 So we're going to keep this moving right along our third chair will be filled. I promise But in the interest of time there we go right here. No, you're bypassing me right there All right, so I'm gonna Introduce each of the speakers one at a time since we have three of them in that way you don't have to worry about remembering Who's who but because of the bio the full bios are available These are gonna be very very brief introductions. And so our first speaker in this panel, which is on long-term prospects for carbon capture and Sequestration our first speaker is Howard Herzog who is a senior research engineer here at MIT in the energy initiative And also executive director of the carbon capture utilization and storage center Which is one of our low carbon energy centers within mighty Okay, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here Get my slide deck up and also if you can reset the clock Otherwise Ernie is gonna really be on my case here Okay, thank you The first slide, please There we go. Okay, so I'm gonna be talking about carbon captures roll in deep decarbonization about 30% of our greenhouse gas emissions can be classified as Difficult to eliminate and of course we're going to get the deep carbonizations. We got to get to net zero Which means we have to eliminate these emissions and carbon capture and storage is one way we can Address a lot of these emissions now. What do I mean by carbon capture? I want to talk about two flavors today The first is from large stationary sources. You can do it from power plants, but they would talk mainly about industrial plants Where you scrub the flue gas we do this with? chemical sorbent that grabs the co2 out of the flue gas that we regenerate the absorbent to release the co2 and put the sorbent back in To catch some more co2 the second way we can do it is Capturing it from the air and I'll go into more details on how they do that one method is through once again through chemical absorption but another method is through biological and These are the four topics. I'm going to talk about and we'll go one at a time here. So let's start with industry The seven largest industries is Responsible for about 20% of our co2 emissions worldwide. This includes cement and iron and steel Why and this is going to be growing it's probably going to grow about 35% projection over the next 30 years So why is this hard to? Decarbonize a lot of these well, especially it takes cement and iron here Is that a lot of the emissions co2 emissions coming out are not from energy? So you can't just replace the energy source they're coming from the process in terms of cement is the calcining of limestone in terms of Steel is the reduction of iron ore with with carbon and so therefore putting Carbon capture at the end of the process. Let's us get to this. We could decarbonize some of the fuels It's not Stoke trivial that just puts a hydrogen in instead of a coal or gas It takes some doing but they can do get you some of the way, but not all of the way There are people looking at sort of carbon-free processes here at MIT Professor Don Sadaway is looking at electrochemical Reduction of iron to produce steel so we don't have to use the carbon there, but these But that's longer term and CCS is available today So at least as a start we can do that while some of these other processes are being developed In the longer term because they'll take up not just a while to develop But even when they're developed they'll take quite a bit of time to diffuse throughout the world Next I want to talk about whoops next. I want to talk about hydrogen Frank's done a pretty good job. So I don't think I have to introduce Blue hydrogen that's basically steam methane reforming with carbon capture and storage It's about a four-to-one ratio today between green hydrogen and gray hydrogen It's still over two-to-one ratio today with blue hydrogen to green hydrogen. So As we heard in the previous talk, there's a lot of infrastructure to build up with hydrogen While we're waiting for electrolyzers to come down in cost We're waiting for the electricity system to decarbonize we can use low carbon hydrogen today to get the systems Moving because they exist we have two big demonstrations of both at a million tons per year of producing blue hydrogen one of them is at Port Arthur, Texas by air products and This is a picture of it and if you look at the left hand part of the screen those Series of vessels there are fresh our vacuum-swing adsorption columns where the co2 is captured From this plant and once again, we're doing this at a level of a million tons a year So that these are some examples and maybe eventually We have the greener technologies come in, you know with with green hydrogen or carbon-free processing But this is available today, and we don't have you know, we really need to get started immediately And this will give us an advantage to do that Now let me talk about capturing from the air I'm going to start with direct air capture which uses Similar fundamental technologies of using scrubbing to get the co2 out of the air Now direct air capture is a very Seductive concept if we could do that we can keep putting co2 out just like we do today and not worry about it You have somebody else clean it up over here with their direct air capture machines. It's not that easy The first of all the question is not whether we can get the co2 out of the air We know we can do it we do it today. We do it in spacecraft. We do it on submarines So we can do it the real question is what's the cost and lately there's been a number argue Articles out there even in peer-reviewed journals that said well We can do it for two hundred dollars a ton and the somebody says no We can do for a hundred dollars a ton the co2 and then somebody says no we can even do it for less than that Don't believe them I've done some work on it. I give a reference to a paper here First of all when we talk about dollars per ton of co2, you got to know what you're talking about You got to be talking about net co2. So any co2 you? Release in in the process to capture the co2 you have to subtract off So first let's say we're talking about dollars per net ton of co2 and I will I will Claim that the price of capturing from the air today In dollars per net ton of co2 is closer to a thousand dollars than it is To a hundred dollars you can go on the website from one of the vendors Climeworks and you can actually buy Offsets for your plane travel and the cost they're charging is eleven hundred dollars per ton of co2 The the reason that This is expensive or there's two reasons one is thermodynamics You're capturing from a very very dilute stream the concentration of co2 in the air is 300 times less than it is at a coal-fired power plant That means the minimum work to capture is more and that's going to cost more energy But another reason is you're gonna have to process 300 times more air to get that and so what does this mean? so up here on the Right-hand side in the circle is the absorber column from a carbon capture plant This is a plant down in Texas Petro Nova and it's capturing 1.6 million tons of co2 a day On the left is the as a Commercial unit from Climeworks the ones that are selling it for eleven hundred dollars per ton of co2 and that is 900 900 tons per year so If you want to do the same capture from the air as we're doing at the coal-fired power plant You'll need 1800 of those units. So the scale here is really daunting. I want to talk about in a little different way This is a The cross-sectional area let me go back so oops So when I talk about cross-sectional area if you look at direct-air capturing unit that face that you see That's the cross-sectional area where all those fans are so we can calculate How much cross-sectional area we need for direct-air capture? If we know how much percent we take out of the air and the speed that we're putting it through the Contactor in the case of carbon engineering another company that does direct-air capture They use 1.4 meters per second 75 percent capture. So they have 47,000 square meters across sectional area and that just to catch 1 million tons of co2 and the assumption is we're running this 90% of the time. So that's just 1 million tons. Well, what's 47,000 square meters? Well, if you take something 10 meters high about a three-story building then that's almost three miles long Where do you put a unit like that? Well, it's been suggested to me to put it on the US-Mexican border, but And if we actually did the full full two thousand close to two thousand miles of the border We can capture about 700 million tons, but 700 million tons while it's a lot It's still less than 15% of the co2 we put out in our systems today So realistically what you need to do is you need to divide it up and and he have farms Just like you have wind farms. You have to be careful not to put one unit You know windmill and in the wind shadow of another here You don't want the depleted air from one unit going into another so for a million tons per year It could be any it could be a column square kilometer or even bigger to do that And then you have to pipe up all these units and that is money And I think people are going to be surprised when they actually try to do these systems How much money that's going to be I have a history of in-process engineering and the people always underestimate those costs in these systems So that's all I'm going to say on direct air capture I'm going to go on to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and this one. I'm actually quite optimistic about What this does is the biomass removes the co2 from the air so we don't need any absorbers Of course, you need a lot of land area for the biomass to do it But then you you burn the biomass in a power plant and Capture the co2 when you do direct air capture you need a lot of energy For bioenergy and CCS the energy is all provided by the biomass and you have energy left over to produce Electricity it uses the same technology that's been demonstrated of power plants Well, we just saw at the Petronova plant What it does require is a sustainable supply of biomass and that's a big question. How much is available? As we go forward, but I think and I think that's gonna be very important. So that's The sort of how this works We've done some modeling here at MIT using the epa model from from our joint program on the science and policy of climate change And I've been working with them and and we were going to put out a paper we looked at all the technical and economic of the entire chain from the land acquisition to the to the Biomass growth and transportation through the biomass conversion to electricity To the carbon capture and storage and we've also included emissions associated with land use change both direct and indirect emissions and What we come out with is a graph that looks like this With this is showing carbon price going into the future the blue line Up there is the scenario we ran without bioenergy and CCS and you see the price going up in 2100 to over $2,000 a ton of CO2 This is being driven by those hard to eliminate emissions And the expenses that would do if we didn't have offsets for them If we run this with bioenergy and CCS we kept out at about 240 dollars per ton of CO2 So this is quite a major impact if we can actually do it As you see with the note there in red Ecosystem impacts and social acceptability, which you really can't put in these models Could limit and probably will limit some of this deployment But even if we get a fraction of this it's going to be a great benefit what our motto says We can do is we'll get 30 exajoules in 2050 going up to 320 and 2100 today the world's energy system uses about 600 exajoules so there's not that much in 2050 you see most of it in the second half of the century We're going to generate 21 gigatons of CO2 negative emissions That's a little over half of our CO2 coming out today And a lot of people worry about the impact on food prices our modeling shows that we're going to get a fairly modest food price increase of only about 5% of course we're making some assumptions about productivity of the Biomass growth and also of a food production as we go out into the future But we're making those assumptions based on past history whether that's going to pan out or not We're not sure and I should say the biomass we can use could be woody biomass But also can be herbaceous biomass and will probably be a combination of the two so that's basically My messages today, I do want to just say if you're interested in the subject more carbon capture I wrote a book about a year ago Published by MIT press and it talks about these topics and more detail as well as other topics And then the question of course comes what are we going to do with the CO2? And I want to turn over to Ruben for that Thank you. Okay, so our next panelist is professor Ruben onus He is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering here at MIT He's a geoscientist by training and among his many Research interests is geological carbon sequestration Thank you Chris. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been looking forward to this set of panels for quite some time now and as Howard already anticipated The question that will be alluding to for the next 10 or 15 minutes Is how do we Store the CO2 in the geologic medium for long periods of time Periods of time there seems to be some echo. Is there an echo for the audience as well or just for me? Is it better now? So I'll be discussing a technological aspects Capacity aspects and public safety aspects of geological CO2 storage. So just to set the stage What do we mean by carbon capture utilization of storage? So the Chain starts with CO2 capture which Howard Herzog just described that is the separation and compression of the CO2 then the transport Typically via a dedicated pipeline and then ultimately the injection for long-term geologic storage And one can already think of different options in the subsurface where this could take place. So perhaps a An obvious choice would be mature or depleted oil and gas reservoirs for a number of reasons So if the oil and gas which are buoyant fluids and are there Means that there's a seal already in the in the geologic reservoir that Has proven to be effective over millions of years There could be also an advantage to storing CO2 there in the form of offsets To the cost of the infrastructure there would be other options including a mineable coal seams, but the physics of how the Storage would work there are sort of complicated and there would be a tendency to For CO2 to leak more so than in other formations and the Geologic formations that will be paying most of the attention to are deep salient aquifers and the reason is the very basic reason is that There are ubiquitous and as I will make a point of in this presentation They provide gigantic capacity that Could address the needs for deployment of this technology at the scale that is actually needed So just a word what do you mean by deep because deep is a very Lose or relative concept deep means depths of one kilometer or more and the reason is that Under those conditions the CO2 is a supercritical fluid. There is a dense gas Which is what you need for effective storage and what do I mean by selling? sailing aquifer means that the Also a relative loose concepts and what I mean is a Brackish formation where the brine Has a salinity that is many times larger than seawater could be ten a hundred or a thousand times or more Sailing than seawater, so it would never of course be used for drinking water purposes So this but I would like to frame the Discussion there's to follow as to what is the role that CC us can play because I think we have we need some clarity So CC us cannot be seen as the ultimate end game solution It simply is not so the end game solution is a yet to be determined low-carbon energy system The question is How do we get there energy systems have inertia a lot of inertia as it turns out and We need to deploy solutions at a scale that we will discuss in a moment In a rapid fashion, so it is in that sense that CC us Can play a role in a mitigating climate change and this has been recognized in and in our own work and in the work is a very nice Summary paper that our third panelist Arun Majumdar In collaboration with John Deutsch just put out in the journal jewel last year In particular as Howard Herzog our Previous panelist has pointed out CC us a plays a role not only by itself But also as an enabling technology for other climate change technologies including beaks or director capture with CCS This has been recognized and very nicely summarized in a report published by the European Academy of Sciences last year or two years ago and And then I would like to give another piece of information before we the turn Into some more visual aspects of the problem and that is so really what is the scale that we're talking about them? No, I think we know it's a gigantic scale actually the gigaton scale if we look at the world man-made world CO2 emissions They are in the order of 11 or 12 billion metric tons. That's 11 gigatons of carbon equivalent per year And much of that comes from coal fired and gas fired power plants Let's say a third of that Four gigatons of carbon equivalent per year. So let's take a fourth of that as our unit one Gigaton of carbon equivalent per year. You can multiply by 44 divided by 12 that would give you the CO2 equivalent. So that's 3.7 gigatons per year so that's 3.7 times 10 to the 12 kilograms per year, which really doesn't mean much to me and probably Wouldn't too many of you. So let's try to make it more understandable So we can divide by the density that's compressive to would have deep in the subsurface at this Depths of one kilometer or more that would be about half the density of water 500 kilograms per cubic meter So that's about seven times 10 to the nine cubic meters per year. It still doesn't mean anything to me So to wrap our arms literally around what that means Let's convert that to barrels per day. So one cubic meter is about six Barrels and a year has 365 days. So it gives us a Volumetric flow rate a volumetric rate of over a hundred million barrels of compressed CO2 per day So we know that we can move things around the globe in that scale. So about 80 million barrels of oil are Produced and distributed around the world every day, but this would be at around that scale So this plays a role not only for carbon capture and storage, but for any other mitigation technology if you're going to Grow algae. No, this is the scale that one should be worrying about in there is a number of success stories perhaps the most prominent is The carbon capture and storage Project in the North Sea in the Norwegian North Sea in the Sleipner project Which has been in operation for about three decades injecting at one megaton of CO2 per year so if we think of Casting or if we allow ourselves say 50 years to deploy this technology that means that we have to put in place 3,500 Sleipners and In 50 years, that's 2,500 weeks So we need to deploy about one to two Sleipners per week, but we've deployed one in three decades Right, so that's the good news The bad news is that that's just to solve 10% of the problem, right? That's one gigaton of carbon instead of 11 or 12 Okay So on that note, let's now think of how this can Actually work and very quickly you realize that to operate at that scale There has to be a concerted effort to inject in the subsurface that would affect the subsurface at the geologic Scale at the hundreds of kilometers is scale So one has to think of entire geologic basins Where this would occur and the CO2 being a buoyant fluid even if dense But a buoyant fluid would tend to migrate up deep in these geologic formations and then interesting physics Take place and that is what my group and others Study their mechanisms that act in the direction of trapping the CO2 An immobilize it in the subsurface one of them is as the plumes migrating capillary forces will dislodge Gigantic plume into small blobs ganglia that are then trapped in the pore space in the rock and as they see you to move skits in contact with Brian and That is the solubility is low maybe one or two percent but enough to Make the Brian slightly denser and As that happens, then we have a layer of dense Brian on top of Less dense Brian and that turns a convection cell that greatly accelerates the dissolution And you may or may not be interested in that process But one should be interesting. What is the impact on the large-scale migration of CO2? So I invite you to take a look at this Bench Experiment in which we use analog fluids, but there at the bottom of the slide you will see a Boy and fluid that is going to start running up the slope and as it does so It gets in contact with the fluid below which is denser and as the two fluids mix the mixture is denser than either fluid and The overall effect is that that is a very powerful mechanism to stop to consume the migrating CO2 plume and Limit its migration in the geologic medium So we can now use of these physics to better understand how much CO2 Can actually be stored on the ground at the geologic basing scale and there are two Aspects to this problem one is how far the CO2 will migrate the other one is How much the pressure is going to increase as a result of injection and there's an important concept here in that How much we can inject will depend on how much we give ourselves to inject if we give ourselves one minute Not much can be injected without pressurizing Over pressurizing the entire reservoir if we give ourselves a hundred years Cumulatively cumulatively much more CO2 can be injected. So that's why you see there a graph That shows that the capacity depends on how much Time you're allowed or you give yourself to inject we've applied this Quite carefully to know a variety of geologic basins in the United States to gain an understanding of overtime for a given injection duration How much? Storage capacity can be activated So that's one half of the story the other one. So that is the Supply side of the story then there's the demand side of the story We can think of CCS once again as a bridge technology Bridge that will have a duration and they will have a rate of Deployment and then a rate of phase out So now we we can see the problem in a way that an economics person would see it We can over time provide Storage space But there's a demand for it and the demand curve is convex The supply curve is concave. Those two curves are gonna cross at some point. So a legitimate question is Are they going to cross in a year from now or in a thousand years from now? So our analysis Indicates that even just looking at the Small subset of the geologic basins for instance in the US this would be a Viable climate change mitigation technology over centuries at the century timescale or longer We publish those results. This was a number of years ago and the same journal same year Mark Zovac and Steve Borellic published another paper I would say more of a position statement where they declared as the Last sentence of their abstracts is a risky and likely unsuccessful strategy for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and their point was that Well, there would be a risk of inducing earthquakes and inducing earthquakes would lead to leakage along faults so they articulated that what is a Important but also well-known concern that CCS as many other strategies or many other subsurface technologies can induce seismicity But their characterization was a My opinion our opinion a big misrepresentation of how it actually affects or how it would be relevant to CCS for the most part because Having full sleep doesn't mean that the fluids will leak and one good country example is all the oil and gas reservoirs in California highly Active tectonic region where the buoyant fluids have stayed in place for millions of years But it did point I think To an important aspect of the problem for very important geologic or technical aspect And that is that site selection is key and one should be looking at Geologic formations that are away from brittle rocks away from the crystalline basement and then that would be The starting point for initiating the exploration. So I will summarize The Key points by saying that we have to understand storage capacity as something that is dynamic It depends on how long that bridge is we cannot just give all these geologic basin has a storage capacity of 10 gigatons That doesn't really make sense and that should be incorporated into a poly policy aspects Site selection is key. We should be looking for soft sedimentary rocks away from crystalline basement There's an aspect that I have not had time to discuss but critically important and that is we have to build We have to build confidence that the operations are done in the way that they should be done And that comes with a multidisciplinary monitoring time lapse through the seismic pressure monitoring composition Monitoring perhaps micro seismic monitoring and in terms of R&D I would say that right now what is perhaps more critical is to better understand the behavior of geologic faults both from a Frictional point of view and a hydraulic conductance point of view and the way to improve that knowledge would be perhaps ultimately with Field demonstrations that have different risk profiles and by that I'm going to be a little controversial here. I mean We ought to be able to have a portfolio of field demonstrations where we can point to one and say this one will fail and it will fail at this rate and for this reason and It is that that will build the knowledge or allow us to build the knowledge that we need I'm all that being said. I think that there should be if we want to If we want to really make good on our efforts for climate change mitigation we need that bridge to the very cool very low carbon energy systems that await us and But we cannot wait for it. So with that, I will stop. Thank you And our last speaker in this panel is Aruma Jumdar who was previously Previously introduced by Secretary Moniz. He is visiting us from Stanford where he is the J. Precourt provostial chair professor in the departments of mechanical engineering and material science and engineering and co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and I'll reiterate what was said before is that he's also known as the founding director of the DOE's advanced research projects agency energy also known as ARPA-E Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Ernie for inviting me. It's really always a pleasure to come here And just be inspired by some of the talks that we just heard There are three things I want you to take away from what I'm going to say Three words. One is scale. I think Rubini already alluded to that The second is speed or urgency and the third is options. What options do we have? But it's late in the evening and I guess I'm the last talk So I'm gonna start as a regular professor does. I'm gonna have I'm gonna throw two quizzes at you Okay, number one question number one If you add up the weight of all the human beings on this world 7.7 billion what is the total weight in gigatons? Quick anyone It's let me give you the answers It's half a gigaton Okay, the weight of all the human beings on this world is half a gigaton Now the second quiz is coming. It's a little more complicated The second pop quiz is the following I'm gonna throw numbers at you and I want you to guess the units Okay One perfect. Yes one degree Celsius This is the roughly it's 1.2 Global average temperature rise from the pre-nustral stage It's about one and we are seeing now the effects of the extreme weather conditions, etc. And all the effects of that The second number is two You can well guess this is two degrees. This is the Paris Agreement. I don't know if Secretary Kerry's still there This is the what we had agreed on says one degree produced of those extremes extremes that we are now seeing Imagine what two degrees would be? The third number is 800 This is not 800 degrees Celsius If you that's right Venus is actually lower than 800 I checked This is if two degrees is the is the what we really like to do This is the budget of co2 that we have left okay The fourth number is a scary one is 40 40 gigatons roughly 40 gigatons of co2 per year and the last number is even more scary is 20 It's 20 years left and after that we have to be zero If you really want to bill a be below two degrees This is another fancy way of explaining this chart basically, right? So we have to have negative emissions. We have to look at global carbon management And so this was the question which I think provoked Secretary Moniz to throw us the the quiz at the end six months left in your term and To look at carbon management, it's important to find out where the carbon comes from globally and Electricity is certainly a big chunk Transportation we think is a big chunk. It's 40% food and agriculture is huge Industry cement steel concrete petrochemicals all of this is really big And if you really want to look at carbon management at a global scale and look for all the options You have you get a chart like this This is not a quiz. I don't want you to memorize anything Because what it says is that if you go from the flow of carbon to where it will be and if you want to close the loop It is complex There are many options the multiple pathways the science engineering economic scale finance markets Regulation supply chain policy consequence all of this This is a gigaton scale problem and all of this will have to be considered if you really want to manage this So clearly we know we cannot follow each one of them If you really want to be at the gigaton scale, you do not shoot for the kiloton or the megaton scale That's not going to cut it So what is it that has the gigaton scale effect? So this is where this chart is a slightly outdated but nevertheless gives you the magnitude of the things This is in gigatons of carbon not co2 you got to multiply that by 3.67 to get to co2 Nevertheless, it gives you the magnitude you can see right away that You have nine or it's actually 11 gigatons of carbon that is emitted by a fossil fuel consumption cement and all of that Look at the number out here on photosynthesis 120 plus something Okay, and most of it goes back only a few percent remains in the ground Okay Look at the oceans. This is 90 plus something 90 goes back two remains that gives you acidity acidification of the oceans So there are massive carbon fluxes that are that have been in balance for centuries Now are being imbalanced by this little thing out here So if you really want to manage this carbon well, I mean certainly you want to reduce this and You want to capture it in some way and that's important But you also want to leverage what nature has actually given you and so so this led to Things like that we talked about in this report that we wrote Converting co2 whoops Let me go back converting co2 into chemicals and fuels harnessing the natural biological cycle and We kept away from the oceans Thinking that that is a it's it's it's kind of complicated. It's really want to Do things in the ocean where the people acceptance of it. It may be difficult So if you look at this then of course carbon capture geological sequestration, there's already been discussed Let me drop on a few things that perhaps has not been discussed Harnessing the natural biological carbon cycle as I mentioned We have 120 gigatons of carbon coming in per year. We only keep about a few gigatons In the ground and the rest of it all goes back and the speed Gigatons per year is the important thing. It's not only just the capacity but the rate because speed is of importance So if you looked at that then we said what needs to be done Well, there are lots of research questions We frankly have not addressed some of it have been addressed but these are really hard How do you increase the photosynthetic efficiency the enzyme rubisco has to be improved? Well research has been going on for a while, but this needs Continuous research in trying to understand this one of my favorite ones is how can and Ernie teases me about this one Is how can we grow develop crops with deeper roots and higher lignin content to increase the soil carbon? You know people grow these mega pumpkins, you know for these pumpkin in a competition. I want to grow mega carrots Okay, I want to put them the radish deep down inside Because if you really look at the soil the carbon degradation it goes exponentially down with depth Okay, so the deeper the roots and this is where things like CRISPR cast 9 that people around here talk about Could potentially be used and the agricultural in industry be Incentivized to do these kinds of things so that they make money out of it and that hopefully you'll get to scale That's at least one way Well, this is another one. I whoops you pointed out This is look at can we develop seeds and land management for no till agriculture? Land management extremely critical because if you till the carbon goes away, okay? So I won't go into all the details please look at that complex report and the summary that John and I wrote for jewel and there's a it's a 15 or 20 page report with 80 page appendix. Good luck It's a letter. It was a letter 80 page letter to you second thing about chemicals And this is it's already been touched upon. I won't go into too much detail But two things I want you to take away number one is that how can we develop carbon-free CO2 free? Exergy don't forget heat most of the The chemical industry today is thermo chemical. It's not electro chemical Not that we don't need to develop electro chemical But if you really want to if you want to know how for scaling in the industry, that's thermo chemical So I would say exergy to for at less than $30 a megawatt are that's not you know We are almost there in terms of solar and wind in terms of electricity. Let's not forget nuclear heat This the second thing is that can we produce carbon-free hydrogen? It's already been discussed at less than dollar 50 kilogram. There are multiple options some of them are not quite there I think you talked about Frank about how can we get lower in electro chemist methane pyrolysis methane is essentially free Today at least in the North America Can we use that for to pyrolyse methane to produce hydrogen and solid carbon much easier to handle than CO2? I won't go into too much detail. This has been talked about but this is Came out from a report that I was part of a school chairing before I went to the Department of Energy for the American Physical Society on director capture exactly what you talked about earlier and what we said is that look if you plot And I won't go too technical if you plot the rate constant out here and the heat of reaction the kinetics and the thermodynamics What you really want is over here high rate constant low heat of reaction and that amounts to low capital cost and lower energy operating cost But what we have today at least sorghum's the mono ethanol emini amines Piper's in et cetera or hydroxide highly alkaline to have you know acid-based reactions these are all along here and what you really need out there and this was about ten years ago and Since then frankly there have been some scientific breakthroughs and some of them have been things like moff's These are cooperative binding. It's almost like a phase transition. You bind CO2 and boom it goes up the optic It's not a typical language acid or which is really important But the problem today is that these things are not stable. So we need to get them at scale We need to stabilize these again lots of details out here. I'm skipping in the interest of time Finally, this is something we did not have in the report is methane and I think this is a sleeper and We need to really look at methane because the methane concentration is going up It is a highly stable molecule much more there in CO2. There's a quadruple. This has this is very stable You can't hold on to it. The activation barrier for methane is more than 400 kilojoules per mole. How do you activate it? And this CH1 activation has been the challenge for chemists for I don't know how many decades our chemist would know that so this is a problem and now although we have seen and by the way the radiative forcing as Methane goes out at 80 times more than CO2 and then it degrades a little bit But if you look at the radiative forcing, it's not quite CO2, but boy, it's it's scary Okay, and so just last week There's a paper in nature that came out that using C14 versus C12 in a fossil doesn't have any C14 It's all C12 because the half-life of C14 is about 5,800 years So it's all C12. So by monitoring C14 and C12 you can then tell the source of The methane and what they found is is mostly from fossil sources now, of course, this was last week I'm sure there'll be other work whether this is accurate or not but it highlights the issue that there is methane out there and Frankly as the permafrost starts warming there could be more methane going out Which is a tipping point and that's a forward in a positive feedback and we really don't know what's gonna happen None of the climate models really capture this properly and This is worrisome and so they have been You know, this is some of our colleagues at Stanford said that we need to do something. This is just a comment There's nothing done yet. This is just a comment. We need to do something and I think we really need to do something about this And I won't go into the calculation This may not be as tough except that the research that is needed is on Selective methane sorbents and I come back to this molecule which is so stable and symmetric I don't know how to hold on to it and so this is a research need. We have to figure out how to get this done Just to end before time I want to get out of this technical thing and kind of give my impression of the times we're living in and This goes back. This is from a different age for 50 years ago But it captures the moment that we're living in in no uncertain terms and this quote is from Martin Luther King We are faced. We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today We're confronted with the fierce urgency of now in this unfolding conundrum of life and history There is such a thing as being too late. Let me stop here. Thank you so we only have about 10 to 15 minutes to try to unpack whether or not we're too late and the first question I'm actually going to ask is Directly related to room what your last comments were and I certainly would like all the panel a comment on this The question is the following this symposium is based on a 1.5 to 2 degrees scenario But the challenge is described today make it clear That no significant progress will be made in the next 10 to 15 years You can you can first of all answer whether you agree with that or not But here's the question if technological slash commercial slash policy barriers are not conquered until 2035 so another 15 15 years Aren't we looking at more than a two-degree scenario? And if so are the pathways we discussed today sufficient Is it the reverse quiz to me? It is Well, look, I think and I'll give you my personal I think two degrees is kind of baked in Especially with the infrastructure and all that is there. I don't think we are moving fast enough and So we'll be extremely extremely lucky Especially You know the economy is going we want the economy to go strong if the economy goes down because of coronavirus or something I don't know. Maybe we'll our fuel consumption energy consumption will go down, but we don't want that So I think two degrees is kind of roughly baked in The so the question is what do we do beyond two degrees? We should be preparing the adaptation to three three and a half In terms of water drought resistant crops agriculture livestock And other air conditioning by the grid whether that'll sustain. I mean those kinds of and sea level rise So those adaptation issues are really important I and I go back to John Deutch who has looked at this very carefully and it's got a four-pronged approach to this It's one is mitigation. The adaptation is looking at geoengineering. We should be looking at Options now not that we have to implement these things, but at least do the research In this and to find out whether it is the governance is worthy of of discussion or not But I think we have to look at this comprehensive because we are you know, unfortunately looking at you know Two and a half three three and a half degrees. We don't know exactly where I don't think anyone can say for sure So I would like to offer one thing and that is The problem seems so daunting that one could think well, how are we going to manage all this carbon all this carbon output? at the gigaton per year scale and What I would say is that In this particular case there's one aspect that could be saving the equation and that is that It is the geopolitics of carbon. So if you look at it at where that output takes place Really you as it stands now and as it could stand for the foreseeable future You have two large players That could agree to a massive overhaul of how we manage carbon So we don't need everyone to agree We need two players to agree so In the original question about two degrees C The trains left the station. There's no way we're gonna we're gonna hit it and you know I've said this at meetings at the IEA. Why don't you admit? We're not gonna make two degrees C But the international climate people They won't say no And so that's why you see these scenarios while these negative emissions and if I could say something about going that negative You know first got to get to net zero and and everything we said today is still important Even we miss two degrees C because we got to get to net zero and stabilize somewhere the the lower we stabilize the better off will be then the question is what once we get there will we go in that negative and That will be up to the people to the side You know several decades in the future when we get there But just think what net negative means it means that today we can do a lot to keep the carbon out It doesn't matter when the carbon goes and goes in today or 40 years from now was still up there We can do a lot today at $10 $20 $30 per ton to keep it out So we don't have to you know, so you stabilize lower yet now we're going to be expecting Future generations our children grandchildren their children to take it out of the air at hundreds of dollars a ton of CO2 or maybe even more I mean, that's really unconscionable In my mind so people to make these scenarios with net negative and say we got to do this They should be saying we've got to do it today as fast as we can because we're going to leave a mess for our kids and grandkids Ruben I'll pose this question to you using saline aquifer sounds like it may have unintentional ecological impacts How do you address? How do you mitigate any damage that may be caused by injecting carbon into these environmental reservoirs? So the the basic answer is these are These are Water reservoirs that would never ever be used so what is important is to Confirm that the CO2 remain isolated in these reservoirs the intrinsic economic or ecological value is Non-existent what is of course important is to make sure that the CO2 would not be fugitive CO2 and I've alluded to What are the critical aspects that would have to be? Tackle in that regard and One important one is a pressure mitigation So over pressure mitigation and there is something that noise. I'm some engineering problem that Can you my mind be addressed? Howard you talked about optimism with Beccs so bioenergy with carbon capture storage the question that came in is how do we deal with? Depletion of cropland as we produce biomass for the purposes of using it for carbon capture How do we how do we how do we deal with? Fertile land being depleted as a result of So so I mean there's a lot of land you can grow biomass on which is called marginal and not necessarily cropland today In fact, we run our models. It's not really cropland. We're eating into it's like past your land or other types of Land there so so you know the motto we run has there's a lot of details and we have a paper It's gonna be coming out that will detail some of it, but It's not there, but one thing I mentioned is It depends really important on the assumptions these models is the productivity increase So how the productivity increases with croplands so how much land they'll need how much the productivity? increases for Biomass crops Becomes very very important and how exactly far we can push these things a Question came in about the use of oceans Rune. You said you were not gonna talk about oceans Ruben you mentioned saline aquifers, but not oceans directly. So either one of you. Can you comment on? What's known or what the challenges are with using oceans? And the other question that came in along with that is when you talked about the natural cycle of being able to to turn over as much or capture as much carbon with Plants so the question here is why not just plant additional trees since that's a well proven and time-tested strategy I mean for the ocean. Let me say that we did consider that We know that oceans are getting it's acidified if you want to neutralize that you need some basic alkaline Things but the cost of breaking rocks alkaline rocks and putting in the ocean is a lot and the scale is just so much The other thing is you know, can you put some food material like iron for example and grow some algae? This is your field Well, I think you can certainly do that the question again comes up as you know What other unintended consequences would there be? It's a similar very similar to geoengineering issues because it is it will be at the geoengineering scale anything that we do at the Gigaton scale will have some geoengineering effect, right? so That's the kind of thing that I think research is important to understand what could be done But I think it's also really important to find out how what the through the research the Unintended consequences that we don't can't perceive and how would you do the governance of that because these are international issues? This is not a just a domestic issue So I think that's on the ocean front on the other hand we looked at not just growing trees, but crops Because if you have a fully grown forest frankly the CO2 uptake is net CO2 uptake is not that high But we grow annual crops we grow that for food And if you could somehow have a co-benefit of growing more food, which we might need anyway for higher population and And also capture the CO2 and put them put that in the ground I think that those kinds of co-benefits are options we could could pursue Not to say that you know that wouldn't have unintended consequences. So in our report We also looked at the use of water. Can you get less water using seeds? And this is where science and technology comes in to figure out what that would be So and all for that matter fertilizers now There are companies that are trying to grow their own fertilizer old and fix their own nitrogen in the roots and Amplify that then what has been done in the past. So there's I think it's a combination I do believe that science and engineering and technology will play a very important role But that's not the only role in this whole gamut And if you wanted to add anything on oceans So one last question that had come came from the audience We've spoken a lot about science and technology about the role of policy and the role of Government and a little bit of the earlier panels in terms of driving technology This question is what should be the role of oil and gas companies in Addressing the challenge of carbon capture and storage Sure, so I mean a lot of the oil and gas companies today are have fairly significant programs and Research for carbon capture and storage They have the technology that can really carry it out, especially The underground part of it, but also they're producing a lot of the fuels You know that are causing the emissions So they they have an ulterior reason that they need to clean it up Otherwise they'll eventually go out to business. So of course you have the tension here Are they doing things for real or just buying time and greenwashing? but my You know the people I work with in this company these companies which are not you know the top people but the people I work with are very serious about finding solutions and working on this technology and they're the one segment That's actually putting significant money into this area today Yes, I would like to I would like to second that I mean the strongest terms possible. I Believe that there's a genuine Effort to see themselves as part of the solution and that is that is a Shift that I have seen in my interactions with them over the scale of let's say a decade from being And from perhaps trying to be Take a step to the side to be an integral part of the solution and that is as Howard just pointed out a Lot of the expertise resides also with them in the science and technology and engineering of the subsurface so in that respect having that that psychological shift of a Considering themselves as part of the solution is I think an important and influential one The only thing I'll add is that And I'll go back to the gigaton scale if you really want to address the gigaton scale you need gigaton scale industries to do this and Those can be counted on your fingertips oil and gas being one and it's very important You also need giga scale dollars Okay, so let's be honest. I mean this is not going to be cheap But there could be money to be made if there's a price on carbon not the only thing that needs to be done, but and Fortunately at least today The oil and gas companies compared to the renewable companies have a better balance sheet. It's just you know plain and simple They also are engineering companies at the end of the day. They're in business, but if you look at the skill sets They have engineering companies and frankly right now The shareholder pressure on these oil and gas companies is so high especially European oil and gas companies That they have to move. I mean, this is there's no option. They have to be energy companies Now if you go back in the history, you'll find that they have had some scars on their back on Trying to do solar time. So they are now pivoting and the question is Depending on the company and their shareholders and all that is how much they want to dial But they'd have to move the dial. There's no question in that and how much they do Because if they do completely today their balance sheet goes away, right? So it's that trade-off that they're trying to play and it's they're in a precarious position Frankly, if I think long term not the stock market today and tomorrow, but long term They have to pivot and and the the rate of pivoting really depends on the shareholders and but they the good thing is that right now They have the assets They have the skill sets. They have the financial You know, at least the balance sheet and they have they know how to do things at scale So I would say embrace them embrace them and enable them to shift in the right way in the right direction I'm going to follow Secretary Moniz's lead and give everyone an opportunity for a parting comment either a message that you want to leave for the audience or perhaps a message You want to leave for policymakers in terms of what something we should be doing? To be able to bring about these technological revolutions that we've been talking about When we start at the end What's your what are your parting words? What's the message that you want to leave? I think there's a lot of technology out there ready to go. We just need the policy in place to make the economics work So I would second that I would say two things internalize like really internalize the cost of carbon Which where internalization is different from subsidy and to think of solutions both in terms of the Shift of the energy system and deploy that quickly and transition as quickly as possible But do not forget about bridge solutions that we absolutely need if we're going to make a dent on climate change mitigation On the last word on the messages to the the younger generation because we are a university and I'm assuming there's some MIT students watching first of all, I Wish I was an undergraduate freshman entering MIT right now This is because as an engineer you want to look at you want to solve problems Well, you can't find a bigger problem than this one and this has all the complexity that you can ever imagine And so if I were a student I said oh my god, this is great I I want to take on this challenge. I want to get Not just MIT But MIT and all the other universities around who are interested in this bring them together Bring the industries together. You got some trillion-dollar industries saying that they want to be carbon neutral or carbon-free Fantastic, but that's for them. How do we get the benefit of that elsewhere, right? So I would actually get I wish there's some young freshman is listening to this and so that I want to start this Movement where I want to get all the universities together I want to get the companies together and if Washington is not moving fine Let's move because if you don't move I think we'll be too late Thank you all very much