s always like that when we try to raise a significant investment as is needed here and so uh we are we will run this together with the Israel Geological Survey again in the format that we established with the Academia on a research center so we’ll have a joint
Executive committee where um you know we as a government will influence how what research directions of the research and what is going on and the budget that we hope to allocate that is is over 15 15 million euros over the next 10 years we are still not uh we have not actually
Been able to to guarantee that at this point um so how what what is the main thing I I said that we we we are going to look into uh underground storage um uh so there’s going to be um a character characterization of the Israeli underground more thorough and also oriented toward storage
Of various things that we want to store now with put CO2 at the top of course but other um other reasons to store underground we are quite clear we may want to store large amounts of hydrogen compressed air for electricity storage there’s still need to store
Natural gas at least for the next 20 years now uh heat is also something that we could potentially store underground also we are looking into a deep underground um heat extraction geothermal energy usually it’s called and um of course there’s I’m sorry the the word waste was dropped
Here but nuclear waste in case in case Israel eventually will um start the nuclear power generation we will need to handle the way so all of these topics are interesting and we need to um improve our knowledge base for the underground of Israel um briefly because I saw that
Most people here understand quite well methods of CO2 storage so there is the structural meaning basically there is a hole or or or let’s say that CO2 can be stored in um the next one is solubility and the next one mineralization this graph here shows essentially uh the time scales that CO2
Can be stored in the x axis um so so let’s say mineralization is the longest and solubility is still also quite long uh particularly uh for Israel it looks like solubility will be the prime potential for storage if we look at the negative you see on the bottom right
Here a map of the south of Israel and this area which was at least the current knowledge is mostly concentrated there we can see a cut across from sorry from west to east so West on the left hand side to East and we can see the Israeli underground there are water aquifers
Under the isra ground um at depth between about 800 M and two 2500 M uh they’re separated here to upper middle and lower uh acfer and um the water there are braish braish water underne uh again there’s this shows a mapping of um the south of Israel in
Terms of the middle aquafer in this case it shows the depth of aquifer on the right hand side and the thickness of the this level of the aifer and basically this shows that the potential for storing CO2 as a solution in water is quite significant and we expect
That we if if necessary it will be possible to store more more than enough let’s say underground in in in Israel so that covers most of plus or minus our knowledge we as I said we will uh improve uh this knowledge expand it to cover more precise more detailed information so
That we can actually auction off to the private sector um and reach maybe at some point what Jennifer described these CO2 hubs uh projects but I I don’t expect that to happen in the next few years it will will take us some time but I hope that by 2030 we will be
More settled better in this in this sense we will have at least a pilot of CO2 storage uh I do want to talk a little bit about innovation in uh in the area of carbon capture and and the storage um I’m starting here actually as a as a
Country that has natural gas reserves and I would say that it is the waste not to use the the natural gas as long as we don’t harm the environment and I think uh it is possible so if we can separate the the methane into hydrogen and
Carbon uh then uh then we will be in very good shape so again at least for the next you know 10 to 30 years that could be a good solution H so this project here shows a H2 pyrolysis it’s done at Tel Aviv University by Brian Rosen and uh
Basically methan percolates through the Catalyst at high temperatures here and it breaks into hydrogen and carbon the carbon floats on the metal and can be then separated physically when that carbon carbon is of course quite a useful material today and so there there should be no problem
To find uses for the carbon and then hydrogen is a clean fuel that does not emit CO2 of course and very briefly a list of um companies let’s say and project research projects also in quite broad so as this list mostly wants to show how broad the research efforts are and I
Will mention these companies here and the research projects so aerovation is a memorization project where actually with peroxide they try to get Chrome CO2 minerals I will mention that minorization is actually turning one problem to another okay so we have the CO2 gas which we need to uh
Get rid of somehow and at the U output we get the mineral so most of the minerals if we think about the quantities that we’re talking about gigatons of CO2 the minerals are not used for these quantities so we need actually to get rid or at least store
Them so at the these projects need to be done at locations that the minerals can just stay or B P or something like that so it’s not a neg negligible issue serious issue where actually to put the minerals in the end and another company carbon blue um is attempting is company
To get Co2 from the sea water again direct air capture I have to say personally looks quite difficult in terms of quantities because the concentration of CO2 in the air is so small H so if you look at the numbers of how much air you need to pass through
Your system uh they look quite scary and of course the numbers the economic numbers don’t make any sense right now ER however for seawat there is a I believe a lot more potential to a lot more C2 there and so this company is trying to get carbon from the seawater
With a specific Catalyst that they develop another interesting direction is to store CO2 in algae and then bury the algae in the deep ocean this needs to be tested also in the environmental sense I would say an interesting idea comes from a company called bonvento it’s um a company that
Says okay we have wind turbines running the wind turbines actually process a huge amount of air so why don’t we put let’s say you or put them to use to do things similar to direct air capture in this case they want to capture NO2 which is also a a greenhouse gas so
Um they want to um cover the wings of the turbine with a catalyst and and also you need the you need the UV lights so light this area and then capture the the NO2 uh it is an interesting idea in the sense that the win tur bands process
A huge amount of air because of their nature so that alleviates the necess the issue that I mentioned before how do we get all the air through the this system um reap air is a direct air capture company with membranes special membrane LOL is actually doing CCU so which doing let’s say
Standard not not not not any inov technology but Standard carbon capture um and it tries to uh create from the carbon and separately generated hydrogen methane fuel in order to reuse reuse the carbon um we are supporting a project by this is also an industrial stage project carbon storage in Wetlands
Was also mentioned by Jennifer before as a potential for CO2 sequestrations and in the Academia we have um a project for mineralization of brine from Desination attempt and electrochemical selective CO2 reduction to Fuels also so the the potential to generate fuels from the CO2 is also quite quite attractive as we will need uh we will need fuels as part of our overall U energy scheme for 2050 with zero zero emissions that concludes my talk I thank
You and um would would love to hear from you if you have any questions or comments you can also write with me later on thanks so now we go back to Academia and see how we spend the money from the Federal Ministry um yeah and my name is Nicholas
Fen I’m from rwth AR University in Germany if you’ve not been there there’s a nice drone shot of part of our city it looks a a little bit nicer to the right because that’s where we have a nice cathedral but I like this perspective because in the background you see um one
Of the dirtiest coal power plants that we have in Europe um so that’s uh still present but soon to be history and of course in the front of the picture you see our Institute and of course that’s that’s the future and um in the future we think we will have um direct air
Carbon capture so what we’ve heard already and I would like to ask the question whether that’s an energy solution so we know what’s the the problem with our Energy System right now it’s uh CO2 emissions and that’s why we rebuild build pretty much everything so
If we now add a new technology to the portfolio the question is um Can it actually reduce or remove emissions and um in a nice study by our colleagues uh on direct air capture of an industrial air capture system by clim works they made a thorough life cycle assessment
And what they showed is um that the carbon footprint is negative so that we actually reduce or remove CO2 from the atmosphere with this technology so the purpose of the technology is met that’s a good news however what you see on the xaxis is uh the CO2 intensity of
Electricity because this process needs energy and needs a lot of energy and this energy has to be clean in order that it makes sense so that we have a net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere so overall then this um energy is quite huge and it’s additional to all the
Additional electricity and energy demands that we heard before direct electrification uh electric vehicles um heat pumps uh indirect for hydrogen use and so on so the question is what’s the place of direct air capture and what we like to do is to sort things and kind of
Do uh draw some some uh Merit order curves and um that’s what um my PhD buddy Andre stck did um for the question you get one hour of uh one megawatt hour of electricity for free yeah uh what should you do with it in order to reduce
As much CO2 as possible so what would should you substitute and he found some exotic things like making formic acid uh with electrochemistry but then the usual suspects uh like heat pumps and Battery electric vehicles where you save the most now then you have some other things
That still reduce CO2 emissions but to a lesser extent and I was quite surprised to find that Direct air CT capture with the energy use is not to the very right end it’s somewhere in the middle while right now we’re at the lower bottom so
The the bars that you see are ranges so we’re at the bottom range and we haven’t factored in some some Upstream energy for the materials but still um it’s not completely nonsense to do this right so you could argue from this kind of graph yeah okay then let’s just do business as
Usual and uh add carbon capture maybe from the air well that’s of course just a selection of technology so that’s not the complete picture because of course you can capture CO2 from other sources so we draw another Merit order curve for where should you uh Source the
CO2 from and you can see uh now it’s it’s it’s negative uh numbers so also reductions again there are other sources uh where you have much larger reductions so um that makes much much more sense and just to the very right end this gray part that’s direct air capture so that’s
Kind of the last thing that you should do so only if we kind of uh got rid of all the other CO2 sources then uh from this energetic and environmental perspective then we should do direct air capture so to come up to answer the question yeah that was discussed in
Nature Communications is direct capture an energetically and financially costly distraction yeah maybe to some some degree but it’s not total nonsense but what we can conclude is it’s definitely not the first thing that we should do maybe it’s the last maybe not but the thing is and we heard that already we
Have to do it yeah so that’s what what we know from the from the different grasp scenarios and projections that by mid century we need some sort of negative emissions in order to to limit the warming between 1.5 degree whether we like it or not and whether we can
Achieve uh the the DraStic reductions now or we start later then we need more or less negative emissions but we need it yeah but we need it as we heard before after we did all the reductions so to make it more catchy I would say reduce at best and then remove the rest
Yeah okay but removal is necessary and it will be huge so the scale I don’t know if you remember the the small numbers in many of the presentations from EA yesterday and also from Jennifer wock it will be in the gigaton scale yeah with the energy demand of gigles
Per ton CO2 removed we in this EXO scale worldwide that’s in the order of magnitude um of Renewables that we have today so what does it mean for the development of direct air capture it means we should be as efficient as possible yeah and we have to have it
Ready by 2050 even earlier because 2050 is when we should be CO2 uh net we have Net Zero emissions but we have some hard toate emissions so we have to have negative emissions even before that not necessary direct air capture but we need this technology very soon so we should
Really start developing um now to have it ready and to have it very efficient okay so we need neck negative emissions maybe just one more word uh on this because it’s sometimes confusing net negative means we have to take CO2 from the atmosphere and store it somewhere else as Robert schluger said
We have we need a sea dump yeah which is not the atmosphere so um and that’s the only way to achieve net negative emissions you can do carbon capture and storage from fos with fossil carbon and also carbon capture and utilization but that’s at best carbon neutral which is
Good we should do but it’s not helping in the sense of this negative emissions that we also need and in order to to be clear that it’s not negative I think we should do sound environmental assessment looking at the entire life cycle and also taking into account other
Environmental impacts because we know we will have a tradeoff there will be other impacts um yeah at the benefit of of uh reducing or removing CO2 from the atmosphere um okay so um we have a German um um yeah project uh called CDR Terra and CDR Mara where we look at
Carbon dioxide removal technology on land and in the ocean I won’t go into the details so I will focus on direct air capture yeah and rough classification is what we’ve already heard into solvent based U Technologies where we absorb into a liquid uh allows continuous uh process but we need high
Temperatures to get the CO2 out of the solvent again and the other hand we have sbit based or absorption based uh capture where CO2 absorbs onto a porous solid and the benefit is that we can do the desorption of CO2 from that material at much lower temperatures the downside is
We have a solid so we cannot just pump it around we need an kind of adsorption and desorption cycle and with this I would like to go a little bit into the details of this technology so how does it look like well we have a device yeah
With this with some kind of material that likes to absorb CO2 so and then we have a fan and blow air through this device CO2 is absorbed onto the surface of this material and then CO2 poor air comes out again so then we uh close the inlet we
Uh Evacuate the remaining air and then we add heat and we add even more heat and then the CO2 is released again well why do we distinguish between this first and second heating phase well the different material materials and different concepts but for the material
That we looked at it does not only like CO2 it also likes water yeah and there’s moisture in the air so uh the material absorbs uh CO2 and water and we also have to get rid of the water again and the nice thing about the material we
Looked at is um if you apply heat for desorption first the water is released and then after that the CO2 so with the right timing you can kind of um Skip One separation step after afterwards or the condensation but they’re different concepts this is the basic idea and and
Um this is what we want to use to kind of optimize the system across different scales so ideally we would also design new molecules materials yeah have varying process Concepts tailored to this we build some prototypes to validate simulations and then also put it into big Energy System models yeah
Because energy demand is key and that also drives in the end uh the net negative performance and also the other environmental impacts I would just talk about three approaches that we wanted uh to do so uh we have um um a DAC uh process how does it look like so in the
Middle there’s this this plan that’s kind of the process that I showed you before um and this requires energy and of course uh this energy comes with CO2 emissions even if we’re if you renew uh some Renewables there will also be emissions from constructing the plant and from the sorbent production there
Will be energy for compression uh storage and so on so that’s kind of the process that we look like and what people typically do is they optimize this for minimal energy demand however that’s not the complete picture because we have the um emissions that are not really energy related like from plant
Construction and sorbent production so we thought okay um how how does it look like if we change it and minimize for net CO2 removal because that’s what this process is supposed to do remove CO2 so um yeah that’s uh that’s the setup it kind of is a model for The clim Works uh
Container um that you can buy so now the question is you bought a container from clim works for direct air capture how should I operate it and we say say operated uh with respect to a maximal uh net2 removal and to skip some of the details we could show in optimization uh
In this perito front because you always have a trade off with a PL productivity that in the red curve is the classical Appo approach but now we have the blue curve optimized for removal and we get uh an improvement it’s quite moderate maybe 4% so what else could you do well
We already heard about sighting so we have this container where do we put it yeah we could put it in different places of the world and that affects our process firstly it’s affected by ambient uh air temperature and humidity yeah so uh Co cooler temperatures uh favor the
Kinetics of absorption humidity is in our material it favors co-adsorption it can also be disadvantage um uh in other materials but it affects the energy demand and productivity so and then we also heard energy is different in uh different places of the world we looked at wind
And solar PV as energy sources um and and their carbon footprint which varies if you have larger wind speeds higher solar irradiation of course then the carbon footprint uh comes down so the question is where should should we put it we first uh looked at um at um just
Uh Ideal Supply so we neglected energy demand and just looked at the the influence of the air and this is kind of the result blue are good places so it’s in places where it’s cold and humid yeah but then we find something like a good place that we might thought of in the
Beginning like the Sahara Desert um is not so good yeah but um you could add PV panels there so how does it change the picture that’s the second case it doesn’t change it too much still not a good place but the north uh regions are not so good anymore because simply the
Sun doesn’t shine so so often so um what about wind if we couple it it uh with wind then we see just a second um that the good places uh for direct air capture where the air is good for the process and high wind speeds they kind
Of overlap so that’s uh you can see for example here something like Iceland yeah that’s where clim Works put their DIC plans they don’t use wind power they use geothermal could be another case that we haven’t looked uh into into yet uh for transparency we completely ignored
Storage so we assumed just we capture it we don’t know how to store it where to store it so no transport or storage included uh in here but of course we can do that then one final thing that we looked at and we heard okay if we want
To renew renewable uh energy we know it’s fluctuating so why should we operate our process in a steady state manner yeah it works but it’s expensive and can reduce the cost by adding flexibility in the sense of a demand side management right so what we did is we added
Flexibility to the process how did we do it this is kind of the the process uh also in a cycle and what we did is we added brakes before and after the absorption phase so we can just kind of decide whether we turn off the fan or
Not and just wait a little bit and also doing aborption we can kind of adjust the power of the fan so the mass um flow rate of air and this tiny bit of flexibility is now put into an optimization to reduce the cost or optimize for cost we compare compare it
To a case where we just have identical Cycles over the year and we end up with a net carbon removal cost in the order of 750 per ton of CO2 removed and if we Now operate it flexibly which is quite challenging from the com computational
Point of view now we have some uh some time series here for prices for the carbon foot print and to be honest we also have time series for uh air humidity and temperature uh and if we leverage that by optimization uh spare the details here uh we end up with
Individual Cycles so day cycle night cycle summer cycle winter cycle uh and we can reduce the cost by about 27% so just by having adding flexibility um and not taking into account that you get any money for the flexibility of what happens to the grid
So next thing we do is to put it in our Energy System model that we have and and and have that combined as well so that’s just two PhD students in less than three years which uh who I think did a great job but there’s much much more to do we
Just looked at one material just for the reason because um there’s not much data available but we also build up some some prototypes and testing equipment uh so I think there’s lots of to potential to even bring down the cost even more right
But we have to do a lot and I just uh listed a lot of challenges that we have so yeah very important is the material yeah we need classification we need data uh they have to be very stable which they are not so much uh right now um so
If you’re working on this or if you have data uh please reach out to us we neglected storage as I said before um we have a project uh where we look into our partners look look into acceptance risk perception and mental models of Dax which is quite interesting and uh I
Think we have to find good business cases to really to really make it work and the support by the right policies so if you’re working on this you can contribute please talk to me I’m happy to exchange or or happy to connect you with our other project Partners thank you very
Much so what I would like to tell you about is a project that my partner Matias Ma and I started or thought about when we were posts and that is now um a project investigating negative emiss emission Technologies based on Photo electrc chemical methods um and I’ll
Present to you the current status of this project so this is a project um with quite a few Partners you’ll hear more about that um in a minute first of all what I what do I do I’m a professor of climatology at tubing University a small University Town in
The south of Germany it’s beautiful I describe it as it’s like Cambridge in the UK just with hills and it’s a great place when you’re a climate scientist um for various reasons because it gives me peace of mind in my daily life um what you see here is something
That my research group is um focusing on our mission is to think about sustainable Pathways under climate variability you see 66 million years um of evolution of the planetary surface temperature from the hot house climate gradual cooling towards future projections based on state-of-the-art Earth system models and you have in the
Far right um modern era and the the Future these projections run with low medium and high mitigation efforts and when you look at the scale this is on the far left I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this is an anomaly with respect to our
Observational period so 1961 to 1990 and the maximum value is 16° global mean temperature warming with respect to the historical period and over the time that we’re looking at here CO2 concentrations have varied so the last time we were at CO2 concentrations that we are at today is
At least two million years ago might be even now further back in time and this is a time when we had a different ocean circulation we did not have established ice sheets so we had a much higher sea level and at the same time time this is
The kind of phenomena that we have to take into account when we’re talking about global warming and thresholds of 1.5 degrees or two degrees of warming so to come back to our mission we look at what does this kind of warming or cooling do to climate and environmental variability in space and
Time do our models that we run into the future actually give us a real istic depiction of the variability that we could see and what kind of sustainable future Pathways can we envisage so the second part really in in devising this this project that is netek um comes from solid driven
Electrochemistry and the solid state um electrochemical expertise of my partner Matias ma um and just um just like like me he leads an uter research group um at tubing in University and here I’ve brought one of their recent highlights a new record of solid to hydrogen production on centimeter scales based on
35 semiconductors and I encourage you to check out the references for details but here you can already see that our perspective is based on climate and on a detailed understanding of processes in climate as well as a detailed understanding of materials and how they interact with light so why are we talking about
Negative carbon Emissions on the x-axis here we have the cumulative amount of carbon going into the atmosphere and the Y AIS we have Global mean surface temperature here with respect to 1850 to 1900 and the blue or blue red orange scenarios are the same ones that I showed you earlier but now we’ve
Compressed um this into timelines with carbon emissions and the key point that I want to make here is that every single ton that goes into the atmosphere adds to gloam Meine surface temperature and this is because our natural sinks are slow and they are only adjusted to um offsetting natural
Sources so decarbonization is key to the 1.5 degree Target and to lower the risk of Crossing these thresholds that honestly we cannot at this point really determine well the other point that was made earlier as well is that we need by 2050 the potential to realize 10
Gigatons of um CO2 removal per year and this is really exclusively for hard to Abate emissions we also and this is um something that in mckas present ation we also saw the potential and the realization of this potential needs to start by the end of this decade what kind of the approaches are
There and Granger asked me to include a bit on um natural photosynthesis of course if you um promote a Project based on artificial photosynthesis this is um kind of important as well so the mature technology that is that is proposed and has been established for a while um is
Based on bioenergy carbon capture and storage and Illustrated in the top left here but of course in the public eye and public opinion a lot of our problems could be Sol solved by air forestation there is direct air capture and I will not add to what Nicholas said
About um that there are um approaches such as biochar soil sequestration in enhanced weathering as well as um different methods applied on the ocean it’s important to note here that most of the mature Technologies draw on natural photosynthesis for the fixation of carbon but there’s a really um difficult
Conundrum here if we still want to be able to feed the planet then this kind of approach is really difficult to um reconcile why well let’s take a step back and let’s appreciate that forests are beautiful they’re important for for us for humans and at first glance what we think about
Artificial photosynthesis brings to mind these difficult environments um such as this um solar thermal power plant here on the right hand side what is going on in the background is of course that um shortwave radiation is integrated in the plant and produces carbohydrates and this is
Exactly what we aim for also in our netp approach so to drive the reaction directly with um sunlight so our key Benchmark here is the solar to carbon efficiency so the number of carbon or the amount of carbon fixed from CO2 of the atmosphere divided by the number of
Typical photons um the solar Spectrum provides if we think about natural photosynthesis um then what we need is um about 10 gatons per year which translates to 10 million square kilometers and now we can think about the size of North America um the efficiency for energy concentrated in biomass is in the order
Of 2 to 3% and this is the 2 to 3% is ambitious it’s for genetically modified organisms um and not under natural sunlight artificial photosynthesis how however on the other hand is and this is something that threw me a lot in the beginning when studying the literature
Any kind of small to large modification of natural photosynthesis so if you scan the literature there’s a lot out there so that’s something to be aware of um energetic efficiencies can be 20 to 45% 47% is actually the current world record but I see U Mr hbling has left so I’m
Safe perhaps with the 40 on the slide but it’s it’s it’s much higher than what natural photosynthesis does now focusing on photoelectrochemistry and this is the third point we want to maximize this solar to carbon efficiencies and when we discussed this first we realized that we really need to
Put carbon at the front so efficient carbon sinks are not necessarily value added products and oh I’m you’re missing a slide here that’s really sad um so on the right hand side um you would see a diagram that shows you that oxalate formate are really great
Products in terms of the solar to carbon efficiency where whereas other um products which include more hydrogen bonds such as methane are far less efficient and this translates directly and you can check out the reference on the right hand side Earth System Dynamics um this translates directly
Into the required module area so um on the bottom here we estimated with conservative 50% of Maximum efficiency that only 177,000 Square kilom for 10 gatons of carbon for oxalate as a syn product would be sufficient now this is this is completely based on on assumptions um and theoretical
Calculations and within the framework of the netri project we want to go further so in this table I’ve put together the the benchmarking criteria that we’ve design we’ve looked at and we realize there’s natural photosynthesis there’s what we try to do in npeg which is artificial photosyn synthesis and direct
Integration and then there’s what we can do on the right hand side PV and electrochemistry um so energetic efficiency solar to carbon efficiency water requirements costs the potential for carbon storage all come into play and at the bottom I’ve added Beauty and multifunctionality and I think in particular in P public
Opinion this is a very important aspect and this is entirely engineered for most of the solutions that we’ve discussed in the last days so what do we want to do we want to take carbon out of the atmosphere we start in our project from the concentration of CO2 in an
Electrolyte we do not include the direct air capture part we focus on how we could realize efficient um conversion to solid or liquid products this is important to us directly solar driven solar toar carbon efficient and safe liquid or solid end products so we our project and I’m going
To jump quite quickly over the details of our product our project project but um you’re then welcome to check out the slides later integrates um a partner in stard on um perite solar cells we need about three um volts to drive the electrochemical equations H reactions
And um of course in future projects we might also bridge to other types of solar cells second part and this is the biggest part of the project is looking at into how to characterize at these electrochemical cells that we’re um aiming for the reactions that are going
On how to understand them and we also use like um was just alluded to in the talk by Mr fredman um liquid metal catalysts so these are three partners that are particularly focusing on catalysis in olm tubing and and in Berlin at the helmold center and we look
At um non- aquous um environments and in particular the production of formate and oxalate but also carbon Flakes and on the one hand yes we already see these products formate an oxalate we can say that oh and there should be a picture here in the bottom right um where you
Could see this shiny surface on the previous on the previous slide here and you would see it in black on the right hand side because we’ve recently in the last two weeks um been able to confirm that we are actually seeing um solid carbon on these surfaces so our approach
Works so we’ve implemented this in climate models and we test different spatial scenarios for deployment on the left hand side this would be the the picture for the land cover type desert on the right hand side we have one of our so-called fair share scenarios we in
The global North have been emitters and the past and we should also be deploying this in the future this is the kind of assumption but what is a fair share Paradigm what are realistic areas um this is challenging to Define and to discuss so finally we do look into
Storage and the good news is for the products that we envisage graphite oxalate organic acids the um type of area that is suitable for solid storage is available it’s in the same order of magnitude if we consider surface mining or oil reservoirs of our current CO2 emissions and more will be forthcoming
In in a paper by the partners in darhad we do see that this entire process is already carbon negative at um the current electricity mix but we realize that the electricity mix is um currently constraining us because we do not yet have a fully integrated device
And we have to assume that for example our energy at this point comes from photovoltaics and um we do have to drive electroly and we do need to integrate direct air capture we know that the integrated device in a mature stage will probably not need a full direct air
Capture process but in the figure on the right hand inside you can see that um we do actually um see carbon negativity and the ma major part of the um residual emissions are come from are coming from direct air capture so we have a couple of challenges ahead we’re only one and a
Half years into the project so um I think this is it’s it’s quite encouraging to see we have challenges at all fronts but we are quite encouraged to continue with this so my final take-home message is I would say we do see that direct photoelectrochemical reduction can facilitate efficient
Carbon removal and efficiency is key if we think about this limited resource that is the land surface in electrochemistry we need to in include um Imaging and understanding so that we can control and design the reactions and modeling is key to that as well we see that the land and climate impacts from
Carbon dioxide removal scale with the efficiency um we do actually see quite a lot of potential for solid and liquid disposals within the national borders and this is important um for the polluter Pace principle of course our products can also be used in CCU but the
Scale of of the problem is too big to only envisage CCU we in the project have been benefited from including social ecological and economical life cycle analysis and this is important to ensure that we also include biodiversity Justice and equity in our future um projects and and scale up um
And it’s important to ensure public support because if people do not understand our Technologies they cannot profit from the Technologies and it’s implemented in a top- down manner they will not support us in scaling up finally I want to say that um this is really coming out of fundamental
Research and it’s now being co-funded thankfully um by the bmbf and I would say basic and applied research is required for Innovation and for scale up and this is um not an area particular basic research where a lot of money is going at the moment and with
That I think thank you and I’m looking forward to questions potentially over lunch uh thanks a lot for all the presentations I have a quick question to to Nicholas because when I I was listening to the stack approach I thought you you have to heat up again to remove the humidity and the
CO2 probably it’s why do don’t you use it in let’s say cities like Singapore where if you do the air conditioning you have to do the same process step anyhow um yeah so so water is a is a problem but it can also be uh uh good for the
Process yeah it can it can favor the process and then also like the question where you put it uh so in the scale that you uh that you might need for gigatons of CO2 we think you should put it like somewhere big outside yeah but of course
There are a lot of startup companies also from a business point of view that integrated in to air conditioning so that’s happening and also maybe to to touch on that also because the water can also be a byproduct so if you use that in in Aid regions that can also be very advantaged
And there’s a nice work by Aldo Steinfeld from eth who combines direct air capture uh um uh to provide CO2 and water and from CO2 and water then make synthetic fuels so you make fuels just from components out of the air and sunlight so that’s really
Nice which is not yeah and of course the carbon engineering folks are talking about making fuel other questions around the table Yeah J appt yeah also for Nicholas uh have you done the math to figure out how many terawatt hours the uh the CDR envisioned by 2050 requires
Um I have it I have to look it up I keep forgetting them and I also have to say maybe first I think the 2050 project projections have very high uncertainty so for me that’s always like I mean that’s just guessing right but it’s uh
Wait let let me check just for a second well even the 2035 wedge uh of the startup sorry I didn’t get that even the the wedge startup in 2035 for CDR is significant I’ve been interest in the number of terawatt hours yeah so so my calculations like with
Some exemptions that I mean you need electricity and heat and the question is if you can waste heat that’s always perfect yeah but if you can for the low temperature maybe also use in heat pump uh and let’s say just 50% is provided by heat pump good coefficient of
Performance for the two gigaton scale that was mentioned couple of times then you end up with something like 4,000 ter hours yeah any other questions comments I have one here yeah go ahead ye so um we saw different number right understand it’s far away is
A 2 gigot time per year CO2 should be looking into or is a 10 kot per year let me share my thought with you I understand is carbon negative 10 get to two is offset by 2050 those still had a base sectors but if we could do 10 you
Use two to offset uh those carbon steel emitting then the remaining a is purely 8 Gat per year taking 8 Gat out of the air could be very attractive so every one PPM change is about 8 gigot of CO2 if we continue to do that
For 150 years we are going to take out all of the CO2 out of the from the industry Revolution right roughly that’s 140 PPM adding to the air since uh you know be be right before compared to right before Industrial Revolution I I think that will have huge impact on the
Climate it’s worth a discussion should we be even more ambitious in thinking about that is taking out the CO2 and get back to the pre-industrial revolution yeah yeah and of course the the the counterargument you will hear from many is that paying any attention to uh direct air capture
Sort of takes attention away from doing what we should do which is reducing emissions but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least be thinking and working on it but it is politically very touchy yes go ahead thank you I just wanted to briefly comment so the 10
Gatons are Global and the one gigaton was I think mentioned by Jennifer Wilcox and her address I think is a national is us only so that’s that explains the major difference so 10 gigatons is what we need at the global scale just to clarify and to clarify further going back to um pre-industrial
Conditions would not be a bad idea whether it’s feasible or not that we can discuss um later okay well seeing no other questions or comments I’m going to wrap this session up with just three slides on a key issue that we haven’t been talking about uh it’s not an energy
Issue but very much a climate issue there are basically two ways to change the climate uh the first is slow that is we can warm the Earth by gradually adding more greenhouse gases uh we can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and that’s a slow process
Also or we can modify albo now nobody is proposing nobody with his head screwed on straight is proposing that we ought to be doing that right now on the other hand uh in our Institute for a number of years we have thought a little bit about the political
And other implications of this we actually back in in 2009 we discovered that the international uh uh Community didn’t the the political Community the Foreign Affairs Community didn’t even know this was a possibility so we ran a workshop to begin to get them informed we and others have done a fair
Amount of science uh here’s a piece that I published in uh uh an opinion piece some years ago and the key Point here is that solar radiation management has three essential characteristics it’s cheap fast and imperfect all right the fact that it’s cheap means it’s tempting and the fact
That it doesn’t take consensus means that some major entity like China for example could wake up one day decide it’s hard to feed our people and do it unilaterally so none of this is to argue arue that we should be doing it it is to however argue that we need to understand
It if we don’t understand it and somebody suddenly decides to do it we’re in a deep problem so here’s a couple of pieces of my own on needing research guidelines the National Academy the US National Academy has similarly been working for some years to try to improve understanding Jennifer
Wilcox referred to one of a pair of reports back in 2015 the other one on that pair was on uh albo modification much more recently just in 2021 the National Academy did another review of reflecting of uh albo modification finally after a couple of Decades of difficulty the NSF has
Indicated they will now support in modest ways some research in this area and the University of Chicago has just announced that it’s building a brand new program on advancing our understanding of the potential risks and benefits of climate system engineering I say all of that not as a proponent of doing any of
These things but simply to remind us it’s another thing out there it’s cheap and it’s tempting and so we do need to understand it and with that why don’t we go downstairs and have some lunch can I make a comment on this of course
Of course no no no we have a we have something from the internet sorry we didn’t see you for a second so Dan has something to say yes please so yeah I don’t want to go to the rest of the session just one technical comment on the discussion on the carbon
Budget I think there was some confusion about using gigaton of carbon and gigaton of CO2 and I think we have to pay attention to the difference it’s a factor of four but regarding the alido I want to say that when you talk about albo and geoengineering of a sun
Solar reflection you probably mean engineering at the top of the atmosphere of adding s aerosols so but this is very dangerous because we had we have no control it’s difficult to reverse it but there also ways to manipulate Alo at the surface of the Earth and this is
Something that is is get less attention but can be as efficient and easier to do and it’s actually considered in some areas even I I hear that in plant genetics breeders are trying to change the color of large scale crops to to help modify the alido
Of the surface of the Earth this is a much safer approach to modifying Global alido yes I in fact in this field there is a lot of work on on um not just stratospheric activity but things like Coastal uh clouds uh seeding clouds from with with seawater changing surface albo
In a variety of ways uh I was not be I because I wanted to be very brief the key point is just that this is an issue we should not forget about