#carbon capture

[wachinyeya]

hold up everyone—new bacteria discovered named “Chonkus” that can help us with our mistakes!

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

When rain pounds earth that contains the right mix of minerals, carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into the water and reacts to form new compounds that imprison carbon dioxide. With enough time, this natural process of literally petrifying the air will cleanse the atmosphere of the carbon dioxide pollution humanity has emitted from burning fossil fuels and other activities. The problem, though, is this natural cycle takes millennia. Kanan’s idea is to take a process that normally operates on geologic time — and speed it up. To do so, his team mixed together limestone with a crushed silicate mineral that contains magnesium — such as olivine, an olive-tinted mineral that can be found around the world. When heated to furiously high temperatures in a kiln, calcium in the limestone and magnesium in the silicate jiggle and switch sides, like participants in a square dance. The result of the chemical reaction is two compounds — magnesium oxide and calcium silicate — that both readily react with air and water to trap carbon dioxide in a matter of weeks. After accounting for emissions from heating the kilns and capturing carbon dioxide from burning limestone, each ton of material can remove one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the researchers estimate. “We didn’t expect that it would work as well as it does,” said Yuxuan Chen, lead author of the study who worked in Kanan’s lab while getting his PhD, said in a statement.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - March 1-7

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! I’m almost finished with February’s doodles, sorry for the delay

1. Charles Darwin saw this Galápagos bird on Floreana Island in 1835, then it wasn't seen again for almost 200 years

“The Galápagos rail […] had been deemed locally extinct – and due for reintroduction from other Galápagos islands – until it was seen during recent fieldwork. [… “R]emove the invasive threats, and native species can recover in remarkable ways,” says Island Conservation’s Paula Castaño.”

2. Bill supporting free student meals passes through Utah legislature

“[The bill] would move thousands of students who qualify for reduced-cost school meals into eligibility for free breakfasts and lunch. […] H.B. 100 secures $2.5 million from the state’s education budget to help students from families who do not qualify for federal aid like SNAP or TANF.”

3. Indigenous leaders sign landmark carbon deal in Philippines

“[The deal establishes] the country’s first locally owned forest carbon project. The project, which places a monetary value on the potentially climate-warming carbon stored in trees, aims to halt deforestation through the sale of carbon credits — effectively making the forest more valuable alive than cut down.”

4. Powerful Speeches From Trans Dems Flip 29 Republicans, Anti-Trans Bills Die In Montana

“Transgender Reps Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell delivered powerful speeches on the Montana House floor on Thursday. Republicans defected en masse to join them in voting against anti-trans bills. […] One Republican even took the floor to deliver a scathing rebuke of the bill’s sponsor.”

5. Illinois proves states have a lot of power to advance clean energy

“[Two new bills] aim to evaluate the state’s current power grid, make it easier to expand the transmission system, and add a ton of new battery storage[…. Illinois already] has one of the cleanest grids in the nation thanks to bountiful nuclear power.“

6. ‘I feel real hope’: historic beaver release marks conservation milestone in England

“”We are visibly, measurably recovering nature and that is so exciting[….]” [… In] recent years, beavers have been returning to our waterways via licensed releases into enclosures and some illegal releases. […] Last week, the government announced that, with a licence, it is now legal for conservationists to release beavers into the wild, with no enclosures necessary.”

7. One of South Dakota’s largest wind farms just got the green light

“Invenergy says the new South Dakota wind farm will pump $78 million into landowner payments over the next 30 years, while local governments will see $38 million in property tax revenue. [… T]he project is expected to create 243 construction jobs and support eight long-term operational roles.”

8. The Antarctic ozone hole is healing, thanks to global reduction of CFCs

“[The] new study is the first to show, with high statistical confidence, that this recovery is due primarily to the reduction of ozone-depleting substances, versus other influences such as natural weather variability[….] "By something like 2035, we might see a year when there's no ozone hole depletion at all in the Antarctic.””

9. Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico rebound this year

“The number of monarch butterflies wintering in the mountains west of Mexico City [doubled] in 2024 despite the stresses of climate change and habitat loss[….] Tavera Alonso credited ongoing efforts to increase the number of plants the butterflies rely on for sustenance and reproduction along their flyway.”

10. Pip in final egg means bald eagles Jackie and Shadow should soon be parents of triplets

“Triplets would be unprecedented for the eagles in a decade of observation. […] The [third] eaglet is "actively working on getting out of the egg." […] The two already-hatched chicks, who will be named by the public in the days to come, are "looking much stronger than they were even yesterday[….]””

February 22-28 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[reasonsforhope]

"The world is betting heavily on carbon capture — a term that refers to various techniques to stop carbon pollution from being released during industrial processes, or removing existing carbon from the atmosphere, to then lock it up permanently.

The practice is not free of controversy, with some arguing that carbon capture is expensive, unproven and can serve as a distraction from actually reducing carbon emissions. But it is a fast-growing reality: there are at least 628 carbon capture and storage projects in the pipeline around the world, with a 60% year-on-year increase, according to the latest report from the Global CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) Institute. The market size was just over $3.5 billion in 2024, but is projected to grow to $14.5 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights.

Perhaps the most ambitious — and the most expensive — type of carbon capture involves removing carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the air, although there are just a few such facilities currently in operation worldwide. Some scientists believe that a better option would be to capture carbon from seawater rather than air, because the ocean is the planet’s largest carbon sink, absorbing 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

In the UK, where the government in 2023 announced up to £20 billion ($26.7 billion) in funding to support carbon capture, one such project has taken shape near the English Channel. Called SeaCURE, it aims to find out if sea carbon capture actually works, and if it can be competitive with its air counterpart.

“The reason why sea water holds so much carbon is that when you put CO2 into the water, 99% of it becomes other forms of dissolved carbon that don’t exchange with the atmosphere,” says Paul Halloran, a professor of Ocean and Climate Science at the University of Exeter, who leads the SeaCURE team.

“But it also means it’s very straightforward to take that carbon out of the water.”

Pilot plant

SeaCURE started building a pilot plant about a year ago, at the Weymouth Sea Life Centre on the southern coast of England. Operational for the past few months, it is designed to process 3,000 liters of seawater per minute and remove an estimated 100 tons of CO2 per year.

“We wanted to test the technology in the real environment with real sea water, to identify what problems you hit,” says Halloran, adding that working at a large public aquarium helps because it already has infrastructure to extract seawater and then discharge it back into the ocean.

The carbon that is naturally dissolved in the seawater can be easily converted to CO2 by slightly increasing the acidity of the water. To make it come out, the water is trickled over a large surface area with air blowing over it. “In that process, we can constrict over 90% of the carbon out of that water,” Halloran says.

The CO2 that is extracted from the water is run through a purification process that uses activated carbon in the form of charred coconut husks, and is then ready to be stored. In a scaled up system, it would be fed into geological CO2 storage. Before the water is released, its acidity is restored to normal levels, making it ready to absorb more carbon dioxide from the air.

“This discharged water that now has very low carbon concentrations needs to refill it, so it’s just trying to suck CO2 from anywhere, and it sucks it from the atmosphere,” says Halloran. “A simple analogy is that we’re squeezing out a sponge and putting it back.”

While more tests are needed to understand the full potential of the technology, Halloran admits that it doesn’t “blow direct air capture out the water in terms of the energy costs,” and there are other challenges such as having to remove impurities from the water before releasing it, as well as the potential impact on ecosystems. But, he adds, all carbon capture technologies incur high costs in building plants and infrastructure, and using seawater has one clear advantage: It has a much higher concentration of carbon than air does, “so you should be able to really reduce the capital costs involved in building the plants.”

Mitigating impacts

One major concern with any system that captures carbon from seawater is the impact of the discharged water on marine ecosystems. Guy Hooper, a PhD researcher at the University of Exeter, who’s working on this issue at the SeaCURE site, says that low-carbon seawater is released in such small quantities that it is unlikely to have any effect on the marine environment, because it dilutes extremely quickly.

However, that doesn’t mean that SeaCURE is automatically safe. “To understand how a scaled-up version of SeaCURE might affect the marine environment, we have been conducting experiments to measure how marine organisms respond to low-carbon seawater,” he adds. “Initial results suggest that some marine organisms, such as plankton and mussels, may be affected when exposed to low-carbon seawater.”

To mitigate potential impacts, the seawater can be “pre-diluted” before releasing it into the marine environment, but Hooper warns that a SeaCURE system should not be deployed near any sensitive marine habitats.

There is rising interest in carbon capture from seawater — also known as Direct Ocean Capture or DOC — and several startups are operating in the field. Among them is Captura, a spin off from the California Institute of Technology that is working on a pilot project in Hawaii, and Amsterdam-based Brineworks, which says that its method is more cost-effective than air carbon capture.

According to Stuart Haszeldine, a professor of Carbon Capture and Storage at the University of Edinburgh, who’s not involved with SeaCURE, although the initiative appears to be more energy efficient than current air capture pilot tests, a full-scale system will require a supply of renewable energy and permanent storage of CO2 by compressing it to become a liquid and then injecting it into porous rocks deep underground.

He says the next challenge is for SeaCURE to scale up and “to operate for longer to prove it can capture millions of tons of CO2 each year.”

But he believes there is huge potential in recapturing carbon from ocean water. “Total carbon in seawater is about 50 times that in the atmosphere, and carbon can be resident in seawater for tens of thousands of years, causing acidification which damages the plankton and coral reef ecosystems. Removing carbon from the ocean is a giant task, but essential if the consequences of climate change are to be controlled,” he says."

-via CNN, April 29, 2025

[mindblowingscience]

Stanford researchers have found a surprising genetic twist in a lineage of microbes that may play an important role in ocean carbon storage. The microbes, known as blue-green algae or cyanobacteria, have two different forms of a ubiquitous enzyme that rarely appear together in the same organism. “This is one of those great examples of science where you go out looking for one thing, but you end up finding something else that’s even better,” said Anne Dekas, an assistant professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and senior author of the Nov. 25 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue Reading.

[solarpunkbusiness]

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a brand-new device designed to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air and turn it into fuel – and it does so with only the power of the Sun.

���If we made these devices at scale, they could solve two problems at once: removing CO2 from the atmosphere and creating a clean alternative to fossil fuels,”

Reisner and his team sought to find a solution, and what they landed on was inspired by a natural process: photosynthesis. Similar to how plants require only sunlight as the energy source for converting carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugar, their new reactor device is also solely solar-powered.

The reactor is intended to work diurnally. The first step takes place at night, with the device capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air using specialized filters made out of a solid silica-amine adsorbent.

Things then heat up during the day; a mirror concentrates sunlight onto the bed of captured carbon dioxide, releasing it into another part of the device that contains a bed of semiconductor powder and triggering a chemical reaction that converts the carbon dioxide into syngas.

Syngas is short for synthesis gas, and though it can be used as a fuel itself, the team is aiming to find a way of converting it into a more widely useful liquid fuel – and to make their design even bigger.

[cognitivejustice]

Often, the dominant image of natural carbon sequestration is a vast forest canopy, but while reforestation is vital, it is not the most stable long-term carbon sink. Carbon stored in trees is vulnerable: wildfires release carbon as CO₂, and storms cause fallen trees to decompose, feeding microbes that respire carbon back into the atmosphere. To build resilient carbon sequestration systems, we must expand our focus to other ecosystems—such as grasslands sustained by herd animals.

The Role of Herd Animals in Grassland Ecosystems

Restoring and expanding grasslands means dedicating more land to herd animals like bison (North America), wildebeest and antelope (African savannas), reindeer and caribou (Arctic tundra), and elephants (Africa and parts of Asia). Trophic rewilding reestablishes the intricate food webs that sustain these ecosystems. Through grazing, trampling, and nutrient cycling, herd animals regenerate grasslands, making them powerful carbon sinks.

Unlike forests, where carbon is stored in above-ground biomass, grasslands primarily store carbon underground. Their deep-rooted perennial grasses sequester carbon in subsoil and humus, a highly stable form of organic matter that can last centuries or millennia. While tree roots also store carbon, they eventually decompose upon deforestation, releasing CO₂. Conversely, grasslands continuously build soil carbon through root growth and turnover, making them a more enduring carbon sink.

How grazing enhances soil carbon storage

Grazing by herd animals facilitates long-term carbon storage in several ways:

Increased Root Turnover – When grasses are grazed, they shed fine roots, which decay and contribute to humus formation, locking carbon into the soil.

Boosted Microbial and Fungal Activity – Manure, dead roots, and trampled plant material provide organic inputs that fuel microbes, which convert carbon into stable soil compounds.

Stabilized Carbon in Soil Aggregates – Organic matter binds with soil minerals, forming stable aggregates that slow decomposition and protect stored carbon from being released.

[cottonwoolsocks]

if you don't know what's happened in UK politics today, it's terrifying news for climate change —

the UK government have just announced plans for over 100 new oil and gas drilling licenses. these new licences will directly contribute.

alongside this, the government announced funding for carbon capture and storage projects — this is great! carbon emissions are stored deep underground, and thus removed from the atmosphere. this solution has been being worked on by climate scientists for 40 years.

but the UK government are using carbon capture as a get out of jail free for drilling more oil.

this is dangerous.

carbon capture and storage works at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it does not negate further emissions. it only works if we stop burning fossil fuels.

carbon capture and storage is not the problem — continuing to burn fossil fuels is.

we should be angry.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Scientific American:

The scene that unfolded on a cold November day in central Illinois might seem commonplace, but it was part of a bold plan to pull billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stuff it into the ocean.

A few miles south of Urbana a dump truck trundled past bare fields of dirt before turning into an adjacent lot. It deposited a cottage-size mound of grayish-blue sand—190 metric tons of a crushed volcanic rock called basalt. Farmers spread the pulverized basalt across several fields that they sowed with corn months later. This was the fourth year of an ambitious study to test whether the world’s farmlands can be harnessed to simultaneously address three global crises: the ever rising concentration of planet-warming CO2 in the atmosphere, the acidification of the oceans and the shortfall in humanity’s food supply.

The trial results, published in February 2024, were stunning. David Beerling, a biogeochemist at the University of Sheffield in England, and Evan DeLucia, a plant physiologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the study. They found that over four years, fields treated with crushed basalt and planted with alternating crops of corn and soy pulled 10 metric tons more CO2 per hectare out of the air than untreated plots. And crop yields were 12 to 16 percent higher. In other research, they found that adding crushed basalts to soils improved the harvest of miscanthus, a tall grass that is used to make biofuels, by 29 to 42 percent, and the fields captured an estimated 8.6 metric tons of CO2 per hectare of land each year, compared with untreated fields. “It was exciting,” Beerling says. “We were pleasantly surprised.”

Their findings added to positive results elsewhere. In 2020 researchers in Canada reported that adding the mineral wollastonite to fields growing lettuce, kale, potatoes and soy sequestered CO2 in the soil at rates as high as two metric tons per hectare per year. And last spring Kirstine Skov, a natural geographer at the start-up company UNDO Carbon in London, showed that crushed basalts improved the yields of spring oats by 9 to 20 percent while reducing soil acidity in several fields in England.

The basalt in Illinois came from a quarry in southern Pennsylvania, where it is mined for roofing and building materials. Basalt is the most abundant rock in Earth’s crust. As it naturally weathers—gradually dissolving in soil water—it captures CO2, converting it into bicarbonate ions in the water, which cannot easily reenter the atmosphere. The reaction also releases into the soil nutrients that are important for plant health, including calcium, magnesium and silicon. Grinding and spreading basalt—an approach known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW)—speeds up those processes greatly. It could help cash-strapped farmers around the world by increasing crop yields, reducing fertilizer use and potentially allowing them to sell carbon credits.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The U.S. political right wing does not have an answer to climate change. Neither does the technocratic and centrist net-zero discourse, which has failed to achieve adequate reductions, as will become increasingly apparent within just a few years. With no one else driving the agenda, the left needs to offer an alternative, sector-by-sector roadmap for decarbonization. We need to fill the voids in leadership, analysis, planning, organizing, and coalition-building. Rather than focusing on particular technologies, we need to be setting objectives for the areas in which these technologies could be used. If we put forward both best-use cases for CCS and alternatives to CCS, we are more likely to avoid bad CCS projects—and we can play a leading role rather than a defensive one. 

[...]

It’s true that we need a robust climate movement to block truly harmful projects that would lock in new fossil fuel infrastructure or violate Indigenous sovereignty, and it is critical to support communities in this work. But it would be a mistake to narrowly focus climate organizing on reenacting successful infrastructure-blocking tactics in ways that fail to discern useful industrial carbon projects from bad ones.  Such an approach puts the climate movement into a reactive role just when climate advocates need to be the ones who plan the energy transition. Taking a wider-strategy approach to CCS will take patience. It will require building broader coalitions and organizing in rural areas where a lot of decarbonization needs to happen. It will be challenging—but the cost of being absorbed by the CCS distraction is not one that the movement can afford.

[reportsofagrandfuture]

"Some species of kelp produce more biomass annually per metre square than tropical rainforests"

[wachinyeya]

Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, once a thriving wetland, is now being revived as an essential carbon sink to help combat climate change. Peatlands, like those in the swamp, cover only 3 percent of the Earth’s surface but store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined - which cover 30 percent of global land area. By restoring these unique ecosystems, researchers and conservationists aim to reverse centuries of damage caused by human activity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Peat is a spongy layer of partially decomposed plant material found in waterlogged, acidic environments like the Great Dismal Swamp. This natural carbon storage system has been severely degraded over time.

Since 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy have been rewetting parts of the swamp to protect and rebuild its peat layers. This involves constructing dams and plugging drainage ditches to retain water, which slows peat decay and allows new organic material to accumulate.

Restoration efforts have already rehydrated 60,000 acres of the swamp. Over the next few years, The Nature Conservancy plans to restore an additional 33,000 acres and protect 10,500 acres in Virginia and North Carolina. These projects are funded by over $200 million from the Inflation Reduction Act.

The impact of Virginia’s peatlands will be environmentally significant: restoring them could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of removing up to 1.4 million cars from the road each year.

The secondary benefit is that wetlands like these are home to a diverse range of species, many of which are adapted to the unique, waterlogged environment. Restoring their habitat will enable both plants and wildlife to thrive once more.

Mike Waddington, a peat researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, says: “When we think about storing carbon in ecosystems, it’s almost always about planting trees. There’s often tremendous pressure to plant trees in drained peatlands," he said, "but that’s the wrong choice given the carbon-storing ability of an intact bog." Adding: “In a way it’s the low-hanging fruit.”

The world's largest peatlands are in the central Congo Basin, covering 16.7 million hectares - more than five times the size of Belgium. Researchers reveal that these peatlands store between 26 and 32 billion tonnes of carbon - roughly the equivalent to three years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions.

[hope-for-the-planet]

I didn't realize carbon capture was a real thing that actually worked (outside of trees, of course!)

Hi Anon!

It is a real thing and it does work! The big caveat is that it definitely isn’t a standalone solution to climate change, but it’s a real technology that has helpful applications in mitigating the climate crisis.

A lot of carbon capture occurs at the emissions source, to capture the carbon dioxide and either pump and store it deep underground or run it through algae scrubbers or a chemical process to capture the carbon dioxide as biofuel, reusable plastic, or other materials.

The caveat here is that a lot of folks are rightfully worried that focusing too much on carbon capture will give the powers that be an excuse to drag their feet in cutting emissions and decarbonizing. Why worry about changing the status quo if a magical technology will come along to bail us out by pulling all those emissions right back out of the air?

Carbon capture also has a lot of significant limitations, such as the amount of energy required to fix a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide. This isn’t my area of expertise, but my understanding is that this technology will probably be most applicable to capture emissions for industries that will be particularly difficult to decarbonize—for example the creation of certain materials that are either exceptionally energy-intensive or inherently release carbon dioxide in their creation (like cement).

So very cool technology, but it’s not going to make a big enough impact on climate change without us also significantly reducing emissions. And it’s not going to replace planting and protecting trees, since nature’s carbon capture is still usually much more energy and resource efficient (as well as all the habitat and climate control benefits)!

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - February 22-28

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (This month’s doodles will be a little delayed since I wasn’t able to work on them throughout the month)

1. City trees absorb much more carbon than expected

“[A new measurement technique shows that trees in LA absorb] up to 60% of daytime CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion in spring and summer[….] Beyond offering shade and aesthetic value, these trees act as silent workhorses in the city’s climate resilience strategy[….]”

2. #AltGov: the secret network of federal workers resisting Doge from the inside

“Government employees fight the Trump administration’s chaos by organizing and publishing information on Bluesky[…. A group of government employees are] banding together to “expose harmful policies, defend public institutions and equip citizens with tools to push back against authoritarianism[….]””

3. An Ecuadorian hotspot shows how forests can claw back from destruction

“A December 2024 study described the recovery of ground birds and mammals like ocelots, and found their diversity and biomass in secondary forests was similar to those in old-growth forests after just 20 years. [… Some taxa recover] “earlier, some are later, but they all show a tendency to recover.””

4. Over 80 House Democrats demand Trump rescind gender-affirming care ban: 'We want trans kids to live'

“[89 House Democrats signed a letter stating,] "Trans young people, their parents and their doctors should be the ones making their health care decisions. No one should need to ask the President’s permission to access life-saving, evidence-based health care." "As Members of Congress, we stand united with trans young people and their families.”“

5. Boosting seafood production while protecting biodiversity

“A new study suggests that farming seafood from the ocean – known as mariculture – could be expanded to feed more people while reducing harm to marine biodiversity at the same time. […] “[… I]t’s not a foregone conclusion that the expansion of an industry is always going to have a proportionally negative impact on the environment[….]””

6. U.S. will spend up to $1 billion to combat bird flu, USDA secretary says

“The USDA will spend up to $500 million to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400 million to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu[….] The USDA is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorizing their use[….]”

7. An Innovative Program Supporting the Protection of Irreplaceable Saline Lakes

“[… T]he program aims to provide comprehensive data on water availability and lake health, develop strategies to monitor and assess critical ecosystems, and identify knowledge gaps to guide future research and resource management.”

8. EU to unveil ​‘Clean Industrial Deal’ to cut CO2, boost energy security

“The bold plan aims to revitalize and decarbonize heavy industry, reduce reliance on gas, and make energy cheaper, cleaner, and more secure. […] By July, the EU said it will ​“simplify state aid rules” to ​“accelerate the roll-out of clean energy, deploy industrial decarbonisation and ensure sufficient capacity of clean-tech manufacturing” on the continent.”

9. Oyster Restoration Investments Net Positive Returns for Economy and Environment

“Researchers expect the restored oyster reefs to produce $38 million in ecosystem benefits through 2048. “This network protects nearly 350 million oysters[….]” [NOAA provided] $14.9 million to expand the sanctuary network to 500 acres by 2026 […] through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

10. Nations back $200 billion-a-year plan to reverse nature losses

“More than 140 countries adopted a strategy to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars a year to help reverse dramatic losses in biodiversity[….] A finance strategy adopted to applause and tears from delegates, underpins "our collective capacity to sustain life on this planet," said Susana Muhamad[….]”

February 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[mindblowingscience]

A pair of climate scientists at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science ETH Zurich, working with a colleague from Stripe Inc., has found evidence suggesting that the only way to prevent the planet from continuing to grow warmer is to use 1000-year carbon sequestration strategies. In their paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, Cyril Brunner, Reto Knutti and Zeke Hausfather suggest their research has shown that short-term carbon sequestration strategies will lead to the release of captured carbon before the planet can recycle the carbon in the atmosphere naturally.

Continue Reading.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The federal government's proposed tax credit to incentivize companies to capture and store carbon dioxide underground doesn't exclude projects that also involve extracting more oil, according to policy experts who reviewed a draft of the long-promised legislation. First announced in the 2021 federal budget, the tax credit is intended to "support and accelerate" carbon capture — a blanket term that refers to technology used to sequester CO2 and store it safely underground — to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Projects where the carbon is piped away to an oil field, and injected underground to recover more oil, through a process known as "enhanced oil recovery" (EOR), were not to be included, the government said at the time. But the latest draft legislation shows the tax credit will be available to projects that are, in part, using the captured carbon for that purpose.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada