As governments dither about greenhouse gases, billionaire Richard Branson offers a reward for removing excess carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Billionaire Richard Branson is on a tear these days. Last year at Bill Clinton's Global Initiative meeting in New York, Branson announced that he would spend $3 billion of his Virgin profits to research and develop renewable-energy technologies. Now he has announced a $25 million prize for anyone who creates a system that removes at least one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in each of ten years.
Removing carbon dioxide is key here. Anyone who has read global-warming studies or seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth knows that even if we stop increasing greenhouse gases and level off carbon dioxide, much damage has already been done. Nearly every scientist in the field agrees that human consumption of fossil fuels has already caused global temperatures to climb and ancient ice in Greenland and Antarctica to melt as seas slowly begin to rise.
A panel of environmentalist heavyweights will judge Branson's prize: former vice president Al "Inconvenient Truth" Gore; Jim Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute; James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory; Australian conservationist Tim Flannery; and Crispin Tickell, director of the Policy Foresight Programme at Oxford University, UK.
One contender might be Craig Venter, cosequencer of the human genome and the man Time magazine once called the "bad boy of science." Venter has been working with Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith to build from scratch a synthetic organism they want to program at the DNA level to consume carbon dioxide. Venter and Smith have been quiet about the project recently, suggesting that they are having a tough time.
As interesting as the prize is this burgeoning age of billionaires doing the work that nations used to. More accurately, we are returning to an era before governments took the lead in community efforts, when tycoons gave large chunks of their money to worthy causes. Think Andrew Carnegie and Leland Stanford in the nineteenth century. These fellows were robber barons, and Branson is not, as far as we know. Nor are his fellow billionaire givers Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, though Gates has been every bit as ruthless as any business titan from the 1800s. (Ask Jim Clark of Netscape.) The intent with all of these men is the same: to be remembered for doing great things rather than for being merely uber-rich.
Still, there are two excellent reasons for us to be pleased that Branson is offering his prize. First is the failure of world governments to take decisive action on even slowing the growth of human-produced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, never mind removing the gases we have already pumped into our air. The lead ditherer is the Bush Administration, which still officially denies that increases in greenhouse gases are as dire as scientists say and that human activity is to blame.
Second, Branson has seized on the idea of a prize to encourage exactly what needs to be encouraged: innovation by individuals. As he noted in his announcement last week, this sort of prize has a great tradition going back to at least the eighteenth century, when the British Parliament offered a then princely sum of 20,000 pounds to the first inventor to come up with a method for accurately measuring longitude at sea. Clockmaker John Harrison won, as recounted in Dava Sobel's wonderful little book, Longitude. Another model was Branson's own $10 million X-Prize handed out in 2004 for inventing and flying the first privately built spaceship.
Branson has added a caveat to his prize. The winner gets $5 million up front but must wait ten years to validate the system to get the other $20 million. Winners will have to find their own financing in the meantime, though Branson has said that he will help promising technologies find funding if their inventors are having trouble.
With all of Branson's do-good bravado, there is a dark cloud above his environmentalist credentials. His businesses include Virgin Air and the Virgin railway system, which contribute to greenhouse gases. I happened to fly a Virgin Boeing 747 to London just last week, and I rode to Manchester and back in one of Branson's trains. They are cool and colorful and modern, but they also pollute.
This suggests that Branson's $25 million, added to his $3 billion for research, should be considered a down payment on the billions he has made from businesses that spew carbon dioxide into the air. It is a payback to be emulated by others who have made billions, or even mere millions. A billionaire movement may already have begun. Late last year Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin promised $1 billion to their new charity Google.org, which lists alternative energy as a major focus.
If we are lucky, the billionaires will try to out-billion each other. Let's hope it's not too late.
Comments
mbmurphy777 on 02/13/2007 at 10:55 AM
14
Pyrolyze biomass (heat in a restricted O2 atmosphere), run the pyrolysis gases (which contain about 1/2 the energy of the biomass) through a solid oxide fuel cell to convert them to electricity at 50% (already better than the standard 30% for steam turbines and rapidly improving) efficiency. The rest of the biomass is converted into charcoal (pure carbon... 30% by wt of the origional biomass) and ash (minerals); the carbon can then be buried (or run through a direct carbon fuel cell to get more electricity).
If buried, this will have the effect of sequestering the CO2 (charcoal is very stable and non toxic) out of the atmosphere (the biomass pulls it out of the atmosphere and incorporates it into the plant cell wall) allowing us to go carbon negative). The charcoal can even be blended into soil to improve crop yields (by helping soil to hold on to water and nutrients), thus replenishing lost top soil.
As noted in this essay, the CO2 given off by the SOFC exhaust could be sequestered by algae, creating biodiesel and starch (which can be converted into ethanol). This could then be used as transportation fuel or heating oil. Alternatively, this could be fed back into the pyrolysis process to capture even more CO2.
The same could be done for coal plants, or other ways of CO2 sequestration could be utilized.
Increased use of wind, solar, geothermal, Coal CO2 sequestration, and biomass CO2 sequestration (perhaps in combination with injection of sulfur based microparticles into the stratosphere) offer a solution for the long term:
http://www.springer-sbm.com/index.php?id=291&backPID=132&L=0&tx_tnc_news=2646
It'd be hard to get agreement on this type of intervention, but it is worth looking into
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2006/04/braking-before-environment-crash.html#links
Using sulfur based microparticulates delivered into the stratosphere could mitigate much of the expected warming, until there is a technological breakthrough in energy generation.
Of course, playing with a complex system like climate can be dangerous (which is why agreement on even a pilot study will be difficult).
sceptic on 02/13/2007 at 12:55 PM
1
mbmurphy777 on 02/14/2007 at 12:11 PM
14
http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/
climate/2001-05-23-warming-and-trees.htm
The biomass pyrolysis scheme noted above could replace a fair portion of fosil fuel consumption for electrical generation (50%, and that number could go up if SOFC efficiencies continue to climb)... thus displacing tons of CO2 production AND at the same time sequester nearly 1/2 billion tons of carbon (the equivalent of approximately 1.5 billion tons per year of CO2).
So go ahead and plant some trees, but refrain from summary dismissal of potentially complementary ideas.
Todd on 02/13/2007 at 2:03 PM
5
MITBeta on 02/14/2007 at 8:34 AM
21
Todd on 02/15/2007 at 5:54 PM
5
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/09/nbranson109.xml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/09/AR2007020900693.html
cornstoves on 02/14/2007 at 8:22 PM
2
Also notice the offer is only $5 mill up front and not $25 as advertised. The rate of return is rather disingenious.
abcarterjr on 02/13/2007 at 3:54 PM
45
to the level of a city storm drain. The stack
could create a draft to move the city storm drain
air through CO2 scrubbers( perhaps Algae Tube
Farms) before exhausting the scrubbed air back into the upper level city atmosphere.
corporatedave on 02/14/2007 at 9:36 AM
11
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/science/earth/13tier.html
David Ewing Duncan on 02/14/2007 at 9:52 AM
2
apblake on 02/14/2007 at 2:59 PM
1
Barring the pumping of CO2 back into the ground as a gas which is pretty expensive and currently hinged to pumping large amounts of carbon out of the ground, there are only two ways to solve the problem:
1. Use solar energy to replace oil use ( I don't know if this would even count as fulfilling the challenge)
2. If the above does not count, then use solar energy to create solid forms of stable carbon that can be buried.
Both of the above can be done, the only problem is that 1 billion tons of carbon removal is on the same order of magnitude as displacing all of the oil used for transportation in the United States. So, in the best case, $25 million dollars is being offered to come up with a way to create oil from solar energy that costs less than oil out of the ground (Unless subsidies are used, it would have to be economically viable). In the second case, $25 million dollars is being offered to come up with a self sustaining system that creates carbon from solar energy at a rate equal to oil consumption in the US.
Both of these goals are ridiculous when only $25 million dollars are on the table. I think the challenge would have been more appropriate if the same money was offered for a smaller scale result.
mswisher on 02/15/2007 at 10:58 AM
5
Pellionisz on 02/16/2007 at 3:28 PM
1
The "Hydrogen economy" through "Synthetic Genomics" (by modifying the DNA of eg. Mycoplasma Genitalium) is one of such declared goals (another is to team up with potent IT partner such as Google).
As for the "Hydrogen program", as recently as in the "Atlantic Monthly Jan/Feb 07" Venter was very adamant and up-to-date about accomplishing this goal within the lifetime (of the no longer very young) "Ham" Smith and himself. (Venter is turning 60). One hurdle that may need to be overcome is the fact that even the smallest DNA of a free-living organism (Mycoplasma G.) contains almost 8% so-called "junk" DNA. (Even the "non-coding" adjective may only apply only in the orthodox sense...). However, for one I have every reason to trust that Venter (and his ventures...) have the capability and wherewithals to focus on the problem of "gene regulation" of the smallest number of genes - and thus will kill two birds with one stone:
Understand "gene regulation" - and thus have even better chance for modifying the genome towards a "hydrogen economy".
Excerpts of the piece can be found at http://www.junkdna.com (doing a "find" for Venter lots of information will pop up).
Rooting for Venter,
pellionisz_at_junkdna.com
abcarterjr on 02/18/2007 at 1:45 PM
45
Electrical generation Biomass burning Plant in
NE AZ. will be on stream late 2007 and will
emit byproduct CO2. Suggest byproduct CO2 & water
from this plant be utilized by Algae Farmers
contiguous to the plant site. Algae Farmers
can grow Algae in water in closed tubes with by-
product CO2 and produce Algae Oil as well as
a low moisture fuel for the plant. Algae Oil
value is explained elswhere in the literature.
bernard via on 02/21/2007 at 4:21 PM
1
Cpt_Nemo on 02/21/2007 at 8:55 PM
14
Branson needs to analyse the carbon dioxide output of his various businesses, in particular the airline, train, and spaceflight divisions. Participating in talks with the companies that developed these engines to see if they could work on a new fuel that doesn't produce the excessive emissions in the first place.
It would be a good place to practice the ideas he claims to support first(put your money where your mouth is!!) - otherwise he is just greenwashing - and is just wasting both his and our time!!