Best Carbon Capture Technology
“(I) Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology,” Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote in a tweet, followed by a second tweet that promised “Details next week.”
It’s a bit unclear what we’re talking about here. If this means removing CO2 directly out of the atmosphere, we run into the problem that carbon dioxide represents only 400 PPM, meaning that 99.96% is something else, mostly nitrogen.
While there are technologies under development to take the CO2 from point sources like power and concrete plants, there are no conceivable devices that would be effective in dealing with the extreme concentrations we find outside of them.
It looks like planting trees may be our best answer, but I doubt I’m going to receive $100 million for pointing that out.
Char Preta technology might be our best hope in that regard – using pyrolysis technology to extract most of the energy from plant materials such as straw whilst leaving a residue of charcoal. Bury the charcoal back into the soil, and you have a long duration carbon store in the soil which acts as a soil conditioner enhancing plant’s and their associated saprophytic myco-rhyzome fungi access to micronutrients and water which tend to get adsorbed onto the high surface area charcoal.
The richest soils in the Amazon basin were formed in this way over centuries by indigenous Amazon tribes.
Wow. Interesting stuff.
The way I look at it, trees that live at least a few decades sequester CO2 for a period of time long enough for us to come up with other solutions.