This subtitle is not finished yet. If you are able to, please support us and watch the talk in amara for the last changes: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/2113 Thanks!
*rc3 preroll music 2021*
Herald: Welcome to the "gehacktes from Hell", we're streaming from the
Bierscheune in Alte Hölle in Brandenburg. The coming talk, looks at the method of
carbon sinking, a way to limit climate change. Hans-Peter Schmidt will tell us
how to do this with the help of biochar. We're really happy to have him as a
speaker because Hans-Peter is a pioneer in the field of biochar science, and he has
worked on the development of its technologies and the application.
Following the talk, we have a short Q&A session from your devices at home. You can
send your questions via Twitter to the hashtag rc3Hell or via the I.R.C. chat or
the rocket chat at hashtag rc3-gehacktesfromhell. Later, you can also
meet Hans-Peter in a jitsy room called Discussion.altehölle.de. And now over to
Hans-Peter. HP: For 15 years now, I work on methods to
extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to sequester the extracted carbon in a
stable form and then soil on sediments. And we found in many others who work on
the same subject found several methods that can extract significant amounts of
carbon dioxide. And also methods that can transform the extracted carbon dioxide
into stable carbon forms that do not degrade biologically or chemically. And
the Ithaca Institute for which I work also developed the first carbon sink
certificate, and it can certify and assess the amount of carbon that are stored in
carbon sinks. And now at the end of 21, we are the stage that several of these
technologies could be scaled and have to be scaled to reach the objectives of
climate policy. But this scale up of these technologies is so massive that it will
have an influence on the geo physics of our planet and that we have to consider
and those risks we have to sink them now. Without. Further waiting. To scale climate
technologies, but we need to take care that the scale up is done sustainably and
and in our talk, I want you to make some of these points that we will not hopefully
save the climate to get extinguished by other means and didn't. So did. The
situation is rather clear, and most in the world, most governments and people are
understood by now that we need to reduce the emissions to close to zero by 2050.
And and in all scenarios, we should have reached already the point of highest
emissions by now. But in fact, emissions still rise. But. Everybody counts on on
emissions reductions to happen rather soon. So to be honest, we cannot see these
reductions happening in the close future, but. Let's let's assume emissions will be
reduced, then according to the plan, until 2050, even then, we will need massive
carbon sinks because of the effect of the CO2 that was already admitted to the
atmosphere and that is not degraded, but has a global warming effect that continues
for several hundreds and thousands and thousands of years. So to clean up legacy
emissions, we need to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and need to
establish carbon sinks. And we know that if everything goes according to all the
plans of the Paris Treaty and other decision makers. Then we need to extract
800 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by the year 2100. So this is
not to balance further emissions. This is only to balance the effect of the
emissions already occured, but the technologies that are available to extract
carbon dioxide, they are called the negative emission technologies. It's
negative because it's positive is when you emit to somewhere negative would be just
this abstraction. Not a nice name, but that's what it is. So net technologies are
nature based like afforestation and the growth of biomass, which in fact is the
way to extract natural carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And as long as these
biomass is growing and does not decompose, carbon is stored. However, when you
transform the biomass carbon by pyrolysis into a stable form like biochar and
paralytic oiles, this transformed carbon can be stored for longer times. And that's
what is here in the middle of the biochar or power organic carbon capture and
storage method, which is partly nature based and partly persistent and measurable
because you have long term carbon sink that cannot just go away by accident, like
in a forest fire. There are other means like enhanced weathering take volcanic
stone powders that can react to carbonates. And then there is direct air
capture is when when you extract by adsorption the CO2 and so you filter air
and extract CO2 and transform it then into something that you can store. So our
specialty is picks the biochar method and just shortly to show you how this works.
So you have biomass, you heat the biomass in the absence of air. Up to 400 to 800
degrees and then it's like cooking without air. And these biomass and then you have
solid residue, which is the biochar and liquid residue that you can condense from
the gas phase, which is the paralytic oil. And you still have a permanent gas, which
usually is combusted to drive the whole process, which is energy neutral. So you
do not need external energy to run this process. And and then this biochar can be
used, for example in agryculture to increase yields and to improve soil
quality. And then this makes that you can grow more biomass that then again, can go
back to to the production of biomass and then transforming by paralysis by truck
can also be used in industrial products and in building materials in plastics and
and composite materials where the carbon does not decompose. Neither. So so this is
in very short what is picks out any carbon capture and storage. This is a pyrolysis
unit of of a smaller size that can produce up to something like 1500 tonnes of
biochar per year. So shortly again, how it looks inside paralysis, so biomass that is
shredded to smaller particles goes into this screwdriver. And so it's avoided. Any
air can enter this process and then it goes into this cruel reactor and the
biomass is transported here in this reactor, which is heated from environment
temperature of 20 degrees up to 600 decrease. And then the biochar is the
solid residue of this cooking. It flows out of the process, while the other 50
percent of the carbon is in the gas phase, which is separated here. And then in this
case, all the gases are burned to produce thermic energy that drives the process and
is then be used for heating purposes. However, if you do not burn the gases, you
can also condense the gases and use the liquid off of the process. And the biochar
is looks like this. It's a very porous material that conserves the biological
structure. Here you have a piece of wood that is carbonized. It looks like
charcoal. And if you look on the microscope, you see this enormous porous
structure, which explains a lot of functions and effects that we see in
biochar. For example, you can impregnate it was organic fertilizers, and then all
these pores are filled with organic fertilizers is preserved, so it cannot be
leached out. The soil and plants and microbes can feed from this conserved
organic fertilizers. So we have an effect of this biochar on economic systems. But
what I want to talk about today is only the effect that if you put this biochar to
soil this carbon, which was CO2 in the atmosphere, which was assimilated by the
biomass which was transformed in the pyrolysis, to aromatic carbon, which is
this black stuff, this aromatic carbon cannot be degraded over centuries by
microorganisms. So if you put it to soil, it is a long term carbon sink. So. To have
a global effect, we need a lot of biomass. In the European context we could say,
yeah, we use residual biomass leftovers from food processing or harvest residues
or manure or sewage sludge. So these are all biomass that could be transformed by
pyrolysis. However, the amount of this residue carbon is not as much as it could
have a climate effect. We need a lot more biomass, and it means we have to grow
biomass, especially for the extraction of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the
transformation by pyrolysis. So we have to combine. Carbon farming systems was picks
or separates any carbon capture and storage. And there are different methods
that are not just monocultures, highly intensive production, but these are, what
we call carbon farming systems, like you can see here. These are several arable. So
you combine wood and crops with arable crops, or you have this kind of
agroforestry systems that are highly productive in regard to biomass. Instead
of having just pastries, you can have zero pastries. So animals range below trees
that produce additional biomass. We would also need eggy farms that are highly
productive and could be combined to shellfish and Ardis, which also clean
coastal water from exceeding nutrients. And so we can see that if we investigate
different farming systems, that in addition to food production, because we do
not want to replace food production by biomass production, but in addition to
food production, which is the green bar in the tropical agroforestry system, we can
produce the same amount of food as now. But in addition, we can produce biomass
for carbon sequestration. Also in systems like Tropical Forest Garden, you can have
both. And you can intensify the systems. However, the suggested eucalyptus
monoculture, as you can see here is would only be for carbon capture and would not
produce fruit. And as you can see, is not very efficient anyway. It just doesn't
make much work. And also, marine seaweed is quite efficient in this regard. Now, if
you come back, if we want now this part, this green part, this is the carbon sink
part that we need to balance global temperatures and we know we need 270
billion tonnes of carbon in this carbon sink. So this is 800 gigatons CO2
equivalent. And what does it mean, if we would with this message, Paragon carbon
capture and storage deliver 30 % of the necessary carbon sink. What does it mean
for global resources? So for this to happen, for this 30% of the minimum
necessary carbon sink, we would need about 100 billion tonnes of biochar and that
gigatons of biochar into 2100. And just to get an imagination on how much this is,
this is the amount of 1500 of this Matterhorn mountains. So the volume of one
Matterhorn that you find in the Swiss Alps multiplied by 1500 was dense biochar. So
just the imagination of how much we need to extract and sink. And that's only 30%.
And this amount corresponds to a thin layer of two centimeter of biochar to a
centimeter of biochar on each hectare of global agricultural land. So we would have
to cover all agricultural land by two centimeters of biochar, which then will be
dicked or plowed into the soil as a carbon sink. So it is a massive, massive mess and
it only makes 30 percent of the biochar. So we would need to produce this amount of
biochar. We would need 190 gigatons of biomass. And. So this and it's kind of 90
gigatons of biomass. We need to compare to the global standing biomass. And that's
about 0.8 percent of the global standing biomass and 0.8 percent of the global
standing biomass would have to be paralyzed every year from the year 2050 to
2100 to produce the amount of carbon sink. That's necessary to preserve 30 percent of
the climate. And that would need about he handed 80000 industrial paralysis plants.
So we calculated and looked and what does it mean to produce 500000 pyrolysis
industrial pyrolysis plants? We imagine it could be, or there has to be produced in
chain production like cars. But to reach the negative emission potential that's
necessary by 2050, we need an exponential growth of the production of this pyrolysis
units, which would be possible. And you you see you see here, this is the blue
line. So we have this exponential growth. And as you can see, we have then the
slowdown of of the growth of absolute numbers. So the the orange line here, you
see the production numbers per year, so you have to grow until 2043 to produce
50000 units per year. But then you have to to slow down the production because we can
only use 400000 pyrolysis units on Earth. After that, we do not have more biomass to
treat. So we need an exponential growth because of the severity of the problem of
the problem. And then we need an exponential growth after 2043 to a steady
state of the production of few plants that are needed to renew these standing plants.
So this is a very interesting from economic point of view, and we will see
this in several areas because of the global economy and global problems and the
global limits of resources that we need. Exponential growth and growth for several
technologies. And how that will be done. It's very interesting. That's subject of
today. So, so you saw it's massive. What would be needed? 400000 plants in one
plant costs about 1.3 million euro, so that's about 500 billion euro, and that is
not so much in the end, it's less than 50 percent of the annual military spending.
So from an economic point of view, it would certainly be possible to make it
happen. So more problematic is how can we make it happen on an economic point of
view? Financially, this is very attractive, as we can see first, the
production of the industrial units and then you have a global carbon sink market.
If you calculate a 100 per tonne of CO2 equivalent and we know how much CO2 we
need to extract. So this is a 400 billion euro markets per year only for carbon sink
credits. So massive and very interested market. And that's why you see a lot of
financial institutes going already now into these markets. Well, what do we have
with the risks and side effects? So. The 0.8 percent of the global plant mess that
has to be paralyzed every year, that's about 0.75 ton biomass per hectare of
agricultural land. So if we extract from every sector of the world's crop land and
bit less than one ton of biomass, we could solve the problem so that that's not seem
too much. However, this biomass is everywhere, and there are now millions of
farmers that all would have to be convinced to do it. And then we have to
bring the industry close to them so that they can extract the biomass. So let's say
if 10 percent of agricultural land was used for biomass production by carbon
farming. So we set aside 10 percent of the global agricultural land and then we only
need 7.5 tons of biomass per hectare. And that would be feasible because thanks to
biochar based fertilization, crop productivity can increase about more than
20 percent. So to have 10 percent aside would be possible. So let's say. It would,
in theory, be possible to produce the biomass necessary for the carbon sinks on
the available agricultural land without decreasing food production. But in the
last five minutes of my talk, I want to give you another outlook because socially
and environmentally, it's still very much on the edge to do this huge scaling carbon
by organic carbon storage project, because we have several other problems on Earth
and not only the climate problem, we have the biodiversity crisis, other ecosystem
crisis and therefore the Half Earths project was announced about five years ago
to say that. It is needed that 50 percent of the Earth's surface is preserved for
nature recovery, and there are, in fact, quite a lot of governments that agreed to
this program astonishingly. And it has a lot of support this initiative from Archie
Wilson. You find more information and half earths project on the website that you see
here below, because that's that's the point. If we do all this climate action,
we do not have enough land to preserve it for natural revival. However, we have
technology that's possible. And in the latest Saudi Arabian solar energy project,
the kilowatt hour was produced at zero point eighty eight cents. And that means
energy becomes so cheap that we have new possibilities for technology to produce.
In fact, carbon sinks without plants. So the Obrist company, they created this
project a fuel, which is methanol factory that runs entirely on renewable powered
energy, so you have this large solar panels and then you have here. The
chemistry that's behind. So in short, you have direct air capture here where you
filter out the CO2 from the atmosphere. The energy is used for electrolysis that
is done with desalinated water. So they produce hydrogen from desalinated water,
which the solar energy. And with the CO2 from direct air capture, there is methanol
synthesized. In methanol is a liquid form of carbon. It's a bit like alcohol, but
just methanol, and which is not toxic, which can be pumped, which can be
transported, which can be used as a fuel, and which could also be used as a carbon
sink. So you can find here and when you have more time, you can go into details.
We calculated the total balance. So for 500000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent
in the carbon sink, so that means we extract 500000 tons of CO2 from the
atmosphere. We need 11.5 km^2 square kilometers of solar panels that produce
6000 gigawatt hour of energy. Part of this energy is used for the direct air capture.
Part of this energy is used for desalination and electrolysis, which
produces oxygen, and then the hydrogen and CO2 are synthesized to methanol great
produce some energy that goes back to the process. We produce also water that also
goes back to the process. And then you have the carbon sink. And this methanol,
in fact, can be pumped back into old fossil storages like in the Saudi Arabian
desert. And so we scale this up and. We would need only 21% of the surface of
Saudi Arabia used for this Methanol carbon sink technology to sequester the necessary
800 gigatons of CO2 equivalent and pump it back into abundant fossil oilfields until
2100. And the interesting thing here is that only. This is only 10 percent of the
surface that would be needed if we do the same thing with plants and biomass and
where everything works perfectly optimized without chemical fertilizer, without
irrigation and not counting the risk of fire. And as a disaster is happening to
the biomass production, there is this technological solution. I think we could
prepare the biggest, the biggest hack ever. To turn. The Arabian fossil fuel
producers into carbon sink produces and pumped back the liquified carbon extracted
from the atmosphere to the fossil oilfields. Thank you very much.
Herald: So how can we avoid the risk of deployment of CO2 sinks becoming a cheap
excuse for not pursuing the necessary reduction of CO2 emissions on the other
hand? HP: Yeah, this is this is and the main
problem, I think now when we enter this carbon sink markets, because all the
carbon sinks to the bottom now are used for emission compensation. And but but we
have no choice. We have to curb the emissions. So normally policy makers
should defend the compensation of emissions with carbon sinks because the
carbon sinks we need for the compensation of legacy emissions of all the CO2 it was
already emitted before now. Herald: Yes. So how do you estimate the
potential of picks against the background of increasing interest in biomass for
food, energy and chemical industry? HP: Yeah, we need all of it. And we will
not have enough of it. And that's why I presented the possibility to extract
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for the chemical industry, for fuel, for
materials, for plastics and also for carbon sinks. I think we will not achieve
the protection of our ecosystems and of the climate with the biomass that we have
on the planet only. Herald: All right. Actually, just a fourth
question came in. I think we have time for one more little question. How can we be
sure that Oprah's would be more successful than an example? Desertec.
HP: And what was the first one? Herald: How can we be sure that this
operation will be more successful than this attack?
HP: Yeah, I. The economics are much better now because solar energy is so much
cheaper than 20 years ago when desetec started, and the system is more complex
because of decoupling with chemical industry with carbon sink, and the
necessity is also higher. So I think we we can achieve this and and desetec is not
dead yet and could continue also towards more complex systems.
Herald: All right, thank you. Hans-Peter, thank you very much. I'm saying goodbye to
you in the stream now about everyone is invited to join further discussion in the
Jitsy room now, which you can reach and discussion dort alte-hoelle@de Goodbye
from Bierscheune and sieh you in the jitsi room.
HP: Thank you.
*rc3 postroll music 2021*
Subtitles created by many many volunteers and the c3subtitles.de team. Join us, and help us!