StoppingClimateChange.com               Directory    This website is about building advanced technology wood-burning power plants to roll back Climate Change.    Prolog                          

 NOW IS THE TIME TO START ROLLING CLIMATE CHANGE BACK TOWARD THE ICE AGES
Stopping Climate Change might be quicker, easier, and cheaper than we think.  Prolog
            

As an introduction to this website, your author is using the abstract portion of the scientific paper:  "Carbon sequestration via wood burial" by Ning Zeng.  

"To mitigate global climate change, a portfolio of strategies will be needed to keep the atmospheric CO2 concentration below a dangerous level.
Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in trenches or stowed away in above-ground shelters.
The largely anaerobic condition under a sufficiently thick layer of soil will prevent the decomposition of the buried wood.
Because a large flux of CO2 is constantly being assimilated into the world's forests via photosynthesis, cutting off its return pathway to the atmosphere forms an effective carbon sink.

It is estimated that a sustainable long-term carbon sequestration potential for wood burial is 10 ± 5 GtC y-1, and currently about 65 GtC is on the world's forest floors in the form of coarse woody debris suitable for burial.
The potential is largest in tropical forests (4.2 GtC y-1), followed by temperate (3.7 GtC y-1) and boreal forests (2.1 GtC y-1).
Burying wood has other benefits including minimizing CO2 source from deforestation, extending the lifetime of reforestation carbon sink, and reducing fire danger.
There are possible environmental impacts such as nutrient lock-up which nevertheless appears manageable, but other concerns and factors will likely set a limit so that only part of the full potential can be realized.

Based on data from North American logging industry, the cost for wood burial is estimated to be $14/tCO2($50/tC), far lower than the typical cost for power plant CO2 capture with geological storage.
The cost for carbon sequestration with wood burial is low because CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by the natural process of photosynthesis at little cost.
The technique is low tech, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and reversible, thus an attractive option for large-scale implementation in a world-wide carbon market."

The above article abstract is available from: http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/3/1/1 © 2008 Zeng; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.  Read the whole paper. It's short and well-written.  2.220.01.pdf   
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Can planting more trees save the planet?   https://www.microsoftnewskids.com/en-us/kids/video/my-world-episode-1-trees/vi-BB10jkjJ    YES, if they are harvested for their CO2 when fully grown.  

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A New Kind Of Large, Non-Nuclear, Zero-CO2, Power Plant Has Just Been Invented And Is Being Tested

Allam Cycle power plants alone, running on natural gas, can potentially delay the time to reach 450 ppm CO2 (or 2 C temperature rise) by 4.5 years.

Your author is suggesting it is possible we can take even better advantage of Allam Cycle power plants by powering them with tree-captured CO2.


(BECCS = Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. BECCS is a new technology which extracts CO2 from biomass (trees) and stores it geologically, thus removing large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere)   https://www.carbonbrief.org/BECCS-the-story-of-climate-change's-saviour-technology

Something New.  You are looking at the recently-invented Allam Cycle electricity plant. It burns NATURAL GAS, gasified COAL or OIL harmlessly, naturally capturing their emissions.
It liquefies all its CO2 emissions to pump them directly into underground CO2 disposal wells to become solid 'CarbFix' limestone.   Big 300 megaWatt electricity (~400,000 horsepower),  No Smokestack.

Allam cycle power plants alone, running on natural gas, can potentially delay the time to reach 450 ppm CO2 (or 2 C temperature rise) by 4.5 years.
(From the paper cited below*:)
"Based on the Table 6 results and the following assumptions: (1) all power plants are converted to the Allam cycle; (2) all generated pipeline-grade CO2 can be sequestered or utilized (3) power generation by renewable energy sources are not considered; (4) all other carbon emissions remain constant; (5) the global power generation carbon footprint is constant at 49.04% as shown in Figure 1b; (6) all earth source/sink dynamics remain the same; and (7) 1 Gt of CO2 emission = 0.127 ppm of CO2 in earth atmosphere,
the authors performed the following simplistic calculations to estimate the potential benefit of the Allam cycle technology on reducing the global atmospheric CO2 levels:
Carbon footprint reduction: from 34.22 Gt/yr to 22.95 Gt/yr: Years to reach 450 ppm level: (450-409.36) ppm/[(22.95 Gt/yr) (0.127 ppm/Gt)] = 13.9 yr.  Years to reach 450 ppm level: (450-409.36) ppm/[(34.22 Gt/yr) (0.127 ppm/Gt)] = 9.4 yr.     Where 409.36 ppm is the CO2 level in 2018 and 34.22 Gt/yr is the latest global CO2 emissions (Baseline).
It can be seen the Allam cycle technology alone can potentially delay the time to reach 450 ppm CO2 (or 2 C temperature rise) by 4.5 years."  (Emphasis by website author).

*This website's subject is about extending the environmental benefits of Allam Cycle power plants beyond a merely 450 ppm delay: The scientific paper, "Process and Carbon Footprint Analyses of the Allam Cycle Power Plant Integrated with an Air Separation Unit" 15/Sep/2019  appeared in 'Clean Technologies' Journal.  18 of the 41 references are listed as 'CrossRefs'.  Google fetched a free pdf copy for your author at:  https://www.mdpi.com/2571-8797/1/1/22  Engineers should have a copy in hand because the paper will give them detailed insight into how the Allam thermodynamic cycle both functions and performs.   2.804.35 

It's important to realize and understand that the Allam Cycle is a new form of general combustion energy, applicable to many forms of large stationary power plants.

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10 billion tons of CO2 need to be removed from the air every year by 2050 and double that by 2100.
U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine - (quoted by Fred Krupp and Ernest J. Moniz in their article: "Cutting climate pollution isn't enough - we also need carbon removal.") (9/23/2019)

According to the United Nations (UN) backed scientific panel 2018 report, nations have barely a decade left to take extraordinary measures to cut the greenhouse gas emissions in half by the year 2030 so as to keep the Earth's warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid serious health and economic impacts to the U.S. as well as the rest of the world.    

This Website is suggesting a way we can begin reversing Climate Change's growth now while waiting for the world's energy companies to completely decarbonize the way we use their products.

IF POWERED by synthetic natural gas made from WOOD, the Allam Cycle could indirectly REMOVE CO2 FROM THE AIR as it makes electricity. Over time, it could remove all of Climate Change.
Wood fuel could repair Planet Earth's air by reducing air's CO2 content from 415 ppm (now) to 280 ppm (end of last Ice Age), causing Earth's extra Climate Changing heat to radiate back out into space.
How? Burning wood to unlock its captured CO2 can REPAIR THE AIR if the CO2 is converted into synthetic natural gas fuel to power Allam Cycle electricity plants and the CO2 is pumped deep underground.

Powering fewer than 10,000 Allam cycle power plants with wood could indirectly sequester half of current daily greenhouse gas emissions.

Why Wood?  The CO2 molecule is made of one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. 1 Kg of carbon on complete combustion will produce 3.67 Kg. of CO2. Wood is heterogeneous and the exact amount of [air's] carbon in 1 Kg of dry wood will vary depending on the species of wood, age of wood etc.
It is reported that 1 Kg of wood contains about 450 to 500 gm of [air's] Carbon. This means 1 Kg of wood is holding about 1.65 to 1.80 Kg of [air's] CO2. This is how wood or forest act as carbon sinks. Similarly, burning of 1 Kg of wood containing 500 gm of carbon will generate [supply] 1.65 to 1.80 Kg of [air's] CO2 and 17,070 btu of heat.
- - - So, we can use the heat to make electricity and capture the CO2 and store it safely deep underground instead of returning it to the air via a smokestack.

Decarbonization is not optional but it has proven to be much more difficult than was first thought to persuade the world's energy producers to decarbonize their products.
 Also:  https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-shot-tolerable-future.html 

Converting wood to Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG) is a known industrial process but has not been done on a large-scale commercial basis.

(Below) This is how an Allam Cycle BECCS power plant could both make electricity and pull Climate Changing CO2 out of the air, disposing of it deep underground.

Air's CO2, captured by trees as they grow, can be permanently recovered and locked underground forever by BECCS power plants. If trees decay on the forest floor, their CO2 returns to the air to make Climate Change worse.
A key critical feature of this power plant site is that it is located directly over an adequate CO2 geological sequestration site for fastest and least expensive CarbFix CO2 sequestration.

Planet Earth currently has about 3 trillion trees and might support an additional trillion. (A trillion is a thousand billion and a billion is a thousand million.)  It's essential we plant as many trees as possible immediately all over the world because we will need them for removing Climate Change from the air when the last of the fossil fuel decarbonizations have been completed and the installation and startup of the first several hundred Allam BECCS power plants have been implemented. The Allam power plants will first be running on natural gas and coal converted to synthetic natural gas, switching over to wood BECCS mode as the wood gasification equipment is installed. This could be as soon as 2030 to 2040 so the first Climate Change removal trees would be only 20 years old at most. After that, perhaps an annual rotating crop of trees or equivalent energy plants such as switchgrass will be needed for over 100 years.
California has 30% biomass electricity power plants that consume 1 ton (900 Kg) of woody biomass per hour for each megaWatt-hour of electricity.  So, a 50% efficient 300 megaWatt Allam BECCS power plant may use as much as 24 hours x 0.7 ton mW-h * 300 or 5,100 tons of woody biomass per day. 
1 Kg of wood holds about 1.65 to 1.80 Kg of CO2. A 10-year old typical small tree weighs 1,800 to 4,500 Kg. 1 ppm CO2 = 2.12 Gtonne carbon or 7.76 Gtonne CO2. (IPCC and Gilbert Masters). 1 Tonne (a Metric Ton) = 1,000 kg. 1 G (Giga) = 1 Billion.
To remove enough CO2 from the air to go back to the end of the last Ice Age we would need to remove from the air: 415 ppm CO2 - 280 ppm CO2 = 135 ppm CO2.  135 ppm x 7.76 Gtonne CO2 or 1,047 Gtonne CO2 or about 1 trillion 2-ton trees.
In this particular installation, consider obtaining the heat for the natural gas hydrogen reformer's steam from a point in the Allam engine's thermodynamic process that would compliment cooling to eliminate CO2 generation and energy waste.

Just as a world with thousands of coal burning power plants was a major cause of Climate Change,
 a decarbonized world, along with thousands of biomass-burning BECCS power plants, would be a way to completely roll back Climate Change. *

The Big CO2 Picture             Air Remediation

About BECCS, an air CO2 removal technology, considered by some to be a Climate Change savior.
(BECCS = Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. BECCS is a new technology which extracts CO2 from biomass (plants) and stores it geologically, thus removing it from the atmosphere)   https://www.carbonbrief.org/BECCS-the-story-of-climate-change's-saviour-technology

BECCS technology has the potential to take a giant leap forward. A more powerful potential BECCS tool is the newly-patented Allam power plant. In large numbers, it appears be ideal for rolling back Climate Change to 350 ppm.
Once you begin to reduce the strength of Planet Earth's CO2 'heat blanket', the heat it has been holding in will radiate out into the cold of space and Climate Change will begin to reverse.
An Allam Cycle demonstration power plant has been running for over a year (since November 2018) in La Porte, Texas. It is a 1/10 size, 30 megaWatt pilot power plant. Toshiba will be building the full-size 300 megaWatt commercial version in 2022.
Part rocket, part stationary power plant, part nothing like any engine that's ever run before, each of it's emissions comes out a different pipe. It's working fluid is supercritical CO2. If you know about power plants, you'll want to know about this one.

Compare the early 1930s technology today's BECCS facilities are using and a new second-generation BECCS facility which could be the 300 megaWatt Toshiba-Allam BECCS power plant.
 Early BECCS approaches to carbon capture applications can actually increase air pollution and are not efficient at reducing carbon in the atmosphere, according to research by Mark Z. Jacobson, in a 10/25/19 Stanford University paper.(5) 
Videos and articles describing and explaining the natural gas, coal, and lignite versions of the recently invented Allam Thermodynamic Cycle power plant being suggested by this website for BECCS applications:
     The Allam Cycle Engine:  https://www.netpower.com/technology/     https://www.netpower.com/news/     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allam_power_cycle     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFcbev1TkoU    
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pzbtbDRKvU         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keDJQa2MyME  
      CarbFix - CO2 Locked in the ground forever. Watch:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDZmIDbDO0
     Descriptive Articles:               https://www.powermag.com/inside-net-power-gas-power-goes-supercritical/?mypower                       
     See also Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions Corporation: https://www.toshiba-energy.com/en/  "Technology for the Hydrogen Society"

BECCS is a combination of wood gasification and catalytic synthesis chemistry technologies to make both electricity and underground limestone. 
Wind, hydro, nuclear, electricity, coal, oil, natural gas, lignite, are energy forms that can't be used to ROLL BACK Climate Change via BECCS.

A BECCS version of the Allam Cycle power plant would burn wood's CO2 that has been converted into synthetic natural gas.

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Doing It.

Practical, purchasable, BECCS carbon-negative power plants to roll back Climate Change could be built quickly worldwide through technology licensing agreements with Toshiba.

0 Discussion 1 Strategy 2 Rolling Back Climate Change 3 Engineering 4 Biomass Preparation 5 Gasifier 6 Syngas Cleanup 7 Methanator 8 Allam Power Plant 9 CO2 Sequestration Well

Allam Cycle power plants have already been engineered for burning natural gas, coal, and lignite. https://undeerc.org/  
A wood (biomass) burning Allam Cycle BECCS power plant is what is needed to remove Climate Changing CO2 from the air.
About the G65 Plasma Syngas Gasifier: Originally engineered and built by Westinghouse for waste-to-energy applications such as converting municipal solid waste into syngas to minimize the burden on municipal land fills (i.e., city garbage or MSW)  for powering city syngas electricity generating turbines. The Canadian company selling it, Alter NRG, has been acquired by the Chinese company, Sunshine Kaidi New Energy, a hi-tech environmental protection and green energy company. Syngas gasifiers work best when optimized for single type of substance. Wood pellet's biggest problem is tar while MSW's biggest problems are excessive moisture and inorganic fragments. The G65 does a good job of converting the metal and glass fragments routinely found in MSW to molten slag but this is an unnecessary feature for wood pellet gasification since a plasma gasifier's extremely high temperature breaks tar down into its simple component atoms. http://apageinc.com/demo_facility/

There are almost unlimited opportunities for locating completely new greenfield electricity power plants now that underground strata for CCS CO2 storage locations have been identified enabling cheap straight-down CO2 disposal via disposal wells located on plant site property. Allam power plants could be located virtually anywhere there is a CO2 disposal strata underground and sufficient biomass available by truck or rail.

EARLY WOOD POWER PLANT ESTIMATES: 1,997,280 tons CO2 sequestered per power plant per year. 3,163 tons wood per day. That's about 790 4-ton full-grown trees per day or 288,350 trees per power plant per year.

2020 Break-Even: Number of power plants necessary for 35 billion tons of CO2 sequestered per year: 17,523. Number of of 4 ton trees needed per year: 5,052,757,050 - a little over 5 billion. The world has 3 trillion trees, a trillion is a thousand billion.

Advanced BECCS plant operators can sell: 1, Carbon-negative Electricity, 2, 'Blue' hydrogen for vehicle fuels made using the CO2 disposal well, and 3, excess carbon-neutral pipeline gas.

Advantages over the first generation BECCS power plants being advocated by the IPCC:
 1. Much better fuel efficiency. 2. On-site CO2 disposal well for cheapest, safest CO2 disposal. 3. On-site Natural Gas "Blue" Hydrogen Reformer for abundant, cheap hydrogen. 4. On-site Natural Gas backup for electricity generation. 5. Up to 1/2 million gallons of fresh water per day is produced as a combustion product. 6. Everything carbon-negative. 7. No environmental emissions.
The path ahead:
 1. The 300 megaWatt Toshiba-built Allam Cycle power plant is 6 times larger than the wood-to-synthetic natural gas 50 megaWatt BECCS adaptor plants that have been built to date in the U.S. and Holland. The Toshiba plant is on-track to begin shipping in 2022 to the U.S. and one location outside the U.S. The natural fuel for the Allam Cycle engine is natural gas. Both coal and lignite adaptors have been designed but not built. They are similar to syngas gas fuel adaptors designed for 'Clean Coal' combined cycle aeroderivative jet turbine power plants. Equipment used to adapt metropolitan solid waste (MSW) [garbage] to syngas in the UK, China, and India may possibly be modified to produce synthetic natural gas from densified wood pellets.

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Stopping Climate Change might be quicker, easier, and cheaper than we think.
The electrical grid enables BECCS electricity plants located over CO2 disposal strata to be distant from population centers.


30,000 illuminated cities could mean more than 30,000 nearby coal power plants. 20,000 Allam BECCS power plants could, over 50 to 200 years, roll Climate Change back to normal or less.
 We could build BECCS power plants next to existing unneeded coal power plants on their property to roll back Climate Change at minimal delay and cost.
Shut-down old coal power plants are already connected to electrical grids.        
A LIVING EXAMPLE that happens to be located over an EXCELLENT CO2 DISPOSAL STRATA:  https://michiganhub.com/ 
Nearly 300 coal-fired power plants have been "retired" since 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to the Sierra Club.

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               Possible Cash Flows For The First Ten Wood BECCS Fuel Processing Systems                  Wood Pellets                                G65 MSW Plasma Unit  https://www.netzeroteesside.co.uk/                              

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U.S. and Global Deep Underground BECCS CO2 Storage Zones and Issues

The United States' Carbon Capture and Storage Situation
 "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. 

See CarbFix: CO2 Locked in the ground forever. Watch:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDZmIDbDO0   (Skip the ad someone inserted in front of the video.)
If water is added to the liquid CO2 as it is pumped into the ground, the CO2 will turn into limestone after a few years. This locks the CO2 underground forever.

               
Maps Showing various UNDERGROUND CARBON CAPTURE STORAGE STRATA LOCATIONS 
See:  "Geospatial analysis of near-term potential for carbon-negative bioenergy in the United States" by Ejeong Baik, et al.  https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3290  (pdf)
Locations without carbon disposal will have to rely on renewables - wind, solar - for their electricity.

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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 - in some ways - the current Climate Change crisis resembles the world's early 1900s horseshit crisis described in this website's 'Prologue' story.
You can't see or smell them, but your car's 150+ horsepower engine is capable of making appallingly large amounts of CO2 turds when you stand on the accelerator.

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."