 All right, well welcome everyone to the final panel of the day on carbon management My name is Sarah Salzer. I'm the managing director of the Stanford Center for carbon carbon storage and also helping to Organize some of the carbon management activities here at Stanford We've got a neat panel for you today. We've got three speakers We've got Allison Hoyt who's an assistant professor of earth system science We've got Tony Kovsak a professor of energy resources engineering and Connor Nolan a postdoctoral fellow from the Woods Institute for the environment So to kick things off I'm just gonna say a few words But each presenter will be speaking for 15 minutes and we're gonna ask you to hold your questions to the very end Where we'll have a panel where you can ask any of your questions and I'll just ask one question to get it all started But carbon management is a really very very broad space and Actually, many of the panel sessions that we've already had today have covered many of the areas that are within the carbon management Landscape and when we think of carbon management, we can think of it as atmospheric restoration Getting the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere that can encompass either point source carbon capture or direct air capture It can also involve not just co2, but methane or n2o or other items and It it can also involve natural climate solutions and then of course once we get the greenhouse gases out We need to figure out. What are we going to do with them or we're going to dispose of them? So that's where carbon conversion Utilization geologic storage all come into play and then what ties it all together is systems modeling in In terms of the carbon management landscape at Stanford We actually have activities going on in all of these different areas And this slide just highlights in the simple count of the number of faculty of The number of faculty that are doing work in each of these areas and you can see just from this that we've got a quite a Quite a bit of faculty doing quite a bit of work in these areas We also have various programs centers Initiatives and things that have been set up to cover some of these areas the research going on in some of these areas For example, we've got Suncat We had a lot of them up on the stage in the last panel dealing with carbon conversion and convert and utilization We have the Stanford Center for carbon storage dealing obviously with geologic storage of co2 And we've got the Woods Institute natural capital project and the Center for ocean solutions Which I'll deal with natural climate solutions and tying it all together again is the energy modeling forum dealing with systems modeling Point source carbon capture direct air capture and methane and N2O Removal are all going to be part of the new door school accelerator first destination focus area which was announced just a couple of weeks ago and Of course the solution space that the that the focus area will be covering is not just Engineering it's also going to cover natural solutions and the focus will be on technical financial and policy gaps and Next year hopefully we will hear some of the neat and interesting research that comes out of this new destination focus area for the school Carbon conversion and carbon utilization were discussed both in the last panel, but also in some of the panels this morning And I did want to mention that tomorrow morning There will be a panel that does a lot of the energy systems modeling that we do here at Stanford So what we're going to focus on today is two remaining areas in the landscape Geologic storage of co2 and natural climate solutions So the speakers for this session in the correct order this time are Tony Kov sec Connor Nolan and then Allison Hoyt So I'd like to start by inviting Tony Kov sec up to the stage to talk about risk assessment of geologic carbon storage So I'm going to talk to you about really sort of a workflow that we've been using to understand Actually specific sites where we might want to store carbon and we're working in sort of two geographic areas the Gulf of Mexico and in the San Joaquin Valley, so I'm going to Talk to you mainly about the San Joaquin Valley Because I had a lot of slides ready to go. So there are You know, there are a whole host of risks that could be associated with Geological carbon storage GCS the probably the primary risk in the San Joaquin Valley is Leakage along an existing well bore as you see on the you know that the two wells sort of on the left of your of the slide there There also is possibility for induced seismicity. So earthquakes and then slip along, you know, the pre-existing faults that you see Sort of in the middle of the middle of the figure And then of course there's undesired plume migration here. It's showing plume migration upward It also could be plume migration Out of sort of the area of interest for you So we have a top-down workflow and I'll take you through it at a pretty high level, but it consists of site selection and then regional techno economics Some collection of background information to understand seismicity in the area storage reservoir engineering and We believe it's important to do coupled flow and mechanical calculations especially if you're interested in things like induced seismicity and then basically leakage in and seismicity risk assessment So I'll show you the kind of the end result here of a relatively Full set of site selection criteria So this again is the you know, the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley You can see the city of Fresno sort of up at the top and Bakersfield is hidden there in the in all of the green so what we have done here is screened for Location of faults screened for past location of earthquakes screened for sensitive habitats parks You know national historical kind of sites and the remainder here is what you see in in in green is potential sailing formations and the red and the gray are or our oil fields. So there are there's gigaton potential here in the in the San Joaquin Valley. So the the next step is to you know do some techno economics there are a lot of incentives now for you know for storing CO2 and this is a Kind of one of one of the results here. We use a tool called SIM CCS. There's a commercial version of that. There's also a Basically a publicly available version of that and what you need to see or know here is that in the see in the SIM CCS Language things that are like negative. So like you see the red. That's a negative cost. So that's actually Revenue right so it's net revenue so the Scenario on the left is the so-called cap mode where we have decided to basically collect and store all of the point source emissions in our air of interest which is Kern County and the LA Basin and On the right is a scenario where we want to maximize revenue. So both of these Scenarios actually make money. You can see in red and this cap mode. It's about $320 million of revenue and then the the the price mode which has been optimized is a little under a billion dollars of revenue. So The difference in what stored is The cap stores about 40 million tons per year of CO2 and the and the price mode stores about 20 million tons of CO2 So that's a lot of CO2 that's being stored regardless So, you know, this is a prospective area To to store CO2 is the is the answer. So in terms of you know, some of the other things that we do We want to collect background information on seismicity. So this is a site that we've identified The first circle is a radius of 10 kilometers around sort of that site On here, you see earthquakes Indicated by The red circles and the bigger the circle the bigger the earthquake. So about the maximum around here is maybe magnitude five Or so there's also faults. So you see the numbered faults in there and we've I won't show you this But we've considered, you know slip on those faults So sort of now that we've sort of characterized the site a Fair amount of storage reservoir engineering we've done. So I'm showing you here on the left a compilation of a bunch of Simulations so on the y-axis is the size of the CO2 plume and then on the x-axis is the pressure buildup So, you know, if you want to minimize risk, you want to be down in the lower left-hand corner there, right? So small plume size small pressure Buildup the view on the right is a view of the storage formation a cross section through it So you can see the injector well, so it's actually it's a it's a horizontal well So it comes down and it actually goes that well goes down dip through the bottom of the bottom of the formation and the red is the CO2 content the CO2 saturation and This is actually at the end of injection which in this project is 20 actually it's 18 years And so you can see the CO2 is all in the bottom of the formation. It's all a nice compact You know a nice compact plume the arrow on the bottom indicates, you know a six mile transect So this is pretty close to our best case that you that you see there Okay, so from this best case scenario we can Make an estimate of what the plume looks like on the surface So you see on the left the the solid blue line is the shape of the plume 100 years post injection as I mentioned we also do mechanics and so We're predicting So the figure on the right is uplift. It's about three centimeters of uplift or point one eight feet So actually this surface is going to go up this is the the maximum right because there is a An injection site schedule here that has a maximum injection rate and then it's lesser over time So this is the maximum surface deformation Again, we're looking at mechanics. We're trying to understand all of the potential risks, right? So we want to understand these things also to in terms of monitoring The surface, you know the actual what happens at the surface is something monitorable and as a way to Tell yourself or you know to check your predictions and try to understand if your predictions are Actually being borne out while you're injecting CO2 so The the other kind of really big part of this There's two really big parts of the of the risk assessment first one is Leakage so what we are concerned with are two things one is upward migration of CO2 We're also worried about pushing brine out of the storage formation up into an overlying overlying formation This site it's pretty interesting It has things that I identified as underground sources of drinking water But if you actually looked at that nobody would want to drink that water because it's it's really pretty saline But it's been identified that way. So we have to treat it that way so the the model that we use here is from the national risk assessment project and wrap and It takes the results from those Reservoir simulations that I just showed you and it takes those as input and it calculates Basically the rate of escape along along well bores Because you have a penetration. It also calculates An estimate of the upward migration of fluids through the cap rock on the on the formation But the primary, you know conduits are our well bores So I'll show you some results here. The the basic story is this this area doesn't leak. Okay? So this these are worst-case scenarios where we assumed the high end of permeability along the well bores on You know not a well bore that's open, but a well bore with that's significantly damaged and You know you see leakage of brine and you see leakage of co2 on the left on the right is the Ratio of co2 loop leaked to what you injected And on the right hand side of that figure on the right. It shows you the cumulative CO2 injection in in green so at 150 years, it's it's You know the leakage rates are orders of parts per million, right? So one part in a million of co2 that you injected so much less Then even you know like the upper threshold that some people suggested of like 1% so this you know effectively You know, this is not a very this is a good place for for co2 storage then you know we've done all of the Calculations understand the size of the plume to understand the deformation of the surface We also lay her on top of this a seismicity assessment And so it can take a minute to explain this figure so on the y-axis is the distance from the injection well and On the x-axis is time, but you see zero is kind of in the middle So we haven't started injecting yet. So it's a look back in time of a few years and What you see layered on top of this is basically the seismicity so the circles indicate the size of the earthquakes from 1950 to present and then the coloring gives you a sense of the ground shaking so the seismicity rate is there Okay, so This is looking out very far from the injection site, right? So we are Only predicting the plume to be a few kilometers and in fact on this figure you see the predicted plume size with error bars on You know for going from zero, right? So it's all within five kilometers And all within five kilometers there is essentially no seismicity at this side are very very small amount of seismicity so That's the you know, this is sort of the forward look here of what we expect might happen behind this there will be monitoring and We are proposing a traffic light system, right? So there are different colors here to indicate how the operations should Continue so Basically no seismic events are green continue injecting Small seismic events say magnitude two or less you know with some notification to the Right to the regulatory agencies To understand what they might want to do and then things such as you know the seismic events are greater than three Which would mean immediately stop and and assess what you're doing And then figure out what the what the problem is So that's the end of the workflow and those are my acknowledgments and that's all that I have to say Our next speaker is Connor Nolan and the title of his talk is the role of nature in carbon removal portfolios Thanks Sarah, thanks for the organizers excited to be here to talk to you My name is Connor Nolan I'm a postdoc in the Woods Institute and then and I'm an ecologist and climate scientist and some of the things I've been working on lately are involved nature-based solutions and carbon removal I would just start with this kind of idea that forests are in this kind of unique place where they're kind They're simultaneously at risk from climate change we have drought heat stress disturbance Deforestation and forest degradation, you know emit greenhouse gases and been particularly thorny problems to address but forests and nature in general can Also have a role in contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation, but we want to try to figure out the right size for that role and And the enabling conditions So the idea that forestry nature contributes to climate change mitigation It's not not a new idea. I found this report from the pre-courser of the IPCC in 1990 talking about tropical forestry response options and coming up with some similar estimates of the kind of scale That people are talking about now and but there was recent interest There's been you know interest in terms of nature representing a win-win across Climate conservation and sustainable development goals To try to get a sense of the scale that we can expect from nature We gathered a bunch of different estimates from the literature that we could find so I ended up with 42 different estimates of Papers these are just a few just of the titles and we ended up plotting them all on the like as an estimate of the Contribution to negative emissions from now to 2100 and we get a range of Estimates from you know less than a hundred billion tons to well over a thousand billion tons and so it's a really wide range and these And the orange bar here is an estimate from IPCC about the amount of negative emissions That might be needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees and you can see only the maximal Estimates get in it kind of anywhere in that range and many of the estimates are well below Since kind of par some of these estimates we came up we talked about this mental model of Whether you think about the biosphere as a silo or a haystack if the biofier is more like a silo You might be limited to refilling past losses in carbon from the biosphere from human and land use change and other things like that And then you might think of potential on the order of a few hundred billion tons or less But to get to these high-level at high estimates of a thousand gigatons You're really having to think about increasing carbon storage far beyond historical bounds in the biosphere and This kind of silo versus haystack framing kind of makes Explicit some of the implicit assumptions about biogeography and biogeochemistry and management choices and the types of the vegetation you might want to plant so I'm not going to go through this in detail, but this work is in published in nature of use earthen environment and We also looked at what kinds of constraints different estimates considered so Many of them are just purely like maximal biogeochemical potential But some consider things like maintenance of other ecosystem services The cost of implementation social political constraints and government governance and financing constraints Take away from this Work is that like right now governance and financing constraints are the near-term limiting factors But in the end biogeochemical potential do set kind of like a long long-term maximum So how do these different constraints translate to implementable potential? I think there's a really nice study from Some a group working in Southeast Asia reforestation and they they they gathered all the a bunch of data and like remote sensing data and other data To come up with a biophysical potential and then they added in layers of financial constraints land use constraints Operational constraints and found that the actual implementable potential was was well under 20% of the biophysical maximum so this is kind of illustrates the importance of these like wide range of constraints in In kind of it's not just about is it biologically feasible So we did a deep dive into all these individual estimates looked at some of the most highly constrained ones We use some of this back of the envelope kind of a fifth or less on some of the other ones in and we came up with a range of that natural Natural climate solutions can reasonably contribute something like a hundred to 200 billion tons of CO2 removal over this century and that's a huge amount It's really very very meaningful amount and it represents a huge scale up from what's currently happening But it's nowhere near probably what the ultimate need for negative emissions and carbon removal is so that leads us to like arguing for a portfolio approach where nature has a role, but it's kind of complemented with a lot of the other solutions as well and An example that we would like to point to as a kind of illustrating this portfolio approach is this Livermore lab report on getting to neutral in California in this report They found that California needs something like 125 million tons a year of negative emissions to meet state goals And they find something like 20% of that 25 million tons a year could come on natural and working lands With the remainder coming from bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and some from direct air capture with CO2 storage, so this is kind of in line with what we're saying where where nature has a role, but it's it's a part of a portfolio and So state local and national kind of action is like still in its Relatively early stages as far as carbon removal, but corporate climate plans represent kind of a Proving ground for these kinds of portfolio approaches So we've been working with some companies and thinking about like what the optimal kind of right-sizing of nature is in their portfolio So, you know Microsoft has an ambitious goal to be carbon negative by 2030 and has been talking about their Approaches this requires their goal of carbon negative requires a lot of like inexpensive Carbon removal like which often comes from nature and Stripe and Google and meta and some of the some other companies have joined as frontier, which is a big advanced market commitment to accelerate permanent technological carbon removal and These are just kind of some different examples of things are going on part of this this push is in the corporate sector and the new emphasis on quality has led to a move away from nature in favor of permanent technological carbon removal and The criticisms kind of have been on two main fronts One's additionality challenges and baselines and the other is on permanence. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about some work We've been doing on these and as a That's part of kind of like making sure nature can try to maintain a role a play a role in in carbon portfolios and carbon markets But these criticisms have been substantial and they've been they've like, you know To represent bad press which you know companies want the reputational risk of saying their climate investment wasn't successful. I think Part of what I would argue is that the bad press is that nature-based solutions have been Implemented for some number of years. So there actually is of what just a wide range and of quality and there doesn't mean that all nature is bad But it just means and there's been learning over time as these things have been implemented and we can kind of That learning doesn't have to be a crisis we can kind of The learning can be an example that we're that we have a path towards improving So additionality one of the main challenges and criticisms Has two components financial additionality, which is like what was the role of carbon financing and getting a project out the ground and then the other part of additionality is about baselines, so what do you Measure your success rate against and then avoid a deforestation project What what are you assuming the deforestation rate was in a reforestation projects? What what would be the natural regrowth in the absence of the project and there's a really difficult question to answer it relies on a unobservable counterfactual and Like when these projects were first implemented, we didn't have remote sensing and other things So projects relied on relatively weak baseline standards like just assuming zero regrowth or Assuming regional average deforestation rates and that has led to some potential over crediting but now as as advancements in Standards have started we started getting backward looking match controls which helped like to Deal with these over crediting and going forward with the new remote sensing and machine learning techniques We there's a potential for that truly dynamic match controls where projects don't even know We may not even know their baseline in advance They are they'll be measured truly with what they did that is observable and different from other projects on the ground which is to me an exciting path towards quality in this space and the idea that nature relies on a counterfactual and this it's began of Impossible to credit well. I think it's used as a cudgel against nature, but I think Counterfactuals when you look deeply actually underlie a lot of different carbon removal options, especially things like enhanced weathering which involves Adding crushed rock to agricultural fields and leading to ultimately increase carbon storage in the ocean You need a counterfactual of what would have happened in the ocean carbon sink in the absence of this project And you need to be able to measure that with high confidence So there's learning that it can be applied from the history We have with nature to these other things like enhanced weathering and this also applies to things like an ocean alkalinity enhancement And I think there's absolute even things like direct air capture which have a very clean Additionality in most arguments they may have some issues with counterfactuals in terms of what's the alternate uses of the Renewable energy that goes into power these things so kind of this dealing with counterfactuals and thinking about counterfactuals and It underlies a lot of different things in climate change vindication and carbon removal in particular so We have some forthcoming work about defining and aligning additionality across carbon markets and national inventories and global budget So we can deal that paper will be coming out for too long The other thing I'm going to talk about briefly is some work on permanence risk so permanence risk is the idea that you know There's an argument that certain during carbon in nature is inherently impermanent because it likely be released pretty prematurely and We had a master's student working on us who kind of broke up the risks here in terms of delivery risk Which is before carbon credits were issued and permanence risk Which would be after over the kind of hundred-year permanence window or whatever you want to define in a different registry Permanence risk traditionally has been handled at the registry level via buffer pools where projects Put some put some proportion of their credits for a given project into a shared buffer pool If there's a reversal event credits from the buffer pool are retired to account for the Reversal event and as long as the buffer pool remains solvent the permanence claim remains intact across all projects and I think buffer pools There's been criticism of the buffer pools are likely undercapitalized and we agree with this probably like that there is Kind of non-stationary risk and need to be accounted for with climate change But they may not fundamentally be the wrong approach and there's some interesting updates to the non-permanence risk tools from Vera and other registries that we think could be Could help solve this and but we're exploring other options as well risk and other Industries as often handled via insurance and buffer pools are a form of insurance or self insurance But there's some carbon removal insurance companies are starting to pop up Kita and Oka are to that we're aware of They are so far mainly focused on delivery risk that before the carbon credits are issued but before but after Capital is invested, but they're exploring options along with other insurance and reinsurance companies to develop Permanence risk tools Permits risk is kind of difficult because obviously no one's writing in a hundred a hundred year insurance policy But there have been some proposals of a writing Series of short-term insurance policies that may have an obligation to renew over the life of a credit or a claim And you either renew the policy or you replace the carbon credit So, you know, there's insurance industry is kind of difficult and we've been learning a lot There's this interesting kind of first mover risk and insurance where they often may have the first movers have to pay out big Losses without the damage history. They might need to underline underwrite and estimate the risk accurately And we've been working on some analogs thinking about analogs to flood insurance and fire insurance financial portfolio insurance mortgage insurance We think there's potentially some interesting shared learning across these different industries Ultimately, we want to Like our key going forward in this is that there's some entity needs to be needs to be liable for Non-delivery and non permits of the atmosphere isn't left holding the risk, which is kind of where we're at now and in some cases so We have some forthcoming work Also to explore these financial and insurance tools relevant for enabling nature and carbon removal portfolios And it will be relevant beyond nature and then yeah, lastly here take them takeaways with my email at the bottom And I look forward to discussion later, but takeaways our nature has a role to play it, but it's only one piece of the puzzle counterfactuals are really underlying everything we have to get those right and developing systems that can incorporate new knowledge and where there's incentives to get the measurement reporting verification, right Our key and we want to treat learning like as a way to improve the system not as a crisis to the system Thanks. Thank you Connor Okay, I'd like to invite our next speaker up Allison Hoyt and the title of her talk is rewetting Indonesia's degraded peatlands and a natural climate solution Thanks so much for having me today I'm going to talk about tropical peatlands in Indonesia and and the potential for restoring and rewetting these ecosystems This is a joint project with others here at Stanford as well as our partners in Indonesia So for those of you who aren't familiar peatlands are wetland ecosystems and peat itself is the organic rich soil That is formed so below ground and they're present all over the world and they look different in different environments So this for example is one of the most well-studied peatlands in Canada. It's made of sphagnum moss And you may even be familiar with moss used in horticultural purposes. There's a widespread peatlands in Scandinavia and Canada But today I'm going to be talking about tropical peatlands Which above ground instead of having moss have these huge tropical rain forests But what they have in common is that below ground on both these tropical and northern peatlands are very large carbon stocks So this is a picture of a cross section where they were actually building a road So just bulldozing right through the peat so you can get an unusual view to see on what the peat itself looks like in these tropical peatlands And you can see the soil is really made up of this woody carbon rich Material and although it looks very intact. It's actually can be thousands of years old So so that wood has been there and is protected by the anaerobic and wet conditions that prevent decomposition and because of this This carbon accumulation peatlands are major carbon stores They actually store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests below ground in this really deep carbon-rich soils and The peat accumulates over thousands of years as I mentioned due to slow decomposition In Southeast Asia this old peat carbon that's been forming over a long time is now being threatened by land use change So here you can see the island of Borneo. It's about the size of France or Texas so very large area in Indonesia and Malaysia and you can see how the forest has has been retreating over the last decades and how especially the deforestation Has really been concentrated in coastal areas, which is also where a lot of the tropical peatlands are present So in these areas Drainage typically follows deforestation So the the map I showed you was the receding forests with deforestation But in these peatland ecosystems drainage and deforestation go hand-in-hand So drainage canals are often the easiest way to export logs It's lower cost than building roads through a swamp and then drainage canals also once deforestation has happened lower the water level so that agriculture can proceed and So here you can see some pictures of what that looks like across the landscape But this also has big implications for the carbon stocks in these peatlands So as we lower the water table through drainage suddenly oxygen can come into the soil much more than it previously had And that speeds up decomposition and that leads to CO2 emissions and fires So we've done a lot of work to quantify these CO2 emissions and we found that they're huge across the region for example They're similar in magnitude to the fossil fuel emissions from the same region So in Southeast Asia this peat degradation and disturbance is a major major source of CO2 emissions in the region It the drainage also leads the peatlands to become susceptible to fire Because as you saw it's basically a pile of woody material and as soon as you drive that out The chance for it to catch on fire is is very large and you can see these are not forest fires as maybe we Imagine them here in California, but it's actually the material underground that's smoldering and these fires can last for weeks or months and That also leads not only to air quality impacts, but to another major source of CO2 emissions in the region So again similar to fossil fuel emissions So I've been telling you all about the problems associated with peatland Degradation in Southeast Asia, but now I'm going to talk a little bit about the solution and Opportunities to reduce or stop these CO2 emissions and fires so peatland Restoration and particularly peatland rewetting offers us the opportunity to stop these CO2 emissions and restore the ecosystems to their function as carbon sinks So here's some data that I wanted to show you that Underlies our rationale of why we think this is such a promising approach So on the x-axis you can see that water table depth So and on the y-axis is CO2 emissions and you see that when we have and in blue like above zero is when we have wet Condition so it's flooded this kind of how these Ecosystems typically in like a natural swampy setting and you can see the CO2 emissions are near zero And then as the water table gets deeper and deeper the emissions increase nearly linear linearly So the drier the system the more CO2 emissions And so this is the real motivation for our The idea of rewetting peatlands as a natural climate solution if we can move from high emissions back to a low emission scenario That makes a big difference and one thing I also wanted to point out is that partial rewetting can still have a big impact if we can Make these ecosystems a little bit wetter, but not we don't have to fully restore them to their flooded state We can still cut the emissions for example in half So because this is such a promising and low-cost idea There's been very recently a lot of interest in it I'm in Indonesia as the government has set up a peat restoration agency And they have committed to rewetting 2 million hectares of tropical peatlands So a big chunk of land and this is done by blocking canals So basically putting small dams into the canals Which is a really low tech and low cost intervention So it's something that local communities can run people can be paid to do this And sometimes the dams are made with local materials other times with concrete But in in most cases, it's relatively simple to carry up This has also been identified as part of a wetland pathway towards natural climate solutions 19% of the low-cost natural climate mitigation are wetland pathways and Of these peat restoration and avoided peat impacts are specifically highlighted One thing I wanted to show here is that the size of the air bars the uncertainty on peat restoration Is huge and that comes to the project that we're working on And the the reasoning behind this is that tropical peatlands are very diverse So in their natural state the tropical peatlands look like tropical rainforests above ground And really carbon-rich soils below ground But then once they've been deforested there's a range of different land uses That of course leads to different water tables and also different costs of restoration So here you can see some pictures that I took in Southeast Asia On the left is a small holder agriculture In the middle is kind of like a burned and deforested area that's been largely abandoned And on the right is a seedling oil palm plantation So if you just imagine how people are using the land in each of those different scenarios You can think about how restoration might what the challenges might be associated So in the project that we're working on here at Stanford We're aiming to identify priority areas for peatland rewetting And think about where can the largest emissions be avoided most cost effectively So given this very diverse landscape where should we be prioritizing peat restoration And to answer these this question we're using data sets that have been developed by our team Particularly new remote sensing data sets So I'm going to talk a little bit about each of them to give you a flavor of the type of work And the type of new data that we're developing here So these include carbon stocks, CO2 emissions, fire risk and rewetting costs And by looking at each of these across the landscape Then we can really pinpoint how the balance of costs and benefits changes in different places So the first one is the carbon stocks thinking about how much carbon is at stake As I showed these peat profiles are really carbon rich But in some places the peat is one meter deep while in other places it's 10 meters deep And so if you think about the time scales of which you're protecting this carbon Protecting for long time scales you really want to target those really deep places Versus if you want to think about short-term action Then you want to think about where are the emissions highest right now And maybe you don't care about the total depth The second thing you want to think about is how fast is the peat carbon being lost So as the peat is drained and is susceptible to being emitted as CO2 That's actually a loss of that underground carbon to the atmosphere So that's unlike subsidence for example here in the Central Valley When we see subsidence in Southeast Asia it's actually a loss of carbon So there you can see a poll where subsidence has been measured from 1979 to 2007 So the ground has sunk down all of that distance as a result of peatland drainage And that's actually all carbon that was in the ground that's now been emitted to the atmosphere It's a very visual representation of the carbon stores that we're losing And then what we can do is use remote sensing So on the right we have an example of the maps that we can generate with satellite For example with INSA remote sensing to actually detect the subsidence rate And from that we can calculate how much carbon we're losing per year So in most of the peatland areas our typical loss rate is about two centimeters per year So you can think about that as like the actual physical amount that the ground is going down And that's how much carbon is being released to the atmosphere We also are using remote sensing from the SMAP satellite to look at the fire risk By looking at soil moisture So as I mentioned fire has a huge air quality impact as everyone here in California is aware But also is a major source of emissions And so we're mapping how dry the peat is and looking for thresholds We found like very clear thresholds when the peat is likely to burn And then finally we're thinking about how much would it cost to rewet these peatlands So we've generated the first high resolution maps of drainage canals on these peatlands You can see they're really variable across the landscape With some areas being intensively drained and others not so much And so by looking at the density of the canal network We can also then calculate what the costs would look like Given the certain number of canal blockages etc So we're putting these all together to think about this question of How can the largest emissions be avoided most cost effectively By trying to minimize the cost of restoration like the network of canals And divided by or considering the total emissions from the peatland Oxidation as well as fire emissions And we're also thinking about feasibility considerations based on the land use So to give you an idea of how this plays out We take into account the costs of restoration And then we think about the emissions from oxidation So the decomposition of peat as well as fire And this just gives you an idea of the spatial scale that we're looking at So we can really make these calculations at a very fine spatial scale So that we can then give recommendations to individual land owners Based on our whole map of the region And really pinpoint how these costs and benefits play out at a small spatial scale We're also thinking about other considerations Like the health impacts from PM 2.5 emitted by fire Damage from fire and then the employment benefits from dam construction We've seen a lot of communities are really excited about The jobs that are created from building dams And finally we also have to think a lot about more technical assumptions For example as we're looking at fire risk into the future We need to think about of course fires We don't know exactly where they're going to catch So we need to also make assumptions about that And thinking about how deeply the fires will burn How much CO2 they'll emit So that gives you a flavor of what we're working on We're also doing field campaigns to validate the greenhouse gas emissions And trace these projects before and after So we're working with the Nature Conservancy Indonesia As well as Untan University in Pontianak And actually three members of my research group are in Indonesia right now I'm doing these field measurements So that's all I have for today I just wanted to share these different data sets that we're bringing together And hopefully let you know about Petrie Wedding As a potential strategy to substantially cut CO2 emissions Thank you Thank you Allison All right I'd like to invite all of our speakers up onto the stage for panel discussion Okay I'm going to just kick it off with one general question to everyone on the panel But please be thinking of your own questions that can either be directed toward one individual Or if you can come up with a question that spans all three that would be great as well So I'll just start out with you each talked about some carbon management solutions What do you see as some of the obstacles for scaling and or opportunities for scaling your solution And let's start with Tony So I think really it's probably just public acceptance you know at scale There's going to have to be a lot of CO2 going into the ground And if you think about you know the distribution of current CO2 emissions you know about 30% Globally are really hard to you know hard to avoid emissions right so it's still a lot of CO2 So I think it's just public acceptance of the technique Allison? Yeah as you saw we're hoping to pinpoint how the challenges vary across the landscape Because these areas are so diverse but definitely the economic and social considerations of Convincing people to change the land use I think is one of the biggest challenges So a lot of these areas are actively farmed or they're oil palm plantations and so Like convincing people to convert it back to a swamp land is not going to be easy And so I think that also points to one of the biggest opportunities Which is targeting some of the lower production land uses like the about 25% of the Peatland area in Southeast Asia is kind of has been deforested but is not actively used For other economic uses and so I think that area is really where we should prioritize Peat rewetting and the other potential opportunity I think is this partial rewetting That I mentioned where rather than trying to fully restore the area to a natural swamp land Which may be less palatable raise up the water table to the point where it stops fires cuts CO2 emissions in half but the land can still be used for farming Awesome Connor? I guess I would say the kind of two buckets of things that are the help with scale which One is kind of high trust measurement reporting and verification that's relatively That kind of fires of carbon credits trust and but it's implementable for project Developers and people on the ground and then the other thing is really this needs to develop Like relationships with people on the ground like there's a lot of maps of the potential global Potential for XYZ solution but that all often all comes down to relationships on the ground And is there the structures in place to make that happen on the ground? So make that permanent on the ground by bringing You know economic benefit to those people directly Awesome. Okay. Well, I guess it's actually a common theme in your answers. It's the people on the ground. Great. All right I'd like to open it up to questions from the audience The question to Connor. So Just take the us for for a moment and talk about how we can have the biggest impact Let's just say in the agroforestry space or better managing our forest systems in in this country Can you tell me both a recommendation on a policy and then on technology that you're most You think would have the biggest impact on trying to get to this issue of verification measurement and monitoring Yeah, I've In the u.s. I know there's there's there's some there's some startups and people working on agroforestry in the southeast u.s. I've know of and some of them are working on kind of using iphone lidar technology and stuff to to to be able to measure that the Forest growth on their land and make it really easy for farmers to do this. It's something that they have already And yeah, I I've not I'm not sure I know exactly on the policy side But I think that there are going to be big opportunities in the upcoming farm bill negotiations to include carbon considerations and Like as parts of the farm bill negotiations I thank you. Thank you for the great introduction. Um, so my question is mostly for connor analysis You talked a lot about collaborating with nonprofits community organizations on the ground Where do you see the role of industry? in pushing these nature-based solutions forward and how exactly do you see us researchers in academic setting collaborating with industry partners Thank you Thanks So I can talk about it in the tropical peatland context So I think there's a really big role for industry to embrace some of these practices for example raising the water table because half of the roughly half of the peatland area in southeast asia is either oil palm plantations or acacia pulpwood plantations and so Most likely those areas are going to remain With within industry hands for the foreseeable future But they are there's no need for the water table for example to be a meter deep It could easily be 50 centimeters deep and right there that would be a 50 percent reduction in emissions And so that's something that land managers being thoughtful On their own lands could could really make a difference And there is starting to be some collaboration for example the april plantation In sumatra is doing really careful monitoring and has actually collaborated to publish some really high impact academic papers showing what the The potential differences there are so I think Yeah, that's the way that academics can get involved is by adding more trustworthy measurement and monitoring. I think one thing I would add from the perspective of People in industry who are bought like purchasing carbon credits is like in the nature-based space is like not just buying the cheapest carbon credits But look but engaging with the project developers and see understanding what's going on on the ground and Finding projects that align with the corporate vision of what they are looking for Beyond just carbon that these things are having conservation and sustainable development impact that they That that is meaningful and it's yeah, it's not just finding the cheapest Whatever one dollar per ton avoided deforestation project to offset your emissions It's finding something that feel good about and feel and is meaningful and it's a demand signal for quality projects be to be continued to be developed I can also mention there's another group for example the round table on sustainable oil palm is a group of industry partners that have Come together to try to signal their interest in doing a better job to reduce co2 emissions and fires and so I think as Outside like an academic and nonprofit community if we can engage with those groups and try to make sure that it's not just virtue signaling that that the Suggestions are implemented. That's also a place that we can make a difference and that's kind of led to some rake or Happened in tandem with some regulation in southeast asia to to suggest keeping the water table at 40 centimeters in p-land areas So if those Regulations could actually be followed in a widespread way that would immediately lead to a very big reduction in co2 emissions Hi, two questions for for tony First it's hard to get anything built in california And i'm kind of curious on your your non technical view perhaps of whether we'll see meaningful carbon capture In sequestration in in california And then the second is You know i'm not an expert in this area So i've heard others say that hey the long-term stability of co2 how it interacts with water And can it be acidic and chew through rock if you could just speak to some of those uncertainties right that are longer term Reactions that co2 might do sure so yeah on the first topic. Yeah, it is hard to get things. I think permitted in california That's one of the attractive features about this Project and why we've actually you know we've attracted funding for it is because The feeling is you know if this project can be done here then you know, it's it's really sort of like a Keystone for a bunch of other projects that will follow Because this this the site really you know It wasn't just us right but the people who are collaborating with there was a lot of work to really find a site with Very few well penetrations no seismicity in the area. So yeah, so yeah, it could be tough But we think that you know this would be if this gets permitted it'd be the first of many and there are other You know, there are other interesting places in california. There's a bio refinery That may have a may actually there's a project that will happen there And the attractive part of a bio refiner is you capture the co2. There's actually negative co2 emissions The so yeah, the you know the the interesting thing So my lab group we also do a lot of really sort of nerdy experiments where you take rocks and torture them So you torture them by subjecting them to acids like You know carbonic acid is that's going to form as well as you know pulling and stretching And you know the ultimate torture is kind of pushing on them while you're flowing acid through them And a really interesting thing happens across this really broad set of rocks that we look at There there is some you know people will call damage But they actually become better seals Because you have these rocks that have heterogeneities in them And the fluids tend to flow through the most permeable or the easiest to flow pathways And you dissolve features in there But then the stresses that you put on them, which are similar to the stresses in the earth Actually close up those close up those You know close up those things and then they become actually better seals. So they actually become less Permable to the fluids that want to move through there The other thing I didn't tell you but this this site also that talked about There's been a lot of geological characterization. It has a thousand feet of Impermeable rock above that storage zone So it's it's a pretty it's that's a lot of you know, that's a lot of reservoir seal But yeah, these are all part of quite you know These are all important questions that need to be answered in the sort of the site characterization part of the Or the process I wanted to ask all of you about permanence So when we burn fossil fuels and put co2 in the atmosphere is going to stay there for hundreds or even thousands of years So when you're talking about nature-based solutions Uh, I think these rely on Assumptions about changes in land use and land management. And so how do you think about? Confidence that those kinds of changes even if you achieve them, you know Next year in Indonesia or something are going to last for 100 years or 500 years, right? And then on the geological storage side one of the criticisms that we hear is that people aren't really sure about You know, all of this is done as modeling in risk assessment But do you have tools that you can actually see what's happening with the plume? Underground once it's been injected so that you know, we can sort of verify that those models are accurate and people can start to gain confidence I'll start off with Permanence broadly and then Allison can talk about Indonesia in particular, but I would say It's it's definitely a concern. I think but I think nature-based Solutions are kind of available now and and in in one in one way connected as a bridge towards permanent technological carbon removal But but and can have real benefits even if they are Uh temporary there's been a bunch of work lately on lowering the peak reducing the or uh and kind of like Buying time Even if the nature-based solutions might not be permanent, but I would also say that forests have been around for millions of years and even an individual Individual site may experience variation over time We have high confidence that that Forest are going to keep sequestering a lot of carbon And we and we have an ability to affect the amount of carbon and how fast they're doing that So I think there's You know that that would be my a couple high level points of permanence for me Yeah Yeah, I think the point that you mentioned is true. We we are relying on People to continue a land management change indefinitely in the future if we want to see these benefits Um, but at the same time like connor mentioned, I think For example in the case of the peatland rewetting This is a change that we can make on the order of weeks like if you put in a dam It's raining every other day The peat rewets and you have immediately shut off those co2 emissions. And so I think while it does have the downside of We we can only rely on future land managers to do as well as we're currently doing and whatever policy choices they make It has other benefits. Um, for example the low risk that we know that it will definitely work and it doesn't Need any like new technology that's untested and that we could take action right away The other point As I was saying something I was talking to a project developer lately about is which is They are they were arguing that if a project if a community sees benefit from a project financial and financial benefits in particular The project will keep going. So it's not necessarily relying on nature itself Anything abstract you're relying on a set of people in a place to do a task And if they're seeing the benefit of continuing to do that the project will keep happening and tony Yeah, I'd say, you know the measuring And very you know monitoring and verification is going to be plan is going to be really important for these You know these projects Uh, you know one of the ideas that we have that's emerging is I showed you The how the basically the surface deformed and we Think that also would be a good way to Get a quick idea and be able to monitor right because if you know what's happening at the surface You have a model that you're running and you you know modify the model so that it matches the surface Uh, you know deformation. That's another you know piece of the puzzle In in monitoring, but there are other, you know, I think really powerful Geophysical techniques as well like uh distributed acoustic sensing that could be quite quite powerful in really telling us, you know, where things are moving and Where the fluids are moving as well as even you know monitoring for uh seismicity at very You know small magnitudes um so that we can adjust the Process as it's you know being carried out. Hi a question for professor Kovac The project you're working on in southern california. What are the point sources for the co2 that you are Thinking of sequestering. I guess is one question the second part of it if these are dilute sources of flue gas from from burning fossil fuel, for example Are the technologies for capturing those like at a point where it's worth doing? Yeah, right, so maybe this the second thing i'll say i should do some techno economics, right? So we basically identified all of the point sources In the area from the epa has a nice database Uh and so then the costs that were in there for capturing are actually Based on the amount of co2 that you expect in the flue gas so the you know the Costs are expensive, right? But but uh, you know, it seems it seems sort of economic And that the the project that I showed uh, there's a local industrial source Uh That's quite close. Uh, so that doesn't have to be much of a pipeline built Extending that into Capturing more there's actually a lot of co2 missions in curren county. Uh, there are there's cement plants. There are Like tomato canning facilities that actually Use a fair amount of natural gas so they make a fair amount of co2 So there's a lot of opportunities there to capture those things and that would be a more difficult process because you'd have to locate the Uh, the pipelines to bring them in. Um, but It's certainly doable one of the main critics of the nature-based solutions is that the absorb Carbon dioxide eventually goes back, you know, the tree burns or dies and decomposes so i'm Wondering if nature-based solutions should perhaps also try to absorb methane which also has carbon in it Right because it's unlikely to come back as methane if the You know, you're genetically modified soybean that digests carbon dioxide and methane equally if it burns It comes back out as carbon dioxide, which is less harmful. So in the long term. Do you see possibilities for methane? absorption rates to get increased significantly in in nature um, I know for for example, um Thinking about how we could modify agricultural practices, which I guess is like broadly still Nature related so for example in the case of rice rice produces a lot of methane emissions and We can reduce those emissions with practices such as alternate wetting and drying so we by Lowering the water table and then flooding the rice again and then lowering it the during the dry periods The methane is oxidized and or the methanogen community is Suppressed and so like those types of practices I think could really reduce methane emissions Is that the type of thing you're thinking about? Oh actual I don't think I haven't heard of anyone working on an absorption of methane in nature. Yeah But methane should absorb the carbon right so if you had If you were putting You know like a almost pure carbon source it should have some but it's going to be proportional to what's in the atmosphere So I think that expected to be big The challenge is that the methane concentration in the atmosphere is quite low. So even when you have a sink for methane It won't be very efficient except for in some particular locations like Wetlands, but then we don't really want to drain them for other reasons But yeah, maybe there could be some like nature inspired engineered solution near methane and hot spots Thanks for the suggestion. Okay. Well, I'd like to ask everyone to give a round of applause to our three panelists