Microsoft burnishes green cred by paying Swedes to burn biomass and bury CO2

Microsoft has expanded its deal with Stockholm Exergi to buy 500,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal annually over ten years. Critics argue such deals give polluters cover rather than drive real climate action. The newly minted contract builds on a 10-year agreement signed by the two firms a year ago covering 3.33 million …

[Dinanziame]

Schemes like this are just a license to pollute for tech giants, or so critics say

Well the point is that at least they have to pay for it, so it puts a price on the pollution. It technically gives them an incentive to pollute less, which otherwise they wouldn't have to care about. Now if you think they should pay more, that's a different question. I hear carbon offsets are full of fraud, e.g. golf courses getting paid for not cutting the trees, making the prices too low.

[IGotOut]

Green washing at its finest...

Shall we just ignore this eh?

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/microsoft_co2_emissions/

[A. Coatsworth]

I may need to run this through Google's dumber-downer from the other article because I don't get it: MS is paying Sweden to burn wood -that did not need to be burnt otherwise- and bury the soot... And that somehow grants them the right to pollute somewhere else?

[Jellied Eel]

MS is paying Sweden to burn wood -that did not need to be burnt otherwise- and bury the soot... And that somehow grants them the right to pollute somewhere else?

Yep. Only we can prevent forests..

The International Energy Agency (IEA) describes the ECCS as "the only carbon dioxide removal technique that can also provide energy," but warns that the necessary infrastructure to transport and store the captured CO2 lags behind what is needed.

Drax in the UK has been doing this for years and making many millions from subsidies. Burn forests, trouser money. Green! Theory went that Drax and similar schemes would only burn scrap wood, but biomass power plants need a lot of fuel, on account of wood's energy density being a lot lower than coal or gas. Plus there's the energy involved in felling trees, transporting, processing into fuel pellets and then transporting those to be burned. And then energy to create chemicals for CO2 recovery, processing those to remove CO2, compressing that and pumping it... somewhere. Especially somewhere where the CO2 doesn't then escape and gas people, or just end up back in the atmosphere.

It's the kind of scheme Kafka would have been proud of, but does generate carbon indulgences to offset MS's bit-barn building.

Curious if this will mean Swedish councils creating Ikea dumps for furniture that's fallen apart or just isn't trendy any more.

[A. Coatsworth]

"carbon indulgences"

I'm stealing that. It's the best description I've seen of the whole circus

[Doctor Syntax]

Any archaeologist can tell you that charcoal is stable enough to last indefinitely. Reducing wood to charcoal and then storing would be an effective means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. To put it on an ongoing basis the wood could be renewed and the age-old means of that would be coppicing. English woodlands were managed in that way for centuries. The coppice stools regenerate when cut and continue to harvest carbon. If you see a piece of woodland named copse or Spring Wood, Spring Grove or the like it was managed this way.

The only unusual thing here would be storing the charcoal rather than burning it and is likely to be more effective as long term storage than trying to contain it as a gas. It's not very efficient,of course, to it would need a means of using the flammable gasses released and the waste heat but it would be effective at removing CO2 from the atmosphere permanently and rather less weird than some of the other schemes.

[Like a badger]

Charcoal and or soot aren't very dense, presumably Microsoft will need to make a very big pile, or ask Norway if they can fill in a fjord of three.

[Neil Barnes]

I'm not sure they could afjiord it...

[Filippo]

CCS makes about as much sense as punching someone in the face, then telling them it's OK because you'll pay their medical bill, and then doing it again, and again, and again.

[BenDwire]

The next step ...

Well done MS for dealing with the CO2 problem <cough>. Now, what are you going to do about the colossal e-waste mountain that is about to happen due to the demise of Win 10?

[Doctor Syntax]

"Microsoft uses a reduction-first strategy to lower emissions"

So quit the AI junk.

[Grunchy]

I'd participated on many a greenwash "CO2 sequester" tech call, and absolutely nobody was prepared to acknowledge that CO2 is 2/3 atomic oxygen (and almost 3/4 mass-proportion oxygen).

It's energy-intensive to isolate CO2 and then pump purified gas underground in huge quantities and "stay put!", doesn't want to obey.

To fix the artificial imbalance we gotta un-burn CO2 back into constituents, and isolate and sequester atmospheric carbon to reduce atmospheric CO2.

The plant kingdom draws in enormous quantities of CO2 but the moment any plant dies, all the CO2 returns to the air. It's a carbon cycle!

There was a brief period in Carboniferous era in which trees and plants were immune to decay, and whole forests became buried by geologic forces as coal.

Of course decay microbes have evolved and the world doesn't work that way any more.

Oh wait, there is one form of carbon that seems immune to decay, they call it plastic. Or graphite/graphene, coke, or diamonds, etc.

Just need a way to capture plant biomass prior to decay, transmute some proportion of the carbon into a durable form, and sequester that form.

(If we transmuted into 100s of billions of tons of diamond bricks, sure I'll use up some for a diamond brick veneer on the house. No probs!)