What if I told you that chemists are working on something right now, that could be as big
of an industry as the internet, and just as profitable in 50 years? Elon Musk is offering
$100 million, the largest incentive prize ever, to whoever can come up with a successful
carbon removal method. And a hundred million bucks is nothing compared to what this industry
is going to be in 50 years. Why? Because it has to work. Every climate projection relies
on us pulling out some of the CO2 in our atmosphere to avoid...
So Elon, here's my plan. Trees. Let's just plant a bunch of trees. Honestly, why has
no one thought of this before? Okay, Let's math this. Say we want to get back to a time
before the industrial revolution, in the mid 17 hundreds, when our atmosphere CO2 concentration
was much, much lower. [MATH]
That's 1.2 trillion tons of CO2 to get rid of.
[MATH] So we would need 60 trillion trees just to
get back to pre-industrial revolution carbon dioxide levels. That's a lot of planting.
Plus it takes a while for trees to grow, not to mention that the escalation in wildfires
that we're seeing means more trees are burning more often. And when they burn, they release
CO2. So, uh, we might need something more efficient than trees. What if I go right to
the source, to places that are emitting a lot of CO2, like power plants? Okay. People
already thought of that. It's called carbon capture and storage or CCS. No, no, no, no,
no, no. C C S. We do have CCS facilities throughout the world, including in the U S. The most
popular method for collecting CO2 from exhaust is amine scrubbing. So you run exhaust through
a column, filled with an alkaline amine solution compounds in that solution will bind to the
CO2, pulling it out of the exhaust so that it can't escape into the atmosphere.
Next, you have to release the CO2 from the amine solution so that you can store it, which
means heating the solution up to break those bonds, and then compressing the released CO2.
This of course takes energy, which means burning fossil fuels and releasing CO2. So it's not
perfect, but it's still preventing as much CO2 from getting into our atmosphere. Existing
CCS facilities capture and store tens of millions of tons of CO2 each year, but we're still
emitting around 40 billion tons of CO2 each year. So we need a lot more of these CCS facilities
help reduce our emissions, but we also need to pull out CO2 that's already in the atmosphere.
No matter how good CCS gets, it won't help with the CO2 that's already up there. That's
where carbon dioxide removal comes in. Carbon dioxide removal or CDR means pulling CO2 out
of the atmosphere.
It's often confused with carbon capture and storage or CCS, but they're not the same thing.
CCS is about preventing the release of carbon dioxide from a specific source like emissions
coming out of a smokestack. CDR is about filtering the entire atmosphere of our planet. It's
a lot harder, and that's why our buddy Elon is offering $100 million to whoever can solve
that puzzle. Why is it so hard? Well, CO2 is a very small percentage of the molecules
you'll find in our atmosphere. So let's say you have a gigantic fan that can suck in 10,000
tons of air per minute, of those 10,000 tons, only six are CO2. You need to wade through
10,000 tons of air just to pull out six. So if you wanted to pull 1.2 trillion tons of
CO2 out of the atmosphere to get back to those pre-industrial revolution levels, you'd have
to wade through around two quadrillion tons of atmosphere.
That's nearly half of our entire atmosphere. And that's assuming that your carbon capture
method is 100% efficient. Also earth has a natural carbon cycle where oceans and land
are releasing CO2 all the time. So if we somehow managed to remove 1.2 trillion tons of CO2
from the atmosphere overnight, that shift in atmospheric CO2 levels would actually pull
a lot of carbon dioxide out of the oceans and land to maintain equilibrium. So what
are people who are trying to win this hundred million dollar prize doing? I called some
people up to see. Can you give me more details about how that works? No, no, no, no, no,
no. I'm not going to steal it. I'm just going to put it on YouTube. Hello? Although I don't
know exactly what people are doing to win that prize money, there are some technologies
and proposed ways of pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that exist already, like
restoring and maintaining blue carbon, coastal marine ecosystems, like mangrove and tidal
marshes and sea grasses that pull a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere, or deploying a bunch
of kelp out into our oceans that will absorb CO2 at the surface and then fall to the ocean
floor, taking the CO2 with them.
There's a company I came across that's using fans to draw air into a collector where the
CO2 is collected on a filter, made out of amines supported by cellulose fibers. So there
are a lot of ways to collect carbon dioxide, but then what do you do with it? Where do
you store it? Capturing carbon isn't simple, but storing it is much harder. Injecting carbon
dioxide underground is a pretty popular approach, but that's sometimes used to extract more
oil and gas, which ultimately means releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. There are also some
public safety concerns about leakage and even seismic activity. Another option is to dig
into rocky formations that are deep in the ocean and pump compressed CO2 down there,
where it'll dissolve into the saltwater and get trapped in the minerals and rocks. Successfully
storing CO2 deep in the ocean or underground isn't just about where you put it, it's about
how you keep it there. You have to prevent the CO2 from just leaking right back out,
and you have to trap it there for centuries. There's actually a new proposal to create
a device that could convert the CO2 in seawater to carbonate minerals like calcite, and then
filter them out and concentrate them into larger solids. The really exciting thing about
this proposal is that it's actually doing both carbon dioxide removal and storage in
a single process, and has a relatively low energy cost. We could do an entire video about
the chemistry behind this idea, but for now, if you're interested in learning more, we're
putting a link to the paper in the description of this video. And of course, this is just
a proposal. No, one's actually built one of these devices yet. So maybe I'll get cracking
on that for my shot at that sweet, sweet CDR money.
No, no, no, no,
Stop it. Stop it.