Is it green?

I read today, in something that the MIT Technology Review people sent me, that carbon removal is big business in the US, with lots of players. One of the players is Charm Industrial, people who actually do carbon removal. While Grist and Carbonplan give other people marks out of ten for their carbon removal. Which is not quite as odd as it sounds, as demonstrating that any of the various carbon removal schemes is actually bringing us out ahead is a complicated business - not something that our fat leader would want to engage his brain on.

The Charm wheeze is to cook up farm waste - like that snapped above - in something called a pyrolyzer - with part of one of these snapped below - to produce a brown oily substance. This contains quite a lot of carbon and the idea is to pump it deep underground, perhaps into disused mine shafts, where it will solidify and capture that carbon for perhaps a thousand years. You might also get hydrogen and a form of charcoal, both of which can be put to green uses.

The difficult bit is scaling the process up and getting price down from around $500 per ton of carbon captured to around $50. People then pay you to capture carbon and pour it down holes as part of some complicated carbon tax regime.

Which all sounds quite promising - and Microsoft certainly thought so as they have put some money into the project - but we shall have to wait and see how it turns out. Plenty of other people out there with ideas, whacky or otherwise. For two examples of which see references 5 and 6.

All of which notwithstanding, for the moment at least, I remain a fusion man. For which see, for a start, reference 7.

PS: I also read today, in the context of the upcoming rail strike (here in the UK), that our government is trying to cap public sector pay rises at 2%, as part of its effort to put public finances back together again after paying for the COVID plague. The snag is that private sector pay rises are running at two or three times that, inflation is running at 8% and probably rising. Telling us that we all have to take a bit of pain and pull together will probably not play too well after all their shenanigans of the past few years - even if it is true. A pity that Labour have not come up with a loud and clear message: standing on the side lines is not really good enough, might not be enough to get them elected next time around.

References

Reference 1: Meet the startup producing oil to fight climate change: How Charm Industrial became a go-to in Big Tech's mission to offset its carbon footprint - Emily Pontecorvo, Grist - 2021.

Reference 2: https://grist.org/.

Reference 3: https://charmindustrial.com/.

Reference 4: https://carbonplan.org/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/05/hydrogen.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/fusion-at-petrol-pump.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/frost-report.html.