What do you make of this?
He believes his proposals would cut annual emissions by at least 150 million tonnes.
The measures include creation of the Green Carbon Initiative to offset greenhouse gases by capturing carbon and storing it in the soil by using improved farming practices.
He will argue that large quantities of soil carbon are lost to the atmosphere because of conventional cropping methods that leave soil exposed for long periods, and that the opportunities for carbon abatement through changes in agricultural practices are gigantic.
The Opposition Leader also wants to fast-track the development of “biochar” technology, under which green farm waste is heated in the absence of oxygen in a process called pyrolysis.
It turns half of the material into bio-fuels that can be used to generate clean electricity, and the remainder into charcoal called biochar.
“Biochar is then returned to the soil, which dramatically increases agricultural productivity,” he will say. “We will invest in our own land and at the same time offer the world an example of how real, practical action can be taken in the battle against global warming in the here and now.
The basic problem with regard to global warming and energy systems is how to go about sourcing the energy we need for our modern societies. Once we have comprehensive non-pollution systems for sourcing energy – ie mostly with wind, thermal solar, PV solar and eventually space-based infrastructure – we don’t need to burn fossil fuels. There will be a transition phase where we will also have to reverse the long term effects of burning fossil fuels by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The basic problem with any form of carbon capture and either sequestration or reprocessing is that the extra work to process the CO2 and other wastes reduces the overall efficiency of the fossil fuel. So higher volumes of fossil fuels will need to be burnt for every unit of fossil-fuel-sourced energy that is used, while the required energy to service our needs also increases exponentially. CCS and its variants just won’t work on a large scale, even if we attempt something like a great leap forward.
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About biochar – here is a link to a website about it. I remain extremely skeptical about it. For one thing, logistics is a major problem and I don’t think such a scheme would be commercially viable. We can not even set up a glass bottle deposit and recycling system so the odds of carting around agricultural wastes to biochar power stations and then carting the soot off back to the country seems mildly fanciful. There would be transport costs and costs for burning the agricultural wastes in terms of energy. And then there is the issue of our sometimes fragile soils and how large amounts of soot would interact with local ecologies and if large amounts of soot were to be flushed into rivers. Another issue is the source of the carbon and whether some ingenious bright spark tries to mix in industrial wastes from mining and coal stations.
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26 Jan
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere and converting it into a safe form – most likely charcoal – is NOT the same as a biochar process. The source for a viable transformation of CO2 into soot or charcoal is CO2 itself – not organic matter. Our use of fossil fuels is at an industrial scale and it is powered by carbon in fossil fuels that have been removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago. Tinkering with biological measures – such as tree plantings and the things proposed in the speech above – can not work at the required scale economically. Carbon stored in forests can be released back into the atmosphere whenever there are extreme weather events – such as cyclone Katrina for one example. To counter the wastes from fossil fuels we need industrial plants that take CO2 and render it harmless. There may have to be fleets of airbourne drones or balloons with apparartus to capture COs in-situ and return it to industrial plants on the ground where the CO2 can be transformed. This will all require surplus energy that only a solid infrastructure of renewable energy sources can provide. For 99.9% reliable renewable energy there would have to be space-based solar collector satellites with the appropriate infrastructure to move energy around (and possibly people living permanently in space or on the moon to start off with). That is all long term and out of reach for now, but we can still work on the most important enabling technologies.
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