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CDR is a giant industry in its infancy
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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
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CDR is removal of CO2 from the atmosphere - an essential basket of technologies for achieving UN IPCC best outcomes to mitigate climate change. This is a community for discussing advances and issues of CDR.
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The common thread in all these articles about CDR is that they focus on corporate investment into large scale projects. If the government was serious about meeting climate targets, they would be raising taxes on the largest companies, and giving the money to small scale, open-source carbon removal solutions. People to run these could be pulled from the enormous unemployed labor pool, and given grants in the form of equipment and technical education.
It seems like CDR could be done on a small scale with photovoltaic panels and an open-source hardware direct air capture (DAC) system. People could be subsidized to place panels on their home, and side-step the logistics of connecting it to the grid by having it wired directly to a DAC system. The existence of panels would be an incentive for the electrical grid get re-designed at a faster pace. It is currently not possible to feed energy back to the grid in a lot of places for worker safety reasons, but this creates a chicken and egg situation where the costs of re-aligning the grid for domestic energy production needs the existence of existence of domestic solar capacity to help justify the costs, and domestic energy production is much more expensive if you can't benefit from selling your surplus back to the grid. Having subsidized DAC justifying the installation of solar capacity would solve the bootstrap problem.
Of course the additional funds to do a program like this would have to come from raised taxes on the most polluting industries. This is all wishful thinking.
Governments are starting to spend on CDR development, but it is not enough - considering the scale of the problem. There are also a variety of ways that governments are promoting CDR through tax means - creating a market for low-carbon concrete or giving tax breaks for low-carbon activities. I received a nice tax discount when I installed my own solar panels. I am in a CDR volunteer collective called OpenAir (openaircollective.cc) where we are trying to promote CDR in many directions.
I did not install a grid tie connection at my house - the connection is one-way and I seldom use any grid power at all. But it is nice to know there is a back-up. I would have been willing to cross-connect and share power, but there were barriers: high connection cost and very low payback. Here in Puerto Rico, there is an activist group promoting micro-grids at neighborhood-scale or city-scale to make the system more resilient - but I do not think their efforts are catching on with the entrenched interests at the power authority, unfortunately.
The existing fossil fuel subsidies would go a long way to developing the CDR technologies we need. The money is there, but it is going the wrong place.
That's awesome you're using residential solar power. Have you experimented with community-scale CDR, like generating bio-char?
I have made small quantities of biochar experimentally, and I am considering making a 55-gallon drum sized burner (TLUD-style). I bought this place in 2021 and I have been using every scrap of biomass for composting so far - the soil here was very poor. Of course the biochar would help the soil too, but it won't support earthworms - I needed to kick start the soil organisms first. But all my neighbors mow every week and generate lots of grass clippings and little else. It will be hard to make that into biochar I think - green and dense - but I will eventually try. For now I have at least convinced several to quit bagging the cut grass and putting it in trash pickup.