There have been efforts towards forwarding the negative emissions technology. One of which is to grow trees for biomass electric power production, and capturing and storing the resulting emissions. Some also think of planting large forests across the globe and altering soil management to increase the amount of carbon it can store.
quadrillions of dollars, especially when the world needs thousands of these negative power plants.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges now, according to Mark Barteau, director of the University of Michigan Energy Institute and cofounder of Beyond Carbon Neutral, is the overall lack of research funding and the just recent acknowledgement of the problem.
Notwithstanding that design, Beyond Carbon Neutral engineers and scientists are looking at forests to store more carbon dioxide.
While there are right avenues to find funding, Barteu, through the Beyond Carbon Neutral, wants to generate more interest in negative emissions so the technology can be developed sooner. They can only do this while continuing to exhaust all ideas about the technology. Supekar actually has one in mind. His model focuses on what seems to be large “negative power plants”, which will directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it somewhere else. However, there’s a huge problem with this design: it requires a massive new electric power and carbon storage infrastructure whose cost could range into the 36
Power & Water Leaders • May 2018
He said, “Removing emissions using direct air capture as a large-scale mitigation approach is likely to be more expensive by at least two to three orders of magnitude relative to preventing our emissions in the next 10 years.”
John DeCicco, a climate mitigation researcher at the same university and co-founder of Beyond Carbon Neutral, said that forests can only create negative emissions if they increase the rate at which they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keep it locked up in the ecosystem’s roots, tree trunks and soil. This is what is being studied now on private forestlands in Northern Michigan. They are finding ways to enhance the rate at which forests absorb carbon. Meanwhile, DiCicco urged the public to “grow more trees better and keep them parked longer,” to add to the more than 500 million acres of federal public lands that the U.S. now has.