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Decarbonization, carbon capture, and solar-radiation management will provide work for decades to come

David ForkRoss Koningstein 28 Jun 202119 min read See “Disrupting Climate Change Is a Math Problem“ at the bottom of this article. ↓

Ross Koningstein

In 2014, two distinguished Google engineers wrote for IEEE Spectrum about the sobering lessons they’d learned while trying to develop renewable-energy systems that were as cheap as coal. That article, titled “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change,” struck a chord. By the metric of online readership, it was the seventh most popular article Spectrum published in the 2010s. The piece bluntly described the enormous scale of the challenge.

Seven years later, the authors, David Fork on right in photo and Ross Koningstein, are back with a new message, and it’s surprisingly hopeful. “It’s stunning how rapidly things have been moving since the first article was published,” says Fork. The scope of the challenge is still enormous, of course, but experts now have a better understanding of how a variety of technologies could be combined to prevent catastrophic climate change, the coauthors say. Many renewable-energy systems, for example, are already mature and just need to be scaled up. Some innovations need significant development, including new processes to produce steel and concrete, and geoengineering techniques to sequester carbon and temporarily reduce solar radiation. The one commonality among all these promising technologies, they conclude, is that engineers can make a difference on a planetary scale.

“We need engineers to recognize where these opportunities are, and then not step on the gas pedal but step on the accelerator of an electric vehicle,” says Koningstein. Concerned about the pessimistic tone of most climate coverage, the authors argue that wise policies, market pressure, and human creativity can get the job done. “When you put the right incentives in place, you capture the ingenuity of the masses,” says Fork. “All of us are smarter than any of us.”

And we’re showing our work

We, the authors of this article, work at Google on the renewable energy team, and in our jobs we could never get away with presenting a bold idea if we didn’t have the math to back it up. So we’re presenting here some data and calculations to support the biggest claims in our article.

We need to remove about 2000 gigatonnes of CO2from the atmosphere

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)special report “ Global Warming of 1.5° C“ states that cumulative CO2 emissions from 1876 to the end of 2010 were 1,930 gigatonnes CO2, and that by the end of 2017, the amount had reached 2,220 Gt CO2. These emissions were accompanied by an estimated 1° C surface temperature change over that time span. So to reverse the effects of climate change we need to remove at least 2,000 Gt CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans. Add to that total our emissions going forward, which are currently 40 Gt of CO2 per year. There are other ways to get to a number of the same scale. That same IPCC report also states: “Pathways that aim for limiting warming to 1.5° C by 2100 after a temporary temperature overshoot rely on large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures.” This acknowledgment has led to including large-scale (as in tens of Gt CO2 per year) carbon removal in models for reducing net carbon emissions. It’s important to understand that net carbon emissions means actual CO2 emissions minus the CO2 that we pull out of the air and sequester. The IPCC report states a goal of reducing net emissions to zero by 2050, using both significant emissions cuts and carbon removal to limit global warming to 1.5° C. A graphic shows net emissions gradually decline to almost negative 20 Gt CO2 per year by the end of the century, and would clearly have to continue on at that scale. If about 20 Gt CO2 per year is removed for the next 100 years, that would be 2000 Gt CO2. We don’t need to know the precise amount of necessary CO2 removal to evaluate the suitability of potential approaches to this problem: Whether the number is about 2000 Gt or even higher, net negative emissions would need to continue for perhaps a century at 20 Gt CO2 per year to restore the atmosphere (and oceans) to desired levels. So when setting targets for carbon removal, think tens of gigatonnes CO2per year—think big!

Humans use about 1 zettajoule of energy per year

In 2017 global energy consumption was about 160,000 terawatt-hours. This is about 6x1020 joules. Over time energy consumption has always increased as development has improved the quality of people’s lives. It therefore seems likely that later this century, humans will be using even more than 6x1020 joules of energy. In our article, we round up humanity’s energy use to 1 zettajoule (1021 joules) for simplicity.

To supply 1 ZJ of energy per year with photovoltaic solar panels, we’d need to cover 1.6 percent of the planet’s land surface

Solar installations are rated in terms of their peak capacity, which is their power production in full sun. To determine the output of an installation, we need to know its capacity factor, which is the average utilization of its peak capacity. In a good location for solar PV, the capacity factor can be about 20 percent. For every watt of peak capacity with a 20 percent capacity factor, one year of operation will produce 6,307,200 joules of energy (365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 0.2 capacity). Dividing this number into 1 ZJ reveals that it would require solar panels with a peak capacity of 160 terrawatts to produce 1 ZJ per year of electricity generation. A utility scale solar farm typically has a ⅓ ratio of panel area to land area, which translates to about 66 peak megawatts of power generation per square kilometer. To produce 160 TW of peak solar generation capacity we would need about 2.4 million square kilometers, or about 1.6 percent of Earth’s land area. For comparison, farming claims about 40 percent of Earth’s land surface. About one-third of the planet’s land surface is desert; hence in a scenario where desert land is used for solar energy generation 1 ZJ of energy per year could be produced without significantly impacting the food supply.

To supply 1 ZJ of energy per year with nuclear power, we’d have to build three 1-gigawatt plants per day for 30 years

A typical nuclear power plant today generates about 1 gigawatt of power. Let’s say that the plant operates with a capacity factor of 95 percent, meaning that it’s up and running at its design capacity 95 percent of the time. This one plant will produce 3x10 16 Joules per year. One zettajoule is 1021 Joules. So it would take a little over 33,000 1-GW plants to provide the capacity for generating 1 ZJ per year. Given 30 years to build this quantity of nuclear power plants, the average rate of construction would be about 3 plants per day.

A 50-pound bag of concrete mix will cost about 42 cents more if the emissions from cement manufacturing are captured and stored

Making a tonne of cement by burning fossil fuels to provide process heat releases CO 2in two ways: It’s released during the combustion process and also comes from the heated feedstock of carbonate rock. Combined, the emissions are about 0.93 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of cement. The roughly “1 tonne per tonne” rule of thumb makes it rather easy to compute the cost of producing zero-carbon cement. As of this writing, the price of cement averages around $125 per tonne. If a cement plant were to attach machinery that captured and sequestered its carbon emissions for a cost of $80 per tonne of CO2 (an optimistic cost estimate), this process would add 60 percent to the cost of cement (0.93 x $80 / $125 is about 0.6). A 50-pound bag of cement weighs 0.023 tonnes and produces emissions of about 0.021 tonnes CO2, hence at a sequestration cost of $80 per tonne, the added cost would be about $1.69. Ready-mix concrete is about 25 percent cement by weight. That cement would add about $0.42 (0.25 x $1.69) to the cost of a 50-pound bag of concrete. Cement is such a valuable material, it’s arguable that if the price were to increase significantly more than this amount, even if the price were to double, humanity would still use lots of it.

Removing 2,000 Gt of CO2 would account for roughly 2.8 percent of global GDP for 80 years

In the article, we suggest that 2.8 percent of global gross domestic product would be a reasonable amount of money to spend to pull down the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. In 2021, global gross domestic product will be about US $90 trillion. Choosing the timeframe for drawing 2000 Gt of CO2 is a very uncertain task; 80 years seems like a reasonable number to get the planet into decent shape by early next century. This time horizon gives us an annual CO2 capture and sequestration target of about 25 Gt of CO2 per year. The cost of mechanical direct air capture of CO2 and sequestration is currently hundreds of dollars per tonne; in the article we note that the area is ripe for creative R&D. If the price could be reduced to $100 per tonne, drawing down those 25 Gt of CO2 per year works out to $2.5 trillion per year, or about 2.8 percent of current global GDP. Carbon capture is perhaps the best lever to use for stabilizing Earth’s climate in the long term—meaning a time scale of centuries. Drawing down the greenhouse gas concentrations to below current levels will eventually cool the land and ocean temperatures, and will reverse ocean acidification as well.

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