Dr. Roger Aines is the Chief Scientist of the Energy Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and coauthor of the LLNL report Getting to Neutral: Options for Negative Carbon Emissions in California. On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change, Roger joins Ross and Christophe to discuss how the California study came about and walk us through the three carbon removal strategies outlined in the report—natural solutions, waste biomass and direct air capture.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash nori podcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what nori knots are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club, get special access to nori events. Go take a look at patreon.com slash nori podcast for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon here with my co-host Christophe Jospe. We are talking science today, which is a fun thing that we don’t do nearly enough.
And we really need to dive in deep on this one because an interesting report came out. Isn’t that right, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Sure is. The report was getting to neutral. And it took a look at how California, I wonder why just California, but how California can get to carbon neutrality by 2045. We’ll still be alive then, I hope.
Ross Kenyon: If all goes according to plan, I’m sure you will be fine. And we have a guest who was a co-author of that report. Why don’t you introduce him, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: We’ve got Dr. Roger Aines. He’s the Chief Scientist of the Energy Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And I had the pleasure of first seeing him speak when I was working at the Lenpha Center for Sustainable Energy. With Dr. Klaus Lackner and Dr. Alyssa Park, both of whom were principal investigators on a National Science Foundation grant called the Research Coordination Network in Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage. And those were very early days of being A policy wonk who cared deeply about the engineering side of how to industrially capture carbon dioxide and do something with it.
And it was just such an amazing conversation that was really dynamic and really brought me up to speed of where’s the Hi, thank you very much.
Dr. Roger Aines: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: It’s our pleasure. And maybe just to start it off, to give people a sense of how this works, I don’t think the average person really understands how science progresses. Speaking for myself, I don’t really understand how it works. So what exactly is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory? How does what you do there come into the real world in a way that regular people experience? How does science essentially work?
Dr. Roger Aines: Our little slice of the pie anyway. So Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a fairly large operation. We have about 7,000 people here, and we are part of the Department of Energy’s science infrastructure. After World War II, the Department of Energy was created, and the science to basically do energy and weapons development was focused on this group of national laboratories, which there are a total of 17 And those laboratories work under contract to the DOE, but we also do work for industry and for even philanthropies, which is the point of this report, which was done with philanthropic funding.
We do two things. We tend to address the questions of the moment. So for instance, when the big blowout oil spill in the Gulf occurred and you heard that Government scientists were calculating how much oil was being released by that blowout. That was my guys who were doing that calculation. So we do things like that. But we also do things that are longer term. And one of our efforts here at Livermore has been to look at this issue of what’s going to happen in the future with climate change. And we’ve seen the models tell us that we’re going to need negative emissions.
What’s that mean? That means we’re going to need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. At a gigantic scale. And we looked at that and said, well, that’s a hard problem. We should start looking at that now so that when we need it, we’re going to be ready. And that’s another thing that the national labs are very proud of doing.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, this report seems like a big deal. We got a lot out of it, and it’s very interesting to see that California is once again flexing their muscles, their climate and environmental leadership muscles, one could say. So what exactly is in this Getting to Neutral report? Why do you think it was such a big deal? What should we expect from California, essentially?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, let me tell you a little bit of history of how this report came to be. California’s had a series of environmental ambitions, I will call them, that turn into laws. At first, it was to get our emissions back down to 1990 levels by 2020. We accomplished that two years early. Then was to get a 40% reduction by 2030, and we’re on track to do that. Then the next ambition was by 2050 to get down to an 80% reduction, and that’s in law today. That’s a California law to get to that level.
But last year, before we left office, Governor Brown Said, you know, the way things are growing in the world, we need more ambition than that. So he signed an executive order that said the state aspires to be carbon neutral by 2045 and be negative after that. So that’s the history of what we set out to look at. And so all those laws that are in place, the 2030, 40%, the 2050, 80% reduction, have had good analyses done of them. And there are people who’ve looked at how you can get to them.
And they’re all quite feasible to get to. But this additional ambition of getting to zero hadn’t been studied yet. And it was pretty clear from talking to people that there was a lack of tools to get there, that they basically had used up all the tools they had In the getting to 80% reduction. So that’s where we entered the picture.
Ross Kenyon: I see. And this harkens back to what we were just asking you about with how exactly the science works when it comes through a national lab like Livermore. Why just California? Why the focus there rather than something broadly the entire country or an entire region? Is that just an issue of scope or of politics or both or something else? How exactly does it work to delimit a study like this?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, it’s very much a question of scope that the state had this ambition and there were philanthropies in the state, in this case, Climate Works, who were interested in assessing whether the state could actually reach that goal. And so they funded our report. So it’s not federally funded. It’s not our normal funding stream. The important part about why you’d want to do California, though, Is that California has done all those other laws that I mentioned. So they actually know what the glide path looks like to get close. And this is what we really don’t have in most places around the world.
We have ambitions, we have, you know, some plans, but California has done a lot of hard work to get that at 80% number is really You make it sound so easy, Roger.
Unknown speaker: So let’s go for it. Wave your magic wand. How do we get there?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, the observation that we made that was important was that There’s a lot of ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and you need to figure out what are the limits on all of them. So there are three major categories. The first is natural solutions. This is growing trees, adding carbon to soil. These are extremely important, have a lot of co-benefits, you know, good water, better soil is better for farmers. And we said, okay, we want as much of that as we can get. These tend to be very inexpensive to do.
But we realized that there’s not an infinite amount that you can do. For instance, reforestation is often mentioned as a natural solution. Well, reforestation is something you can do in Tennessee and get a lot of carbon out of the air. But in California, we never deforested California, so we can’t reforest it. So there are limits on basically ecosystem limits on how much you can do. And so we went through and we calculated what are those limits, Very generous calculations. How much could you do if you were really aggressive and you really did a good job of it?
The second thing that we then took into account though is another form of natural solutions is that there’s an enormous amount of waste biomass in California. So what do I mean by biomass? This is things like almond shells. There’s a million pounds of almond shells produced in California every year. Manure, sewage, trash. And waste from logging. When you looked at a logging operation up in the forest, you’ll see that a lot of the little branches and all that stuff stays up there. They pile it up and you either just leave it piled there or they burn it.
And then California has an upcoming problem that’s going to generate more of that. And that is that because of all the fires we’ve had, the state plans to do some fire control clearing where they basically thin the forests in areas where fires are Likely to be dangerous. And they take out all the small stuff and leave the big trees. And that is going to generate, their plans indicate generate about 15 million tonnes of that material a year. So that’s another source of biomass. And what we realized is that biomass is taking carbon out of the air right now.
And if you burn it, the carbon just goes back in the air. But if you could figure out how to get that carbon dioxide underground, that would be a really good negative emissions And so the scenario of turning that biomass into fuel, in our case, our favorite fuel is hydrogen. We can come back to why that is. But turn it into fuel and then put the CO2 underground is a great way to take advantage of nature to basically pull the CO2 out of the air for you.
Christophe Jospe: In the first one, natural climate solutions, okay, we’ve talked a lot about the different natural climate solutions we’ve talked on this show before. We’ve talked about some of the nuances. This is pretty de-risked because Mother Nature has been doing this for a long time. So more or less, the technology exists. I do want to comment, one of the things that I loved about the report was that essentially you were able to pull out nuances to say, you know, when talking about the soil, you It’s not as simple as saying it’s either removals or emission avoidances because sometimes when you’re putting yourself on a pathway toward emission reductions, you might see outgassing from certain other greenhouse gases and you need to account for all that.
That’s something we obsess over. I also think it’s worth noting when talking about improved forest management. And yes, indeed, you’re felling trees, but actually that gives some other trees more room to grow larger and sequester more carbon. And that’s all awesome. But you just introduced a way... So for our listeners who are extremely savvy, could you talk a little bit about this new technology for producing hydrogen or kind of what it’s going to take and how much of this is on the ground deployable technology today versus something that’s more hypothetical?
Dr. Roger Aines: Sure. Let’s talk about this new technology that is the oldest technology in our package. Gasification is a Something that was developed in the 1920s to turn coal into gasoline. And you basically heat up the organic material, whether it’s trees or coal, and you heat it very hot and it breaks down into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. And this is a mix of things that we call syngas and the Chemists over the years have learned how to turn syngas into almost anything you’d want to make. And so they can turn it into jet fuel.
For instance, there’s a big plant being built in Reno, Nevada to take California’s trash and turn it into jet fuel by gasifying it. The turning it into hydrogen is one method that you can use there. And the reason that we like the hydrogen answer is that you get All of the energy out as hydrogen, and you get all of the carbon out as CO2, and then that CO2 can be put underground. And that’s really important to this whole story, and we’ll come back to it later, because you wanted to talk about the technology.
These things are, these gasification plants are widely available. You can buy them out of the, if you know the right chemical catalog, you can buy them out of the catalog. And so it’s actually old technology. Putting all these things together, doing biomass and putting that into a gasifier, that’s done in a few places, but not as many. But it’s widely done around the world. And then catching the CO2 from that is a very straightforward process, but it’s only done in a few places today. So while this is old technology, combining all these three things together actually needs to be done and demonstrated at this scale.
Christophe Jospe: What you’ve got, it’s Fischer-Tropsch process, is that correct?
Dr. Roger Aines: Fischer-Tropsch comes in after you gasify it. So after you turn it into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and CO2, if you put it through a Fischer-Tropsch catalyst, it will turn it into jet fuel, for instance. In the case of the hydrogen, we do a thing called reverse water gas shift, which turns all of the carbon monoxide into hydrogen by reacting it with water.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. So let’s just make this super simplified. You got a big pile of a bunch of almond shells.
Dr. Roger Aines: Yep. So you turn the almond shells into hydrogen. And it’s a very efficient way to do that. The only downside to this is that it’s fairly expensive equipment. And that has always been a drawback to it. But we’re going to have to spend some capital if we want to do this job.
Christophe Jospe: Totally. Okay. So we’ve talked about gasification and using biomass to do the heavy lift on the photosynthesizing side. What’s your third pathway?
Dr. Roger Aines: So the third one is the other one that gets an enormous amount of attention today, and that’s direct air capture. These are machines that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And that’s a very attractive concept because in principle, you could build as many of these machines as you want and capture the CO2 from the air. And put that CO2 underground permanently and never have to deal with, you know, basically have cleaned it out of the atmosphere permanently. So what are the issues with that? Why is that my third and not my first answer?
Partly because it’s expensive today. The only system that we know of that we have really good cost date on looks like it’s going to cost on the order of $300 a ton today for the first plant. But of course, as you build more plants, it’ll get less expensive. And we estimate that if you could build enough plants, in fact, if you could build 100 million tonnes of capacity, which is not irrational by the size of the job we need to do, that those costs could drop to the vicinity of $100 a ton.
That’s still the most expensive thing in our report. So you’re going to do that last. The second concern about direct air capture, it’s either a concern or a value, depending upon your viewpoint, is That it doesn’t depend upon the source of the energy. And so there’s a lot of thoughts that you’re going to use renewable energy to power these direct air capture plants. And that’s one of the things that we discovered is actually a concern, that when you look at the amount of solar panels that it takes to drive one of these plants, it would take 17 square kilometers of solar panels to power a direct air capture plant that Captures 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
That’s an enormous amount of land. And in California, we’re very sensitive to land use changes. Although it might appear that we have a lot of land in California, we kind of like what it’s being used for now. And so the idea that you would change enormous amounts of it, that you would cover the desert with solar panels, that’s not really a very practical solution. So we actually like the idea of using more concentrated sources of energy, in this case geothermal, or when geothermal energy is not available, to actually use natural gas and capture the CO2 from the natural gas along with the CO2 from the air.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, one of the interesting points of this report is that people focus on the cost of direct air capture in deployment, but they don’t focus on the amount of land that is often necessary. So is it primarily about the use of renewables like solar in order to fuel direct air capture? Is that the main holdup with land? Or is it also about the potential seismological complications that can come about from from bearing this captured CO2?
Dr. Roger Aines: No, it’s really about the size of the renewables that you need to power it. The actual direct air capture plants themselves are not that large, roughly a square mile, two and a half square kilometers. So that’s, you know, that’s within the range of things that you can scale up.
Ross Kenyon: And to what degree do you think that is a concern that we’ll have to deal with? Because when we do capture carbon dioxide, and the report talks quite a lot about how to bury it and where might be good places in California to do so. I’ve seen people who are concerned about this risk. There’s environmental justice concerns about where these reservoirs are used. To what degree are these concerns valid or overstated? How should we be thinking about what happens with this buried CO2?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, there’s a variety of things that get wrapped up in the discussion of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, which of what we’re talking about is one element of things that could be called CCS. But let’s look at the safety thing first, because I think that’s the best dealt with. The idea is that you inject the CO2 deep underground, 3,000 feet underground, at which point it’s a liquid at that pressure. And it’s a liquid that has very much the same properties as oil. And so you inject it into rocks that They’re either old oil fields or look like old oil fields.
They’re basically sandstones that have spaces in between the sand grains. And you fill those spaces with the CO2, just like they could have been filled with oil. And the behavior of this is going to be very much like an oil field, which is to say you could get a leak from a 3,000 foot deep oil field, but that’s not very common. And So the Department of Energy has had a 20 year program to look at the safety of how you would do this. They put a total of 14 million tonnes of CO2 underground in experimental tests where they looked for leakage.
They did all kinds of monitoring. They have found no leakage. It’s all been done safely. And so the Department of Energy has convinced itself that this is a safe thing to do, that it’s a common engineering practice to do this. You use oil field technology, which is pretty well understood. And so it’s a pretty straightforward thing to do. You have a couple of constraints. You have to choose the right rocks. You have to put it into these sandstones that have space in between the grains. You have to avoid major faults.
Not minor faults, it turns out, but big ones. You don’t want to inject this next to the San Andreas. That’s probably pretty obvious to anyone. And the overall operation is really a very minor footprint. It looks like a natural gas well. And I’m sitting in my office here in Livermore. The entire footprint of a CO2 injection operation would fit in my office. So it’s pretty minor impact on the landscape. And it’s also, we believe, And I want to talk a little bit about why we believe it’s safe. And we’ve done science, but that’s not why people should believe that these things are going to be safely done.
They’re going to be safe because of regulation. Just like the fact that we don’t build 20-story buildings without building codes, we’re going to have the right regulations do this safely underground. And we have a federal regulation that controls this. We also have a state regulation here in California, which is even more strict. And so we have the most strict regulations in the world. And we believe that those are going to be adequate, just like we build 20 story buildings safely here.
Christophe Jospe: So I really appreciate everything you’re saying. And I’m sure this might make this scientist and you shudder. So I’m just putting all disclaimers ahead of before what I’m about to say. I mean, I hear you on the safety thing. I hear you. What is it? You need a class four injection permit in order to pump CO2 underground. But perception.
Dr. Roger Aines: That’s it.
Christophe Jospe: Okay. Yeah. But perception changes not necessarily based on the reality or based on science. And I’m concerned that a comment you just said is, well, obviously, we don’t want to pump it where the San Andreas fault is, is that you might quickly find yourself up against... You know, what used to be NIMBY, not in my backyard, becomes NUMBY, not under my backyard. And people say, no way you’re going to pump this under here. And even if you do all the safety tests that you possibly can, you’re just not going to change people’s minds.
The science doesn’t matter.
Dr. Roger Aines: Your alternative is to leave the CO2 in the atmosphere. Which one do you want?
Ross Kenyon: There’s no third option? Like, can you pump it under someone else’s backyards?
Dr. Roger Aines: You know, I think the places that we do this are going to be very carefully chosen. It’s important. The good news in California is that this practice today is part of what we call our low carbon fuel standard. And that is a cap and trade program to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. And a ton of carbon dioxide in that system is worth a lot of money. Today it’s worth $200 a ton. Which means that the people who build and operate these systems are going to be able to compensate the landowners who choose to do this.
And that’s a big deal. You know, I think a lot of the discussion around environmental things has always sort of expected people to accept risk without being compensated. And yeah, it’s fine for me to say the risk is low, but I think it’s better to say, and you’re going to be paid for it. And then it becomes a negotiation.
Christophe Jospe: So you’re saying $200 a ton can go to the person living above the reservoir, not the process that needs that money to pay for the capture itself?
Dr. Roger Aines: No, you need to split the money among everybody. That’s the capture, the transportation, the storage. The point is there’s plenty of money in the system to do things safely, to understand all the risks, and to compensate people.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds pretty good to me. Yeah, I think that would be fair. I’m sure you could probably find people that would be willing to take that deal. And there will probably be some that won’t, but that’s okay too.
Dr. Roger Aines: Here in California, we have this oil industry that’s in decline. And people in the Central Valley recognize that there’s going to be a loss of jobs. There’s going to be a loss of infrastructure in the Central Valley. And this is one way that can be helped. That this is a new thing that will come in, a new job market that will evolve, but it uses many of the same things the oil industry uses today. It uses the same drill rigs, the same lunch trucks, the same mechanics. And so there’s a lot of benefits to doing this as well.
Ross Kenyon: We are optimistic, although David Roberts, when we had him on the podcast recently from Vox, thought we were a bit too enthusiastic about this, but very much looking forward to oil and gas inverting itself and becoming direct air capture and CCS companies. Hopefully that industry is born. Hopefully something like this helps to create it. We will certainly see. And go ahead there, Kristoff.
Christophe Jospe: Well, I mean, there are many ways we can take this. I think it’s worth noting for the listeners, like we are talking with one of the world experts in carbon capture utilization and storage who’s worked in this space for a really long time. And Roger, I appreciate the way that you’ve broken out the distinctions between direct air capture and carbon capture and utilization and carbon capture and storage. But can you paint a picture of the sort of industrial carbon management landscape for us?
Dr. Roger Aines: We tried very hard in this report to separate the idea of negative emissions from the idea of industrial carbon management. And the reason for that is that there’s a lot of ways to manage the emissions from industry. You could change your fuel, you could electrify things, you could shut down industries, you could do carbon capture and storage. The reason we didn’t discuss that, even though I’ve worked on it for 20 years, is that It really kind of muddies the conversation around negative emissions. So why are we going to need negative emissions?
Well, the answer is we haven’t been fast enough. We’ve just been too slow. There’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now. And there’s a lot of things that we’re never going to get completely rid of. You know, airplanes are one of the things you might think is obvious, but an interesting one is nitrous oxide. Which comes from fertilizer. When you spread fertilizer on a field, a tiny amount of it turns into nitrous oxide. But that’s a very strong greenhouse gas. So the question you ask yourself is, are we going to stop fertilizing?
Well, I don’t think so. And so that emission is always going to be there. And so you’re going to have to compensate for that emission somehow. And that’s why you’d want negative emissions. And that’s really what we were addressing in this report is What would we do about the things that we can’t deal with by any other means? Because we’re not saying that you should use negative emissions to compensate for industrial emissions. You should solve those by the direct means, direct point source solutions.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, totally. And an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Like, would you rather pay $20 to reduce a ton of carbon into the atmosphere or pay $200 to have to clean it up later? I think most of the emitters who might be on the hook for paying this would much rather be focusing on those less costly ways. Absolutely. But I’m kind of curious and my question is just to I appreciate the distinction to not muddy the waters. Here we are in a long form podcast. So we’re totally all about muddying the waters not to thoroughly.
So, I mean, one thing that you often hear in the carbon capture industry is, oh, well, like direct air capture is really hard and really costly because you’re dealing with an extremely dilute molecule that’s carbon dioxide, which is at 0. 04%. Whereas something coming out of a natural gas or coal fired power plant may sit more at like, I don’t know, 5% from natural gas or 12% for coal. And because the molecule is not as dilute, figure out how to capture that as well. And so I’m just a little bit curious.
I’m curious, this piece obviously was focused on the cleanup crew that is carbon removal, and obviously that’s near and dear to Nori’s heart, for the state of California. But underlying all of this is that California is still a pretty large emitter and still has a lot of heavy industry that needs to decarbonize as well that may include carbon capture and storage. So how does all that fit and what might those technologies look like?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, the important thing for California is to recognize that the natural solutions that we all love and would love to expand are relatively limited if we restrict ourselves to what’s inside the state. We can do on the order of 25 million tonnes of removals per year. Today, the state emits more than 400 million tonnes in 2045. We estimate that states still going to be emitting 100 million tonnes. So that 25 million tonnes is substantive, it’s real, it’s important, but it’s not enough. And so you’ve got to have other solutions for those other things.
The interesting thing about your comment about California’s industrial emissions are, can you guess what the biggest emitter is in California?
Christophe Jospe: It’s the smug factor coming out of San Francisco.
Dr. Roger Aines: And it’s cars. It’s transportation. Transportation is more than half of California’s emissions today. If you count the oil reproduction and refining, all the oil we produce in California is used in California. So if you add all that together, along with all the cars and everything, it’s 51% of our emissions and growing every year. California’s emissions have been declining on every other additive basis, but the component of it from transportation is still climbing. So That’s the big gorilla that we have to deal with. And that’s why we’re focused in this report on things like making better transportation fuels from biomass and overall dealing with that transportation industry in general.
We don’t have a lot of other heavy industry, not like Texas or the Gulf Coast. And so that’s actually, you know, we have cement plants, which are about 8 million tonnes of emissions per year, and we don’t want to send those offshore. So we have to deal with those. All of those things will roll together. No matter how you look at it, you’ve got to put a lot of CO2 underground. There’s just not any other place to put it. Maybe you could make some things out of it. That’d be great.
But it turns out that you can’t make anywhere near enough to compensate that. So it’s really important to get these underground facilities up and running and get that CO2 going underground so that it’s permanently out of the atmosphere. And whether that’s because you’re trying to clean up the atmosphere or because you’re trying to clean up a cement plant, it’s the same storage that’s required.
Ross Kenyon: Roger, one of my perceptions in reading this report is that it’s somewhat conservative in that it focuses on deploying existing technology that’s already ready to be deployed and isn’t reliant upon future developments. If you were to be a little bit relaxed in that kind of way and you were to look at technologies that were coming soon that maybe just aren’t cost effective yet, what might you have included as well?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, the constraint that we put on it wasn’t that it wasn’t cost effective, but that we had good numbers to use in costing it. So we had to have things that have been built or studies have been done. So all these things exist at pilot scale or larger so we could actually make estimates. The technology for California that is most interesting that’s coming in the future, we call mineral carbonation and carbon mineralization. You can go either way with that one. Basically, there are rocks in California. The state rock of California is serpentinite and that rock will react with CO2 and form limestone, essentially, form calcium carbonate.
We think that’s a really excellent way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it hasn’t been tested at a large enough scale yet to really understand the capacity or the issues associated with it. But those tests are going on, particularly in Canada. And we think that’s something that is going to be important in the future and maybe very inexpensive.
Christophe Jospe: Ross, that harkens back to an old podcast we did with Greg Dippel.
Dr. Roger Aines: He’s my hero.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we should have Greg back on. I’d like to hear an update with how all that is going. I know there’s various experiments and pilots, at least last I heard. And then we’ve also done some episodes with Vesta in California that they’re working on, Olivine, and how exactly that might be deployed. But our fingers have long been crossed for this sort of process, and someone’s going to figure it out. I don’t know when it’s going to be, but hopefully it’s not too far off either.
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, Greg has these industrial demonstrations going. He’s going to have a number of them running this summer where people are already mining this rock for another reason, often because they’re extracting nickel out of it. And so you can test out the idea without having to pay for a giant demonstration because the mine is already there. And that’s why I said he’s my hero, because he’s really getting a lot of progress on a relatively minor investment. And the Canadians in general are just really All right.
Ross Kenyon: Well, you’ve sold me. I will try and get Greg to come back on and update us. That is great to hear.
Christophe Jospe: I have a question. So this report on the getting to zero captures the emissions coming from human activity, correct?
Dr. Roger Aines: Yes.
Christophe Jospe: However, there are also emissions coming from forest fires or even potential methane leaks and various other things that might be feedback loops as a result of a warming planet. Do you envision that there may be a fuller life cycle or fuller carbon accounting rather for a state that’s looking to get down to zero?
Dr. Roger Aines: Absolutely. You mentioned two things that I would consider differently. The methane leaks I would consider to be man-made. That’s part of what we have to account for and that’s part of what our 125 million tonnes of negative emissions has to include is any residual methane leaks that are still in the system. The issue of emissions from forest fires is a complicated one. Since the trees sucked the carbon dioxide out of the air relatively recently, They tend to be counted as not an emission, that it’s neutral. But of course we know that an old tree that burns and emits a bunch of carbon dioxide turns into a little sapling next year, that’s not neutral.
And I think that accounting has got to be done and it’s very complicated because it has to do with how the forest is used and how people intend to use the forest in the future. And unfortunately, it’s one of those things that gets very heated. And so I try to stay out of it because it’s more about pathways than about endpoints. But I think we’re going to have to think about that. And as we look at these giant emissions from things like the Australian fires, you know, new growth of Australian forests is not going to take up that CO2 again for decades.
And so, yes, it is a net emission.
Ross Kenyon: Roger, how much do you think California getting to neutral is going to cost? What does the report say about how much this might cost residents of the state?
Dr. Roger Aines: So that’s why we wanted to only run the numbers on things that we could actually get good costs on. We didn’t want to say more research is needed. We’ll tell you later how much it’s going to cost. And When we added up all these, we started with the least expensive solutions, natural solutions. We used all of that we could. Then we used all of the biomass we could. We basically said, if we committed all the waste biomass in California, how much CO2 could we remove by doing that? And then we polished it off to meet our 125 million ton goal by adding as much direct air capture as we needed.
The scenario that worked out to be the most likely and the lowest cost cost about $8 billion a year. That is about 0. 3% of California’s GDP, so a lot less than 1% of California’s GDP. It’s less than we spend on trash collection per year. And very similar problem where you’ve got trash we’re throwing in the air, we have to clean up. So about $8 billion a year, and that’s levelized costs. That includes the capital and the operating costs to do it. By the way, per ton, that’s an average of about $60 per ton, which is a lot lower than most people thought the total was going to be.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. And do those numbers include something like the technology getting better and us learning over time how to use it? Or is that assuming just the numbers that we currently have right now?
Dr. Roger Aines: It assumes conservative learning for direct air capture. We assume that about 40 million tonnes of capacity would be built for California and in parallel with California. That was actually a subject of considerable debate between us and our reviewers. We had this reviewed by 22 different people. And we originally went with the rhodium group projections of air capture in 2045 that said there’d be a billion tonnes of capacity. And when you apply learning curves to that, you get pretty low costs. You drive down to this number of $100 a ton. And our reviewers thought, you know, they cried foul.
They said, you can’t expect that’s going to happen. And California doesn’t have control of it if it does. So we scaled back and we said, okay, we’ll only cost 40 million tonnes. But even at that, that reduces the cost of air capture by 30 or 40% with that much learning. And we included that in the $8 billion.
Ross Kenyon: Great. That is a very useful wrinkle to know. Well, what should we expect from California in the future with regard to carbon removal? Do you predict? I guess it’s hard for you to forecast, but do you imagine that California is going to continue its environmental and climate leadership in this emerging field?
Dr. Roger Aines: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the messaging that we get from Sacramento is that people are very interested in getting to zero. They want to get across the finish line. And Our analysis was really intended to give them a sense of what all the options might be. And we evaluated more than 50 different pathways in this, and that $8 billion pathway is just the one that was the cheapest. But there’s other ones you may choose for other reasons, for, like you said, environmental justice, or for jobs, or for land use, you may choose different pathways.
And the good news is that all the different things we evaluated didn’t exceed more than $15 billion a year. For a government approach, that’s a very flexible sort of thing. So we think policymakers are going to be able to pick and choose and do things that meet their other needs as well as meeting our climate needs.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. I hope you’re right. And I look forward to seeing how this plays out. Roger, since you’re an expert in this field, where do you see direct air capture and carbon capture and storage? Where do you see this field going in the next couple of decades? Is it basically what’s written in this report or do you diverge somewhat or what might, despite us tracking this as a company and individually being curious about it, what might we not know about what’s happening in that field?
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, I think direct air capture is going to be extremely important in industrial uses of CO2. If you talk to Shell, who are very interested in making their products out of CO2 instead of making them out of oil, which I fully support, they say, we need to look at direct air capture because none of the point sources we can find are big enough to feed the kind of factory that we like to build. In order for it to have a constant supply, if they’re going to make their lubricants or they’re going to make their ethylene or they’re going to make their carpet fibers out of CO2, then they need a big constant source.
And so direct air capture is likely to be very important for that. And I like that idea because that’s recycling. That’s just classic, you know, we’ll recycle the CO2, make it into the carbon products that we use every day. You’re probably sitting on top of a carpet made out of petroleum.
Unknown speaker: I am.
Dr. Roger Aines: And I’d like to see that carpet made out of CO2. And they can do that with direct air capture.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think that I was being Pollyanna about oil and gas inverting and becoming direct air capture companies or carbon capture and storage companies? Or is that just a little too optimistic? It sounds like you’re at least somewhat sympathetic that this view might actually play out.
Dr. Roger Aines: I agree that I think that’s a very important part of the evolution that’s going to occur. And that’s How we like to think about it as an evolution, because these jobs are going to grow in. People are going to build these plants. They’re going to tie to geologic storage. It’s not like Chevron is going to suddenly become a geologic storage company. But I think that as these things evolve, you’re going to see a lot of that. And you’re going to see the big oil majors playing a huge role because they understand the technology that needs to be done and they have the capital to do these things.
These are enormously capital-intensive ideas, and if you don’t have that capital, you can’t get started.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. I also hope that is the case. Christophe, do you have anything else on your end? Do you feel uncontent?
Christophe Jospe: What aren’t we asking you on this podcast that we should have asked you?
Ross Kenyon: I feel like we should be utilizing this time really wisely. This is good stuff we have here.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, there’s a lot of useful nuggets, but what didn’t you get to say?
Dr. Roger Aines: One of the things that we learned in the course of doing this is that there’s an enormous amount of money moving around. And people talk about doing things like direct air capture in other parts of the world. They talk about doing it in Algeria, for instance, which would be great. Technically, that would be terrific. But when you look at a jurisdiction like California or if New York wanted to do this or if the Gulf Coast wanted to do this, all that money Leaving that area, I think, is going to be pretty sensitive.
And so as we think about negative emission solutions, I think you have to think about them being done relatively locally so that the people who are paying and the new jobs and the new things that are being created are more or less in the same family. And in California, we can say that pretty authoritatively. So everything we analyzed in this report Stays inside the borders of California so that you don’t generate that concern of basically transferring a bunch of money outside of the jurisdiction that’s paying to have it happen. I think that’s going to be important as this conversation goes forward.
Christophe Jospe: All right. So you left too much juicy bait for me to not respond. I mean, cynically, I’d say this is just trade protectionism. Wouldn’t you have a more cost effective way if you truly look at the separation of the source from the sink when it comes to negative emissions that you could find lower cost ways on average globally to balance our carbon emissions?
Dr. Roger Aines: Yeah, and that’s the failing that we’ve all gotten trapped into and thinking about these climate solutions as we think of the global optimum. And how’s the global economy going to look in 2050? And that requires what I call a hand of God solution. You know, is God going to come down and make those things happen? No, local jurisdictions are going to make them happen. Politicians are going to make them happen. People who pay taxes are going to make them happen. And so it’s our job as technologists to put technologies out there that are useful.
But we have to be pragmatic and realize that those kind of constraints are going to control which technologies get picked up and where they get applied. And it’s a mistake for us to just assume that the best technical or the best engineering answer is the best answer overall. It’s unlikely to be true.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, maybe. Okay. But it seems as if California is trying to play the hand of God and dismiss the invisible hand that Adam Smith, maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s got a few flaws in his model. But when thinking about markets and a market on carbon removal to help potentially find that equilibrium.
Dr. Roger Aines: Well, let me intercede for a minute here. This is not the state’s report. This was strictly the 22 authors of this report’s And so that was a constraint we placed on it, not the state. Because we thought that would allow for any, you know, you could go, if you decided you wanted to purchase these things from outside the state, you certainly could do it. And if you decided that you could do it cheaper outside the state, you have that option. But what we wanted to do was tell the state how they could do it under what we thought was a politically very feasible situation.
And then if they wanted to adjust the economics, That’s perfectly straightforward to do. And we expect that’s going to happen. That conversation is going to be important. But I don’t think there’s going to be a global optimum. I think it’s going to be very local decisions.
Ross Kenyon: I’d be curious to see how that exactly works. Christophe, I had a similar reaction to in reading this. And at the very least, it might just make for better politics. It might make it easier for it to pass California if the jobs and the money stay in the state. On the other hand, I had a friend who He recently took a vacation and he went into some shop in this cute little town and saw something that he wanted and got up to the register and saw a buy local sticker and was like, oh, you’re right.
Maybe I should just buy this at home and then didn’t buy from that store. And I wonder, is that just something that’s going to play out on the macro level too? I think we should chase where the most cost effective ways of deploying carbon removal technology actually makes sense. But you also have to take into account, Kristoff, there are political decisions being made and people paying for a bunch of jobs to be created in other states. I think humans are perhaps a bit too partial to really do that. And maybe is that sort of broadly the point you’re trying to make, Roger, or have I missed the mark?
Dr. Roger Aines: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And it’s not we didn’t want to make that decision. We simply wanted to say, let’s analyze it with this constraint on it. And then if you choose to release that constraint, It’s obvious that you could get these things done cheaper. You could optimize the system by doing things in different places. And I think that the expressions that we’re getting from non-governmental agencies, environmentalists in general, are that we need to keep our own impacts local and that if California has a certain number of emissions that they’re responsible for, that dealing with them locally is the appropriate thing to do rather than asking some other part of the world to take care of our emissions for us.
Christophe Jospe: I think it’s a really valid argument and I was just kind of pushing back on the thought experiment and I do believe that we’ll find ourselves in a yes and approach and I absolutely sympathize with the need to do things locally. But I just wanted to hear the reasoning a little bit more behind it. And I am just very impressed with California putting its stake in the ground and coming out and saying this and sort of showing and exhibiting leadership for the rest of the states to maybe follow on and try to write their own getting to zero and getting to carbon neutral report.
Dr. Roger Aines: You know, the statement that I like to use about this is that this is California’s Nike moment. It’s time to just do it.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a wonderful place to cap it. Roger, thank you so much for coming on Reversing Climate Change. We’re so grateful for your time and for your being here.
Dr. Roger Aines: Thank you very much. My pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: And also, if someone wanted to follow your work or the work of your colleagues, what do you think is the best way for them to do so?
Dr. Roger Aines: You can follow me on Twitter. I’m Roger Ames on Twitter. And Lawrence Livermore National Lab is very present on the web. If you want to read our report, you can simply Google LLNL Carbon Report. And that’ll come to the top of the list.
Ross Kenyon: Terrific. And that will be in the show notes as well. Well, thank you again. And thanks for listening. If you like what we are doing here, please rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. Tell your friends. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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