Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Photo by Cata on Unsplash

Our modern lives insulate us from and make us forget a knowledge that came simply and unforgettably to our hunter-gatherer forebears. That is the discrimination between needs and desires. We don’t need smartphones, automobiles, TV, indoor plumbing, granite countertops, Nikes, non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles, YouTube, scented candles, or video games. We do need food, air, water, a modicum of shelter, and a proper temperature range in which our species can exist. The last was a given until recently. That’s why there’s no life on Mars or Venus—too cold, too hot. The fact that temperatures go up in lockstep with CO2 levels now makes CO2 capture and sequestration mandatory to provide us with one of our necessities, a livable temperature range. 

If you want to make a lot of money, figure out a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and stash it somewhere for several hundred years or forever. Everyone will thank you and shower you with cash. Ahahaha! That’s not true, but it should be true. Unfortunately, Trump is gutting U.S. funding for research in this area. That leaves the Chinese as the world leader for this technology. At the rate CO2 levels are increasing, we may end up renting the technology from them. Ironic, since they probably stole the idea from us to begin with. 

Since energy companies revealed they are spending 5 trillion dollars over the next decade for fossil fuel exploration, it is a foregone conclusion that CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) will be a technology of existential necessity.  The fossil fuel industry has an enormous cache of wealth acquired at the expense of the Earth’s climate. They are going to use that wealth to continue doing what they do by gaming the legalized bribery system at the heart of many of America’s problems—lobbying. The energy companies plan to sell combustibles until fossil fuels are gone, they are too expensive to extract at a profit, or their client base has plummeted due to “natural causes.” 

We are currently at 413 ppm CO2. We are on track to hit 550 ppm by end of century. This will raise average temps 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit.  At some point in the next century, if we keep going at our current rate, we could see 700 to 900 ppm CO2, something not seen since the Eocene some 50 million years ago. Temperatures were up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit higher on average. There was no ice at the poles, but probably alligators and palm trees in Antartica. 

Looking at past geological records, it appears there is a lag time of one to four centuries for sea levels to catch up to rapid changes in CO2 levels. None have been as rapid as the last 200 years. We know that sea levels were a hundred feet higher during the Miocene, 15 million years ago, when CO2 levels were similar to what we have now. The reason we don’t see that large increase in sea levels or the 11 degrees F. higher temperature yet is because of the buffer provided by our still-cool, deep ocean waters. Ninety percent of the ocean is between 32 and 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit. But over the next couple of centuries we will see increasingly rapid elevations in sea levels and temperature. 

If we burn the rest of our fossil fuels scientists estimate atmospheric CO2 levels could rise to 1000–5000 ppm. If it is toward the upper limits of this estimate, it is debatable whether life will continue as we know it on Earth. Before we get there fossil fuel companies will, hopefully, realize they could lose their customers and, therefore, make some changes. These same scientists say just 450 ppm will be disastrous. It is a certainty we will reach that. With uncontrolled fossil fuel use and no capture and sequestration, CO2 levels will easily blow past 500 ppm; and our civilization could collapse under the strain of drought, food chain disruption, defrosted pathogens, resource wars, heat prostration, and tropical diseases. 

That is where CCS comes in. Various means of scrubbing CO2 from the air have been developed. It is then used for making lubricating oil and putting the fizz in soda water. Those are pretty small markets for the amount of CO2 we need to eliminate. Plus, who is going to pay for it on the industrial scale that is required. It would be ideal for those responsible for the CO2 in the first place to pay for capture and sequestration by implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme. Otherwise, we are simply paying to clean up the energy companies’ mess which, in the end, may not be out of the realm of possibilities.

In the past it was thought that CO2 capture would have to take place at those industries where it is produced—chemical, power, concrete, steel, and fertilizer plants. Then it would be pumped somewhere to be injected into the ground. This is very expensive and unlikely to be adopted. 

A recently developed CCS technology allows carbon to be extracted directly from the air. Not oddly at all, it is called Direct Air Capture (DAC). With current technology it may be possible to get this down to about $100 dollars per ton. It needs to be ten times less expensive ($10 to $20 per ton) not to be a drag on the economy. This is the only technology that can realize a carbon negative offset. In other words, it could remove more carbon than is produced by mankind and nature to reduce overall levels in the atmosphere. The only alternative coming close is massive reforestation and afforestation. These have their own sets of problems and need funding to iron out the bugs. 

The problem is money. No one except a few universities and Bill Gates are spending money in the U.S. to develop this technology. It is not enough that we strip carbon out of the atmosphere. It must be put in a stable environment or condition and left there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Turn it back into limestone? Make CO2-foamed concrete? Make plastic to feed our 3D printers? Plant all available land with trees? I don’t know. That is why we need some smart people working on this right away.

Environmentalists are in a moral tug of war about CO2 capture and sequestration. Some believe it will give the fossil fuel companies an incentive to keep on doing what they are doing. That ship has sailed. We cannot be picky now about how carbon is removed from the atmosphere. It is all good, but CCS offers at least the possibility to reverse the levels of carbon in the atmosphere, staving off the worst of global warning until the climate stabilizes at a reasonable temperature—one of the basic needs that will allow us to keep on drinking non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles. 

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Photo by Karsten Würth (@inf1783) on Unsplash

Although the current 413 ppm CO2 in our atmosphere may have been experienced as recently as the Miocene ten to fifteen million years ago, we have yet to see some of the radical effects of such a CO2 level. Seas were a hundred feet higher, and average surface temperatures were 11 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in the Miocene.  One explanation may be that nowhere can we find a rate of change (upper 200s ppm to lower 400s ppm of CO2 over a period of a couple hundred years) as rapid as this, as far as we know, in the past three and a half billion years that life has been present on planet Earth. 

Because of this blink-of-the-eye rise (geologically speaking), there may be a significant lag time before the Earth starts to once again look like the Miocene. Because we are so short-lived, we scoff at people that warn us of these future changes. Yet, when these changes come along we think of them as normal because that’s the way it’s been most of our lives. This life span problem is a major disadvantage to our species. It ranks up there with greed and stupidity. 

If we do manage to transition to lower CO2 levels and successfully reverse climate change, we should then be ever vigilant of our greenhouse gas outputs and our use, or misuse, of energy.

Surviving climate change will result in a massive change in how we think about energy and its uses. For our civilization to survive intact and recognizable, a political upheaval will have to take place, replacing our leaders with people concerned about the planet we live on and not some special interest group that gives them money. A social and technological upheaval will have to follow in which we become good stewards of the Earth. This doesn’t necessarily mean eating vegan and riding a bike to work, but we will think differently about energy. 

In the future, not only will we be avoiding the combustion of fossil fuels but the burning of solid fuels such as wood, peat, and grain pellets as well. Industrial processes will be switched from fossil fuels to electricity. Wind, tidal, hydro, solar, and even nuclear will power our industrial future. Electrical power, however, can be inherently “dirty” by having spikes and dips in voltage, current, and frequencies. This dirty power causes inefficiencies in transmission and usage. Filters, surge protectors, and line reactors can mediate these problems, but it is an area ripe for innovation, especially software controlling these solutions as a package. Clean power will be a mantra of the future. 

Even if we are producing and using only “clean” power generated without fossil fuels, there is still a lot of heat generated and wasted by the end devices using electricity. If a waste heat source is hot enough, it is sometimes used to make steam and turn generators in a process called cogeneration, but this is not the norm, even with our current use of fossil fuels. Waste heat sources below the boiling point of water are generally ignored or underutilized. 

Climate change is going to force the human race to look at waste heat in a different light. We have to put it to work. This low grade energy will, in the future, be looked at similar to the way we look at geothermal locations now. These waste heat hotspots, though, are much more widespread. This is a technology that needs to be developed.  

Industries such as cement and steel will have to switch to completely electric or solar energy. It will not be as hard for steel since a quarter of it is already made with electric arc furnaces. There may need to be some technology development and tweaking to make that work for all types of steel, but it certainly seems possible, and it will need to be done. 

The cement industry is one of the biggest emitters of CO2 after the fossil fuel power industry. The reduction of limestone (CaCO3) to lime (CaO) involves getting rid of a carbon atom and two oxygen atoms in the form of CO2. Also, a lot of fossil fuel is burned to produce the heat required for this reaction to take place—a dual production of CO2. Fortunately, we may get to make our cement and use it too, if researchers from George Washington University in Ashbury, Virginia have their way. They use solar energy directly to melt the limestone and heat it greater than 800 degrees Centigrade. Then it is electrolyzed to produce lime with byproducts of carbon monoxide and oxygen. There is still a lot of heat sloughed off from this process that simply goes into the atmosphere. If we put that to use, this would be even more Earth friendly. 

It is not just big, fossil-fuel-fired industries that are sources of waste heat. Data centers, server farms, and digital currency factories are sucking up energy and pouring heat into the atmosphere. According to an article by the New York Times, data centers waste up to 90% of the electricity they use because all servers are on all the time whether they are being used or not, just in case they are needed. 

First, someone needs to figure out how to cut down on the wasted electricity. That would almost certainly be a software solution. Secondly, ways to scavenge that heat and turn it back into useful electricity must be found and implemented throughout this industry. 

But how can we make these low grade heat sources useable? One possibility is some iteration of the sterling engine. Another is pentane. Pentane is a hydrocarbon similar to butane, but pentane boils at 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Even sources of low grade heat are usually much greater than 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Perhaps a way can be found to use this component of natural gas to generate electricity at lower temperatures the way water is used at higher temperatures. It would certainly require a good containment system because pentane, besides being highly flammable, is likely to be a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. This may be yet another nascent energy company of the future. 

We are currently drunken sailors when it comes to spending energy. In the future we will be soberly searching out waste heat sources before their entropic dissolution and figuring out ways to put them to use. We will design things with efficiency in mind. We will innovate to make more with less. C’mon, it’ll be fun. It certainly beats the alternative of letting the planet heat up to disastrous levels. 

How We Will Get Asteroid Material Back To Earth

Tesla Roadster in space - courtesy wikipedia

We won't be hauling it down with a Tesla Roadster.

An asteroid one kilometer in diameter is parked at the Lagrange point L5 of the Earth/Moon gravitational system. The asteroid orbits the Earth at the same distance as the Moon - 238,900 miles. If a line were drawing through the center of the Earth to the Moon and the center of Earth to the asteroid there would be about a 45 degree angle between those lines. It is in a safe, stable orbit that does not require regular expenditures of fuel to keep it there. This safe, stable location was the deal between the United Nations and the company retrieving the giant space rock; actually more metal than rock. 16217 Ryugu contains iron, nickel, cobalt, water, nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia. 

Plastic bags are made from ethane, a part of natural gas burned as waste before they started making plastic bags. 

Outer space construction has not yet hit its stride so some cheap way is needed to get these metals to the surface of Earth where they can be sold. Here is how it could be done. 

If chunks of metal were cut off of Ryugu and simply dropped to Earth, it would be a mess. Chunks big enough not to vaporize completely upon reentry could do major damage. The velocity when it reached Earth would be nearly 200,000 miles per hour and create an explosion equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT. So, for practicality, we need to get this stuff closer to Earth and reduce that velocity. 

Flaming mass making reentry - courtesy Neil Bleving

A deal is brokered between the powers that be on Earth and the asteroid mining company so that a million ton chunk of iron can be brought into a medium Earth orbit about 2,000 miles up with careful planning and monitoring. Along with it comes several space tugs and lots of water (from the asteroid) as fuel (electrolysis - oxygen, hydrogen) to keep it in orbit. Engines are anchored to the big asteroid chunk and will automatically kick in to prevent a deterioration in orbit. 

Any amount of heat one requires in outer space is available. One simply needs the right size mirror configured to apply that heat to an appropriately sized area on command. With this heat the stoney portions of an asteroid and, perhaps, lunar regolith can be melted and turned into ceramic. Metals can be melted down by these same mirrors. 

Concentrating mirrors cut off a 300 ton chunk of iron and begin to melt it down. 

Concurrently, stoney portions of the asteroid are melted to form ceramic. While the ceramic is molten, pre-heated (to prevent explosive expansion) nitrogen is introduced into the ceramic melt to produce a foamed ceramic material. This material will be formed into the shape of a lifting body similar to that of the Space Shuttle but about half the size.  As the hot nitrogen entrained in the ceramic cools it forms a partial vacuum, making the material much less conductive to heat. 

It takes 7 trucks to move the same number of paper bags as one truck moving plastic bags. 

The blob of iron melt is rammed into the ceramic mold. High temperature spargers inserted through the wall of the mold inject the iron with nitrogen as well, making a foamed metal having one tenth the weight of iron while still retaining much of its strength.

Once out of the mold, a foamed-ceramic mat is attached to the bottom of the foamed metal lifting body. and a steering module is inserted into the cavity molded in the rear to accept it. This is a heat-resistant rudder and elevators on vertical and horizontal stabilizers controlled by an onboard GPS and autopilot. Built in space with only the electronics and motor coming from Earth, those parts are used again while the rest is recycled. 

A railgun is built on the mass of the asteroid chunk and points at a tangent point to Earth about 100 miles above the surface. The lifting body is attached through grooves molded into it and launched towards Earth at 20,000 miles per hour retrograde to orbital velocity. When the lifting body reaches the upper atmosphere, it is going much slower in relation to the Earth, allowing a safe, guided landing on a shallow lake where it is recovered. 

The bubbled metal might be worth many times its solid value, making the whole operation profitable. Many types of metallurgy may be possible in a vacuum and weightlessness that aren’t feasible on Earth. We could be talking about metals such as high temperature inconels that are very expensive. I designed a coil in a furnace, the prototype for making BPA free plastic bottles, where a 6 inch schedule 40 (1/4” thick wall) piece of pipe cost $1200 per linear foot. 

For smaller packages of very valuable metals like platinum or palladium, NASA may have just the thing. They have developed a folding heat shield. A small reentry vessel with a hundred pounds of palladium has a heat shield that folds out to a much larger size than the vessel itself, creating a shield off of which most of the frictional heat is sloughed away around the side of the vessel on its reentry path to an elevation and speed at which it can deploy a parachute. Be there to pick it up before someone else gets it because that's 1.6 million dollars we're talking about. 

courtesy NASA

These are the possibilities once we start thinking about how to maximize the payback for such a massive undertaking as capturing an asteroid. Of course, the real payoff for the asteroid miner will be when construction off world begins, increasing the value of their asteroid many times. Unexpected returns will be the technological advances necessary to get this done that will eventually work their way into our everyday lives. 

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Very Large Scale 3D Printing In Space

Bryan Versteeg / Spacehabs.com

In 2011 German designer Markus Kayser built a machine called a Solar Sinter. It concentrates sunlight via a 3 foot by 5 foot fresnel lens onto a box containing sand. The box moves a layer of sand in programmed patterns, allowing the 1600 degree Celsius beam to melt the sand in a controlled design. Once that pattern, or layer, is complete, another layer of sand is added and the process is repeated until a 3D object is created from fused sand.

A very similar machine could 3D print objects in orbit around the Earth or Moon or anywhere in space sufficient sunlight can be collected to melt stuff. It would have to be highly modified over Mr. Kayser’s design. For one thing, you don’t have the convenience of gravity holding down your bed of sand. Another thing … you don’t have sand. 

Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career. 

The fresnel lens will have to be replaced with mirrors simply because mirrors are cheaper, more rugged, and more flexible. The bed of the printer will have to be inside a centrifuge affair producing artificial gravity. Envision a large cylinder 80 feet in diameter and 300 feet long. It spins around its long axis. The printer head can travel the length of the cylinder or in a circular path inside the cylinder, or a flat path on a chord of some arc of the cylinder that is still far enough from the central axis of the cylinder to have enough “gravity” for the system to work. Flexible light pipes will take the sunlight collected by the mirrors at the center of one end of the cylinder and feed it to the printer head. A lens at the printer head will further control the acuity of the beam that hits the medium to be melted. 

Ideally, the centrifuge portion would be attached to an asteroid placed in orbit at one of the Lagrange points L4 or L5 in the Earth-Moon gravity system. That would simplify spinning it without the worry of compensating for precession like a top or anything else that spins. It would be attached to the relatively massive asteroid with brackets that extend to the ends of the cylinder where bearings and electric motors provide smooth, stable rotation with a minimum of fuss and bother. The asteroid is acting like a good work bench, providing stabilizing mass to carry out projects in space. 

If a suitable mass isn't available, the cylinder would simply be set spinning by tangential thrusters with any precession also controlled by swiveling thrusters at each end of the cylinder. 

Centrifugal 3D printer attached to asteroid. Drawing by Glen Hendrix.
Click to Enlarge

If we’re not talking about sand as a printing medium, what are we talking about? There are really only two practical sources for meltable medium to be used in our 3D printer. One is lunar regolith and the other is ground up asteroid. The asteroid option is cheaper if you discount the getting it there part. Lunar regolith would have to be transported from the Moon’s surface. Asteroid material is already in orbit. So far, two good reasons asteroid mining will complement our travel to space and our ability to stay there for any length of time. 

Use those plastic grocery bags again. Save money. Save the world. Here’s how. 

The disadvantages of using asteroid material are that it has to be excavated from the asteroid, sorted by material, and milled into a powder. This will call for the invention of robotic excavators that drill into the asteroid much as tunnel borers do their job on Earth. One of the first jobs to be done in mining an asteroid will be to make safe, comfortable housing for personnel during the project. The asteroid excavator can hollow out tunnels which will be outfitted for habitation safe from any stray cosmic rays. 

Asteroid mining - courtesy NASA

The Moon’s regolith, on the other hand, is already a fine powder. So fine, it was a problem on the lunar landing missions. It is also fairly uniform in composition. Although it would have to be transported from the surface of the Moon, the one sixth Earth gravity should make that a cheaper solution than bringing material from Earth, especially if water can be found on the Moon in sufficient quantity for use as fuel. A lot of regolith can be hauled into orbit for the cost of moving an asteroid. 

3D printed Lunar base - courtesy European Space Agency

Let’s say we use another, more traditional method of 3D printing whereby a small, sticky glob of substance is deposited out of a nozzle and the nozzle moves on. Mixing our asteroid or lunar powder with water and some other adhering substance to hold everything together gives us a paste to use similar to what concrete printers use now, perhaps thicker to cut down on explosive evaporation of the paste as it comes out of the printer nozzle.

Imagine a large steel plate as the print bed. It could be a light gauge steel sheet with stiffeners on the bottom. Without gravity and its attendant forces, the print bed is just a place holder and starting point. The printing side is coated with Teflon for easy removal of the printed object. The edges of the plate are rounded to fit pulleys. Four pulleys with bearings, two on each side of the print bed and aligned with each other, roll continuously along the edges of the printer bed in the plus or minus “x” direction. From the centers of these pulleys extend upwards four shafts in the “y” axis direction. These shafts go through a stabilizer frame that holds everything together. This whole stabilizer frame moves in the plus or minus “y” direction. Mounted through this stabilizer frame is another shaft with the printer head and motor to drive that head in the plus or minus “z” direction.  A large tank for mixing, storage, and pumping floats around, making sure there is no binding or interference with the umbilical delivering print medium to the printer head. 

Free-floating 3D printer. Printing volume about 300' x 60' x 15'. Drawing by Glen Hendrix
Click to Enlarge.

This type of printer might be good for producing parts for habitats in orbit or insulating cladding for equipment or personnel tunnels in an asteroid. The cold of space will seep into the deepest parts of an asteroid and must be dealt with. 

Whether we bring an asteroid into Earth’s orbit or not, I predict 3D printing of large objects in space will become a reality. It may or may not look and work like what I’ve described here, but they will be an integral part of a robotic fabrication milieu in outer space. Human workers will be at a premium. Machines will have to fill the gap. 

The human race is on a course of infinite growth in a finite environment. The push into an infinite environment with infinite space, materials, and energy is inevitable and desirable if a global catastrophe is to be avoided. The sooner we start, the better chance we have of surviving our immature macro-societal tendencies. 

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by Glen Hendrix

Long March 2. Long March 9 will be 4x bigger and deliver 18x the payload. Courtesy Wikimedial

When most Americans think of the Chinese, they think of an industrious, intelligent population. Smart enough and with enough inexpensive labor to make things good enough to sell cheap enough to claim market share and make money. The really hard stuff; the sophisticated electronics, avionics, bioprocesses, and software they obviously stole from us. And, ignoring the obvious moral questions, what does that say about their spy/hacking/computer/skills?

Americans forget the ancient Chinese invented gunpowder, paper, printing, kites, and umbrellas. Americans don't do history. Witness Afghanistan. We’ve certainly forgotten that the Chinese invented thorough testing of the people in charge of government before they are allowed to serve. Maybe we should steal that from them. 

What I’m trying to say is we don’t give the Chinese the credit they deserve when it comes to "the big picture" intellectual processes and strategic thinking. Also, Americans don't take into consideration the advantage the Chinese possess in having a central authority figure. Xi Jinping, aside from Vladimir Putin, is the closest thing to a king that exists in this modern era. As such, the country can react with astonishing speed and amazing focus to deal with such disparate problems as pollution and unwanted domestic public opinions. 

Paper or plastic? … If you said “paper”, read this. Plastic? Read this.

The democratic process in America, on the other hand, has sidetracked our progress in dealing with climate change, slowed down social equality, and created a lot of noise that hinders our march towards a smart, healthy population with very few poor and uneducated. That is because it is a process and has its ups and downs. We will get back on track. It just takes time.

In the meantime, China has announced its intentions to march into the future by putting an outpost on the Moon. That is why it is developing the Long March 9, a rocket that will put 140 metric tons into low earth orbit and 50 metric tons into trans-lunar orbit. This is the same capability as the Saturn V, the rocket that took U.S. astronauts to the Moon. How old hat, you say. Been there, done that. 

What you may not know is that China is also heavily invested in nuclear fusion technology with its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, EAST, at a large research facility at Dongpu Science Island in Anhui Province.

Also, helium-3 will make nuclear fusion much more efficient and eliminate nuclear waste and radiation. 

Also, the Moon is littered with helium-3. There is an estimated 1,100,000 metric tons trapped in lunar soil worth about 3 billion dollars per ton. 

Are you beginning to get the picture? I’ll spell it out for you anyway. The future of the planet depends on cheap, non-polluting energy of which fusion will be the world champ. It doesn’t matter who develops practical fusion, it will be done in the next few decades and licensed to anyone willing to pay the price. Having an established outpost on the Moon, China will be in the catbird’s seat to provide the budding fusion industry with what it needs most; helium-3. Three point three quadrillion dollars worth of it. If they are also the lucky ones to crack the fusion puzzle, they will be the undisputed uber energy czars of the twenty first century. 

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags  

Pretty smart strategic thinking about the future, huh? With that kind of economic leverage China would never have to sweat the possibility of a trade war again.  However, it is not too late for two (and probably more) to play this game. By the time fusion technology is powering toasters, everyone will be wise to what the Moon represents for a nascent fusion industry. Perhaps we'll see a stampede of corporate startups to rival the dot com era. In fact, the Chinese are already in talks with the European Space Agency to make it a bilateral effort to build an outpost. We'll see how that works out.

In the meantime, while our current materials technology precludes the building of a space elevator on Earth, it will work on the Moon. This would be an efficient way to haul helium-3, water, and regolith into orbit around the Moon. Helium-3 goes to Earth's fusion reactors, water goes to needy vessels exploring the Solar System, and regolith is building material for space habitats. Recently discovered lava tubes on the Moon could provide inexpensive radiation shielding to the people carrying out lunar exploration and exploitation. Whether they want it or not, things are looking towards the Chinese enjoying a lot of company on the Moon.

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