The Carbon Lab is where I’m documenting my side interest in addressing the greatest problem facing humankind today, human created climate change. We as a species emit 40+ gigatons (Gt) of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. This is being added each year to the existing 1,000+ Gt that we’ve added since the industrial revolution. All this additional CO2 is causing the natural systems of the Earth to change…changes that will are creating global changes that put an increased risk on human civilization.
Note: 1 gigaton equals 1 billion or 1,000,000,000 metric tons (a metric ton is 1000 kilograms); 1 metric ton = 2204.6 pounds (an English system ton is 2000 pounds). So 40 Gt of CO2 is 88,184,000,000,000 pounds of CO2. Or 88 Trillion pounds.
As I’ve researched how I can personally reduce my CO2 footprint, I started to get interested in the bigger picture of the carbon industry. The science started to point me to the fact that we’ve let this issue go unchecked for too long. We’ve put so much CO2 into the atmosphere that the natural systems of the Earth can’t deal with it. So we’re throwing those natural systems out of order. I believe that in in order to solve this problem, we need to have a mosaic of solutions that are applied to 1) changing our energy industry quickly away from fossil fuels while 2) work to reduce the CO2 that we put and have put into our atmosphere. The good news is that there are many people, some you know and more that you don’t, who have already started on these two areas.
Back in 2018 an idea struck me as I started to learn more about how we could actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, what is now called Direct Air Capture (DAC). As I re-engaged in mid 2020 on my idea of a global network of Distributed DAC (DDAC) systems piggybacking on existing infrastructure I realized the need for a rapidly scalable solution like this was even more urgent. And that there are new networks of people actively supporting each other in the Carbon Capture industry. So, my Carbon Lab focus is on figuring out the viability of my DDAC idea.
The details of my DDAC idea, and other carbon capture items of interest that I find, can be found in these most DAC related posts:
Acknowledgments
When you enter down a research path, you never know where you’ll end up…and by the time you get there, you forgot who helped you along the way. So I’m creating this list of individuals have helped educate, influence, and inspire my carbon capture research project journey (if you think I missed you please let me know, any omission was unintentional). Listed in general chronological order of when we first connected in person on this topic.