After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

  To understand the perspective of an entrepreneur in the “new carbon economy,” I spoke with Tito Jankowski. He’s a founder of the sustainable tech consultancy Impossible Labs, which also hosts airminers.org, an index of companies mining carbon from the air. Jankowski emphasizes the importance of tangible products for generating demand for air capture. “How do we put this stuff in people’s hands?” he asks. People find it difficult, he notes, to believe in climate solutions that look like a machine out in the middle of nowhere that nobody sees. “How are we really supposed to enthusiastically buy this stuff if we call up the company and they say, ‘Oh, okay, yeah. You need $400,000 to buy one of our machines.’ How are 7 billion people supposed to get behind that, and say hell yeah?”

  To make it tangible, Impossible Labs had limestone containing carbon captured by the Carbon Engineering, the direct air capture firm, shipped from British Columbia to Oakland. It then molded the limestone with the captured carbon into a consumer product: a planter. Cofounder Matthew Eshed recalls the genesis: “Yeah, it was something we just kind of came up with … you put a plant in the planter, and then a plant sequesters carbon as it breathes and grows, and photosynthesis happens. So it’s kind of a nice full story contained in this one thing,” Eshed describes. The planters were quite popular, though; they all sold out within an hour. Jankowski asked people: Why did you pay one hundred dollars for this cup? “And people said the craziest stuff. Like, ‘This is a symbol of the future.’ Somebody said, ‘This is what I want to see more of in the future, and buying this thing is the best way I can think of to send a signal to the universe that I want more things like this.’”

  Part of the effect of seeing the captured carbon, though, is reckoning with the scale of the challenge. Eshed describes learning through the process of making this artifact. “What happened for me was, I saw the scale that atmospheric carbon removal needs to achieve anything that’s measurable, and that’s what really kind of caused me to start going in a different direction,” Eshed says, commenting that he’s now focusing his professional life on local climate resilience. “What we heard from people is that it represents a conversation. It’s a place for a conversation to start, and whatever industry you’re in, you can look at this thing that we’ve made. We say, ‘This product has 116 grams of carbon dioxide from the air inside of it,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, that’s not really anything, let’s do better. Can you do better? How can you?’”

  Taking direct air capture to the second level, where it works as a pollution remediation mechanism that makes a difference in the climate, is going to require enormous, transformative political action. Who should pay for it? Using a logic of pollution control, it’s the fossil fuel companies that should have to. This might mean not just getting rid of these corporations, as we might like to, but transforming them into companies that deliver a carbon removal service. We can anticipate having to subsidize their transition. There will be a lot of struggles to engage in here. Yet it wouldn’t necessarily have to be incumbent fossil majors that perform the removal service—it doesn’t have to be a vertically integrated scheme. Geologist Stuart Haszeldine suggests that extraction should be linked to storage, using obligation certificates. Each ton of fossil or biocarbon production would be allocated a certificate by its originating government, and the storage obligation certificate would create new CO2 storage businesses. Hence, the extractors or importers wouldn’t need to store their own precise tonnage, but they could pay a services company to store the equivalent—thus, a lever to enforce storage that doesn’t rely only on taxation.26 Direct air capture companies could be the ones fulfilling these storage services.

  Green groups could push direct air capture to the next level—if they decide to engage with it. Is there room to demand cleanup action, a remedial or restorative politics that uses direct air capture or other forms of CCS for climate justice? Without the involvement of civil society, the prognosis looks grim. Anthropocene theorist Kathryn Yusoff asserts that “it is through the violent infrastructures of geology that new forms of politics are emerging, such as those at Standing Rock around the Dakota Access Pipeline that insist of a different vision of temporal affiliation and material filiation.”27 What, then, would be the infrastructural politics of CCS, besides resistance? Yusoff refers to cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s work on infrastructures as convergences of force, structures of feeling; pointing to the affective dimensions of subterranean infrastructures as well as their instability. However, I think that reformist green capitalism or energy-forecast wishes are not made of strong enough feeling to force a vast, deep carbon clean-up infrastructure into being. This genesis instead needs to be driven by the desires of people—people who at this point have no idea that CCS exists, or who have learned antipathy toward it based on its coal tones.

  Living with gas and liquid-filled caverns of carbon isn’t the only option for geologically storing carbon dioxide, however. It’s also possible to store it in a solid state, by turning it into rock, which is what we’ll look at next.

  Sketch: Pecan Tree

  He was sitting under the old pecan tree, when a truck pulled up in the lane. Utility people. He leaned on the armrest of his rusty lawn chair. “Wasn’t expecting you folks,” he called.

  A man and a woman briskly got out, wearing spring-green uniforms and tablets at their belts. “Your account wasn’t taking messages, Jack. Full up.”

  “Well, I haven’t got time for messages.” He wiped his brow, stood up. “Just taking a rest under this pecan tree a moment. I was going to go check on unit eight this afternoon.”

  They looked at each other. “Jack, that’s what we’ve come here to say,” the man said, taking off his cap. “We’re decommissioning your ten units. This formation is pretty well full up. There was some seismic activity nearby a few weeks ago. The modelers don’t want to overstress the rock.”

  “Haven’t heard anything about this.”

  “You haven’t been checking your messages, Jack. We even sent a drone out with a message last week.”

  “That metal bird? Shot that thing down once it crossed my property line.” The woman shrugged.

  Jack crossed his arms. “They told me those would be operating my whole lifetime. I grew up with those wells, you know. I was there when they got put in.”

  “You must have been a kid.”

  “That’s right. Came home from school, and my parents were serving iced tea to the utility men on the porch. I remember their excitement. Said we wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore. I could have gone off to study anywhere, after that.”

  “You know, Jack, even though your repair contract ends when we decommission the units, you’ll still be getting storage rent. It’s not as much, of course.”

  They stood there. The birds in the tree were crowing up a storm. They did that when outsiders came around. “We’ll just be heading out to the units to package them. There’ll be a rig around to ship them off tomorrow.”

  “Well, I should be the one to turn them off, at least. You’ll need help with the cover on five. It has a special trick to it. No one knows how to remove it.” He ambled over to the shed to find his toolbox.

  It was a cloudy day. “I can’t imagine living out here among all these wells,” said the woman.

  “Why not?” replied her companion. “There used to be an orange-brown haze across this whole panhandle, my mom said. She always blamed my grandma’s asthma on it. Now the air is clear.”

  “It’s clear, but there are still these pipes all over the place. And dried-up roads crisscrossing everything.”

  “Best hunting, around here, ‘cause there’s less people. They even opened a savanna across the state line. With camels. Oklahoma camels. You can hunt wildebeest.”

  “That’s horrible.” She wrinkled up her face. “Why not bison? Those would be native, at least.”

  “I dunno. I guess that was too close to home. I mean, just half the savanna is open for hunting. The other half is preserved, you
know. That’s the deal they struck. To get people to sign over their land. Anyway, what else are you going to do with all these old oil fields?”

  “Leave them. Let nature do its thing.”

  “Yeah, but it’s up to the people who live here. If it was up to you, we’d all be living in cities zipping around in tiny scooters. Me, I took this job because it was one of the only chances I had to drive a truck with my own two hands.”

  Jack came meandering back, toolbox in hand. “Ready to go,” he announced.

  The first five units were on the other side of the ridge. They squeezed into the truck, rumbling over a dry creek. Yellow cottonwoods brushed the brown grasses. Jack spied a few weathered boards still tacked to a trunk from the treehouse he’d built for his daughter; echoes of her hair in the wind.

  The first unit was home to a nest of swallows. The weathered metal container sat next to a drill pad, a footnote to the massive wind turbines lining the ridge. “These swallows have been here about five years,” Jack said. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have come up here and built them a birdhouse.” Jack keyed in the code and unscrewed the casing. “No mouse droppings. These sonic repellents I put in are doing the trick.”

  The man inspected the control panel. “This is a real vintage model.”

  “Yup. One of the very first in the world, out here in the Permian. Gave it a few updates over the years.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll shut it off.”

  Jack stood there for a moment. “That’s all, then.” He began to flip the switches. The fan on the unit slowly wound down. The techs were absorbed in their tablets. The blurred blades quieted and then stopped.

  “One down,” the woman said.

  They drove the loop road, a track Jack had pressed into the ground through his rounds over the years. The last one, ten, was his favorite. He used to bring his oldest son up here to watch birds. Jack unscrewed the panel, flipped the switches, and watched the blades still. He looked down at his crusty boots, the leather starting to crack.

  “I got the final number,” the man said, looking up from his tablet. “These units captured 406,781,200 tons of carbon over their operational cycle. That’s almost all of Texas’s emissions from the year 1980.”

  “You should be proud, Jack,” added the woman. “That’s good work, for a lifetime. A whole year’s worth, and not one of those early years, either.”

  “Well, I figure so,” Jack said. “I guess that’s that.”

  “What are you going to do with all your free time, Jack?” the man asked.

  He was silent for a moment. “I guess I’ll work on some hobbies,” he said. “Taxidermy. Maybe do more fishing.”

  “Sounds good,” the man said, nodding. “Sounds like a plan.”

  Jack shook their hands solemnly before climbing out of the pickup. Then he stood under the pecan tree and watched the two drive off, small puffs of dust dissipating slowly into the cooling air.

  5

  Weathering

  Los Angeles, January, 30°C / 86°F

  The eventual fate of carbon is stone. In hundreds of thousands of years, the atmosphere would naturally return to conditions like our ancestors knew: minerals will take up excess carbon dioxide. Very slowly. Here’s how the basic process works in nature. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid. Slightly acidic rain will dissolve rocks on earth’s surface, forming inorganic carbonates which eventually wash into the oceans. There, shell-building creatures and plankton turn the calcium ions into calcium carbonate, and over time, the built-up layers of shell and sediment turn into solid limestone. This gradual weathering process naturally sequesters about one gigaton of CO2 per year in the resulting solid rocks. Though humans are emitting forty to fifty gigatons per year, one gigaton of capture is still a significant contribution by these little-noticed rocks.

  This begs the question: Can this natural process of rock weathering be sped up?

  “Enhanced,” “accelerated,” or “high-speed” weathering all refer to hastening natural reactions that break down rocks and eventually create carbonates. (Make Nature Work Faster could be a slogan not just for engineering super-algae, but for rocks as well: What can’t be sped up?). For more information on how one would go about turning carbon into minerals, I paid a visit to Joshua West, a geologist who looked into enhanced weathering for geoengineering while a research associate at Oxford, and who is now a professor at the University of Southern California.

  Los Angeles was in the throes of a January heat wave. The sun was blazing, but people breezed by on their skateboards, scooters, and bicycles under the azure sky. The geology hall is a Romanesque stone building. Its arcade features a “sacred gifts of nature” shelf, inviting passersby to “leave something and receive something.” The sacred gifts—shells, fragments of driftwood, carefully arrayed—rest serenely beneath a mural of a deer and four contemplative humans, staring wondrously at an orb filled with squiggly microorganisms. Passing through the sunny courtyard, quiet save for birdsong, you could forget that the neoliberal, entrepreneurial university even existed, and imagine you’d stumbled through the heat into a temple of natural worship. The halls were decked with artfully displayed slabs of 2-billion-year-old rock surfaces like pink “Vyara migmatite,” swirled from potassium feldspar. “Geochemists Only” read the sign on the door of the lab. West answers my knock. He’s an affable and extremely tall man with a bright-violet shirt, jeans, and brown leather shoes which, from the looks of them, have certainly seen many interesting rocks. He invites me to sit down on a couch, across from a Phantom remote-operated drone and rolled-up posters detailing discoveries in rock weathering.

  West has been intrigued by earth’s long-term carbon cycle since the beginning of his career: “What is the mechanism that kept climate stable, and what have been the times when it’s been deviated from that stability?” He’s spent his career working on things like the massive volcanism that led to extinctions—the big questions geologists love to ponder. Today, West researches a whole host of questions unrelated to geoengineering. But given his long expertise in weathering, I asked him to go over what exactly it is.

  West patiently explains that in nature, there are rocks called silicate minerals, in which calcium and magnesium are bonded with silicon and other elements. Rainwater falls on them and reacts with them, slowly breaking them down and releasing the calcium and magnesium. These calcium and magnesium ions eventually flow down into the oceans. “If there are ways that we can make the breakdown of those calcium and magnesium silicates go faster, then we can produce more calcium and magnesium … and in an industrial context or something like that, we can make chalk, basically. We can make all the carbonate minerals that would be made naturally over 100,000 years, but rather than waiting 100,000 years, we do it fast. And if we can do it fast enough, then we can meaningfully reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

  How fast is “fast,” I wonder? Faster than 100,000 years could still be pretty slow … are we talking about ten years, one hundred years, or 1,000 years? In a sense, West explains, it depends on how much money and energy we are willing to put into this. It also depends on the technology used.

  Turning gas into stone

  One way to speed up carbon mineralization is to inject concentrated CO2 with water into rock at high temperatures (in mineral weathering parlance, an “in situ” method, as it takes place within the rock, underground). This technique was used at Iceland’s geothermal Hellisheiði Power Station, at a project called CarbFix, where CO2 that bubbles up with the magma that fuels the geothermal plant was mixed with water and hydrogen sulfide—carbonating it, essentially into “seltzer.” Then, the mixture was injected into basalt rocks 400 to 800 meters below ground. Basalt is the most common volcanic rock—it underlies the oceans—and when filled with this soda water, its pores fill up with limestone. The results? Ninety-five percent of the injected CO2 had turned into mineral within two years.1

  Turning carbon diox
ide into rock underground seems much more attractive than storing it as a fluid, from an intuitive standpoint. It’s permanent, for one. West says, “I do think that there’s a sense of security in turning CO2 into a mineral form, one that isn’t gained by trying to put it somewhere where it’s still a fluid, ‘cause fluids move. Minerals move, but they’re solid.” The CarbFix project has even installed an air capture device, moving it toward being a true negative emissions technology.

  Inevitably, there are questions about scalability, especially around the energy and financial costs. This particular project in Iceland is also very water intensive, requiring about twenty-five tons of water for every ton of CO2. This means it might not be a good option in semiarid regions. One option could be to do it offshore—where it would have a ready supply of water, and would not conflict with land uses. But working in offshore environments would also increase the expense. The most suitable areas are 200 to 400 kilometers from land, necessitating pipelines, and their depth is around 2,700 meters, meaning that even a demonstration-scale project would be quite costly.2 Nevertheless, this is an exciting new area of research.