Big Ideas Lab - Roads to Removal
Episode Date: January 7, 2025Entire communities erased by hurricanes. 240,000 square kilometers burned. Floodwaters swallowing towns. Extreme weather isn’t a distant threat—it’s reshaping our world. But here’s the good ne...ws: we’re not powerless. Enter the Roads to Removal report, a new strategy for combating climate change.In this episode, we delve into the science, strategy, and stories behind this effort. Join us as we explore how scientists, farmers, and policymakers are uniting to turn the tide on climate change. -- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Lacey Peace. Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Daniel Brunelle. Story Editing by Daniel Brunelle. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch. Guests featured in this episode (in order of appearance): Jennifer Pett-Ridge, Lead of the LLNL Carbon InitiativeSimon Pang, Associate Group Leader in the Materials for Energy and Climate Security Group at LLNLKimberley Mayfield, Staff Scientist of Energy Equity & Carbon Management at LLNLBrought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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This is the police! You need to evacuate!
Mayor, good to have you on deck as well. This fire I think has, you know, taken everyone...
In 2019, the world watched as one of the worst wildfires in Australian history ripped across the continent.
Brushfires are normal in that part of the world. But this one was different.
People don't really understand it until you actually see it coming at you in a wall of stone.
More than 240,000 square kilometers were completely destroyed.
That's the size of the entire state of Oregon.
34 people were killed and an estimated 3 billion animals were killed or displaced,
including some endangered species that were deemed extinct after the flames were finally
put out.
The fire was a catastrophe.
But it is just one of many extreme weather events to make headlines in recent years.
Once in a lifetime events are becoming common.
In September 2024, Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States.
The resulting floodwaters have wiped entire communities off the map in North Carolina.
Just weeks later, Central Florida braced for the impact of Hurricane Milton, a storm so
severe that lawmakers issued an ultimatum for those resisting mandatory evacuation orders,
saying, if you stay, you will die.
These extreme weather events are only becoming more frequent and devastating.
But climate scientists and activists aren't sitting idly by.
For decades they've been sounding the alarm, dedicating their lives to addressing a global security crisis that rivals the gravest threats humanity has ever faced.
Yet these experts remain undeterred. They
continue to work relentlessly, driven by the belief that we can still change
course. And they're not alone. Scientists, farmers, and industrial workers, groups
that rarely sit at the same table, are collaborating on a bold new vision. A vision guided by a
groundbreaking document. The Roads to Removal Report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
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The past decade has seen a 30% spike in extreme weather,
wreaking havoc on ecosystems and economies alike.
The urgency for change is undeniable.
Floods, wildfires, droughts, category 5 hurricanes, these are the warning signs of a far greater
threat.
Climate change.
And that trend isn't slowing down.
To fix it, we need to face the real issue, the staggering amount of carbon emissions
entering the atmosphere.
Jennifer Petridge, lead of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Carbon Initiative, explains.
Over the past century or so, we have released an enormous amount of greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide.
Some of that is through the way we practice agriculture, the changes that we've made to forest cover on our planet.
But largely it's because of burning fossil fuels.
And so there's been this massive increase in the amount of carbon dioxide.
Your listeners will know how that is then related to climate change, in particular global
warming.
We sometimes talk about the greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect is a natural process where certain gases in Earth's atmosphere,
such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, trap heat from the sun.
This trapped heat helps keep the planet warm enough to support life.
When sunlight reaches Earth, it is absorbed by the surface and radiated back as infrared
heat.
Greenhouse gases absorb and re-emit some of this heat, preventing it from escaping into
space, which warms the atmosphere.
Human activities like burning fossil fuels increase the concentration of
these gases, leading to more heat being trapped and contributing to global warming.
As we go into the coming decades, we've recognized the really serious changes in our climate,
which are causing dramatic weather changes and changes in the way diseases are spread.
So we need to remove that CO2.
The most critical step is reducing emissions
at their source, often called decarbonizing.
This involves shifting away from fossil fuels
and dramatically reducing emissions,
which can address around 90% of the problem.
Both the global and the White House's goal
is to try and get to net zero methane and nitrous oxide
and CO2 emissions by 2050.
But for that last 10%,
mopping up the CO2 already in the atmosphere
and addressing industries like aviation, steel, and cement
where we don't have carbon neutral solutions,
carbon dioxide removal becomes essential.
The solution to meeting the 2050 carbon removal goal isn't as simple as following a single
approach.
It requires a deep understanding of the diverse resources, challenges, and opportunities across
the country.
It requires data and insight.
Enter the Roads to Removal Report, an in-depth assessment of carbon removal potential in
the U.S.
Built by 68 researchers across 13 academic institutions, this Department of Energy-funded
report offers a comprehensive analysis of the capacity and costs for carbon dioxide
removal at a county level. The Livermore Lab Foundation was instrumental in making the report happen as was the support
received from Livermore's external partners like Climate Works,
Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and Breakthrough Energy.
The Roast Removal Report is a county-level analysis across the United States of the different
carbon dioxide removal pathways available, looking at how much carbon we can remove from the atmosphere
using different pathways and what are the costs.
That's Simon Peng, Associate Group Leader in the Materials for Energy and Climate Security group.
He leads the direct air capture program in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's carbon initiative.
And those four different pathways are looking at our forests and improve forest management,
using our agricultural soils to remove carbon, using the waste biomass that's available and
converting that into carbon and value-added
products that we can sell and the carbon we can store underground.
And then direct or capture, which is an engineered form of carbon dioxide removal, where we directly
remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using processes that are designed specifically
for that.
The team had an ambitious vision to evaluate these four methods of carbon removal and create
a comprehensive data-driven report covering all 3,143 counties in the U.S.
So one of the challenges that we came across when compiling trade-off analyses for four
different carbon dioxide removal methods and for CO2 transport and storage is that this
hadn't really been done before. A lot of people had written narratively about some kind of
pros and cons, challenges and points of interest. But compiling all of the potential variables
together for each one of these methods around carbon dioxide removal was
challenging in that there's only so much written and beyond that you actually
have to get out from behind your laptop and go talk to people and by talk to
people I really mean listen to people because it's through listening at
different community engagement meetings that you hear about things that perhaps
you didn't even think about. That's Kimberly Mayfield, staff scientist of energy equity
and carbon management at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.
One of the toughest aspects of putting together this report
was ensuring that environmental justice and impact
on communities were included in the analysis
and considered by the project developers.
The Department of Energy had a lot of community project developer policymaker feedback.
And they told us very directly that a lot of people do not have either the knowledge
or time and resources to gain the knowledge around what are the potential benefits and
risks for each carbon dioxide removal method that we were going to be analyzing in the report. We needed to create a centralized one-stop-shop location for somebody to say,
okay, if I'm going to be doing a project or if a project is coming to my local area, what
are some variables that I need to be interested in or ask about? And this is where the tradeoff
analysis came in.
Whether you're a farmer in North Dakota or an industrial worker in Wyoming, the report provides
information tailored to your region's resources. The goal is to enable informed decision-making
at the local level. What was unique about Roads to Removal and about the analyses that we do at
Livermore is that rather than a top-down approach, a bottom-up approach, looking at what's actually feasible, what can we do, irrespective of the targets.
Across those four different technological pathways, we're looking at how much carbon can we remove
through improved forest management, how much can we remove via biomass, and how much can we remove
via direct air capture. The Roads to Removal Report focuses on four different types of carbon removal.
Forest management, Crop Land Soils, Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage, or BIKERS, and
Direct Air Capture with Storage, or DACS.
Each method comes with its own benefits and resource requirements, and the report equips
communities with the data they need to make informed decisions tailored to their specific regional capabilities. Forest management and
crapland soils are the first two approaches.
In terms of capturing CO2 in either forests or crops, what we're essentially taking
advantage of there is the fact that plants just naturally do that. They do photosynthesis and that is carbon
capture right there. And they are very good at it, they're efficient and forests in particular can
capture a huge amount of carbon and they store it in the stem of the tree. Think of plants as
biological machines designed for carbon capture. Through photosynthesis, they act like natural air
filters. They can pull in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, process it using sunlight as energy,
and convert it into sugars they need for growth. This is essentially how they store carbon, much
like a battery stores energy. Forests in particular function as large-scale carbon storage units, locking the captured
carbon into the wood of their trunks and branches for decades or even centuries.
It's a highly efficient natural system of carbon sequestration.
When we looked at the forests across the country, there's no one-size-fits-all kind of methodology
or management approach.
In New England, the thing you probably want to do
is actually do some thinnings and allow the forests which are already regrowing to be healthy and be
more resistant to disease outbreaks or maybe strong weather events like hurricanes. In the
western U.S., we've got forests that have way too many trees, to be honest, and that's why you've
probably heard there's all these issues
about forest fires that are getting out of control.
So there the opportunity is to dramatically thin those
forests, which actually believe it or not,
helps them fix more carbon because they're healthier
and they're less at risk of burning.
So if you've got a forest where all the trees are right next
to each other, the fire can spread from one tree to the next.
But if you take out 30 or 40 percent, that's less likely to happen.
Now all that biomass that you took out of the forest, you can then also hand to your colleagues that are doing biomass carbon capture and removal.
That is just one piece of the puzzle.
The last piece of the forest equation is in mostly the southeast of the United States
and down there they can grow forests kind of the way we grow corn in a lot of country. It's
literally a crop and it's a high rotation every 20 years they plant and cut and those soils are
pretty poor quality but can support particularly loblolly and other pine trees. And again, that's a way of
pulling a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. It gets put into that wood. That wood then can get used
for some housing material or some other mass timber product which is going to last a long time.
Or some of the residues from those forests could go again to the bikers or biomass carbon removal and storage.
So that's forestry.
Another option is to utilize our country's farmland to capture and store carbon.
Soils hold an enormous amount of carbon, more than the total amount in the atmosphere and all living things combined.
Then in cropland soils, we chose to only look at row crops and particularly commodity crops. So things like corn and soy, wheat, cotton.
And what we were really interested in is how much carbon can we get into the soil.
Our soils have lost something on the order of 500 billion tons of carbon in the past
hundred years on our planet.
An enormous amount has
been lost just through plowing up soils. It causes the microbes to get real excited and
they break down the carbon in the soil.
The third method explored in the report is biomass capture, removal and storage. Jennifer
breaks it down.
We call bikers for short. And there we're taking biomass, as I mentioned earlier, that might be just wastes.
It might be from a municipality, essentially the stuff you put in your green bin.
It could also be residues from a logging operation or from agriculture.
We got a lot of leftover corn stover or walnut hulls or just material that would be left on the ground.
In most cases, it's simply burned or landfilled, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere.
But instead of letting that carbon go, scientists have found a way to capture it.
We pick it up and put it in a truck and we move it to a facility.
The most cost effective thing to do is to make hydrogen.
If you take biomass and under very high pressure
or high heat you convert that to either a charcoal or a hydrogen, we're going to be releasing carbon
dioxide at the same time. You can capture that CO2 and then inject it into a well where it's stored
below ground. So that is taking advantage of the plant having fixed the carbon but
then it's using a biorefinery facility to actually convert it back to CO2 and
typically a side product as well like hydrogen. The fourth method is direct
air capture or DECS. And then finally a direct air capture facility it's
literally sucking CO2 from the atmosphere it's almost like a giant
vacuum cleaner.
You may have seen pictures of these plants.
They have massive fans on the outside.
Those fans are running in reverse.
So they're pulling air in and they literally push it over the surface of a solid or a specific kind of chemical that captures that CO2.
Think of it like a highly specialized air purifier. or a specific kind of chemical that captures that CO2.
Think of it like a highly specialized air purifier,
but instead of removing dust,
it's pulling in carbon dioxide from the air.
The chemical or solid materials inside the system
acts like a sponge soaking up the CO2 molecules.
And then they have to pause after a little while
and use heat to usually desorb or take
that CO2 back out, take it off the surface.
But essentially what you end up is concentrated CO2 at that point.
After a while, the system needs to ring out the sponge.
By applying heat, the CO2 is released from the material in a process called desorption.
This concentrated CO2 can then be collected
for storage or other uses.
And the high pressure concentrated CO2
that we produce from either bikers or from DAC,
we then want to store below ground.
When you inject CO2 deep underground,
it changes from a gas to a liquid and behaves like oil.
We can store that CO2 deep underground,
reversing the process of below ground fossil carbon extraction that's been happening for over a century.
And when I say store, I mean a mile, mile and a half below the surface. So geologic storage of
CO2 is in a way just reversing the process that we've been doing for over a century
of extracting fossil fuel carbon from the ground. We're putting the CO2 back into often sandstones,
saline kinds of reservoirs, rock material that has little tiny, tiny pores. You can inject CO2
and they hold it over a long period of time. They actually,
over time, become part of the rock. And if you imagine, it's kind of like you can pour a can
of Coke under the sand, right? And you're not going to be able to get that Coca-Cola back out
again, but the sand absorbs it. And that's really kind of the phenomenon that we're looking here
with pouring or injecting CO2 below ground. Of all these CO2 removal approaches,
there is not one method that is better than the rest.
Therein lies the beauty and the complexity of the Roads
to Removal report.
So how do the scientists at Livermore
present these options in a way that
supports informed decision making and real world
application?
That is another puzzle altogether.
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Don't delay. Picture a roundtable where scientists, policymakers,
and community leaders work together. They're not just talking about environmental impact,
but about economic and social considerations as well, each voice representing a different
facet of the challenge and the solution.
To bring those kinds of voices together, the team at Livermore had to look at a broader
picture.
So the first step was to identify our colleagues, our collaborators, and we identified about
a dozen universities and other national laboratories that are from all across the country, world
experts in their fields, and tried to, well, convince them
that they should be part of this project.
We had to work up a budget
and make sure that everybody could afford to do the work,
both in time and money.
And then we actually spent several months
figuring out what our methods were.
Where are we gonna get the data?
The forest inventory analysis is a public data source.
Maybe we also want to bring on some private data sources.
So it meant collecting, most of it public data, but from a lot of different sources.
So there was just essentially figuring out those methods took us several months.
We actually published a kind of preliminary report that was just about the methods that
we were going to use.
We also included in this report something that no one has ever really done, which is
an energy equity and environmental justice analysis.
It was that unique aspect, the energy equity and environmental justice analysis, also known
as triple EJ, that made this report particularly compelling.
Because carbon removal is not just a scientific issue.
It's economic, social, and political as well.
For this reason, implementing carbon removal strategies is often met with pushback,
from certain industries worried about economic costs to political barriers that slow down progress. Farmers, for instance, may be hesitant to adopt new practices if there is
uncertainty about how it could impact their cash crop. Industrial leaders may
resist the upfront cost of carbon capture technologies. The report
emphasizes that while carbon removal is crucial, it must be done in a way that
avoids creating new issues like economic disruption
or environmental injustices, and instead brings tangible benefits to the communities involved.
They call this approach a trade-off analysis, which allows communities to look at the potential
costs and benefits of the different options available to them.
We refer to it as the EEEJ chapter.
In the EEEJ chapter, we really focus on evaluating for each one of these carbon
docks that are removal methods, what could be the potential tradeoffs, both environmental
and socioeconomic, and how can these tradeoffs be analyzed through data across the entire
nation to provide people a
interdisciplinary lens with which they can think about not just where is
carbon dioxide removal possible, but also where is it most likely to have
the greatest amount of benefits for a county while also risking the smallest
amount of potential negative impacts.
This analysis allows for new voices to be heard in the conversation.
So for example, one of the variables that was brought to our attention very early was
the discrepancy in terms of land ownership across the United States, particularly when
it comes to cropland and forest land ownership and how there's gender and demographic disparities across
the entire nation.
And not all counties have the same ownership profiles for forest land and croplands.
But then we also heard that a lot of farmers from small family-owned farms were very concerned
that only the large industrial-scale farms
were going to be able to benefit from the carbon dioxide removal industry, and they
were going to be left behind and left out, and that this was just going to further exacerbate
economic pressures that they are feeling every single day.
So part of the roads to removal trade-off analysis that we included farms net income, giving preference for counties that have an
abundance of small family owned farms, minority owned farms, as well as financially struggling
farms.
There is also the issue of money. Not all companies are interested in sharing data when
the financial benefit isn't immediately clear, which makes finding solutions even harder. A lot of the really, I'd say, high quality data is owned by companies, and so they don't
necessarily have an incentive to share their energy use or the cost of their process.
That's a lot of proprietary data.
And so we had to develop our own kinds of analyses of how these different direct air
capture processes might operate.
But even though the challenges are tough, the team pushes onward, trying to look at as many different solutions as possible. This kind of wide lens approach also allows the scientists to find
solutions that don't cause other problems. While a state like Wyoming has really awesome
prospects in the future for having a lot of clean energy powered direct air capture.
If we use their electricity grid today, it unfortunately would result in more carbon dioxide being emitted than the amount of carbon dioxide that you remove just due to the energy source.
The answer seems to be that there isn't just one way to remove carbon. Different places, states, counties, even cities will have to find a solution that works for
them.
This isn't a one-size-fits-all approach.
It's tailored, collaborative, and locally driven.
America is a resource-rich country, from the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest to
the fertile agriculture lands of the southeast,
from the rugged plains of Wyoming to the rolling rangelands of Oklahoma.
Each region is as diverse in its landscape as it is in its potential solution for carbon
removal.
I would say that for wildfire mitigation, there is truly no place better than southern
Oregon, northern California.
This Pacific Northwest coastline area,
protecting its forests, showed up quite highly
in our triple EJ index values.
When it comes to soil-based carbon dioxide removal,
we really saw the Southeast,
think of agricultural lands in the Southeast,
such as all along the Mississippi River area.
This showed up quite highly because you can actually conserve the productive agricultural lands
with these different carbon-based practices on the farm,
such as adding cover crops and perennial field borders while improving water quality
for quite vulnerable counties.
The triple EJ index illustrates which counties could benefit maximally, but it doesn't reflect the struggles a
county is already going through, which could limit its ability to
engage with the CO2 removal project. To address this,
Livermore used the social vulnerability index from the
Center for Disease Control as a proxy for how available a
county's residents might be when it comes to working with
developers on novel
technologies, such as direct air capture with storage. When it comes to direct air capture,
Wyoming really stood out and North Dakota as well. They have a lot of counties that scored quite low
on the social vulnerability index, which means that they really might be more likely compared
to other counties in the United States to have the
social infrastructure and bandwidth to engage from a position of authority and power with
project developers on these different types of projects. We found that they also had a
high abundance of skilled, underemployed energy workforces that could really take the challenge
of scaling up this industry and run with it and make it their own.
So Wyoming and North Dakota really showed up highly for director capture and geologic carbon storage.
Other states such as Oklahoma showed more aptitude for bikers.
The reason for that is that there was a lot of crop residues and rangeland residues that are currently being burned.
And through the burning of these agricultural residues,
you create smoke, which causes air pollution
for local residents.
And by creating a centralized location
where agricultural residues could be brought,
and instead of farmers having to burn these residues,
instead they would be paid for it,
this really changes the dynamic.
And so we saw a lot of potential in Oklahoma for avoiding
air pollution while also sequestering away carbon dioxide.
And the rewards for this would be greater than just satisfaction of knowing you're doing
something important. The report projects a massive uptick in job creation as well, especially in
places where jobs have been lost.
To have that local conversation about the opportunities in doing carbon
capture, because there often are, it's not just costs, there are real
industry benefits. The one thing that I'm thrilled about is we
calculated 440,000 new jobs in this country could come out of these
industries. So that's massive, right? People worried about losing
jobs as the fossil fuel industries decline. This is a really positive upside.
The scientific community has been acting like a canary in the coal mine for decades, sounding the
alarm on climate change as early as 1990. It has taken decades for us to act, and that hesitation has cost us.
The Roads to Removal Report predicts that without large-scale carbon removal, global
temperatures will rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, and ecosystems like coral reefs and
Arctic ice will be gone, never to return. And because we, as a global society,
have not acted urgently enough on reducing carbon emissions,
we have now reached a point where even the IPCC agrees
that if we can somehow get all the countries of the planet
to switch to renewable energies or carbon-free energies now,
we're still not going to make it to our 1.5 degrees
Celsius targets. And I know that that number gets thrown around a lot. And to just give
you a sense of why I care about staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius, I am from a very small
rural island. And I have lived at sea level and I have watched my bike path get eroded
away into the ocean thanks to sea level rise and things to extreme weather events.
And I'm just simply getting tired of watching climate emergencies happen.
Without action, extreme weather events like fires, floods, and droughts will continue to devastate communities.
The Roads to Removal Report shifts the focus towards solutions,
offering opportunities for carbon removal across the entire country.
The report highlights paths forward, equipping decision makers with actionable information.
It lays out what can be done to create new opportunities in agriculture, energy, construction, and engineering. Carbon removal not only addresses environmental challenges,
but also brings co-benefits such as job creation,
cleaner air, and healthier soils,
offering hope for a sustainable future
through collective action.
The nice thing is,
is that in writing the roads to removal report,
it at least made me feel better
because it made me feel like
we're switching to renewable energies as
fast as we can. That's important. That's what we need to be doing. But it made me
feel empowered to think that there's additional efforts that we can be doing.
But we all have to do our part. The solutions in the Roads to Removal Report
aren't just for governments or corporations. Therefore, all of us, farmers, business leaders, workers and
citizens. That's why this year, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory is taking these solutions on the road,
connecting with communities across the country through a
series of symposia. It's a way to highlight the opportunities
in carbon dioxide removal for regions that may not typically
engage with national labs.
The truth is the United States has tons of resources.
We have more than enough to keep cleaning up.
We don't need to stop at one billion tons of carbon dioxide removal.
If people want to keep doing it, sure, get more facilities online.
We've got tons of direct air capture with geologic carbon storage for everybody after
we've done those more immediate and more
affordable carbon dioxide removal methods. We can really push this back down, but it requires a
concerted effort. And it requires a concerted effort, not just for you in your county,
not just for your state, not just for our country, but also across the planet.
Investing in large-scale carbon removal comes with a $139 billion price tag. But while
this annual investment may seem substantial at first glance, it actually represents only
a small percentage of the total US GDP. And this investment comes with significant co-benefits,
cleaner air, sustainable fuels, healthier soils, and a reduction in harmful chemicals like PFAS.
With strong policy support, strategic investment, and community engagement,
this cost is more than justified by the far-reaching rewards.
People want to see that better future. Sometimes we don't all agree on how to get there.
People's interest in having a healthier environment where humanity can coexist with everything
else. There's that base public support for that kind of thing and so that keeps
me optimistic. As the roads to removal motto reminds us, every region has a
story. Every region has an opportunity. We have the data. We have the insights. Now it's time to
accelerate action. Together we can build a future where we protect the people and places we call home.
For those interested in learning more check out the full report at roadstoremovial.org. That's roads, the number two, removal.org,
where you can find interactive maps and dive deeper
into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's methods and research.
Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab.
If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review.
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