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UNLOCKING NET-NEGATIVE EMISSIONS TO DRAMATICALLY REDUCE CLIMATE CHANGE EMISSIONS
If we can put a man on the moon, we can get to net zero.

New technology for rolling Global Warming back to normal is now running in a Texas pilot plant.*

 

The Allam Cycle Making Both Electricity and Net Negative CO2 Emissions to Reduce Climate Change.

Bottom line:
      Deployed globally, this could become powerful enough to remove CO2 emissions faster than we can make CO2 emissions.

HOW?  Global carbon-captured burning of wood, instead of fossil fuels, to make electricity.
1, Electrify everything possible with Allam biomass + fossil fuel electricity. 2, Use carbon-neutral energy fuels for mobility. 3, End uncaptured burning of all fossil fuels. 
4, Don't waste resources on wind, solar, and nuclear (they can't remove CO2 from the air).  5, Keep on perfecting nuclear for when Climate Change is history and fossil fuel is becoming scarce.

One "Emission Day" (ED) = 100 million tons of carbon dioxide. One "Emission Year" = 36.5 billion tons of CO2. The real goal is to suck some carbon (C) out of the air so it can't combine with oxygen (O2) to make the greenhouse gas CO2. Make no mistake about it. Rolling back Climate Change is a staggeringly big task.
It will be a couple of years before the Toshiba Allam 300 megaWatt power plant hits the electricity market so we have some time to mull over the details of a net-negative version for sucking back all that CO2 that's causing Climate Change. I have dubbed this combination of industrial equipment "Skyscrubber".
But it is becoming do-able and practical after about 10 years of advanced thermodynamic research. It will literally take a world of work switching the world to make our electricity out of only wood.   déjà vu

 

So, by adding or removing air's CO2, we can set the world's thermostat wherever we like. . . . . .
The CO2 in the air acts like a blanket - the more CO2, the thicker the blanket. Taking CO2 out of the air is like taking a blanket off your bed - you feel the change quickly. More heat in the air makes summer storms more powerful.

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A Skyscrubber Clean Energy Park

Skyscrubber facilities take biomass made of air's CO2, make synthetic heating gas out of it, then use the heating gas to make electricity in Allam power plants, then dispose of the air's CO2 forever safely deep underground.
Clean Energy Parks have the raw materials to convert some of the synthetic heating gas into net-zero liquid transportation fuels such as Biogasoline, Biodiesel, Biojet fuel.

Raw material and finished goods shipping economics will determine who makes what. Some parks located in heavily forested areas over sequestration strata will, some parks located far from these advantages won't.
If Skyscrubbers run short of biomass heating gas, they can safely use and sequester fossil natural gas to make electricity instead.

Financing the end of Climate Change is going to be difficult. Perhaps a rotating crop of about a trillion trees or equivalent energy plants such as switchgrass will be needed for 100 years. Planet Earth currently has about 3 trillion trees and might support an additional trillion. Consider this: Coal is everywhere. The world's countries - large and small - must have over a half-million professional coal miners. Anyone brave enough, strong enough, and smart enough to be able to earn a lifetime's living for themselves and their families working in what are sometimes dark and dangerous coal mines would certainly make excellent foresters for the forests now growing in the rural areas around most of the world's coal mines.
Forestry agriculture in the most impoverished countries would be subsidized by the world's most industrialized countries. It shouldn't cost much. The net-negative emissions will help the entire world, the electricity - which will be a by-product in this instance - should help the impoverished country immensely. Recall what happened at Niagara Falls when George Westinghouse, Tesla, and Steinmetz built their hydro plant there. It attracted energy hungry companies like ALCOA. Niagara Falls became the foremost source of hydroelectric power in North America, stimulating the development of innovative heavy industries in Niagara Falls and Buffalo.  Like the Arabs, some of those impoverished countries could become wealthy exporting bioenergy pellets.  We have known for hundreds of years where the trees should be planted. We recently learned where the Net-Negative disposal drills should be located.  

Equipment Pages  >    2 Skyscrubber Site  3 Biomass Handling and Preparation  4 Plasma Torch Gasifier  5 Allam BECCS Power Plant  6 Class VI CO2 Disposal Well 

The term "Skyscrubber Clean Energy Park" denotes a dual (300 megaWatt x 2) power plant facility designed to supply the equivalent electrical and other energy demands of 450,000 California I.S.O. houses to its surrounding rural, city, commercial, and industrial populations. It would be equipped with wood preparation equipment, plasma biomass gasifier, have a Class VI CO2 disposal well, be constructed over a CO2 injection and sequestration strata, and have road, railroad, electricity power transmission lines, water, sewage, and digital telecommunication facilities.

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CO2 Sequestration

"The United States has the technological potential to offset roughly only a decade’s worth of its current CO2 emissions through biological sequestration (i.e., planting trees, etc.,) but a few hundred years’ worth of emissions through carbon dioxide capture and sequestration." - from Congressional Budget Office "The Potential for Carbon Sequestration in the United States, 2007" - Summary, page 2.

Storing CO2 underground can have geological consequences and is only done legally under the supervision of government geological permitting agencies. 
Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership:  https://www.mrcsp.org/ 

We still have several hundred years of fossil fuels remaining. A few hundred years should be enough time to perfect nuclear energy.   

      
Maps Showing various UNDERGROUND CARBON CAPTURE STORAGE STRATA LOCATIONS 

The world may need more than 10,000 Skyscrubber electricity plants to head off the worst of Climate Change.  Like cars, airplanes, and ships, Skyscrubber electricity plants would be modular in design similar to today's electricity power plants. Multiple electricity plants could be located at a single site. Such modularity is an economic advantage in several ways. The cost, quality, and reliability of mass-produced modules of anything is hard to beat.  https://www.biomass.net/Biomass-and-Climate-Change.html 

There are almost unlimited opportunities for completely new greenfield Skyscrubber electricity power plants now that prime underground strata for CCS CO2 sequestration locations have been identified enabling cheap straight-down CO2 disposal via disposal wells located on site property. Since potable water is one of the Allam Cycle's exhaust products, Skyscrubber power plants could be located virtually anywhere there is a CO2 disposal strata and sufficient biomass. This means there is no need for a costly national CO2 disposal grid that may take 20 to 40 years and billions of dollars to complete due to obstruction by environmentalists.
Storing CO2 underground improperly could create an unsafe site and is only to be done under the supervision of government geological permitting agencies.

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* The Allam Thermodynamic Cycle That Makes This Possible   

Toshiba, NET Power, Chicago Bridge & Iron, Exelon, Air Liquide, and 8 Rivers Capital are working together to develop and commercialize the application of supercritical carbon dioxide power cycle technology for efficient emissions-free electric power generation.
The successful running of the Allam Thermodynamic Cycle pilot power plant in La Porte, Texas, provides solid evidence the Climate Change situation has changed for the better.
We can remove the excess CO2 we are putting in the air by making carbon-captured electricity from biomass syngas using the Allam Cycle in BECCS mode. This one change may be the quickest way to roll back Planet Earth's to normal.

The Allam Cycle is a very new turbine technology that uses supercritical CO2 instead of steam as its working fluid. As of now, it is only running as a 1/10th size pilot plant in La Porte, Texas, since last November. So far, so good.
     The company:              https://www.netpower.com/technology/     https://www.netpower.com/news/      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFcbev1TkoU     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDZmIDbDO0
     Descriptive Articles:     https://www.powermag.com/inside-net-power-gas-power-goes-supercritical/?mypower     supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO₂) cycles      This web site: Natural Gas or Oil.     This site: Biomass Syngas,     This site: Coal or Lignite Syngas.     This site: Beyond Fossil Fuels

One has to be struck by how different the Allam Cycle engine is from it's long evolutionary line of internal combustion heat engine ancestors such as the Otto cycle, Diesel cycle, Brayton cycle, Lenoir cycle, Leclerc cycle, etc.
Lacking a boiler, it's combustor, connected directly to the turbine, is clearly descended from a liquid fuel rocket engine, on the other hand, it's turbine is a basic single-stage steam power plant turbine exhausting both steam and carbon dioxide into an exotic hotwell.  

To be clear about the Allam Cycle engine's capabilities and possibilities: 
The Allam Cycle Engine is a fossil fuel combustion gas machine that runs in the Oxy-fuel Carbon Capture mode. It uses carbon dioxide rather than nitrogen as the combustion diluent. This means it is incapable of producing air-polluting nitrous oxides (NOx). Different versions will enable it to run on the fossil fuels Natural Gas, Oil, Coal, Lignite. It will also run on Biomass Syngas along with carbon-neutral liquid fuels containing sufficient thermal energy content such as ethanol, etc. This fuel flexibility assures every country in the world has forms of local energy (often rooted in coal or biomass) that can power it and thus obtain Climate Change clean electricity at a very economically desirable cost. Smaller than coal powered steam generators, upgrading existing coal power plant buildings with new replacement Allam machinery may be a possibility for cash-strapped countries.

The Allam Cycle electricity power plant will only be available from a single source, Toshiba, in a single size, 300 megaWatts(e), large enough to power 225,000 California standard I.S.O. houses.

This old electrical engineer may be over-enthusiastic because this is the most successful supercritical carbon dioxide power plant he has ever read about, but at this moment, It looks like the world's first power plant with enough megaWatt power and displacement capacity to punch holes in Climate Change simply by burning a gosh-awful amount of wood and shoving the smoke into the ground. The notion that 6,000 of them could gang up on Global Warming and actually suck it out of the air is very appealing. EOR.

For ending Climate Change there may be a missing link:
A wood biomass chip or pellet gasification facility capable of meeting the Allam fuel quality specification and supplying sufficient gas volume for a 300 mW Toshiba Allam facility. At this time there is no wood gasifier large enough to power a 300 mW Allam electricity generating turbine available on the industrial market. It is conceivable that the gasification system that has already been developed for burning lignite in Allam cycle systems can be adapted for using wood pellets in an Allam BECCS application. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/electrical_energy_generation_and_the_future

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Techno-Economic feasibility of removing up to 100 million of tons of CO2 from the air per day (all sites combined).

                 
If you want to capture large volumes of air's CO2 carbon quickly, you can't beat biomass.
 The Allam Cycle 300 megaWatt power plant is big electricity. Instead of a train a day of coal, it will be at least train a day of wood pellets or chips.
 

A CO2 emissions reference could be the amount of CO2 emitted by all sources on Planet Earth on an annually averaged day.

Calculating CO2 stored in trees based on the mass of the trees [From an Australian study guide.]
We’re going to use some assumptions for this formula. Firstly, the formula we’ll use will obtain an average estimate over the life span of a sample tree, and secondly, will exclude stores in soil carbon.
Some generalizations:
• 35% of the green mass of a tree is water so 65% is solid dry mass;
• 50% of the dry mass (33% of the green mass) of a tree is carbon;
• 20% of tree biomass is below ground level in roots so a multiplication factor of 120% is used; and
• To determine the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide taken from the air to produce the carbon, the carbon figure is multiplied by a factor of 3.67.

CO2 sequestered per tree (kg) = Tree mass (kg of fresh biomass) x 65% (dry mass) x 50% (carbon %) x 3.67 x 120% 

CO2 obtainable per tree less roots = Tree mass (kg of fresh biomass) x 65% (dry mass) x 50% (carbon %) x 3.67 - - - [site author]

Some generalizations:

The carbon dioxide released when burning wood (about 1900g CO2 for each 1000g of wood burnt) is balanced by the fact that this carbon was taken up by the tree from the air when it grew. So this part of the emissions is carbon-neutral.

According to the Georgia Forestry Commission, a typical 50 megaWatt biopower electricity plant might consume 605,120 green tons of wood per year.

Assuming similar green wood-to-syngas conversion efficiencies, a single 300 megaWatt Allam cycle power plant running at full power 24/7/365 might consume syngas containing 3.6 million green tons of wood per year. About a third the weight of wood is carbon from the air, in this case 1.2 million tons of carbon per year per power plant. Since the weight of the carbon atom is 12/44 (or 0.27) of the weight of a carbon dioxide molecule (i.e., one carbon atom (12 mol), two oxygen atoms (16 mol ea.)), the 1.2 million tons of carbon represents about 6.7 million tons of negative CO2 captured from the air per year, or 18,000 tons of negative CO2 per day. 

This implies having a world full of Allam BECCS electricity power plants, i.e., more than 6,000 to sequester 100 million tons of tree-captured CO2 per day, makes rolling something as big as Global Warming itself backwards feasible.

A recent tree census indicates there may be 3 trillion trees in the world. That's 3 thousand billion trees. A billion is a thousand million. Once you have an efficient way to store air's CO2 safely forever underground, storing CO2 forever in trees above ground becomes a very bad idea and far more dangerous. Eventually the CO2 will escape back into the air and make Climate Change even worse. We have to think of biomass such as trees as vegetables, not hallowed repositories of captured CO2.

At some point a tree's CO2 gathering reaches it's maximum and begins to decline. It will eventually die and become mankind's climate enemy, its decaying CO2 returning to the air as surely as if it were burning.

Trees that have reached optimal CO2-gathering growth should be harvested immediately and replaced with vigorously growing young trees to continue the process of gathering as much CO2 from the air as rapidly as possible. The ground minerals recovered in the gasification clean-up process will be recycled as fertilizers and redistributed in the forest farms.

The harvested trees, along with other available biomass (perhaps city garbage, sewage, agwaste, forest trimmings, etc.) would then be pelletized and their molecules broken down by a electrical plasma torch that makes Sun-hot heat.  Heat this hot breaks the atomic bonds that hold molecules together, creating free carbon atoms and other atoms that can be sorted out and reassembled into syngas (synthetic methane gas) fuel for the Allam electricity power plant and remineralizing fertilizer for tree farms.

Getting the job of building thousands of Skyscrubber facilities done quickly: Once the world realizes it needs thousands of Allam BECCS systems, everyone will want them NOW. In times of emergency, manufacture of critical technologies equipment can be licensed to multiple capable, but competing companies to quickly produce thousands of identical machines simultaneously. Led by Franklin Roosevelt, the United States did a masterful job of turning the Free World into the "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II through cross-licensing of war-related patents and other technologies. The United States is again in the position to, this time, invent, produce, and manufacture the tools that will save the world from Climate Change.

The United States alone built 6,768 full-size ocean-going ships and about 300,000 airplanes over 4 years during World War II. With the Allam Cycle electricity power plant, bringing Climate Change under control is a much smaller task.

There is no reason the same wartime crisis production strategies cannot be used to quickly end the Climate Change Crisis.

Cities = power plants.   Thousands of cities, thousands of Skyscrubbers.

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The other technologies needed to build Skyscrubber power plants

1.    http://plascotechnologies.com/  is offering the biomass processing technology for a version of the Skyscrubber power plant now.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YllIj_bzl5A 
2.    Also, check out plasma gasifier manufacturer AlterNRG:  http://www.alternrg.com/               http://www.alternrg.com/waste_to_energy/waste-to-liquids/ 

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ELECTRICITY CARBON TAXES and CARBON CAPTURE and SEQUESTRATION INCENTIVES
Information about the government's different Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Acts (Courtesy of Climate Change Working Group):

First, here's a link to the bill itself: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/763 
Second, for anyone without the time or interest to read the entire bill, a link to a "road map" of the bill's contents, so the most relevant sections can be found with some ease:  https://community.citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Section-by-Section-Analysis-Energy-Innovation-Act-2019.pdf 
Third, here's a link to Citizen's Climate Lobby's website about the bill, which also allows a reader to see who has already endorsed the bill and what the press is saying about it. It includes an endorsement tool: https://energyinnovationact.org/ 
Finally, for anyone wanting to compare this bill to other carbon pricing bills, an assessment that compares this bill (sponsored by Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida and therefore called the Deutch bill in the analysis) to others:   https://energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/how-bipartisan-energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act-compares-other-carbon-tax-proposals

All these carbon tax fees raise a very serious question:
Q. How much per ton of CO2 is going to be refunded by the government to the operators of the above Skyscrubber power plants to establish and operate a carbon dioxide disposal well on their own property?

A. Deutch bill: This section amends the Tax Code (Title 26) by adding the following subsections: Subtitle L - "Carbon Dividends and Carbon Fee", Sec. 9906 - Carbon Capture and Sequestration:

"Provides a refund of Carbon Fee paid when qualified carbon dioxide is captured and sequestered in a safe and permanent manner. Requires establishment of sound criteria for safe and permanent sequestration. Only CO2 from covered fuels, and only rebate for amount likely to remain sequestered."

- - - In the United States there are now 2 big carbon capture incentives: A recently expanded federal tax credit for captured CO2 and California’s new law requiring 100% of its electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2045.

In the U.S., carbon capture has led to the formation of extraordinary alliances. In 2018, a tax credit known as 45Q—so named for the relevant provision in the law—was revised to provide higher incentives for CCS with support from congressional lawmakers of both parties, big oil and gas, industry, and environmentalists. Over time, it will ramp up to $50 per metric ton of carbon stored geologically and $35 per metric ton of carbon stored through enhanced oil recovery, provided projects commence construction by the end of 2023. - Brad Page, Bloomberg Environment, Posted May 13, 2019, 6:00 AM

The LCFS and CCS Protocol: An Overview for Policymakers and Project Developers - California - pdf.  If building the above Skyscrubber Power Plant interests you, you need this document.

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          Producing The Net-zero Combustion Fuels Necessary To End the 100 Million Tons of CO2 We Are Adding to the Air Every Day

                      

                             2016_billion_ton_report_12.2.16_0.pdf (400+ Pages)                                          Methanol - The Basic Chemical and Energy Feedstock of the Future.pdf
                                                                                                                    https://www.chemicals-technology.com/projects/george-olah-renewable-methanol-plant-iceland/                    

                               

Re-equipping our mobile fuels industries for climate-neutral-only vehicle energy products will, along with Skyscrubbing, eventually roll back Climate Change.

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Our Climate Change Outlook

                   

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"Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined." -  ( From Prologue )

One objective of this website is to communicate that the Climate Change crisis resembles the horseshit crisis described in the Prologue's story. 

Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the climate research data for the World Bank, likes to use.
"Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It’s not a linear change."

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ThorCon - The nuclear Ace up our sleeves. One of many second-generation nuclear electricity power plants.

It is clear the Allam Cycle will extend the use of fossil fuels until they run out - perhaps 100 to 200 years. 

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  Disclaimer: This website is energy talk by an engineer exploring Climate Change's opportunities for creating a clean combustion fuel future - not professional engineering advice.