Chevron’s Fig Leaf Part 3: Carbon Engineering’s Scale & Power Problems
Carbon Engineering’s solution would require 2-kilometer long, 20 meter high walls of noisy fans to capture 4 orders of magnitude less carbon than would be useful.
Carbon Engineering’s solution would require 2-kilometer long, 20 meter high walls of noisy fans to capture 4 orders of magnitude less carbon than would be useful.
Carbon Engineering’s solution is a natural gas hog that produces a half ton of new CO2 for each ton captured from the air.
To scale to an inadequate million tons of CO2 a year, the company would need 2,000 two-meter fans blowing air into contactors in an array 20 meters high, 8 meters thick, and two kilometers long.
Climate change deniers operate at the emotional level. Climate change advocates operate at the intellectual level. That’s why climate deniers are winning.
The devastation visited on North Carolina by Hurricane Florence may be opening the eyes of some residents to the reality of climate change and the usefulness of microgrids during grid outages.
A reader recently passed along a story in The West Australian that made scary, but incorrect, claims about rooftop solar power. Let’s take a look.
Last August, Mark Jacobson, a renewable energy expert and senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, was the leader of a study that identified how 139 countries around the world could obtain 100% of their energy from renewable sources by 2050. But that study got some pushback from people who questioned its assumptions. The naysayers said the study relied too heavily on energy storage solutions such as adding turbines to existing hydroelectric dams or storing excess energy in water, ice, and underground rocks.
When the Koch Brothers sit around their mansions at night, do they throw darts at an image of Bill McKibben (the champion of climate change information)? Along with other lonely warriors such as Michael Mann and James Hansen, he is swimming upstream against a tide of climate denial funded by the Kochs, ExxonMobil, and anyone else who stands to make a buck off of poisoning the world with the effluent and detritus created by extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.
Mark Jacobson of Stanford and 26 colleagues have created a road map showing how 136 countries could transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050.
If you’ve followed CleanTechnica for long, you’ve surely run across the “100% renewable energy” work of Mark Jacobson. Basically, he has been uncovering how the world could go 100% renewable (on a country-by-country basis, and on a state-by-state basis in the US). You’ve probably also heard of a man who goes by the name Elon Musk — a South African dude now living in California who has a cleantech startup named after an old-timey dude from Croatia.