“The site, http://www.theclimatechangeclearinghouse.org, will be a “one-stop shop” for water utilities and the public seeking information about this rapidly changing topic. The site is part of the Foundation’s sustained, multi-year effort to evaluate the impact of climate change on water and help solve the challenges it poses to our nation’s water suppliers.”

So, these days, I tend to Google the authors of the papers that interest me, and find out if they have any obvious conflicts of interest.

Consider this list of papers by Exxon scientists:

http://www.exxonmobil.com/ Corporate/ investor_issues_contributedpapers.aspx

I don’t have the time to go through them, to understand which ones are honest and which ones are deceptive. So, I just ignore them. Because of the obvious conflict of interest, I figure they come from a bad source of information, and I accept no information from such a source, peer reviewed or not.

It wasn’t really science, peer reviewed or not, that got us into the ethanol from corn mess, by the way. That appeared to be pure corporate influence and money to fund lobbying efforts that got that past Congress.

Other papers, which appear to me to be revolutionary and obviously at least qualitatively correct, get hung up in the peer review process for years. Read’s paper “Bio-Energy with Carbon Storage (BECS): a Sequential Decision Approach to the threat of Abrupt Climate Change” is still hung up in the peer review process, since 2003, although other papers that say roughly the same thing have made it through the process.

It appears that our peer reviewed science has let us down by vastly underestimating the pace and severity of global warming. Each model seems to show a more extreme prediction than the previous one. It appears that normal scientific caution, the inherent complexity of the possible feedbacks into the system, and the effect of corporate influence have led to a vast underestimation of the problem.

Biochar appears to me to be worth pursuing “by the light of reason” because it puts carbon back into the ground, and because terra preta soils have had what appears to be a benign effect on their ecosystems over a thousand years.

When I solve an analytical problem in the lab, I don’t wait for a peer reviewed paper. I reason from first principles, try to logic my way through the problem, try lots of things in the hope something will work, indulge in plagiarism without shame, screw up a lot, and cheerfully admit error.

At this point, we have to try a lot of different things and hope that some of them work.

Biochar is a wonderful idea, I think, and I don’t want to be excessively critical of it. I think it is likely a big part of the solution, partially because it is so low tech and accessible to people in the developing world. It’s certainly worth doing, and doing in a big way, I think, so long as it is combined with conservation and replanting, or like you say, gotten from algae. So – full speed ahead on biochar, I think. Even if part of the carbon from it does get back in the atmosphere in a few decades, the carbon came from the atmosphere in the first place, and so it is still carbon negative.

It’s certainly worth doing, I think.

But we either need to shut the coal plants down or convert them to something else, hopefully something at least carbon neutral. If we don’t do this, the coal plants will overwhelm everything else. When James Hansen called them “factories of death” he was absolutely right, I think.

Because I believe that other options are not big enough and synergistic enough, I am going to keep pushing for Biomass/CCS, as a stopgap until true geological sequestration as a carbonate can be accomplished.

Good luck with your biochar stuff, and best wishes, for you and for us all.

I’m going to be working on a high carbon concrete aggregate, and if anything exciting happens, I’ll let you know.

Just now I’m working out the cost estimates for producing heating oil and biochar from algae, using the most primitive of techinques, only those which could be done immediately. The idea is that both products are to compete with the fossil equivalents on the world markets; it looks very promising but I’m not done yet; obviously this will have to be done on essentially worthless, but sunny, land.

Once this technique, combined with others eliminates burning fossil coal then of course one turns to removing the excess carbon from the active carbon cycle. That is, unfortunately, likely to be some decades yet. Still, techniques other than simply deep burial in carbon landfills could well be advantageous and need to be thought out. But not by me, my plate is full.

ecostew — In principle all energy requirements involved in growing the algae, pyrolysis, and local movement of product are met from the gas, oil and char created by the pyrolysis of algae. So EROEI is of no interest; meeting operating expenses, including return on investment, is.

A serious issue yet to be explored is the high NPK requirement for quick growing algae. The NPK is in the approximately 4% ash component of the biochar, so if the ash resulting from buring is not returned to the algae farm, an alternate supply is required. Have you looked into the prices of typical NPK farm fertilizers recently?

I have no idea what “CF on biochar relative to sustainability” means.

Well we’ve certainly learned to distrust these folks the hard way, and we do rightfully distrust them.

Which is why I think we should seize (nationalize) the coal fired power plants.

Our current financial elites cannot be trusted with coal fired power plants, nor can they be trusted with our economy, as we’ve just seen. Maybe they can’t be trusted with deep injected CO2 either.

On the other hand, what are the relative risks, in deep injection of CO2 versus a developing methane catastrophe?

I’m not happy with CCS either, and would be glad to find another solution. The biochar made from algae idea of David’s is a really interesting idea. Biochar is a great way to store carbon because it is pure carbon, and if it could last long enough as a soil conditioner that would be tremendous. It might also be possible to mix it with a mineral like clay, and fire it at high temperatures like is done with carbon electrodes, and transform it into a long lasting rock like substance suitable for use as a concrete aggregate.

Unfortunately, carbon is not the lowest thermodynamic state of carbon – carbonate is. So going from carbon to CO2 is exothermic, and going from CO2 to carbonate is exothermic. So we are asking people to bury a potentially valuable fuel. So, we would have to give people an economic incentive to bury the carbon rather than burn it, IMO, and carbon credits might be that incentive. But, we better make sure that we ruin the biochar as a fuel, lest people be tempted to dig it up and burn it.

If we could just figure out how to do it economically, geological sequestration as a carbonate seems like the best answer.

I’ve had some thoughts about talc, rather than olivine, as a rock for sequestration, because talc is soft and easy to mine while olivine is hard, and would have to be crushed. I’ve also seen patents in which chelating agents like EDTA can affect the kinetics of the chemical reactions and speed up dissolution of calcium and magnesium from rock. Unfortunately the sheet silicates like talc are less soluble than the chain silicates, and so rocks like talc and serpentine need to be heat treated as part of the process.

Maybe we ought to just bite the bullet, and go for geological sequestration as a carbonate in a big way. That may be what the recent mapping efforts of calcium and magnesium silicates by the Obama administration are about.