Science

Taking CO2 out of the air would be an absurdly expensive way to fight climate change

Published

6 months ago

April 11, 2024

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Attempting to filter enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make a significant impact on climate change would require hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, according to a new report.

The suite of technologies emerging to attempt that task all fall under an umbrella called carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. It’s still risky and astronomically expensive. But there’s been growing chatter about it, particularly as the US continues producing record amounts of oil and gas.

According to the new report by research firm Rhodium Group, the US needs to spend roughly $100 billion a year on CDR in order to scale up to a level that would help the country meet its climate goals. A majority of that needs to come in the form of supportive policies like tax credits and procurement programs.

There’s been growing chatter about it, particularly as the US continues producing record amounts of oil and gas

For comparison, the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2021 includes $369 billion for clean energy incentives — the nation’s largest climate investment to date. So $100 billion of government spending annually, as the report recommends, is a lot to spend on novel technologies that have yet to prove themselves at scale and potentially still not enough to make this strategy effective. It’s a big gamble, with the livability of our planet as we know it on the line.

Solving climate change is a numbers game, and the goal — as defined by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — is to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 2050. That’s what’s needed to stop global average temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

Crossing that threshold means that climate-related disasters like extreme heat, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss become significantly worse, perhaps surpassing humans’ ability to adapt to these changes in the most vulnerable parts of the world. That 1.5-degree target was set in the Paris agreement nearly a decade ago in 2015 — but greenhouse gas emissions are still climbing.

The US is already dumping a good chunk of cash into capturing CO2, even though the only way to stop climate change and meet goals set under the Paris agreement is to stop depending on fossil fuels. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes $3.5 billion to build new carbon removal hubs across the US. Big companies including Microsoft and Amazon are also paying startups to capture some of their pollution. And the fossil fuel industry has embraced the technology, even using it to market supposedly more sustainable oil. Apparently, that still isn’t enough.

The US will need the capacity to draw down a gigaton of CO2 by 2050 to meet net-zero goals, the report says. It’s an enormous amount of carbon dioxide to capture, equivalent to roughly 20 percent of the nation’s carbon footprint. The country’s capacity to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is tiny in comparison now — in the low single-digit megatons so far.

The report points to three different tactics for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere: natural methods that rely on plants, soil, and the ocean to absorb CO2; building machines that capture carbon dioxide; and hybrid technologies that employ both natural and engineered processes. All three strategies pose their own challenges.

Tree planting has been the most popular nature-based tactic so far — to little success. A growing body of research and investigations have found that offsetting emissions with forestry projects has largely failed. The trees often don’t survive long enough to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric CO2, for example, and then there’s double counting when more than one group claims the carbon credits.

Machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air or seawater are supposed to be better at keeping track of the amount of CO2 they trap. But the enormous amount of energy they use makes these devices inefficient and exorbitantly expensive. It costs upward of $600 to filter a ton of CO2 out of the air. Multiply that by a gigaton (a billion metric tons) and you get to hundreds of billions of dollars of spending.

With that in mind, spending $100 billion on CDR is likely a minimum of what these technologies could cost, according to Joseph Romm, senior research fellow at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

“I think there is a misleading level of certainty in this report,” Romm says. “It is premature to be scaling up any of these [technologies]. These need a lot more study.” There are so many limitations to the most studied CDR techniques — including tree planting and machines that capture CO2 — that Romm says the money would be better spent researching other ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The two most urgent things that we have to do now, are stopping deforestation and stopping putting more CO2 into the air,” he says. Once that’s happening, then it could be worth it to stretch resources toward carbon dioxide removal that tackles our historic emissions. But why put a Band-Aid on the problem if we aren’t stopping the bleeding?

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Science

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin plans to launch a new crew capsule on Monday

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6 hours ago

October 5, 2024

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Blue Origin is preparing to launch its NS-27 mission with the RSS Kármán Line, its new crew capsule, on Monday at 9AM ET. It will be the first launch for the capsule, which the company says in its announcement will have improved performance and reusability, along with “an updated livery, and accommodations for payloads on the booster.”

The flight will carry two LIDAR sensors into space that will be used for Blue Origin’s Lunar Permanence program to develop Moon landers. Those are among 12 payloads that also include ultra-wideband proximity operations sensors, a reproduction of the black monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and student postcards submitted to its Club for the Future nonprofit. Blue Origin will stream the launch on its website, starting 15 minutes before liftoff.

NS-27’s next flight comes as Blue Origin works toward the goal of becoming a real SpaceX competitor. Company CEO Dave Limp, the former Amazon hardware boss who took over late last year, said the company needs to “be able to build things a lot” to become “a world class manufacturer” in an interview with CNBC.

“We’d like to [be delivering] about an engine a week by the end of the year. I’m not sure we’ll get exactly to a week, but it’ll be sub-10 days … [and] by the end of 2025, we have to be faster than that,” Limp said.

Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn, its big reusable booster that recently completed its first second-stage hot fire test, for the first time in November. Blue Origin says the rocket can deliver 45,000 kilograms (more than 99,000 pounds) into low Earth orbit, which CNBC notes is roughly double what SpaceX’s Falcon 9 can do. The company also hopes to land the booster on its first flight.

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Science

Big Tech has cozied up to nuclear energy

Published

7 hours ago

October 5, 2024

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Tech giants are increasingly eyeing nuclear reactors to power their energy-hungry data centers. Amazon and Microsoft each inked major deals this year with nuclear power plants in the US. And both Microsoft and Google have shown interest in next-generation small modular reactors that are still in development.

New AI data centers need a lot of electricity, which has taken companies further away from their climate goals as their carbon emissions grow. Nuclear reactors could potentially solve both of those problems. As a result, Big Tech is breathing new life into America’s aging fleet of nuclear reactors while also throwing its weight behind emerging nuclear technologies that have yet to prove themselves.

“Certainly, the prospects for this industry are brighter today than they were five and 10 years ago,” says Mark Morey, senior adviser for electricity analysis at the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

“Certainly, the prospects for this industry are brighter today”

Much of America’s aging nuclear fleet came online in the 1970s and 1980s. But the industry has faced pushback following high-profile accidents like Three Mile Island and the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Nuclear power plants are also expensive to build and generally less flexible than gas plants that now make up the biggest chunk of the US electricity mix. Gas-fired power plants can more quickly ramp up and down with the ebb and flow of electricity demand.

Nuclear power plants typically provide steady “baseload” power. And that makes it an attractive power source for data centers. Unlike manufacturing or other industries that operate during daytime business hours, data centers run around the clock.

“When people are sleeping and offices are shut and we’re not using as much [electricity], what matches nuclear energy very nicely with data centers is that they pretty much need power 24/7,” Morey says.

That consistency also sets nuclear apart from wind and solar power that wane with the weather or time of day. Over the past five years or so, many tech companies have accelerated climate goals, pledging to reach net zero carbon dioxide emissions.

The added energy demand from new AI tools, however, has put those goals further out of reach in some cases. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all seen their greenhouse gas emissions climb in recent years. Getting electricity from nuclear reactors is one way companies can try to bring those carbon emissions down.

A feat that’s never been done before in the US

Microsoft signed an agreement to purchase power from shuttered Three Mile Island in September. “This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative,” Microsoft VP of energy Bobby Hollis said in a press release at the time.

The plan is to revive the plant by 2028, a feat that’s never been done before in the US. The plant “was prematurely shuttered due to poor economics” in 2019, according to Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of the company, Constellation, that owns the plant. But the outlook for nuclear energy now is rosier than it has been for years as companies look for carbon pollution-free sources of electricity.

In March, Amazon Web Services purchased a data center campus powered by the adjacent Susquehanna Nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. That $650 million deal secures electricity from the sixth largest nuclear facility in the US (out of 54 sites today).

Google is considering procuring nuclear energy for its data centers as part of its sustainability plans. “Obviously, the trajectory of AI investments has added to the scale of the task needed,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Nikkei this week. “We are now looking at additional investments, be it solar, and evaluating technologies like small modular nuclear reactors, etc.”

He’s referring to next-generation reactors that are still in development and not expected to be ready to connect to the power grid until the 2030s at the earliest. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified a design for an advanced small modular reactor for the first time last year. These advanced reactors are roughly one-tenth to one-quarter the size of their older predecessors; their size and modular design are supposed to make them easier and cheaper to build. They might also be more flexible than larger nuclear plants when it comes to adjusting how much electricity they produce to match changes in demand.

Bill Gates, for one, is all in on nuclear energy. He’s the founder and chair of TerraPower, a company developing small modular reactors. Last year, Microsoft put out a job listing for a principal program manager to lead the company’s nuclear energy strategy that would include small modular reactors.

Bill Gates, for one, is all in on nuclear energy

“I’m a big believer that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important,” Gates said in an interview with The Verge last month.

This week, the Department of Energy released a new report projecting that US nuclear capacity could triple by 2050. After flatlining for years, electricity demand is expected to rise in the US thanks to EVs, new data centers, crypto mining, and manufacturing facilities. That growing demand is changing the outlook for nuclear energy, according to the report. Just a couple years ago, utilities were shutting down nuclear reactors. Now, they’re extending reactors’ lifetimes by up to 80 years and planning to restart ones that have shuttered, it says.

“It is reasonable to think that the tech companies could catalyze a new wave of investment in nuclear, in the US and around the world. There has been plenty of talk about the idea in the industry,” Ed Crooks, Wood Mackenzie senior vice president, thought leadership executive for the Americas wrote in a blog post this week.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s all smooth sailing ahead for nuclear energy in the US. New reactor designs and plans to reopen shuttered nuclear power plants are still subject to regulatory approval. Initiatives to build both old-school power plants and new designs have faced soaring costs and delays. Amazon already faces opposition to its nuclear energy plans in Pennsylvania over concerns that it could wind up driving up electricity costs for other consumers. And the nuclear energy industry still faces pushback over the impact of uranium mining on nearby communities and concerns about where to store radioactive waste.

“It’s an interesting time, challenging in many ways,” Morey says. “We’ll see what happens.”

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Science

Watch what it’s like to handle an overturned truck full of burning batteries

Published

2 days ago

October 3, 2024

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A truck full of lithium-ion batteries was knocked over near the Port of Los Angeles on September 26th, exploded, and was left to burn for days — interrupting traffic on highways, and a bridge and shutting down port terminals. A local towing company, Pepe’s Towing Service, caught the explosion on camera and vlogged the incident for days until it was time for them to haul the remnants away.

Pepe’s Tow Service owner Josh Acosta uploaded a lengthy video today chronicling the point of explosion, the long wait as the Fire Department let the batteries burn, and the process of lifting the container full of burnt batteries to transport. In the video, we see what looks like stacks of batteries with liquid cooling pipes between each layer.

Image: Pepe’s Towing Service

In a phone call with The Verge, Acosta says the battery is one “giant container-sized battery” that “does not come apart.” He believes it could be used in buildings for backup power. According to Acosta, the battery weighed 60,000 pounds.

Acosta says he doesn’t remember which company owns the container that transported the battery — but his video blurs out text on the side of the container anyhow.

The video shows the painstaking logistics for firefighters dealing with burning lithium-ion cells — they often need to use thousands of gallons of water to put these out, including on electric vehicle fires. And in this case, the Los Angeles Fire Department told The Verge that the fire kept going on and off.

Acosta told us he was called to the job by the customer who owns the overturned truck, and that’s why he caught the moment on camera. Now, Pepe’s Towing is hauling the remnants of the container for scrap recycling.

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