Pathway 2045 (6)
Listed here are hyperlinks to Half 1 , Half 2, Half three, Half four and Half 5~ctm
Visitor submit by Rud Istvan,
That is the sixth and remaining visitor submit dissecting SoCalEd’s new roadmap to full California (properly, a minimum of their southern California service territory) decarbonization by 2045. This final a part of the plan is ‘easy’: sink the remaining CO2 by way of both organic or bodily (carbon seize and sequestration, CCS) means.
The determine estimates this to be 108 million metric tons of CO2 (not carbon) per 12 months, with timber most well-liked. The 108mmt estimate assumes that the 4 different plan parts are absolutely carried out. Because the earlier posts on this collection have defined, that’s extremely unlikely. To the extent they aren’t, the quantity needing to be sunk is far bigger. As we will present beneath, California runs out of timber.
Timber
The Alabama Forestry Service has a ‘carbon in wooden’ pamphlet offering a beginning quantity. There may be about 1 ton of precise carbon in two tons of dry wooden. The molecular weight of CO2 is 44 (ignoring isotopes) of which 12 is carbon. So 108 million metric tons of CO2 is about (108*[12/44]) 29.5 million metric tons of precise carbon, requiring about (29.5*2) 59 million metric tons of wooden development per 12 months. That could be a LOT of timber, particularly for semiarid/desert southern California.
Timber develop slower when older. That’s the reason Alabama’s southern yellow pine (truly about 20 completely different species) is harvested at about 20 years for pulp, and at about 40-60 years for plywood peeler blocks and lumber.
There are numerous revealed research of annual tree carbon sink charges, since tree biomass is about 90 p.c of the worldwide terrestrial whole. A typical per tree temperate zone carbon sink price is about 10-15Kg/12 months relying on species and age. So SoCalEd wants AT LEAST (29.5E6 metric tons of carbon sunk per 12 months *1E3 kg per metric ton/10 to 15 kg per 12 months) 2 to three billion timber.
California forestry surveys estimate about 7.1 billion timber whole of all kinds, of which a minimum of 129 million are standing useless from drought or bark beetles. Organic carbon sinks look like a viable a part of the SoCalEd plan—supplied California’s utilities cease inflicting massive forest fires.
Apart from one drawback. The two to three billion timber wanted are new timber for future emissions, not California’s current timber already doing the job. No double counting. SoCalEd must discover any person, someplace, prepared to be paid to plant a number of billion timber and nurture them for hundreds of years. Dunno who or the place, and SoCalEd doesn’t both.
CCS
CCS shouldn’t be viable. Many initiatives have been proposed, however just one massive industrial venture has been tried, SaskPower’s Boundary Dam producing station in Canada. One in all its 4 coal fired items (BD3) was transformed to CCS in 2014, with the captured CO2 offered to the close by Weyburn discipline for tertiary oil restoration.
BD3 CCS has been extra than simply problematic for SaskPower. After 5 years of tweaking, it’s presently working solely about 65% of the time due to persistent upkeep points. The CCS parasitic load was deliberate to be about 25%, however is definitely about 35%, which means BD3 solely produces about 100Mw of saleable electrical energy from its 150Mw generator.
Little marvel that each one different introduced industrial scale CCS initiatives have been canceled. MIT’s now defunct CCS Applied sciences program nonetheless maintains a worldwide record of 43 proposed CCS initiatives cancelled as of 2016, when the MIT program went defunct.
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