Carbon Sequestration

Carbon Sequestration is going to do no good. It will just allow the polluters to continue to pollute.

There is a term that you would have heard often - Net Zero. Companies like to throw these terms around to say how environmentally friendly they are.

Many even have target dates for reaching Net Zero.

What does Net Zero really mean?

In my opinion, it should mean that the company is producing ZERO carbon emissions through its operations. But there is a qualifier - NET.

English is a great language you can qualify a word and make it mean something different. It can still fool the layperson.

If a company said we would reach “Zero” Carbon Emission then my definition would have been correct. But they added the qualifier “Net”. That addition means that they will continue to pollute but do other things that will, for lack of a better word, undo the pollution.

In the “Net Zero” universe, it is assumed that the only kind of pollution is that of adding carbon dioxide to the air and if we nullify it, everything will be hunky-dory.

Reductionism

The first problem with this way of thinking is that it is very reductionist. Let me explain that.

Let us take Lithium as an example.

Source: Mining.com

Lithium exists as a salty brine under the surface of the earth. This brine (salt water) is pumped to the desert land, held in artificial pools, and allowed to evaporate. In the above image, the Blue pits are freshly pumped brine which has a mixture of Lithium, Potassium and Sodium. Over consecutive pumping separation, you reach the yellow brine which is pure Lithium Carbonate. It takes two years to go from Blue to Yellow. The saving grace is that they let the sun do the evaporation rather than firing up a power plant to heat and evaporate.

You are digging vast areas of land to create these brine pits and according to some estimates close to 1 Olympic Swimming pool’s worth of brine is pumped out every 20 minutes. These brine pits are so huge, they are visible in satellite images. You can check them out here.

This part of the process is very visible. It makes the “Green” businesses look bad. Hence countless companies are working on skipping this process using another technique called Direct Lithium Extraction. It is just as bad, just less visible.

The dirty part begins after this.

Once the brine in the evaporation pond has reached an ideal lithium concentration, the brine is pumped to a lithium recovery facility for extraction. This process varies depending upon the brine field composition, but usually entails the following steps: ▪ Pretreatment. This step usually employs filtration and/or ion exchange (IX) purification to remove any contaminants or unwanted constituents from the brine. ▪ Chemical treatment. Next, a series of chemical solvents and reagents may be applied to isolate desirable products and byproducts through precipitation.
▪ Filtration. **The brine is then filtered to separate out precipitated solids.
▪ Saleable lithium production. 
The brine is finally treated with a reagent, such as sodium carbonate to form lithium carbonate, and the product is then filtered and dried for sale. Depending upon the desired product, different reagents may be applied to produce other commonly sold forms of lithium, such as lithium hydroxide, lithium chloride, lithium bromide, and butyl lithium.

Source: Samcotech

Most of this process involves heavy use of water to clean and purify which is then drained into rivers. To obtain Lithium that is pure enough to be used on a battery, the Carbonates need to be removed. The chemical treatment mentioned above is an “Acid Wash”.

Extracting lithium from low-grade ore generates a lot of waste including tailings and lithium feldspar powder, all of which needs treating.

Yichun’s Environment Protection Bureau (EPB) suspects the pollution of the Jin River is related to lithium production in its jurisdiction. The Jin is the primary water source for residents in seven cities and townships and has been “visibly abnormal both in colour and smell”. The EPB has ordered Yongxing Materials, Yichun’s leading lithium refiner, to suspend production until the investigation is over. Two other companies have also halted operations but did not connect their decision to the investigation, according to The Paper.

Source: China Dialogue

Not to mention, the removal of the Carbonate ion means some kind of CO2 generation takes place when Lithium is produced. If these reports are emerging out of China, you can imagine how bad the state on the ground is.

Currently, most lithium is extracted from hard rock mines or underground brine reservoirs, and much of the energy used to extract and process it comes from CO2-emitting fossil fuels. Particularly in hard rock mining, for every tonne of mined lithium, 15 tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the air.

[…]

Manufacturing also adds to these batteries’ eco-footprint, Shao-Horn says. To synthesize the materials needed for production, heat between 800 to 1,000 degrees Celsius is needed—a temperature that can only cost-effectively be reached by burning fossil fuels, which again adds to CO2 emissions.

[…]

Exactly how much CO2 is emitted in the long process of making a battery can vary a lot depending on which materials are used, how they’re sourced, and what energy sources are used in manufacturing. The vast majority of lithium-ion batteries—about 77% of the world’s supply—are manufactured in China, where coal is the primary energy source. (Coal emits roughly twice the amount of greenhouse gases as natural gas, another fossil fuel that can be used in high-heat manufacturing.)

For illustration, the Tesla Model 3 holds an 80 kWh lithium-ion battery. CO2 emissions for manufacturing that battery would range between 2400 kg (almost two and a half metric tons) and 16,000 kg (16 metric tons). Just how much is one ton of CO2? As much as a typical gas-powered car emits in about 2,500 miles of driving—just about the same weight as a great white shark!

Source: MIT Climate Portal

So by using an electric car, you just make sure you emit the amount of carbon you would have, driving a petrol-powered car for 40,000 miles or ~60,000 Km even before you sit in it.

The reductionism inherent is that one looks only at the carbon emissions, the ruined river does not figure anywhere in the matrix, let alone the downstream effects of the ruined river. The destroyed land, the animals dead and perhaps even the humans are of no concern. We are going green!

I should have probably picked Copper as the metal instead of Lithium. In the process of trying to emphasise the reductionism involved, I scored the second goal of showing grow green technology is not green at all.

Carbon Sequestration

Then comes the removal of the carbon from the atmosphere. The simplest way known to do this is by planting trees. They need to absorb carbon to grow, they turn it into cellulose.

The other means are artificial and normally involve taking carbon dioxide from the air and concentrating it first. Much like the LPG we use, we can compress it to the point of liquefaction and then bury it inside the ground OR We make the gas react with other materials or gases and then bury them in the ground.

Essentially all sequestration involves making carbon dioxide react at scale in a manner that traps it and then burying it in the ground, from where it came out.

The rivers and lands be damned but we will remove the carbon and everything will go back to normal.

Napoleon

Napoleon lost in 1814 and was exiled to Elba and eventually transferred to Saint Helena. His health deteriorated over the years on the Island and he died due to a stomach ailment. Later upon examination, they found a high concentration of arsenic in his hair. He had been slowly poisoned to death by Arsenic.

Now, Arsenic is detrimental to health, but say I told you I had a way of “sequestering” Arsenic. For the sake of economic growth, have some Arsenic every day, we will eventually sequester it and reach Net Zero.

Would you like to have some?

Net Zero

If Net Zero does not work for your body how can it work for the planet?

I would like to ask the CEO of every company pledging to Net Zero to take up the Arsenic Challenge.

Net Zero assumes this super reductionist view, where the pollution that we are causing does not interact with anything else. The Carbon in the atmosphere is just sitting around waiting to be taken away by this incredible invention.

Further, it does away completely with all other forms of pollution including in landfills, waterways, and the death of all other fauna.

Most people are just struggling to make ends meet and have no time to question the companies about how they do things. Net Zero stickers are a great way to fool those masses into believing that the companies are doing great things to undo the damage their businesses cause to the environment.