I was thinking about economics and the "real price" of things, and it's consistent failure to account for environmental damage in basic microeconomics in the real world. So I wondered: how much of a tax would we have to impose on gas sales to take care of the carbon it puts into the atmosphere, and also to start undoing what we've already put in?
Basic numbers to start:
How much carbon does a gallon put into the atmosphere?
A gallon weighs about 6 pounds.
Each carbon molecule (nuclear weight about 12) in the hydrocarbon combines with two oxygen molecules (about 15-16 nuclear weight about 15). That number based on chemistry becomes 21 pounds. Turns out it's about 20 pounds officially.
So 1 gallon = 20 pounds of carbon
How many tons of carbon are in the air?
A lot of googling got me to the point that there has been a 40-50% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, and that there is about 2700-3000 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
So humans are responsible for about 1-1.5 trillion tons of CO2.
How much does it cost to remove a ton of CO2?
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carbon-air-120911.html
That seems to indicate it costs $1000/ton to remove.
Ouch. So the cost to remove the carbon industrially is 1 QUADRILLION DOLLARS or more.
1,000,000,000,000,000.
That's a billion million dollars. Or a thousand million million dollars.
Since 1 gallon produces 20 lbs which is 1/100 of a ton, that means every gallon to break even should carry a $10 surcharge to be carbon neutral.
If you wanted to tax additional removal, with that big a hole, we should impose another $20.
... gas wouldn't remain a means of power generation very long at those costs.
As fun as punitive costs are to dream about, we have the real problem of the 1 trillion tons of CO2 to remove.
$1000 a ton seems like a lot, and it is really the only flexible component of the whole equation. We need technology to reduce the costs:
- algal biodiesel or algal fertilizer / livestock feed conversion?
- greening the sahara?
- iron seeding of algae in the ocean?
- industrial process?
What we really need is a factor of a hundred improvement here. 100 trillion dollars is possible but hard. 10 trillion dollars is doable.
But keep in mind that a 100x reduction in carbon removal cost, using for example algal biodiesel production, would mean that we could produce biodiesel that is ten cents a gallon...
Keep in mind the GROSS WORLD PRODUCT in 2014 was 77 trillion dollars.
Algal biofuel, based on their engineering goals is to produce $3/gallon biodiesel. Since we can assume roughly 20 pounds of CO2 is removed from the air to produce that, that means biodiesel cost to remove a ton is $300. Each square mile could produce enough biodiesel to remove 50,000 tons of CO2 per year.
If we wanted to do 1 trillion tons per 20 years, we'd need 1 million square miles, or 1000 x 1000 miles. So 1/3 of the Sahara. Yikes.
We might as well green the sahara. How much carbon dioxide does a square mile of forest remove from the air?
Some article says: temperate forest per hectare offsets yearly emissions of "300-400 cars" where a car generates ~ 5.5 tons / year. 280 hectares/square mile... hm, that's 500,000 tons/sq mile. that's 10x what we'd get from biodiesel farms.
So we'd need to create 100,000 square miles of temperate forest to do the job?
Which is about the size of arizona.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5360952/geohackers-want-to-transform-the-sahara-into-a-forest
Two trillion dollars a year to remove eight billion tons of carbon per year, according to that. To remove almost a trillion tons is roughly 200 trillion dollars by that calculation...
TODO: use nitrogen fixation costs for fertilizer/ammonia production to guessimate an industrial process cost to remove CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber
I suspect what is necessary is a multi-headed approach:
- taxation on gas
- massive rollout of alternative solar / wind / nuclear (MSR/LFTR or other designs)
- desert greening
- algal biodiesel research "Manhattan project"
- ocean seeding research
- industrial process for Carbon fixation "Manhattan project"
Basic numbers to start:
How much carbon does a gallon put into the atmosphere?
A gallon weighs about 6 pounds.
Each carbon molecule (nuclear weight about 12) in the hydrocarbon combines with two oxygen molecules (about 15-16 nuclear weight about 15). That number based on chemistry becomes 21 pounds. Turns out it's about 20 pounds officially.
So 1 gallon = 20 pounds of carbon
How many tons of carbon are in the air?
A lot of googling got me to the point that there has been a 40-50% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, and that there is about 2700-3000 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
So humans are responsible for about 1-1.5 trillion tons of CO2.
How much does it cost to remove a ton of CO2?
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carbon-air-120911.html
That seems to indicate it costs $1000/ton to remove.
Ouch. So the cost to remove the carbon industrially is 1 QUADRILLION DOLLARS or more.
1,000,000,000,000,000.
That's a billion million dollars. Or a thousand million million dollars.
Since 1 gallon produces 20 lbs which is 1/100 of a ton, that means every gallon to break even should carry a $10 surcharge to be carbon neutral.
If you wanted to tax additional removal, with that big a hole, we should impose another $20.
... gas wouldn't remain a means of power generation very long at those costs.
As fun as punitive costs are to dream about, we have the real problem of the 1 trillion tons of CO2 to remove.
$1000 a ton seems like a lot, and it is really the only flexible component of the whole equation. We need technology to reduce the costs:
- algal biodiesel or algal fertilizer / livestock feed conversion?
- greening the sahara?
- iron seeding of algae in the ocean?
- industrial process?
What we really need is a factor of a hundred improvement here. 100 trillion dollars is possible but hard. 10 trillion dollars is doable.
But keep in mind that a 100x reduction in carbon removal cost, using for example algal biodiesel production, would mean that we could produce biodiesel that is ten cents a gallon...
Keep in mind the GROSS WORLD PRODUCT in 2014 was 77 trillion dollars.
Algal biofuel, based on their engineering goals is to produce $3/gallon biodiesel. Since we can assume roughly 20 pounds of CO2 is removed from the air to produce that, that means biodiesel cost to remove a ton is $300. Each square mile could produce enough biodiesel to remove 50,000 tons of CO2 per year.
If we wanted to do 1 trillion tons per 20 years, we'd need 1 million square miles, or 1000 x 1000 miles. So 1/3 of the Sahara. Yikes.
We might as well green the sahara. How much carbon dioxide does a square mile of forest remove from the air?
Some article says: temperate forest per hectare offsets yearly emissions of "300-400 cars" where a car generates ~ 5.5 tons / year. 280 hectares/square mile... hm, that's 500,000 tons/sq mile. that's 10x what we'd get from biodiesel farms.
So we'd need to create 100,000 square miles of temperate forest to do the job?
Which is about the size of arizona.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5360952/geohackers-want-to-transform-the-sahara-into-a-forest
Two trillion dollars a year to remove eight billion tons of carbon per year, according to that. To remove almost a trillion tons is roughly 200 trillion dollars by that calculation...
TODO: use nitrogen fixation costs for fertilizer/ammonia production to guessimate an industrial process cost to remove CO2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber
I suspect what is necessary is a multi-headed approach:
- taxation on gas
- massive rollout of alternative solar / wind / nuclear (MSR/LFTR or other designs)
- desert greening
- algal biodiesel research "Manhattan project"
- ocean seeding research
- industrial process for Carbon fixation "Manhattan project"
