Welcome to the Cquestrate blog
-
Conversations about Cquestrate
Cquestrate launched just over two weeks ago and we’ve already seen a great level of discussion on the website. Some of the comments and contributions have started to move the project forward in encouraging ways.
However, discussions about Cquestrate aren’t restricted to this website and it has been fascinating to read, and contribute to, what has been going on elsewhere. Here’s a very small sample:
- Alexis Madrigal covered Cquestrate on the Wired Science blog
- FT.com’s Undercover Economist mentioned Cquestrate after meeting Tim Kruger
- Larvatus Prodeo has hosted a long-running, well-informed debate
- A Slashdot post on the day that Cquestrate launched has so far attracted 874 comments (some funny, some actually quite helpful)
- On the day of launch, Cquestrate was featured in the top 5 ‘upcoming’ environmental stories on Digg
- Cquestrate has made news abroad and has been picked up on in France by Gizmodo.fr and in the djibnet.com forum. Also in Spain on NeoFronteras.
When I come across anything useful I use del.ici.ous to ‘tag’ the page. Links to these tagged pages are collected automatically on our links page for all to see.
Unfortunately, it can be tricky to find all of these conversations. However, it’s important we do our best to follow them - we don’t want to miss out on some potentially valuable information.
If you are part of a community that has discussed Cquestrate or if you’ve blogged about the project, please let us know in the comments below.
One person has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
Prevention is better than a cure
Prevention is better than a cure - but if you can’t prevent something from happening then you sure want to have a cure.
Heating up vast quantities of limestone to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and mitigate ocean acidification would not be necessary if we drastically reduced our emissions of CO2. People have suggested in comments posted to this site that what we need to do is have serious reforestation efforts and increase our energy efficiency to prevent runaway climate change - I couldn’t agree more. But we need to recognise that even if it were possible to change the way that people behave, that reforestation and energy efficiency may simply not be sufficient to solve the problem.
There are concerns that this process involves the processing of colossal quantities of limestone, but then the size of the problem is colossal too. There’s an interesting blog at Wired about what the author, Alexis Madrigal, calls “Gesturengineering” - we need to recognise that changing lightbulbs and not putting our TV on standby, whilst useful and necessary steps to reduce our emissions, are not sufficient - gestures alone are not enough. We need to recognise that the steps we need to take to tackle climate change will need to be much more than cosmetic - that they will affect our economic well-being and may have some side-effects - there probably is no perfect pain-free solution.
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
Why bother heating up the limestone?
It seems like heating up limestone until it breaks down into lime is a lot of hard work to get alkalinity into the ocean. Why not put the limestone directly in the water?
Well, the problem is that limestone is very insoluble, which explains the continuing existence of the White Cliffs of Dover. It is possible to get limestone to dissolve in water, but you have to grind it to an extremely small size and even then it dissolves very slowly. To enhance the ability of the oceans to act as a carbon sink, you need the reaction to take place in the top 100m of the ocean, as this is the layer where most of the mixing with the atmosphere takes place. Even small particles of limestone sink like stones (which is after all what they are) and little of the required reaction will occur in the right place. To grind limestone down into a fine enough powder is both expensive both in terms of energy and in terms of the equipment required. Also the energy that is required is mechanical energy which is much more expensive than heat energy.
There are other sources of alkalinity that can be added. Kheshgi identified mineral deposits of soda ash (Na2CO3) as one such source, but noted that using the world’s entire recoverable resources of soda ash would offset just a single year of CO2 emissions. Caldera and Rau have put forward an idea that reacts CO2 from the flue gases of power stations with limestone and then puts the resulting calcium bicarbonate solution into the sea - this has a lot of merit - it addresses CO2 before it is emitted, but does not remove CO2 from the air after it has been emitted, as the process described on this website does.
All these methods can be used - the questions are how can they be done in an environmentally beneficial way and how can they be done economically? These are the key questions we are trying to answer - and with your help we will
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
Energy Sources
A number of posts have referred to the amount of energy that is required to distribute the lime to the oceans. The cost will be significant, but in energy terms 85-95% of the energy used in the manufacturing of lime (from mining the limestone out of the ground, crushing it and transporting it and heating it up until it calcines into lime and CO2) is required in the form of heat. The total heat energy requirement is approximately 2GJ per tonne of limestone calcined which yields a figure of approximately 3GJ per tonne of CO2 sequestered. The exact amounts will depend on the exact process (how much heat from the CO2 generated is recaptured, etc).
Unless we can generate electricity extremely cheaply it is likely to be too expensive to drive this process. Here’s why: 1 kilowatt-hour is 3.6MJ - so 1GJ is approximately 278 kWhrs. If you have cheap electricity at say $0.05 per kWhr, then to generate 1GJ will cost ~$14. In comparison, natural gas can be much cheaper. There are numerous deposits of ’stranded gas’ where the cost of extracting the gas out of the ground is less than $1 per GJ, but it would cost so much to transport to a market, that it is not worth doing so. Because this process can be performed anywhere where limestone, energy and the sea are in close proximity, it is possible to use that stranded gas.
Electricity is an extremely high-quality form of energy, which is absolutely necessary to run our modern society (including this computer). But for this process we require heat, not high-quality energy and the process of turning heat (from say a power station) into electricity and then turning the electricity into heat is inefficient and unnecessary. Better to use heat directly.
Thank you to Steaphany Waelder who sent me an email with some contacts in Australia who are investigating generating high-grade heat from solar irradiation. This is exactly the sort of information that we are looking for. If we can use solar irradiation that would be ideal, as there would be no CO2 from heat generation - my concern is the cost of the equipment and that is what we will be looking into.
Thank you also to Henry Brown with his post on Opensource maps. The code you have written at the end of your post is, I’ll admit, quite beyond me, but I’m told by someone who knows that this will generate maps of the various elements that we need to pull together - genius!
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
Amazing contributions - thank you
Day two and so much to blog about. Thank you for the quality and quantity of comments, not to mention the range.
One theme that is coming up is about developing the website. We’ve got a great team in Maverick and Juno, who are managing the social networking aspects of the site. They are keen to get on and flex their imaginations as to how to make this website work most effectively - they have been flat out developing the site - they did it from a standing start in three weeks, but are now keen to take the next step.
I really liked the idea that Daily Networker had of organising a get together to allow people to network face-to-face. I’m not sure he/she was volunteering, but if so, so much the better. If not, would anybody else like to volunteer? If you are interested please email at enquiries@cquestrate.com. My thoughts would be somewhere in the centre of London mid-week next week? We could set it up with a webcast and I’d be happy to answer questions - so much quicker and more compelling than typing!
One thing I’d like to clear up is that I haven’t got it in for the Nullabor Plain. There is no intention of performing this process in only one location. Given that the lime would need to be delivered over a very wide area it would make sense to have numerous sites where this process could take place dotted around the world. The reason I mentioned the Nullarbor Plain is to demonstrate that there is sufficient limestone available for this process.
Michael posted a comment yesterday about the experience people who own aquariums have of adding small quantities of Kalkwasser (calcium hydroxide solution) into their aquariums to control pH and add calcium ions. It would be great to get the experience of aquarium owners on this - can anyone post something to an aquarium forum or let us know where we should go?
We’ve had some posts in Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese - does anyone know a good automatic translation service we could link to the posts to allow us all to share information?
Finally, an apology for the broken link on the keep me informed link. We’ll get that fixed. Sorry.
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
First day
It’s the end of the Cquestrate website’s first day and there has been an amazing response. It’s been picked up by people in Brazil, Australia, US, Europe and Russia (at least) and there have been some great contributions and messages of support.
The prize for the most thoughtful and constructive post goes to Judith Rosen, with her post under the Environmental Impact Assessment - she is absolutely right, we need to ensure that we thoroughly investigate the complex systems that such a process would affect. Rest assured that that is what we intend to do and our commitment to an open source approach will ensure that we draw on as wide a range of experience, rather than one organisation finding a pet consultant to write the report that they want to read.
Martin, thank you for offering to produce graphics and animations of the process - that’s extremely generous and I’ll be in touch to see if I can take you up on that offer.
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
Cquestrate.com launches!
The site has been launched! It’s been very exciting finally seeing the website move from the development site over to the internet. It’s been picked up by a few blogs – prize for “First Mention of Cquestrate on the Internet” goes to FEASTA – and someone has already translated the press release from Chemistry and Industry into Spanish (you can see that at Iconoclast.com).
The last couple of days have been hectic, doing the final tweaks – many thanks to Chris Unitt for all his hard work. The fact that Vimeo was unavailable over the weekend just added to the fun!
Looking forward to everyone’s thoughts and comments. It’s not just the idea that we are developing in an open source way – it’s also the website, so please let us know what you like and what you think we should do to improve it.
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?
-
Getting ready for launch
With a couple of days left before the website launches we’re just finalising content, producing explanatory videos and making sure that everything is working properly.
We’ve had to move very quickly to ensure that everything is in place as soon as possible. With the first phase of the website almost complete it’ll soon be a case of making sure that word goes out to the people who can help further this project.
The scope is so large that we need a wide spread of expertise - if you, or anyone you know anyone, can help in any way then we look forward to your input. Have a look at the questions we need to answer and leave your comments on the relevant pages.
Nobody has left a comment so far, why not join in the discussion?