Yes, it’s true.

But decision makers do apparently read Climate Progress.

Once ideas get out into the network, they tend to percolate, and after a couple of exposures, they don’t look quite so ridiculous, hopefully.

I hope that carbon negative energy ideas soon graduate from outlandish to “I knew it all along” and we can start putting some carbon back underground.

Most of the sentences in the above post should say “per year”.

We have the technology to put a billion tons of carbon per year back in the ground, here in the U.S. Worldwide, using biomass/sequestration, we could put several billion tons of carbon back into the ground, and solve this runaway global warming problem, even artificially moving us back past the climate tipping point to safety.

I think we can find or grow sufficient biomass to do this.

We need to nationalize the coal fired power plants, and convert them into enhanced efficiency carbon negative power plants, that run on biomass or biochar, that combine oxyfuel combustion with a topping cycle, and that capture their CO2 for deep injection.

We need to deep inject the CO2 into fractured basalt layers, and deep saline aquifers, which have billions of tons of carbon storage potential. Most U.S. coal fired power plants sit directly on top of such deep saline aquifers, for example.

Most U.S. coal fired power plants are located on rivers, often navigable rivers in the Mississippi/Ohio river basin. Such rivers constitute a natural transportation network to get the biochar or biomass to the converted coal fired power plants.

We need to do this on an emergency basis, and not have to fool around trying to persuade the coal fired power plant owners to make incremental changes over decades. We need to just seize the power plants and do what needs to be done ASAP.

We have a truth shortage, IMO, due to industry supported academic astroturfing, industry supported political efforts, and general industry supported lying to protect profits.

We also have a shortage of political will to make the changes necessary to turn this problem around.

It’s a solvable problem, IMO, we’re just not solving it, right now.

We’re making climate progress, under Obama, but that progress is probably too slow.

For the U.S. alone, standing vegetation has been variously estimated at between 65 and 90 billion tonnes of dry matter (30-40 billion tonnes of carbon), equivalent to 14-19 years of current U.S. primary energy use.

We’ve got 30-40 billion tons of standing carbon in the U.S. The ORNL estimate was based on existing biomass stocks, with no additional biomass plantations planted, and postulated a sustainable, rather than an emergency harvesting operaton.

We’ve got 5-6 million acres of beetle killed trees alone, which probably contain something like 200 million tons of carbon, right there.

Consider that 300 million tons of carbon, from the ORNL billion ton vision report, though.

If it is burned in carbon negative power plants, that combine biochar with sequestration, that would mean 300 million tons of carbon put back into the ground. This would displace the combustion of at least 300 million tons of coal.

But that would mean that we could also burn natural gas containing 300 million tons of carbon, equivalent in heating value to maybe 500 million tons of coal, to get back to carbon neutrality.

If we harvest the forests in a way that would limit wildfires, for example by cutting firebreaks through the forest and clearing the forests of beetle killed trees and combustible undergrowth, we could prevent maybe another 100 million tons of carbon from entering the air from wildfires.

If we use the electricity to run electric cars, this could prevent perhaps another 200 million tons of carbon from entering the air.

Carbonization of biomass would also be a great way to keep organic material like garbage or manure from decaying and producing methane. We could get tens or even hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 equivalent just from prevention of methane producing decay, IMO.

So, from our 300 million tons of carbon put back in the ground, we could get maybe a billion tons of “swing” (change in the amount of carbon emitted to the atmosphere.

Then, there’s always imports. British Columbia has 35 million acres of beetle killed trees, with maybe a billion tons of carbon content in them. Biochar log pipelines could be constructed, to carry compressed biochar logs probably thousands of miles before pumping energy exceeds the energy in the biochar logs. Tropical forests are also going to burn, unless we fire protect them, and Central American countries might very well be willing to sell us shiploads of biochar.

Most coal fired power plants are on rivers, for cooling water. All of the territory upstream of the coal plant, the entire watershed at a higher elevation than the coal fired power plant, then becomes potential biomass collection or biomass plantation area.

We need to put a billion tons of carbon back into the ground, here in the U.S.

We have the coal fired power plants to do it, the carbon sequestration technology to do it, and the natural and artificial transport network necessary to do this.

The only thing we have in short supply is political will, a shortage of truth, IMO.

Not a shabby start, but a long way from enough.

It is abundantly clear that the world is charging past a climate tipping point of enormous proportions. We’re not getting out of this mess without a combination of dramatic emission reductions, sustainable development, AND geoengineering to buy time before tipping points overwhelm whatever reductions human society manages in the next 20 years.

I think your policy analysis of geoengineering needs a more balanced approach to reflect that geoengineering is a risk-risk tradeoff that needs the full engagement of academia and public policy to figure an appropriate level of use.

[JR: I think you miss the point on geo-engineering. My analysis is very current -- hence the focus on what leading experts and scientific studies actually say. In fact, if you talk to scientists on this, as I have, and read the literature, as I have, then you'd know geo-engineering has precious little chance of doing bloody much without massive mitigation. Like I said, geo-engineering is getting all the attention it needs -- and more than it deserves.]

Lest there be doubts, that’s 1.2 billion tons of biomass per year that ORNL located, rather easily, in the U.S., using conservative assumptions, most of it from agricultural waste.

And, of course, there are the sad beetle killed trees, that we have to do something with, IMO. Even if they don’t burn, they will decay, and a lot of that standing carbon will end up in the air as CO2, from the decay process.

Alas, it seems that humans already use around 24% of net land-based primary production.

Yes, but use it how? For what? And where does the biomass waste end up?

I’ll read your link with interest, but there’s no reason that human biomass use, has to be single use, I think. It’s been single use in the past, mostly, but doesn’t have to be so in the future, IMO.

If for example corn is being grown, the stalks and so on are called corn stover, and are considered as waste, and are generally burned, or returned to the land. There’s no reason that the corn stover could not be turned into biochar, with half of it returned to the land and half of it sent off to the nearest carbon negative power plant, burned there, and the ash from that burning returned to the land.

ORNL located 1.2 billion tons of agricultural and forest waste in their “billion ton vision” biomass report- under sustainable conditions. What with the beetle killed tree epidemic, I’m afraid that we have huge tracts of dead trees, containing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon, which will likely burn in wildfires unless this dead wood is harvested.

http://feedstockreview.ornl.gov/pdf/billion_ton_vision.pdf

It’s a massive husbandry, forest management, and replanting job, granted. Trees could perhaps be planted from airplanes, via aerial bombardment, as has been done before, planting hundreds of thousands of trees per day from airplanes.

About the methane hydrates, the earlier warm periods likely happened slower, with much slower evolution of methane from the hydrates, and most of them remaining stable, likely. So there was time, for the methane to oxidize into CO2, and the CO2 to be sequestered naturally by rock weathering as carbonates. The difference now is that we have added 300 billion tons of carbon to the system from fossil fuels and have done so geologically instantaneously. Diatoms don’t have time to evolve, forests are burning or dying from insect epidemics, rather than advancing or retreating over thousands of years.

So, we could be in for the mother of all methane catastrophes. We don’t know. But to prevent ocean acidification, we need to do something about the methane plumes from the hydrates, IMO.