News Category: In The News

After decades of trying to stop Earth from heating up, scientists are exploring how to reverse climate change and maybe even cool the planet back down.

Could clouds be brightened so they reflect more sunlight back into outer space? If lab-grown seaweed is sunk into the ocean, how much carbon dioxide could it absorb? Would drilling holes into glaciers extract enough heat to slow sea level rise?

The University of Chicago positioned itself as a leader in this emergent field — known as geoengineering — after recruiting renowned physicist David Keith to build out a climate engineering program with 10 tenure-track faculty hires and several young researchers.

“We cannot understand (geoengineering) with just a bunch of individual people working on this in an isolated way. We need to bring together a broad group of scholars and students to debate it in a much richer way,” Keith said.

While society is struggling to kick its addiction to fossil fuels, compensating by meddling with Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land masses has long been viewed as taboo. Many scientists have argued that geoengineering interventions are a distraction from emissions reductions at best and too dangerous to study at worst.

The most controversial, and likely also the fastest-acting method is shooting aerosols into the sky to deflect the sun’s rays, known as solar radiation management or solar geoengineering.

Physicist Peter Irvine, 39, arrived in Hyde Park last week from London to study solar geoengineering as a research assistant professor on Keith’s team.

The process is anticipated to have a similar effect to massive volcanic eruptions such as the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia, which disrupted weather patterns globally for three years. Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record and fog dimmed sunlight in the United States.

Continue reading at The Chicago Tribune…

LESC believes the research brings forward the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage. Their findings, detailed in Nature Energy, demonstrate a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of the paper.

LESC said that by removing the anode and using sodium instead of lithium, this new battery will be more affordable and environmentally friendly to produce. Through its solid-state design, the battery also will be safe and powerful.

To create a sodium battery with the energy density of a lithium battery, the team needed to invent a new sodium battery architecture.

Traditional batteries have an anode to store the ions while a battery is charging. While the battery is in use, the ions flow from the anode through an electrolyte to a cathode.

Anode-free batteries store ions on an electrochemical deposition of alkali metal directly on the current collector. This approach enables higher cell voltage, lower cell cost, and increased energy density, but comes with challenges…

Deysher and Prof. Y. Shirley Meng, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and principal investigator at LESC, have filed a patent application for their work through UC San Diego’s Office of Innovation and Commercialization.

Read more in The Engineer

Humanity has spent the past few centuries releasing ever greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – a state of affairs that must be reversed if we are to get to grips with climate change. Removing such CO2 in a process called direct air capture (DAC) has been on the cards for some time, but finally, after years of research and small-scale pilot projects, giant carbon-sucking facilities are becoming a reality. The question is, will the industry grow large enough, fast enough?

DAC got a big boost last week when Swiss company Climeworks switched on a new plant called Mammoth. This can extract up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from the atmosphere – living up to its name, at least when compared with its predecessor Orca, which boasted a maximum capture capacity of just 4000 tonnes per year.

The new plant instantly quadrupled global capacity for DAC and is a sign of a step change under way in the industry. Mammoth will only hold the title of world’s largest DAC plant until next year, when the Stratos plant, built by a subsidiary of energy firm Occidental Petroleum using technology from Canadian DAC company Carbon Engineering, comes online. It will be able to extract half a million tonnes of CO2 a year.

Steve Smith at the University of Oxford says Mammoth and Stratos are the start of a rapid expansion in global direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) capacity. “A dozen or so more DACCS projects are planned to go live in the next couple of years, by various companies,” he says. “If these all materialise, DACCS capacity could be nudging 800,000 tonnes per year.”

Overall, ambitions are high – both Occidental and Climeworks plan to be operating multiple plants with capture capacities of 1 million tonnes apiece by 2035.

This rapid expansion is being driven by two factors. The first is corporate interest in carbon removals, with the likes of Microsoft, Stripe and Coca-Cola buying DAC credits to help offset their own emissions. With the reputation of many traditional carbon offset schemes in tatters, DAC is seen by some large firms as one of the last respectable removal options.

Government policy has also been instrumental, particularly in the US. President Joe Biden’s administration is spending $3.5 billion to support four DAC “hubs” in the US, including Stratos, as part of measures passed in the Inflation Reduction Act to drive carbon removal efforts across the country. US federal tax credits also provide support of up to $180 per tonne of CO2 trapped and permanently stored via DAC, the first major policy of its kind anywhere in the world.

But voluntary carbon credits and generous government subsidies will only take the industry so far. Pathways to limit warming to 2°C will require billions of tonnes of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere by mid-century. For DAC to make a meaningful contribution to that, “some form of regulation by governments” will be necessary to drive the growth of this sector, says Smith.

For example, in February European Union officials outlined plans to create “a European single market for industrial carbon management” by 2050, to ensure all residual emissions from sectors such as livestock farming are balanced with equivalent removals. But the plans are still in their infancy and are yet to be approved by member states.

Another major hurdle is cost. For the DAC industry, the race is on to cut removal costs before government subsidies and corporate budgets run dry. Operators are hoping that by scaling up the size of facilities, the sky-high price of sucking carbon out of the air will come down rapidly, from around $600-$1000 per tonne today to $100-$200 per tonne within the next few decades. That price point would make DAC capable of delivering globally significant levels of carbon removal, most experts agree, but few are sure such a dramatic price drop is possible.

“The science was done 50 years ago. This has always been about the ability to do things at industrial scale, cheaply,” says David Keith at the University of Chicago. “The challenge is whether you can do it at an interesting cost, and I don’t think we know the answer to that yet.”

There are also reputational challenges to consider. Big oil companies including Occidental, ExxonMobil and Shell are all eyeing DAC as a way to justify squeezing more oil from reservoirs, reducing the net carbon footprint of their fossil fuels business on an ongoing basis. Rather than extending the lifespan of the fossil fuel industry, Smith stresses the focus should be on cutting global emissions and developing DAC as a way of tackling any residual, hard-to-abate emissions. He describes DAC as the “carbon equivalent of litter-picking: hard work, expensive, not the first-best way to deal with the problem, but necessary in our imperfect world”.

Some people doubt DAC will ever make a meaningful contribution to global pollution drawdown. Howard Herzog at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative believes the technology is “overhyped”, citing uncertainty over its future costs and high energy demand.

Even Keith, who founded the DAC business Carbon Engineering, says that other methods of carbon removal, such as boosting the carbon storage capacity of soils or ocean waters, hold at least as much promise. “Direct air capture is one of many different carbon removal pathways,” he says. “I don’t see it as being unique.”

Continue reading on New Scientist…

One day in 2016, a British glaciologist named John Moore attended a meeting in Cambridge, England, that included a presentation about a glacier on Greenland’s west coast. Typically referred to by its Danish name, Jakobshavn, but also known by its Greenlandic moniker, Sermeq Kujalleq, the glacier functions as a kind of drain, situated on the edge of Greenland’s massive ice sheet, that moves 30 billion to 50 billion tons of icebergs off the island every year. These icebergs, some of them skyscraper-size, calve regularly from the glacier front, crash into a deep fiord and float west into Disko Bay. Then they drift out into the North Atlantic, break apart and melt. The intense activity here, as well its breathtaking location, have earned the area a designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site and made it a powerful attraction for Greenland’s small but vibrant tourist trade…

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“Geoengineering” commonly refers to human interventions in Earth’s natural systems in order to reap societal benefits even in the face of unclear risks. Some geoengineering ideas, like crushing rocks and dispersing the dust to absorb CO2 from the air — a practice known as “enhanced weathering” — are already being tried. Others, like injecting particulates into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the Earth (much as a volcanic eruption might), have so far proved too contentious to field-test.

In general, geoengineering seeks to reduce the impacts of climate change and to buy us more time as we transition to a zero-carbon world. Such projects also confront advocates with extraordinary challenges of engineering and financing — as well as political, cultural and ethical obstacles. The glacial barrier proposed by Moore and Wolovick is a case in point. It is novel, expensive, complex, potentially risky and controversial. But as the pandemic receded, the two scientists turned their focus to determining if their idea could become more than a hypothetical.

About a year ago, I began talking with Moore about his progress. We first met in person in September, in Rovaniemi, Finland, where Moore works as a professor of glaciology at the University of Lapland. As we sat outside his building, he traced the evolution of his glacier-conservation idea. He was encouraged, he told me, by early philanthropic support for his research into an underwater barrier. (The support had come from a Scandinavian billionaire, he said, in addition to academic institutions.) And recent computer modeling, which he previewed for me, suggested that an underwater barrier could be beneficial in West Antarctica. “I think it’s superoptimistic as a result,” he said.

Moore thought the path ahead would take at least a decade, though, as he progressed to larger sites, starting deep in a Norway fiord, then moving on to Greenland. Then maybe he could begin in Antarctica. An installation near Thwaites — considering its bad winter weather and logistical complications — might take another decade. “No one has really said lately that it’s supercrazy,” he said, laughing. Still, some glaciologists had voiced strong opposition as well as skepticism. And Moore and a team of associates didn’t yet know whether native Greenlanders would find his plans acceptable, or whether the political treaty in Antarctica would allow for construction.

He was nevertheless certain that his project remained viable. “The usual argument against doing any kind of geoengineering is that we have to do mitigation, mitigation, mitigation — those are the three arrows in the quiver,” Moore said. But mitigating our carbon emissions might not do much to halt the collapse of some threatened glaciers. Why not do mitigation and intervention, Moore asked, to avoid catastrophe?

He had reached a point, he said, where he wanted to see if there were good reasons not to pursue his ideas. “Let’s try and find the red flag,” he said, meaning the risks that might follow from creating an underwater barrier. And if we can’t find them, he added, he was determined to move forward.

As we get closer to reaching the point where Earth’s temperatures are 1.5 degrees Celsius greater than they were in preindustrial times — a level we are likely to hit by the end of this decade — it seems increasingly clear that an age of geoengineering, both in prospect and in practice, has arrived. The resulting projects can often require complexity and sophistication. To disperse reflective particles to cool the Earth, for instance, may require manufacturing a fleet of specialized high-altitude aircraft. But geoengineering efforts can be low-tech too. Painting urban roofs white to cool buildings is one example; covering permafrost or glaciers with blankets to keep them cool is another. One afternoon Moore and I discussed whether fencing in the edges of Antarctic glaciers could catch snow and keep it from blowing out to sea, thereby building up drifts to thicken the ice.

David Keith, a former Harvard professor who has been a leading advocate of researching the potential risks and benefits of putting particulates into the upper atmosphere, recently began organizing the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago; one priority is to systematically consider the practical engineering challenges of various climate interventions. Keith told me he has been excited by the global investments in clean energy over the past few years, which surpass $1 trillion, as well as by the increased efforts to remove carbon from the atmosphere by means other than trees. (He is a founder of a company, Carbon Engineering, that is focused on direct air capture.) “It’s not like, will deployment happen?” Keith says, referring to certain kinds of geoengineering. “Deployment is happening.”

And yet, it’s largely happening on an ad hoc basis. No single entity organizes geoengineering research projects or evaluates potential risks and effects; nor is there a clear process by which governments or other entities decide whether they are sensible or safe or affordable. Instead, academics like Moore are usually left to push their ideas forward, independently, and hope they find funding and momentum. In Keith’s view, the Arctic barrier idea is promising (“the best one I’ve seen yet for glaciers”) but might require at least a decade of study to understand its true costs and benefits.

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In early October, David Keith’s new initiative at the University of Chicago sponsored a two-day workshop on glacial geoengineering. The day before it began, I happened to run into Moore and Wolovick at a cafe on campus. Sitting at a picnic table in the sun and sipping from a can of stout, Moore called me over and said, “I’m really enthusiastic about some modeling we got for Thwaites.” These were computer projections, done by a colleague at Dartmouth, that simulated how a curtain might prevent the flow of warm water from hitting the glacier. But some recent data for Jakobshavn did not look as good, Moore added. He grimaced and shook his head. This was not wholly unexpected: A few weeks earlier, when we met in Finland, he was concluding that the air and water in southwestern Greenland were getting too warm for a curtain to be truly effective. He would have to look elsewhere on the island. “You know, 20 years ago it might have made sense to do something,” he said of Jakobshavn, “but it’s too late now.”

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One of the people running the Chicago conference was a glaciologist named Doug MacAyeal, an elder statesman in the discipline who, at age 69, had just retired. “I was a young glaciologist in the 1970s when we thought it was utterly preposterous that changes in ice sheets could affect sea levels in any time less than 1,000 years,” MacAyeal told me. Back then, that consensus was being challenged only on the fringe — especially by a glaciologist named John H. Mercer, of Ohio State, who in 1978 was the first to connect the possibility of a catastrophic collapse in West Antarctica to climate change. But the idea met with ferocious resistance, MacAyeal pointed out. It required decades of studies and data to validate that glaciers in West Antarctica could indeed slide into the ocean within a human lifetime.

MacAyeal told me he sees the curtain proposal in a comparable way. It’s not because he’s sure it will work (he is not), but because he thinks it faces similar disbelief. To stand next to an active glacier, he said, “is like standing next to a monster. It’s so big, so terrifying. And to think a human could intervene in that, and change it? It’s just something that almost seems inconceivable.” It may not be considered inconceivable a few years from now. “We don’t know if we’ll ever get there,” he added, “but the question needs to get into the open.”

Continue reading on The New York Times…