The Internet of Carbon
Carbon capture doesn't just require a technology, it requires an ecosystem that makes sure useful technologies are favored over carbon theater.
The purpose of this newsletter, as most faithful readers know by now, is to promote a simple technology that opens a dizzying array of possibilities to create a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative economy. The technology is called hydrothermal carbonization, and the product that creates these opportunities is called hydrochar.
The dizzying array of possibilities should of course be seen as a major advantage, at least from our point of view. It allows the design and deployment of comparatively simple carbon capture processes without much demand on infrastructure, as our water hyacinth-based sewage plants example was supposed to demonstrate.
On the other, more technologically advanced end of the spectrum we envision scalable, machine-learning optimized continuous operations that find the best process and the best end use for each incoming biomass delivery.
Variety is good, but it can also be a drawback, as complexity can easily lead to the “tyranny of choice”. Too many available options that need to be assessed and evaluated, each with its own technology stack that needs to be investigated in order to separate plausible opportunity from hype, can lead to decision paralysis.
The immediate response to this decision paralysis is sadly a proliferation of carbon projects that look good on paper and create engagement in the attention economy, or, as we like to call them: “every click a tree” projects.
We’ve already introduced a few of the more egregious examples and their obvious shortcomings. This gives us a good opportunity to sketch out an approach to move beyond “carbon theater” and invest in feasible technologies. We are clearly biased in favor of solid carbon solutions, as the title of the newsletter suggests, but ultimately we are happy to support any approach that puts substance over clicks.
How we can get there from here
Thinking about workable carbon economies should proceed in two steps. The first step should be thinking about evaluation criteria. The second step should be finding ways to implement and monitor these criteria. Here are our current frontrunners.
Efficiency. This simply means getting the most output from the least inputs. It’s a criterion popularly violated by blatantly overengineered approaches which tend to be energy-sucks with little to show for.
Flexibility. This means being able to take a range of undesirable inputs, like carbon-rich waste biomass, and turning it into a range of desirable outputs, for carbon-neutral productive re-use or for carbon-negative reversible or irreversible storage, to make the process economically attractive to all participants. Certificates can shift the end use from repurposing to terminal storage, but flexible processes should not depend on certificates.
Decentralizability, or, if this is too much of a mouthful: Localizability. All steps of the process should be conducted in close proximity to both source and storage locations, should be able to be run in small, ideally mobile process units, in all kinds of economic, geographic, and technological environments, and be controlled by the process participants. Carbon economies should not be a luxury item for well-off countries.
Auditability. All steps of the process, and this includes both process steps undertaken by individual participants and handovers between participants, should be auditable by everyone in the process chain, by authorities, and by the general public, with no individual participant having sole control over the audit.
Rigorously applying these elimination criteria should remove quite a few currently very popular overengineered proposals, and also shift the focus from “good” proposals like reforestation to ecologically “better” proposals like remoorestation.
Building the Internet of Carbon
Let's use “Internet of Carbon” as a metaphor for this ecosystem — in part because the original internet was designed to be decentralized, in part because it alludes to the Internet of Things, the emerging connected sensor network we will need to enable tight and continuous, low-cost technological monitoring of all process steps.
Ultimately, the competition for best carbon technology has to center on integrity rather than engagement, or it will end as a “lemons market”. Integrity can only be achieved by establishing high standards of transparency, so that participants compete on their fully disclosed audit trail, and by mutual control.
Handing the monitoring role over to a single central entity will offer opportunities to game the system to both the central monitor and all other participants. This is also true for a publicly sponsored, certificate-based carbon economy funded by a Pigovian tax.
As we have discussed in our previous newsletters, we believe hydrochar and its peer technologies offer all these advantages over popular but overengineered CO2 technologies. But ultimately all technologies that can transparently demonstrate their utility should prevail in a quality competition over vanity projects.