Deviations from the abnormal to the freakish

David Gelles bravely titles his Climate Forward article in the New York Times, "Scientists are Freaking Our About Ocean Temperatures." It would have been every bit as accurate, but possibly less acceptable, if he had said scientists are freaking out about climate change or global warming rather than "ocean temperatures." But, since much of the warming that we're causing is being absorbed by the oceans, ocean temperatures are a proxy for global warming. They took a gob-smacking leap up this year, shifting the historic pattern of more gradual increases.

This astonishing leap follows a record hot January and one of the longest runs of record-breaking summer temperatures the world has ever seen (shown in the above chart in pale orange). As a function of this, ocean temperatures are now in unknown territory, as shown by the red line in the graph above, reflecting readings for 2024.

Scientists have hypotheses as to what might have caused such a dramatic shift. To understand some of what the world's top scientists are thinking, we recommend you read "Global warming in the pipeline," by James E. Hansen, Makiko Sato, Leon Simons and other scientists, published in September 2023 by Oxford University Press, if you are capable of following deeply scientific, dense analysis. Alternatively, Dr. Hansen and his CSAS team sent a thank you memo to supporters in February, with something of a summary of the conclusion from the Pipeline paper. You can read this entire memo here, but we quote the following paragraph:

In Pipeline, among other things, we show that climate sensitivity is higher than IPCC’s best estimate and human-made aerosols are a larger climate forcing that is driving global warming acceleration. A stunning global change now underway is darkening of Earth (Fig. 1). Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) decreased since 2015 by an amount that has an effect on global temperature equivalent to a CO2 increase of more than 100 ppm. This darkening has doubled Earth’s energy imbalance and thrown into a cocked hat official claims about achieving climate targets. These facts make it more difficult, but not impossible, to secure a propitious climate for future generations.

Gelles also tries to answer the question of what's driving the heat. He writes: "Global warming, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, has been driving up global temperatures on land and in the sea for decades now. Over the past year, worldwide average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than before the industrial age. New data from a variety of sources has led some climate scientists to suggest that global warming is accelerating." And since oceans absorb most of the added heat near the earth's surface, they have been steadily warming for years. Even so, data collected in the past year has been shocking to those who have been following the trends. It's pretty much "off the charts."

[Aside: The above graphic provides a powerful visualization of the acceleration of warming that is now happening. We appreciate that this news can be deeply disturbing on many levels, including because we've long been led to believe that it would take a lot longer for the severe heating effects of climate change to be felt. That may no longer be true, although clearly scientists don't fully know how all of the climate feedback loops work. We are deeply worried that we will see a year in which these super warm oceans turbo-charge the already record-breaking hurricane seasons that we've seen coming from the Atlantic in recent years. We post this information, so more people can realize just what unprecedented territory we are in. End Aside.]

THINGS YOU CAN DO

Should you be motivated to do more than you've done before to tackle climate, here's our list:

Review this listing of pronuclear nonprofits, influencers, artists and experts and support efforts to spread the word about the benefits of nuclear power.
Review Bank of America's analysts' report, "The Nuclear Necessity," to get ideas on public market investment options.
For managed fund offerings, we think Parnassus Investments represents the best of the ESG-focused sustainability public fund options we've seen.
Lastly, Nucleation offers a low-cost venture capital fund option, which, while higher risk, is one of the most impactful ways to help accelerate the commercialization of innovative solutions. We are clearly biased but, as Vinod Khosla has remarked about venture investing, “You only lose 1x your money if you fail, but if you succeed, you can make 100x.”

Read more at New York Times, "Scientists Are Freaking Out About Ocean Temperatures: "It's like an omen of the future," by David Gelles, Feb. 27, 2024.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Advanced Nuclear, Climate mayhem, Extreme weather, Future of Energy, LINKS, Nuclear innovation, Solving climate, Zero emission energy

November 9, 2023

A First-Ever Commercial Plant Extracting Carbon from Air

Heirloom Carbon Technologies has opened the first commercial carbon capture plant in the U.S. This key moment presages the start of what is widely expected to be an important new industry whose entire purpose is preventing the carbon emissions released by burning fossil fuels from destroying life on our planet.

Brad Plumer, writing in the New York Times, provides the details of this very small demonstration plant built in Tracy, California. It's an open air structure, with 40-foot racks holding hundreds of trays, each sprinkled with calcium oxide powder that turns into limestone when it binds with airborne carbon dioxide. This is a natural process that Heirloom is working to speed up.

Once the carbon dioxide is "captured" through the creation of the limestone, the company expects to heat up the limestone in a kiln at 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit, which then releases the carbon dioxide, where it then gets pumpted in a storage tank, leaving the calcium oxide to be returned and reused on another set of trays.

The carbon dioxide (called CO2) is expected to be transferred again to be permanently stored. For now, Heirloom is looking at the large concrete marketplace and working with CarbonCure, a company that was launched to mix CO2 into concrete to make concrete stronger by having it turn into limestone again where it will be permanently stored and reduce the carbon footprint of concrete (which ordinarily releases a lot of carbon emissions through its normal creation and use throughout the building industry).

Providing CO2 to CarbonCure has a value for sure but for now, that value is far below the costs of capturing the carbon. Let's look at what these economics are now. The Tracy facility will be able to absorb 1,000 tons of CO2 per year. At the estimated $50/tonne "social cost" of carbon, the Heirloom facility would earn $50,000 per year. Although Heirloom hasn't released info on its specific costs, those funding breakthrough carbon capture activity, such as Frontier (which includes Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability), are typically paying between $500 and $2,500 per ton to accelerate innovation and market development. These high prices are intended to generate sufficient revenue for these early-stage ventures to actually cover their costs. At $1000/ton, Heirloom could earn $1,000,000 per year. However, Plumer estimates that Heirloom's actually costs may be in the range of $600 per ton or higher.

Fortunately for Heirloom and other ventures working in this space, there are a lot of large corporations willing to spend millions to pay for "carbon removal credits" in what has been a voluntary carbon market to effectively be able to claim that they are reducing their carbon footprints. These corporations see reputational benefits from those outlays, even if they do not result in even meaningful actual carbon reductions at this stage. The Biden Administration is also getting into the act and awarded $1.2 billion to help Heirloom

The Heirloom carbon capture plant in Tracy, California

Many people still don't know much about carbon capture and storage, or what has been called "Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration" (CCUS). There are a multitude of approaches being taken to capture carbon and, as a result, a plethora of acronyms have emerged. The approach used by Heirloom is now called Direct Air Capture (DAC) and specifically involve capturing CO2 out of the air but other approaches are simply called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and utilize a range of methods to bind that CO2 in a semi-permanent or permanent way, such as through marine-based CDR or natural processes such increasing the CO2 content in soils or accelerating the use of CO2 by plants, such as by growing crops or trees with the intention of having them capture the CO2.

Utilization of CO2 involves finding valuable ways to use that CO2 or just the carbon (C) from captured CO2. Ventures working on the utilization part of this process pose the prospects of having profitable business models. Nucleation Capital, as a climate-focused venture fund, recognizes that CCUS is a growth industry that is anticipated to become a large consumer of energy. We are following the activity in this nascent space and we are investing in some of the most promising approaches, especially where that approach has strong profit and growth prospects or where it intersects with the need for abundant clean energy. While knowing all the acronyms isn't critical, there are a few key things to know about CCUS in general.

Key Facts to Know about CO2 and Carbon Capture, Utilization & Sequestration

While CO2 itself is natural and not toxic (except in high doses), the enormous amount that we have polluted our atmosphere with by burning fossil fuels for energy is causing our climate to warm up at a very fast rate. We need CCUS in order to lessen and possibly reverse the rate of warming, so we can restore a healthy climate.
All technological approaches to capturing carbon back out of the air or water are expensive and early stage. So are the approaches to carbon utilization and sequestration (i.e. methods to utilize and/or store the carbon so it doesn't get released back into the atmosphere).
To stop making our climate crisis worse, we have to stop burning fossil fuels, as our highest priority mitigation effort. While some might think that capturing the carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels right at the point source may warrant continuing to burn fossil fuels, that will not enable us to use carbon capture to restore the damage already done, which is the primary rationale for CCUS.
Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, the amount of damage the long-lived CO2 pollution is causing the world will continue to heat the planet for decades or centuries. The only way to prevent that is by removing this excess CO2 pollution.
Today, there are only a handful of dedicated carbon capture plants in existence globally but, to prevent serious damage to earth ecosystems, we will need to scale up these plants in record time to be able to reverse most of the emissions produced by the fossil fuel industry in its entire history. We will also need to scale utilization and sequestration capabilities.
The cost of cleaning up all of the emissions caused by our past use of fossil fuels will be enormous and we haven't come to any agreement as to who bears that burden. Some of that cost can be mitigated with valuable commercial utilization technologies.
Powering CCUS plants will require massive amounts of low-carbon clean energy because it makes no sense to emit carbon in the process of capturing carbon. The best and least-cost approach will likely involve using the coming generation of small modular reactors to generate 24x7 power in remote areas.
The cost of clean energy used to capture and sequester carbon will be a significant factor in the total cost of that activity but powering CCUS can help SMRs scale up, which will help reduce the manufacturing costs.
There is no scenario in which the cost of burning fossil fuels and capturing all the CO2 from that activity and permanently storing it will cost less than replacing the fossil fuels with renewables or nuclear and avoiding the release of new emissions in the first place.
Fossil fuel companies are already lobbying to earn carbon credits by pairing carbon capture with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. This is why some environmentalists, like Al Gore, oppose providing funding for CCUS to oil and gas companies, even though the most cost-effective CO2 capture is done at or close to the fossil fuel smokestack source point.

Read more in the New York Times, "In a U.S. First, a Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon From the Air," by Brad Plumer, November 9, 2023.

Learn more about Frontier a consortium that is providing advance market commitments (AMC) that aim to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies, without picking winning technologies at the start of the innovation cycle. The goal is to send a strong demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies.

The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $3.5 billion to fund the construction of four commercial-scale direct air capture plants. In August, the Biden Adminstration announced $1.2 billion in awards for the first two, one to be built by Battelle in Louisiana and the other to be built by Occidental Petroleum, in Texas, through a 50-50 cost share.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Advanced Nuclear, Carbon emissions, Carbon markets, Carbon negative, Climate change, Climate policy, Construction costs, Government support, History Timeline, History-making, Investor activity, LINKS, Private companies, Solving climate, US competitiveness, US technological leadership

December 13, 2022

LLNL Scientists Report Fusion Breakthrough

On Dec. 5, a team at Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach fusion "ignition," which is believed to be a breakthrough milestone, where the fusion reaction begins to produce more energy from fusion than the energy applied to drive it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxQQxCvTSUM

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California determined via calculations that they had crossed a long-awaited threshold in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory. It took a few days for them to do their analysis of the energy product but by Sunday, Dec. 11th, word had begun to leak out. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) , having provided the primary funding for this work, took the lead in taking credit for the achievement and scheduled a press announcement for Tuesday, Dec. 13th. Meanwhile, various results were reported in the press, some claiming 120% gain, some going as high as 150% gain. While the exact number is not that critical, what is important is that these scientists and experts believe that there was a notable achievement in the operation of the plasma ignition that took place, even though it lasted for all of a fraction of a second.

“This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting our world-class scientists — like the team at NIF — whose work will help us solve humanity’s most complex and pressing problems, like providing clean power to combat climate change and maintaining a nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.”

LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of laser energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and businesses, and DOE is currently restarting a broad-based, coordinated IFE program in the United States. Combined with private-sector investment, there is a lot of momentum to drive rapid progress toward fusion commercialization.

Led by physicist John Nuckolls, who later served as LLNL director from 1988 to 1994, this revolutionary idea became inertial confinement fusion, kicking off more than 60 years of research and development in lasers, optics, diagnostics, target fabrication, computer modeling and simulation and experimental design.

To pursue this concept, LLNL built a series of increasingly powerful laser systems, leading to the creation of NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic laser system. NIF — located at LLNL in Livermore, California — is the size of a sports stadium and uses powerful laser beams to create temperatures and pressures like those in the cores of stars and giant planets, and inside exploding nuclear weapons.

[Note: Nucleation Capital has invested in Focused Energy, a private venture which has chosen to develop fusion by following the same Inertial Fusion Energy approach as that used by LLNL. Focused was founded by scientists who had worked at LLNL and who have spent their careers studying both fusion and lasers. Focused Energy has based their ability to deliver fusion upon their expertise in developing the next generation of high-powered laser and the next generation of fuel target, taking what LLNL has done forward with proprietary technology.]

Read more at Lawrence Livermore National Lab: National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition, published December 13, 2022; The New York Times, Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers, by Kenneth Chang, December 13, 2022; and the Financial Times, Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes, by Tom Wilson, December 13, 2022. Also see the statement from TAE, a fusion competitor, TAE Technologies’ statement on US nuclear fusion advancement.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Advanced Nuclear, Brilliant thinkers, Energy abundance, Future of Energy, History Timeline, History-making, Investor activity, LINKS, Nuclear competitiveness, Nuclear innovation, Nuclear R&D, Politicians supporting nuclear, Private companies, Solving climate, US technological leadership, Zero emission energy

April 6, 2019

Nuclear power can save the world

Some of the smartest thinkers on the planet recognize the potential for nuclear power to be the white knight we need for climate change. Writing for the The New York Times, Nuclear Power Can Save the World, Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist, and Steven Pinker extol the technology as the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.

Drs. Goldstein and Qvist are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Dr. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and author of "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" and "The Better Angels of our Nature" among many other books.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Carbon emissions, Climate change, Climate policy, Future of Energy, LINKS, Nuclear innovation