The Truth About Carbon Capture: Michael Barnard Discusses Sustainable Alternatives

Hi everyone, Tom Raftery here, and welcome to episode 188 of the Climate Confident podcast. In this episode, I had a fascinating conversation with Michael Barnard, a climate futurist who's spent the last 15 years delving deep into the challenges and solutions around climate change.

Michael and I discussed the often controversial topic of carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS). We explored why mechanical carbon capture technologies, particularly those promoted by the fossil fuel industry, may not be the panacea they're often touted to be. Michael shed light on the stark differences in climate policies between countries with and without fossil fuel industries, highlighting how nations without such industries focus more on nature-based solutions like reforestation and wetland restoration.

We delved into the limitations of direct air capture technologies, examining why they struggle to scale effectively and why they may not be the most efficient use of resources. Michael also discussed the challenges associated with oceanic carbon capture methods and how they can inadvertently harm marine ecosystems.

One of the key takeaways from our discussion is the importance of prioritising emission reductions at the source. Michael emphasised the potential of sustainable construction practices, such as using cross-laminated timber, to both sequester carbon and reduce reliance on high-emission materials like cement.

We also touched on the risks associated with transporting captured CO2, citing real-world examples that underscore the safety concerns.

This episode is a deep dive into the complexities of CCUS and offers valuable insights into why focusing on emission reduction and investing in renewable energy solutions might be more effective paths forward.

I hope you find this discussion as enlightening as I did. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your app of choice to ensure you don't miss any future episodes. Thanks for tuning in!

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

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Michael Barnard: 0:03

In reviewing the literature on global policy approaches, there's a very clear demarcation. Countries, which don't have fossil fuel industries are all focused on nature based solutions, planting more trees, restoring grasslands, restoring wetlands, changing agricultural practices, Countries with, fossil fuel industries are very focused on mechanical carbon capture and sequestration facilities that reuse oil and gas infrastructure to pump CO2 underground.

Tom Raftery: 0:33

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast, the number one podcast showcasing best practices in climate emission reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 188 of the Climate Confident podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. And before we kick off today's show, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of this podcast's amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping this podcast going, and I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about climate. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee and your support will make a huge difference in helping me keep this show going strong. To become a supporter you simply click on the support link in the show notes of this or any episode or visit tiny url.com/climate pod. In today's episode, I'm talking to Michael Barnard. And in the episodes that are coming up in the next few weeks, I'll be talking to Jim Sullivan from SAP, Tyler Bourns from Dragon Fly Energy, professor, Valerie Thomas from Georgia Tech and Ralph Loura from sustainable it.org. But as I said with me on the show today, I've my special guest, Michael. Now this is not Michael's first time on the podcast. I had Michael on the podcast about two years ago, a little under two years ago. And on that episode, Michael famously became the person who was responsible for the longest ever episode of this podcast. We went over an hour in that one we were talking about using hydrogen in transportation. And we went through all the different modes of transportation, be it road, be it rail, be it maritime, be it aviation. And we went through in detail, well Michael went through in detail, why hydrogen was no good for any of those different modes of transportation. So more recently, Michael wrote an interesting LinkedIn post linking out to a Clean Technica article that he authored talking about CCUS. CCUS for people who are unaware carbon capture utilization and storage. And in it, Michael went through the various reasons why or why not CCUS may be useful. I don't wanna give away, give away too much. Michael, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Michael Barnard: 3:16

Well, Tom. Um, You know, and for those don't know Tom, uh, he's got a brilliant collection. So, yeah, I'm Michael Bernard. I'm a climate futurist. I spent about the past 15 years looking at every aspect of the climate change problem, the scale of them, quantifying the scale, looking at all the purported solutions for the problem area and assessing them on the basics of will they work? Will they be competitive with other alternatives? And will human beings accept them? And so, you know, in that grab bag of everything, last time Tom and I talked about transportation, well, this this magic vacuum that the fossil fuel industry loves so much that's going to, you know, sweep their carbon dust under the carpet has kept coming up. I've been looking at carbon capture usage and sequestration schemes for almost all of those 15 years. As a matter of fact, there's even a Margaret Atwood connection, the famous Canadian author who's responsible for The Handmaid's Um, You know, So why don't we, why

Tom Raftery: 4:22

Margaret Atwood.

Michael Barnard: 4:24

Well, so years ago, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood is a famous birder. uh, birds and with her sadly past husband, Graham Gibson, she had a place on Point Pelee in Ontario on the Great Lakes. And it was a place where birds migrated overhead. And being Margaret Atwood, she's strongly focused on climate solutions, environmental stuff, but she was concerned about the birds and some of the plans for offshore wind farms. so, um, she started asking, and in Ontario, it was a epicenter of anti wind turbine stupidity. And so she on her blog, started thinking about this and I, not knowing it was Margaret Atwood, started commenting on the blog posts because the idiots were posting and like the XKCD comic, you know, somebody on the internet was wrong, so I had to Um, And then eventually I figured out it was Margaret Atwood's blog. I became her green technology consultant for a few years. Then she invited me to lunch a couple of times. So I've actually had lunch a couple of times with Atwood. Uh, She introduced me to Graciela Cicelnicki, who is the, uh, architect of the Kyoto Protocols carbon market, um, and also assisted China with figuring out what they were doing with their carbon market, which is now in operation. And she was one of the co founders of Global Thermostat. A direct air capture solution, which is one of the very, very few that makes any sense, but it makes sense in homeopathic amounts. So it's not going to scale, but at least it wasn't stupid.

Tom Raftery: 5:54

Right. Right. So, tell me Michael, about, for, for people who are unaware, there, there's an alphabet soup out there of, you know, DAC, direct air capture, CCS, CCUS, etc. Talk to me a little bit about what they are and how useful they are or aren't.

Michael Barnard: 6:15

Well, sure, but let's some context. Um, you know, um, 300 years ago, there were about 2000 billion tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now there's about 3,000 billion tons. We've added the extra 1,000 billion tons. And we keep adding 40 to 50 billion tons every single year. That's what's causing global warming. So, one of the things, the DAC part, or the CDR, carbon direct removal, which is, you know, tends to be what um, is, taking that carbon dioxide that we've released to the atmosphere and getting it back out.

Tom Raftery: 6:53

Right.

Michael Barnard: 6:53

And so you know, you've, uh, we've all heard the 415, 420, 427 parts per million. That's like 0.04% of the atmosphere. Uh, I compare that to the, uh, those silvery, uh, rescue blankets that are in first aid kits. If you get cold, if you get hypothermic, you wrap them around you. Well, they reflect the infrared radiation from your body back at you and keep it in. That's why those very thin blankets work. That's the same principle with carbon Um, And so the principal layers, we've got all this CO2 in the atmosphere. And what we're going to do is we're going um, which is problematic. An analogy I use is, imagine you've got a, barn door, and you open it, and all the horses escape. Um, to try and herd up horse, herd, uh, the horses back into the barn. Except there are trillions of the horses, they're invisible, and they're winged, and very fast, and they disappear. And so you're trying to herd trillions of invisible tiny winged horses. Yeah, no, that's not going to work. And so that's the problem with carbon direct, uh, drawdown and stuff. Um, clear, um, in reviewing the literature on global policy approaches, there's a very clear Um, uh, Countries, which don't have fossil fuel industries are all focused on nature based solutions, planting more trees, restoring grasslands, restoring um, you know, changing agricultural um, fossil fuel industries are very focused on mechanical carbon capture and sequestration facilities that reuse oil and gas infrastructure to pump CO2 underground. I'm not sure quite why there's such a distinct difference between those things. And similarly, there's a tremendous distinction between the people who market mechanical and direct, um, you know, air and propose it as a solution versus those who don't, and oddly, it's fossil fuel companies which are promoting mechanical means to clean up after their mess. And everybody else is why not just make first part, point, first Um, You know, certainly I've done the math. Other people have done the math. It's vastly cheaper to avoid making the mess. Then to make the mess in the first place. And so job one has to be that. So that's kind of the scale of the problem. Let me give you a couple of examples. Like I always like to talk about carbon engineering because they're so flawed from the beginning. David Keith, a Harvard professor, who's also responsible. He's also one of the biggest advocates solar geoengineering. He's moved on to a different university now, but you know, most of his fame comes from his Um, He, he came up with probably what is the most engineering, reasonable way to carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Which is to say, it's incredibly silly and a terrible solution. But it's probably the best it, it's, it's, The bar is incredibly low in this space. So here's what it would take. So let's start with remember that thousand billion tons of carbon dioxide. That means materiality, the amount that matters, is probably a hundred million tons. If we want to actually get up to the solution has to take 100 million tons out of the atmosphere if we just want to get something that is actually remotely meaningful in terms of the volumes in the air. That's a lot. And so here's Carbon Engineering's solution. And he defined this in a 2012 I think it was a peer reviewed paper. So I read it there. And then I looked at Carbon Engineering when they built Carbon Engineering in 2015. Bill Gates put money into it, of course. And, you know, when they sold it recently, I'll tell that story, but they need a wall of fan, two kilometers long, 20 meters high, three meters thick, running 24 7 365, dripping fluid through and pushing air through this fluid, which captures the CO2. And then in taking that fluid and putting, precipitating out that carbon dioxide bearing stuff, and heating up to 900 degrees Celsius with more energy in order to capture a million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Two kilometers of fans, 24, 7, 365, 1 percent of materiality. It's a huge industrial undertaking. It's an industrial facility that's larger than virtually any industrial facility in the world, and it doesn't even remotely approach materiality. Now, that process in the 2012 paper, Keith proposed using natural gas to power this all. And that indeed is what they're doing. And so I looked at this and I said, well, what's the only natural market for this? Well, what we have in shale oil in the United States is, hmm, shale oil ends up with a lot of fracked gas coming out as well. And typically they just vent that to the atmosphere, because of course, what else are you going to do with a very high global warming potential gas, except let it go to the atmosphere and make global warming worse. They seem to think this is a reasonable choice in the United States. That's why their oil and gas industry has worse methane emissions than any country in the world. And so, instead you capture the natural gas, and then you burn it to power this stuff, and then you capture the CO2 along with. So if you get two tons of CO2 from the air, you get an extra ton from burning the natural gas and you pump it all underground into tapped out oil wells to loosen up the sludge and create pressure to pump out more oil. And so that's the only natural market for Carbon Engineering's solution. And indeed, after I published a quite big case study in 2019 on the subject, a few months later, formerly Occidental Petroleum, now Oxy, which sounds like oxygen and sounds or a laundry detergent, you know, sounds very virtuous, but it's still an oil and gas major, paid them to build exactly that in the Permian Basin in Texas. And, you know, a year or so ago, they actually bought them outright as their only customer to do enhanced oil recovery on shale oil. And this is a theme. I'll just say this in all of carbon capture and sequestration, virtually every site that's promoted as big everything that gets up to any sort of scale nowhere near materiality with a million tons a year, for example, is doing typically enhanced oil recovery or harvesting taxes It's just the nature of the beast. so So that's Carbon Engineering, worth mentioning. Now for direct air capture there's a few other things. There's mineral weathering where we take rocks. We mine rocks, we crush them into sand or below the level of sand, and we spread them on places right? And then the minerals combine with carbon dioxide from the air, it's called mineralization, and they form permanent bonds, and then they sit there. That sounds great and stuff. The, the big, one that everybody keeps researching is olivine, which is kind of a greenish mineral. And some people have got the idea that what they're going to do is crush it and spread it on beaches. Now, I'm not a big beach goer unless I'm doing a stupidly active sport that I'm bad at, like kite surfing, for example. I failed miserably to become a good kite surfer. I got to the point where I could at least say I had kite surfed as opposed to had fallen in the water while attached to kite surfing gear. But their idea is what beaches. People have this vision of beaches. When you, when I say beach to you, what do you envision, Tom? Just tell me about its color and the sand and the

Tom Raftery: 14:48

Yeah, beautiful, beautiful white, fine powder white sand beaches, blue water coming in, maybe a cold beer in my hand.

Michael Barnard: 14:56

Yeah, that's what people want in a beach. What they don't want is green, sharp, crystalline beaches, where if they, you know, they get in your bathing suit, you know, your ends up with lots and lots of chafing. That's just, it's just not what people want in a beach and they don't want it to be this ugly green. And that's what Olivine is. And so there are people actually proposing, there's a firm that actually proposes to do this. They want to do beach replenishment with ground up Olivine. But the problem with all these mineralization things, this fundamental question, how much does it cost to mine a ton of the mineral? How much does it cost to grind it up and distribute it to where you, spread it across the earth or onto beaches? What is the carbon debt of mining? And so, as we consider all the mineralization schemes, and there are many, you know, there's a magnezite. Somebody was talking about magnezite. Other people were talking about, using the same stuff that, we make, clamshells out of, like limestone, as an example, is a calcium, mineral, you know, so limestone is one of the most common sedimentary rocks. We use it for cement. We use it for villas. We use it for, you know, tables and stuff. It's a very simple, quite hard enough, durable enough rock that it's useful for us. And it makes a big, it's actually, I call it the other fossil fuel because when we make limestone into cement, we get lots and lots and lots of carbon dioxide off of it. And as we consider that, well, oh, what if we reversed taking the carbon dioxide out of limestone and put it back in instead? And so there's lots of organizations trying to figure out how we can reverse calcination of limestone as a carbon drawdown thing. Bill Gates comes in here as well of course. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, part of their portfolio is this thing called Heirloom, H E I R L O O M, which is one of their silly, but rhyming solutions they invested in the same time. The other one was Airloom, A I R L O O O M, which is wind turbine blades on clotheslines, which was, has been tried three or four times historically and never works for a variety of really obvious reasons that aren't obvious to the Breakthrough Energy Venture gang. Don't know why. But yes, they, the Heirloom, H E I R group, what they want to do is, take limestone and grind it down and get rid of the CO2 out of it, then spread it in trays and add a little water and then rotate the trays through this massive conveyor belt through up and down and through. And so over two or three days, the CO2 from the atmosphere interacts with the slurry of limestone paste and turns back into powdered limestone. And then they use 900 degree heat to bake the CO2 off and capture the CO2, and then they just keep doing this cycle for yonks and It just doesn't scale. It's just a terrible Rube Goldberg idea. And it's not atypical for the space of carbon capture, of direct air capture. So, you know, it's just kind of fascinating things like this. Climeworks, up in Iceland claims to be this amazing thing. They're, with their expansion, now I'm going to go back. Remember, materiality. One hundred million tons. That's a hundred million. Climeworks, with their most recent expansion, is going to get up to forty thousand. Thousands, not millions. Like, orders of magnitude off, four orders of magnitude off of materiality. And yet, and they're very expensive. I think there's still over$1,000 per ton of carbon dioxide. So who's paying for this and for how long? Big question. Unlikely to ever, you know, be more than a rounding arrow.

Tom Raftery: 19:13

If they're, if they're getting 40,000 tons a year to really make a difference, we'd need close to a million of those facilities around the world so we could get 40 billion tons out of the atmosphere a year.

Michael Barnard: 19:29

Well, yes, exactly. You know, it's just lots and lots and lots of them. It's just, that's the problem with atmosphere. It's like all those tiny invisible winged horses. There's only one winged horse for you know, a lot of air molecules, and it's the challenge. So that's direct air capture. Now another thing is the ocean. So we've got some oceanic stuff. And I've spent way too much time understanding oceanic

Tom Raftery: 19:58

a quick one, Michael, just before we go on to the ocean. I mean, we're both, you're, you're You're from IBM originally I'm from SAP and before that various other companies. So we're both technologists from our background and we're both used to seeing in technology things like RAM, hard drives, you know, monitors, all these things growing exponentially in their abilities over time.Why won't that that happen for ClimeWorks?

Michael Barnard: 20:29

That's actually a reasonable question. Because, you know, modularity and scaling works. This is chemistry, not solid state physics. Solid state physics gets smaller and smaller and smaller and faster and faster in microns, and we can, you know, flip bits that are incredibly tiny. And so, you know, we've gotten to the point where computers are extraordinary. Like, I'm talking to you on my phone right now. And 20 years ago, just having this conversation online with this degree of quality would have been impossible. That's given us the impression that technology can do anything. Well, that's true as long as it's computers and data. But people keep making this mistake. Peter Thiel is famous for it with his acolytes in Silicon Valley who thought energy was ready for disruption. You know, in the two thousands, they said, well, we'll just do to electricity what we did to data. And electricity can't be quantized and treated in the same way that data can. We can make bits insanely small and fast, but an electron is already a fundamental element, and we just can't make that different. We can't multiplex it. An example I give, in the late nineties and early two thousands, a lot of people were betting big money on fiber optics. And they laid lots and lots of fiber optic cables under the oceans. And then along came laser multiplexing, which enabled 3, 600 channels of data to be communicated through a single fiber. And then we made that better and better and better. And so there's a lot of dark fiber. There's a lot of just basically rotting fiber optic cables underneath the ocean that we don't need because we oversupplied because we can multiplex and do stuff with data that we can't do with other things. And electricity is much closer to data than chemistry is. And all these processes of getting carbon dioxide out of the air are chemistry. And so it's not something where we're going to radically improve that process.

Tom Raftery: 22:36

Okay, so it's physical stuff rather than anything else, which is the, the, the limitation.

Michael Barnard: 22:42

Yes, it is. But let's go back to the ocean thing because the ocean thing is very important. We've got this problem. The excess CO2 in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the ocean. It's one of our great carbon sinks. But there's three or four problems with that. First of all, the more carbon dioxide gets into the ocean, the less alkaline it gets. Slightly, they call it ocean acidification, but it's actually a really alkaline substance that gets a little less alkaline. Which doesn't sound that bad, except the alkalinity is what helps it absorb the carbon dioxide. So the less alkaline it is, the less carbon dioxide it'll absorb. So that's problem one. Problem two is that, well, gee, when carbon dioxide is in the ocean, it does stuff. And this gets back to shellfish. Shellfish are kind of important to us. It's not just oysters. They're incredibly important in our oceanic ecosystems. If shellfish all disappear, the entire ecosystem of the ocean gets disrupted, probably collapses, rebuilds itself from sludge over, you know, trillions, you know, millions of years, probably. And in the meantime, all the calories we get from oceans and all the stuff we get from oceans that goes away. So we don't want to screw with that too much. And the problem with carbon dioxide, when it goes into the ocean, what happens is something very interesting. It turns into carbonic acid. You know, and carbonate ions, and then those carbonate ions, actually turn into bicarbonate ions. And that sounds very reasonable, this doesn't sound unreasonable, except carbonate ions are also what shellfish use. So those carbonate ions that are in the water that turn into bicarbonate ions aren't available to shellfish. One carbon atom comes in. with the CO2. Another one gets dragged out of these carbonate ions, and those turn into bicarbonate ions, which are permanently sequestered. Yay. Except what do the shellfish do for their shells? Well, they lose their shells, and so we start to see brittler, flimsier shells, and they've evolved to require shells. That's kind of the point. And evolution is a wondrous thing, but it's not a fast moving thing unless you're a fruit fly. You know, everything else, it takes a long time. Those shellfish take a long time to build their shells, and we're disrupting the availability of carbon ions. So this is a problem, and it's going to continue to be a problem as we move forward. It becomes less of a problem because the ocean doesn't absorb as much carbon dioxide as we saturate it, but still, so people want to pump stuff into it. My favorite is the Milk of Magnesia guys, You know, Milk of Magnesia, the antacid, you've probably drunk some at some point in your life

Tom Raftery: 25:36

No doubt

Michael Barnard: 25:37

Now, we usually take, you know, little Tums pills or roll aids or something. and Milk of Magnesium is magnesium hydroxide. If you pour it into the water, well, it binds with the carbon dioxide and turns into magnesium ions and avoids the CO2 binding with the carbonate ions. So it leaves the carbonate ions alone. This is good. And it also increases the alkalinity of the ocean a bit. So it increases the uptake of carbon dioxide. This all sounds very good. And people figured this out because it's just chemistry. And a little bit of biology. It's pretty basic biology. This is not Krebs cycle stuff. If you ever want to hurt your brain? Tom, go read about the krebs cycle.

Tom Raftery: 26:21

I'm, I'm a, I'm a graduate biologist. I know all about the Krebs Cycle.

Michael Barnard: 26:25

Yes. Don't take my word for it. Tom, can you describe the Krebs cycle in under an hour?

Tom Raftery: 27:02

Short answer, no.

Michael Barnard: 27:05

It's, I always say, but the Krebs cycle is If creationists and, intelligent design people actually studied the Krebs cycle, they would abandon all belief that an intelligent designer was involved in the creation of human biology. Or, you know, it's just, this is so weird. It's like octopuses. It's just weird. So the point here is that as we move forward, we need to do something about the oceans, so Milk of Magnesia sounds good at one point. Except there's a real fundamental question. Well, how much does it cost for a ton of magnesium hydroxide? And what's the carbon debt of that ton of magnesium hydroxide versus how much CO2 it actually enables to be sequestered. Well, it turns out that it's really expensive and it's really high carbon debt, so it's not actually doing any good.

Tom Raftery: 28:02

Right.

Michael Barnard: 28:03

And this is really obvious stuff. It took me 25 minutes from first hearing about this, doing some googling to find the cost of a ton of magnesium hydroxide. And the carbon debt of a ton of magnesium hydroxide and the oceanic uptake benefit. Which doesn't explain why the company which proposed this to the, Elon Musk funded X Prize for Carbon Drawdown, won a million dollars US for this. And it doesn't explain why, the company then went on to put in place two pilot projects for this. Like zero techno economic due diligence was done on this by either the CEO of a company who's just got some guy from California, same educational institute as Ken Caldera, you know, brilliant people, but academics don't really do the math usually on the basic costs and carbon debt of materials they use. They go to the lab and pour some in a, you know, and do some chemistry and stuff, and it's just not what they do.

Tom Raftery: 29:15

Yeah.

Michael Barnard: 29:15

So, oceanic carbon drawdown has got these problems. There's one actually in there that's, uses electrochemistry. But it's, it has to move millions and millions of tons of seawater, dense seawater, up at least five meters, to pump through, its electrochemistry solution to get relatively small amounts of carbon dioxide sequestered. Another one is purporting to create hydrogen, and it's got similar problems. They just don't scale effectively. It's much cheaper and more efficient to build more wind farms and solar farms and shut down the coal and gas plants. So it's kind of the fundamental problem ongoing. But let's talk about the place where it's going to make sense to do carbon capture. Cause I'm not, the space is big. Enormous amounts of money being spent on it because the fossil fuel industry requires it to be a major solution in order for them to continue to exist. Unsurprisingly, when you've got an existential threat, you'll spend money on really stupid things and try to convince all sorts of other people that they're not stupid. And so there are places where carbon capture will actually be required. Now, I've looked at, one of the things I do is I do projections through 2100 of major climate problem areas. Once again, I said at the beginning, I look at all this purported solutions. I say, well, these are the likely set of solutions because there's no place where there's a silver bullet. It's always a set of levers we have to pull at different levels each decade through 2100. It's something where, you know, carbon capture is purported to be a silver bullet, but it's not, but it is part of our toolkit. But as I said, it has to be economically competitive with alternatives. And so when I look at places, it's very rare I find some place where capturing carbon out of a gas stream from like cement, for example, is actually going to be economically competitive with alternatives. But it's, you know, one of my more recent projections to 2100 was cement and concrete globally. I've got some good news there, by the way. It's about 8 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, which is, you know, quite a lot. But a lot of that comes from China, from their massive infrastructure and city building over the past 30 years, except that's coming to an end. They've built all the cities they require, their population isn't growing, famously it actually declined this year slightly, and they've, they're close to the end of their railroad build out, they're at the end of their highway build out. 177,000 kilometers of highway since 1987.

Tom Raftery: 32:06

Unbelievable.

Michael Barnard: 32:07

Yeah, I know. It's like every time I look at a number and I compare China to the rest of the world, it's like, Oh, my head hurts. And so China's built all this infrastructure. It doesn't need to build a lot more, which is people are saying, well, this is a problem. It's going to, you know, it's economy is going to contract and stuff. Well, no, it's going to electrify and it's going to continue to produce all the things we need at much cheaper rates off its fresh and, you know, not requiring maintenance this decade infrastructure, unlike our crumbling western infrastructure. But if we consider cement, it's going to diminish because China's diminishing. India, Brazil, Indonesia are not going to, are not growing nearly as rapidly as China was, and aren't industrializing in the same way that China did. So they don't need the same infrastructure. They also are bringing people out of poverty, but they're not bringing 900 million people out of poverty. I'll say there's one thing that Mao did, which was, positive, which was gender equality, but everything else kind of sucked. You know, and so, they've done an enormous job. They've brought 850 or 900 million of their population out of poverty. India only is at 11 percent in deep poverty. Right. So it's not nearly as many people. Brazil is at, you know, 30 or 40 million people in deep poverty. It's just not the same volumes. They don't need to build as many cities. They don't need to build as many of the other things. And so their demand is going to be lower, but we're still going to need a lot of, of something like cement. And in my case, I'm looking at, cross laminated timber or mass timber or engineered hardwood, depending on the terminology used, basically you take a ton of hardwood and you turn it into a plywood, but a very hard plywood and use that as a beam or a floor or a wall. And it takes about a fifth by mass of the hardwood as it does of concrete, reinforced concrete. So that's a lot less cement and concrete already. And it's much lower carbon emissions because it was growing instead of us baking off limestone into cement and emitting all that carbon dioxide. And so that's good. And then, oh. It drank in a lot of carbon dioxide when it was growing. It breathed out most of the oxygen, but it kept the carbon for its structure. So every ton of engineered hardwood is an embodied, sequestered ton of carbon dioxide. So when we build a tall building, and in Milwaukee I think it is, they're actually planning a 55 story building with engineered hardwood cross laminated timber construction. They already have a 23 story one. This is completely fit for purpose for very tall buildings. It's much structurally stronger than concrete. And the nice thing about cross laminated timber, by the way Tom, the components get manufactured in a factory ship just in time to buildings and the buildings go up much faster. Don't have to wait for the cement to set. You can actually build a building a lot faster with this technology. It's just in the west we're pretending that it's useful for individual detached homes, especially in North America. And that's not where its value proposition is. Value proposition is in real buildings, not, you know, ranch style homes in Texas. But that all that said, we're still going to need a lot of cement. And cement it's really hard to replace limestone economically because limestone is just dead shellfish from old seabeds

Tom Raftery: 35:43

Hmm.

Michael Barnard: 35:44

And they were everywhere. And so we can get limestone on every continent in large quantities close to the surface in big quarries It's hard to beat that as a raw material, so that's a place where we're going to use carbon capture. And there's some great solutions out there like Sublime Systems. It does electrochemistry, grind the limestone, shove it into an electrochemical reaction, and cold, carbon dioxide in a pure gas stream at 10 atmospheres of pressure comes out of it. And that's perfect for capturing,

Tom Raftery: 36:18

Right.

Michael Barnard: 36:19

Right? it is not seven hundred to nine hundred degrees in a big furnace, which is kind of the alternative. And so there's some stuff there, but we're going to capture that. The problem though, is what are you going to do with the carbon dioxide once we've captured it?

Tom Raftery: 36:33

That was my question.

Michael Barnard: 36:33

Like Limestone is everywhere. Limestone is everywhere. And so are cement plants. Cement plants are wherever the demand is because cement is heavy. And we mine the limestone close to where the demand is because limestone is heavy.

Tom Raftery: 36:47

Hmm.

Michael Barnard: 36:48

Like there's a whole bunch of places where there's limestone where we don't quarry it and turn it into cement because we don't need cement there. That's kind of the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, those places aren't great places to shove carbon dioxide underground and sequester it,

Tom Raftery: 37:04

Yep.

Michael Barnard: 37:05

Right? So there is overlap. What I say is where, and I've done the math on this and you can read articles that I've published assessing this in my 40 odd thousand words on cement and concrete globally, including my projection of, you know, demand through 2100. But basically compared to the alternatives, where a cement plant exists that also has really right next to it a good place for carbon dioxide sequestration, then that will probably pencil out as a place to do, carbon capturing sequestration off that waste stream. But in other places, what we'll do is replace it with, epoxies effectively, geo epoxies made from waste streams from blast furnaces, from bauxite processing into aluminum, stuff like that. We've got alternatives, and we use a lot of cross laminated timber wherever there's forests that can be sustainably harvested. We'll stop, you know, we'll take 500 million tons of stuff we turn into chopsticks and paper napkins that are single use, and we'll turn that into buildings instead. Right? And so, there's pathways through this, but we're going to do some of that. And so, a reasonable question, and you've got to, actually, I see a reasonable question forming in your mind.

Tom Raftery: 38:27

Yeah. So I was going to say that that cross laminating solution, to go back to your earlier expression, will that scale?

Michael Barnard: 38:35

Oh, yeah, we have, uh, you know, we have forests all over the world and, you know, frankly, this is actually a really interesting opportunity for the developing world where most new buildings will be built over the next decades because they have lots of forests and sustainable forestry with electrified forestry equipment and electrified distribution and transportation. They have all the, a lot of what's required for that is software tools, which are absurdly transportable. All of the ability to do the load and stress engineering in software used to be really nerdy people in mostly, European and North American universities who'd be engaged to do some of the stress engineering. Now you can do it on a PC or a Mac anywhere in the world. All right, we've got all the technology for that. It's a huge part of it. And that, by the way, also reduces our cement and concrete load because we can actually build walls and buildings that are only as big as they need to be because we've got this, software which enables us to do this. It's another place where software is going to enable us to be less wasteful, but, The next question is, well, why next to it? Why not just pipe it somewhere? Why not just put CO2 in pipelines just as we do with other gases and liquids today and move it to where there are good places to shove it, like in the North Sea of Europe, like where you are outside of Seville, right?

Tom Raftery: 40:03

Yep.

Michael Barnard: 40:05

Outside of Seville in Spain, there's North Sea is not that far away. There's pipelines going around the place already. So why not put CO2 in a pipeline? Well there's some challenges there. So I, I'm going to take you from Seville to Satartia.

Tom Raftery: 40:22

Oh yeah.

Michael Barnard: 40:22

Satartia is a little town in Mississippi. And when I say a little town, I'm going to say, actually, that's, that's overstating its size. It's a tiny, I'm not even sure village is enough to describe it. It has 43 residents. It's a hamlet. It's, it's like a collection of buildings with a crossroad. and It had a 43 permanent residents in the town and, you know, a couple of hundred in the sprawling district. This is not a, you know, a densely populated part of Mississippi, which is not a densely populated state in Southeastern United States. Well, three or four years ago, they had this challenge. The people in Satartia heard a bang. And then a few minutes later, they saw this slightly tinged cloud of stuff rolling towards them across the ground and it smelled bad. And then a few dozen of them were asphyxiating, unconscious on the ground. And That's kind of a problem, and that was a carbon dioxide pipeline a mile away, 1. 6 kilometers away. So what happens is, in order for us to move gas effectively through a pipeline, we need to pressurize it, or we need to liquefy it. Carbon dioxide as a gas it's really convenient to pressurize until it's liquid, and it's easier to pump liquids because they're incompressible. Gases are compressible, so it's more efficient to pump them along if they're in liquid form. And so we do that in various places, mostly in the United States, because it's used for enhanced oil recovery. So this pipeline was going from one place where there is too much carbon dioxide attached to natural gas. They sucked it out of the ground. They compressed it. They shoved in the pipeline when there was a customer for it. Otherwise, it just vented to the atmosphere because why not? And then they pump it in to create, get more oil out of the ground later. But in this case, this liquid carbon dioxide in the pipeline, well, there's a little bit of rain in the area. Climate change had changed the soil dynamics because there was excess precipitation, the rain. What are the thoughts, and the pipeline was stretched until it separated. You know, didn't break in a shear, didn't puncture, it just popped, like, you know, pull apart, trying to imagine, take a piece of spaghetti in your hands, and then rip it apart, and that's kind of what happened. And so, this liquid carbon dioxide, well, it flashed to vapor. And liquid carbon dioxide is 590 times more dense than gaseous carbon dioxide, so it turned into this big cloud. There were trace elements of some really nasty stuff, but well below the level of fatality or concern for human beings, but that's what smelled. And then it rolled downhill. And you say to yourself, it's a gas. Why didn't you just dissipate into the atmosphere? Well, it did eventually, but it didn't do it immediately. The gas, carbon dioxide, is heavier than oxygen or nitrogen, which are the two primary gases in our atmosphere. And so it sank to the ground and rolled downhill and collected in dips and hollows. And then it rolled across a highway. A couple of people who were pulled off in a rest stop were left unconscious in their car. And then it rolled another 1.6 kilometers over the hamlet, or minor village, or whatever we want to call it, of Satartia, and left everybody unconscious. A couple of hundred people were evacuated, and evacuation was hard, because human beings and internal combustion engines both require oxygen, and the carbon dioxide, displaced all the oxygen so we couldn't breathe and the car engines wouldn't start and emergency response vehicles couldn't drive into Satartia. So everybody is like stuck until that dissipated enough that and it did dissipate But even then hours later hours later in some of the rooms inside the buildings in Satartia, the concentrations were high enough to be lethal in a few minutes, like 30,000 parts of carbon dioxide. If people had been stuck in there, they would have been dead. It was lucky nobody died. Now, you say to yourself, who cares? That's sparsely populated Mississippi, it's, you know, rare occurrence, except that the Europe wants to put 19,000 kilometers of carbon dioxide pipelines to send captured CO2 to sequestration sites through many of the most densely populated parts of Europe. It's, oh dear. And so we kind of sit there and go, yeah, okay, maybe not. And briefly, as I said at the beginning, I'll repeat it. ExxonMobil claims to be the most experienced and virtuous carbon capture organization in the world. Mostly due to their Chutes Creek facility. Up to 7 million tons of carbon, dioxide is sequestered every year. Yay. Except they're pumping it out from underground as part of natural gas. They only. pipe it when they actually have a customer who wants it for enhanced oil recovery, otherwise they've entered the atmosphere. And when they do sequester it underground, it's doing enhanced oil recovery, which is producing more oil, which when burned as intended, turns into more carbon dioxide than was sequestered. So they're taking carbon dioxide out from underground, putting it in underground in another place to get out more carbon dioxide and they're getting money for this and marketing value. So many of these facilities, that's what they are.

Tom Raftery: 46:20

Terrific.

Michael Barnard: 46:21

Last point, probably hydrogen. There's a lot of, you know, the great hope for the fossil fuel industry is hydrogen for energy. If they can convince the world to go down that stupid path. You and I talked about it a couple of years ago. Then they either defer real climate action for a decade while pumping more fossil fuels, or they convince governments to give them a lot of money for things like blue hydrogen, which, oh, captures the carbon dioxide off of natural gases. It's turned into hydrogen and pumps it underground, with tax dollars.. So, yeah, carbon capture and sequestration, direct air capture, there's a few niches where it pencils out, but mostly it's a big distraction that plays directly into human belief that somebody will come along and clean it up. It's like you go to a beach and you say, Oh, I forgot to clean up my litter, but somebody will come along and clean that up.

Tom Raftery: 47:16

Yeah.

Michael Barnard: 47:17

That's okay.

Tom Raftery: 47:19

Mike, we are at the end of the show, unfortunately, because I could listen to this and learn more about it for hours and hours and hours, but I have a hard stop. So if people would like to know more, Mike, about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Michael Barnard: 47:39

LinkedIn, Michael Barnard on LinkedIn, not the lawyer in Vancouver, not the director in, Philadelphia or Phoenix, but Michael Barnard, who actually does stuff with climate change.

Tom Raftery: 47:51

Okay, I'll, I'll put your LinkedIn link in the show notes, so everyone has access to it. Mike, thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Michael Barnard: 47:57

Oh, Pleasure as always, Tom, and you know, I'll continue with my hat envy, until I actually get around to getting hats again. Take care, Tom, and, I'll talk to you again sometime soon.

Tom Raftery: 48:08

Superb. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.