One means to concentrate the CO2 is to grow algae using the flue gas to enhance growth; there is a research project on this at MIT. The algae can then be put into an anaerobic digester to produce biogas. The biogas can be separated by amine (or other) process into methane and acid gas. The methane goes to market; the acid gas goes to sequestration. About 20% (or less) of the carbon in the algae is sequestered, so this won’t capture much.

To put this in scale, to capture 1% of the excess carbon added yearly, using just air capture of CO2 via algae growth, would require a massive installation covering around half of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain and generate (yearly) a quantity of methane worth around $116 million at today’s (low) spot prices for natural gas.

A bit discouraging, really.

Chemical capture (amine or chilled ammonia scrubbing) can’t work in the real world because the hot and dirty flue gas is 75% harmless N2. The nitrogen ballast makes mixing the chemicals in prohibitively difficult, and the fly ash and NOx and SOx play havoc with the reactor. Heat stable salts and corrosion remain unsolved problems. What other ready-to-deploy capture technology is there?

Carbon treatment by underground sequestration is a ridiculous idea, as the GAO found.http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d081080.pdf What other ready-to-deploy alternative is there?

Switching to renewables won’t work because the energy is intermittent.

I want to be clear here that stabilizing at 445 ppm CO2-eq does require a significant annual investment, as the IEA analysis shows. The IEA puts the investment at $45 trillion, which sounds like an unimaginably large amount of money — but spread over more than four decades and compared to the world’s total wealth during that time, it is literally a drop in the bucket — 1.1% or one part in 90 of the world’s total wealth.

Is $45 trillion the annual investment? Or is it spread over more than four decades? The way this passage is written makes it unclear.

[JR: Uhh, that's why we have links. But I think this was pretty clear. The cost is $45 trillion spread over more than four decades.]

Do assumptions need to be updated to accommodate the import of a collapsing economic model?

Has the updated science made this referenced economic work less than relevant (beyond how it feeds into motivated reasoning and a feeling of hope)?

I pose these questions as they seem both relevant to this blog entry and do not seem to be addressed in the framing of this post. The following queries are ones that, from what I can determine, were overlooked in even the initial economic evaluation and assumptions–had the credit crises not happened (until a later date).

Has the US been able to borrow what it needs because the US$ is the global reserve currency, or because we are a nation of savers and good for the extended credit?

To what degree is the US$ the current global reserve currency due to OPEC’s decision to sell its oil in US$?

What, besides sustainable credit, gives value to fiat debt-based currencies?

What, besides economic growth that exceeds the growth in population and inflation, and is reflected in rising wages, makes the extended credit good relative to the debt it denominates if sustainability is the desired outcome?

The relationships among debt, credit, OPEC oil sales, peek oil, the growing rich/poor divide seem to be, like land based ice and the 2007 IPCC report, left out of the referenced economic evaluations. Am I wrong about this?

In any event, it seems to me that the first steps are unfolding for decoupling the US$ from its global reserve currency role. As examples, China has called for the shift in the lead up to the G20 (and a year an a half ago–I think–warned its citizens to not invest in US$); the Russian Foreign Minister, about a month ago, predicted a shift in the reserve currency. The President of the EU has expressed concern about the US’s approach to resolving its credit crises. If the role of the IMF currency basket is expanded to become a global reserve currency our failure to build our nation’s economy as a polity of thrift and savers transforms our systemic dynamics and all assumptions based on them.

What beyond an ability to blow up the world, or track and profit from the enslavement of the world to debt, do we have an excess of to offer in trade for what we do not have/produce? What besides these are our current policies preserving (or at least are trying to preserve)?

Currently, of the three basic physical needs–food, shelter, and clothing–without “cheap” foreign imports, low foreign wages, and illegal immigrant labor, all of these would cost more than they do today. As the US$ is shifted out of its role as the planet’s reserve currency, what is cheap becomes more expensive; what is foreign and “low” becomes domestic and moves toward parity; what is illegal goes home as the relative advantages of being on the lowest rung of the ladder of this society’s economy ceases to be a ladder to anywhere. This shift means that the costs of all of these basic needs are set to rise and, thereby, further erode the value of the credit that has already been extended and the debt-denominated fiat currency it is based on. Where is the “sound”/sustainable credit for a “greening” of a debt-based economy coming from? As the McKinsey Global Institute work that is linked to notes it all “depend[s] on how new low-carbon infrastructure is financed.” What if there is no credit left when all the books are opened and balanced?

In any event, the shift in a reserve currency will be accomplished with peak oil. The current collapsing credit systems has been funded due to an abundance oil. While the preponderance of the pre-peak oil benefits of this dynamic have accrued to the financiers of US$, there has been a bit of a trickle down affect. Just enough for the trickle to not be experienced for what was really happening (getting urinated on). Rather than put her on a responsible diet, the grants, professorships, NGO employment was just enough for even liberal/progressive deniers of how we have lived to succor ourselves at the teats of the litter of the great sow of global debt-based capitalism. Consequently, the greed/motivated reasoning of the financiers of the military industrial complex have, and thanks, in large part, to the policies of the IEA (and our exempting our oil companies from our anti-trust laws to serve for the US in this supra-governmental agency), fed this fatted sow to a sickness that has dried her up. Her litter are the walking dead but for accounting rule changes and the guaranteeing of over leveraged financial institutions by an already over leveraged taxpayer. The surgery being done to effect a dystopian kind of soylent green-like feeding arrangement of her litter of spiritual runts has a limited life. Peak oil will accomplished the same milking of the sow dry. Counter-intuitively, the rise in the price of oil will not created more demand for the US$, but, rather, a collapsed the demand for it. The exponential rise in demand will break the system.

The rise in oils cost are not be factored into the risk assessment models for the credit that has been created. The resulting growth in demand for dollars will quickly outstrip the lactation capacity of this sow (had not the unconscionable leveraging of credit that has been effected done this first). Changing metaphors, in the past the increase in demand for oil and dollars was a “good” thing (i.e. worked). This is because the growth was gradual. The dynamic was kind of like slowly raising the heat on a frog in a pot of water. Doing it gradually you can boil it to death and it just sits there and lets it happen. Sudden changes are not responded to as passively.

Are not such collapses and death inherent to the cyclical nature of things? Is it time to think different: like a constitutional currency coined in carbon credits assigned and held in trust for the people rather than the planet’s elite?

Since my bias is that a sustainable economy is one that, as its fundamental principle, endows people with wealth that one must be mature to be responsible for, my questions and metaphors may simple be an expression of my version of motivated reasoning. Even so, good questions are important for learning and evolving . . . and I hope what I offer reaches that standard.