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Climate Restoration with Peter Fiekowsky | EP159 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Peter Fiekowksy: Before the ice ages, there was a lot of dust storms for various reasons, and providing the iron, which allowed the phytoplankton the algae to grow, and then eventually sink and sequester the carbon. So he said, That's the number one solution. Because we know it works.
• 1:09
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, I want to go deeper into decarbonisation. We do too, we're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it.
• 1:29
  intro: Together, we can speed the energy transition.
• 1:38
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, nurturing the economy is actually the easy part. You know, you my listeners are part of the energy transition. And I have tremendous respect for all of you. And what I love about working in the energy transition is that there's so many mission driven professionals, we all care about the environment and the future of humanity. And the good news is that the energy transition is happening. It's happening faster sometimes than we anticipated. But there's a trillion tonnes of co2 equivalent pollution in the atmosphere that we have to remove, in order to step back from the brink of climate chaos.
• 2:14
  Tim Montague: And so my guest today is a wonderful gentleman, author, scientist, entrepreneur, who has done an evaluation of what's going on with the economy and that trillion tonnes. And he's come up with some very interesting solutions to climate change. So I want to welcome to the show Peter Fiekowsky.
• 2:33
  Peter Fiekowksy: 10. Thank you very much, and audience I'm looking forward to talking and working with you the energy transition is so important.
• 2:41
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts, if you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts, digital twin benchmarking technology, you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 2:59
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at denowatts.com, that's D E N O W A T T S.com.
• 3:08
  Tim Montague: It is it is. And it's I think my listeners might be a little Now back to the show.
• 3:18
  Tim Montague: surprised to hear this message that the energy transition is the easy part. And it's going to happen, right? There's this as as we were saying in the in the pre show, Peter, there's this tide of resources flowing into solar wind and energy storage, right. And capitalism is a real force. And when companies find markets, they create technologies, and they they lean on the accelerator, and that is truly happening. We have the resources, we have the technology to netzero the economy. And the good news is we also have the resources and the technology to take that trillion tonnes of co2 e out of the atmosphere. And we're going to be talking about that. But before we go there, Peter, tell us a little bit about your background, you have a very interesting background, hardcore science and, and hardcore tech entrepreneurship. And but you also had an awakening of your own, which led you to write this book, the book is climate restoration by Peter Fiekowsky.
• 4:21
  Tim Montague: You can just go to peterfiekowsky.com to check out the book, and all the other stuff that Peter has going on, which is a lot but tell us about your journey. Peter.
• 4:31
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I started out as a doing astrophysics. I just loved astronomy as a kid at MIT. I remember sitting on the sofa in one of the lounges reading science magazine, or Scientific American is a 74 or so. And reading about global warming, and this is you have to go back and picture the early 70s as huge cars and they just stank.
• 5:02
  Peter Fiekowksy: We we were pretty used to them thinking but they really think that this is before catalytic converters. And so the idea that we're gonna have to get the co2 back out of the air was really obvious. We were doing, we were cleaning up the rivers, the rivers, were getting clean. The you know, all these places we were cleaning up and it's like, of course, by the end of the century, we'll have removed this excess co2. And I decided that's chemical engineering that's really hard for a physicist. And so I said, Stay with astrophysics. And so I'll let the smart people do the chemical engineering. Long story short, you know, that was 7475 And the thing to remember is again for a 19 year old a By the end of the century, which was 2526 years later was more than a lifetime away. Right. And so it's like, Oh, it'll be taken care of, I'm gonna do the something fun and interesting. And, you know, I was studying a supernovas in the galaxy about 50 million light years away, no one was gonna get hurt. I say that, because so many people are careful about their work and climate, because they want to make sure that if I do something wrong, no one will get hurt. And that was my algorithm back in the 70s. And all the way up till 2010. And I was doing a lot of volunteer work, I just, I've moved here to Silicon Valley have a software business, in semiconductor manufacturing is I have all the normal things a family and I have got three grandkids now. So I was doing volunteer work on advocating for hunger and poverty issues that said, you know, what's really hard is how do you feed everyone? That and so that was my big focus for decades as a volunteer, and getting we got, we got funding to vaccinate the world's kids and, you know, vitamins, all these things, made huge differences. By 2010, was that was clearly levelling out. And things were beginning to get worse because of the climate. So I went back, and I thought, you know, 35 years ago, it was very clear what we had to do. Let me go back and stop ignoring the climate and see how they're doing. So I go to my friends at MIT. I went to Dr. Jim Hanson, who was on the board of one of the organisations I work with, and then hey, how's it going, getting the 1000 gigatons of co2 out of the air? And was just silence. They said, Well, we're not working on getting co2 out of the air. The UN says we have to reduce emissions. I said, Well, it's too late for that.
• 7:50
  Peter Fiekowksy: We're already 40% 30% Above anything humans have ever survived. And they said, Yeah, that's true. But you know, the UN says, we have to reduce emissions. And so that was, that was how I got into it. I was very reluctant. I'm a painful time for me, because I did not want to lead a movement. I had a software business, I had a family, and always well, but I, I'm committed to our children, to our children having a historically safe climate climate that we know humans have survived. And that wasn't on the agenda.
• 8:28
  Tim Montague: This reminds me of the saying, you know, we are the ones that we've been waiting for. It's it's very convenient to think that someone else is going to solve the problem, so to speak. Yeah, but we're all responsible, we have to acknowledge that we have the knowledge and information and resources to solve the challenge. The challenge is real. There are significant forces that continue to try to convince society that there's not, they're there with climate change. The oil and gas industry is front and centre in this, they're pouring lots of resources and political power into keeping the burning going, right. And the result is, you know, co2 in the atmosphere, the levels are now above 420 ppm, they're going up, right, even though the rate at which they're going up is starting to slow a little bit. Right, we are starting to put on the brakes globally, you have to think about all the countries in the world that are still developing, right? And we here in America, have, you know, a we're 5% of the population, but we're a much larger share of the problem, per se, right. And so, we have a fiduciary responsibility, I like to call it really to do our part. And the answer is surprisingly simple. You know, as far as the energy transition goes, as Jigar Shah likes to say deploy, deploy, deploy solar wind, batteries and other forms of energy storage, okay, there's a plethora, look at our back catalogue, go to clean power hour.com, check out our back catalogue. We did a wonderful series on all kinds of energy storage technologies in the last six months, and they are many, and they are using today's technologies. Okay, so it's not some future fantasy. And no nuclear power isn't the answer, because it just takes too long to develop nuclear power. Of course, the technology works.
• 10:32
  Tim Montague: We've been using SMRs in submarines for decades. But they're not the answer.
• 10:37
  Tim Montague: Unfortunately. The answer is surprising though. And I love this paradigm that you created, finding solutions that are permanent, scalable, financial, okay. And then here You're now right like practical AI. So I want to start with, tell us about that journey on identifying the solutions that you have identified in climate restoration, the book that you wrote in 2022. And it's a very accessible book, it's written for lay people. And, and I would encourage all of our listeners to check this book out, it is my favourite book for 2023. I just discovered it, thanks to my father, Peter Montague, for bringing it to my attention.
• 11:21
  Tim Montague: And, but I think it's very, it's very sensical. And but but not obvious, right, the solutions that you've identified are somewhat off the beaten path.
• 11:30
  Tim Montague: Some of them are no brainers.
• 11:34
  Tim Montague: Like synthetic limestone manufacturer, I think most energy professionals know that we could capture co2 out of the atmosphere, and make limestone.
• 11:40
  Tim Montague: And of course, that's going to stay as stone for a very long time. And thus, it's a permanent solution. Unfortunately, there are other forms of carbon capture, for example, CCS, right, compressing it into liquid co2 And then pumping it into the Earth's crust. It might work. But there's a lot of uncertainties about that. And we now have 60,000 miles of co2 pipelines planned for the United States. And they're putting it in places like my home state of Illinois, where they're going to put it in the ground and pray to God basically, that it stays down there. And if just a fraction of it leaks out, then we have the same problem. So anyway, tell us about your journey to identifying the solutions. And then we'll get into the four solutions that you've identified.
• 12:26
  Peter Fiekowksy: Perfect, perfect. Yes. So once I started getting serious about the climate, the first thing, of course, was to figure out, this is for me around 2012. How do we transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. And you mentioned Tony Seba, and there was very clear, it became clear 2012 2014 2015 2016 Very clear that the energy transition was going to happen. And in the book, and given that your listeners are largely energy people, my chapter two summarises a lot of the work that Tony Seba did. And I think almost everyone here listening is clear that we are going to be mostly electric vehicles in 10 years, most of our energy is going to be solar and wind. I would say that nuclear differently, I mean, the same thing, but I say it differently, that there's a there's a niche for nuclear. And then nuclear will fill that niche. And because it's 10 times, roughly 10 times I think the IEA says nine times the cost of solar, well, there are places where solar doesn't work. So you know, for them, and if there's no wind, they'll use nuclear. So and that's fine. But the point is, that's happening. And so the thing I invite people who are working on the energy transition to do is to make sure you have a lot of fun doing it. So we don't need to bash the nuclear industry, we can welcome them in there, there is going to be an itch for them. The as you said, the economics are very cut and dried. They're not going to build a new nuclear plant in California, because we have lots of sun and wind, right? That's fine.
• 14:22
  Tim Montague: Maybe Maybe Antarctica or something like that. Although there's lots of wind down in Antarctica, there's not a lot of sunlight, but there's a lot of wind and wave energy. But anyway.
• 14:34
  Peter Fiekowksy: So then once you get that the energy transition is essentially a done deal. And we want to make it a beautiful done deal. I love the picture in your background there of the solar panels on the hillside. Then you say, okay, good. If that's a done deal, let's figure out the next step, which is how do we get the co2 back to sustainable levels? And the first, the first step there is to answer the question, what's the level that we want?
• 14:58
  Peter Fiekowksy: And that was the biggest breakthrough was it actually happened at a climate conference for me in Marrakech, and you can just imagine the bazaars in Marrakech. And so there was a bishop who had a dinner and who invited me and by 10 other people, and he said, we're going to talk about the morality of climate. And as a physicist, I rolled my eyes and thought, morality, I'm into solid things, but we'll learn something, I will at least meet someone here.
• 15:31
  Peter Fiekowksy: And it changed my life. And it perhaps changed life in general, because for the first time, I saw that the climate was an issue for humans, that the rest of the planet besides humans would just roll with the punches, no big deal. It's happened a gazillion times and will happen a gazillion more times that Climate change is radically. For humans, we want to restore the client, we want the climate such that humans will survive. And being that tells us we want to restore the co2 levels that humans have historically survived, which is anything below 300 parts per million. And that's the level we passed last time in 1920. And then before that it was 300,000 years ago, humanity was still homosapiens. And co2 s level was at that level for 1000 years or so. Anyway, so 300 parts per million, the level it was 100 years ago. So okay, good. We now know what the goal is, oh, how do we get there, we have to remove as you said, 1000 Giga tonnes of co2. Cool. And again, I love that we have a fairly engineering audience here, because I think they'll just get the feel. Okay, good. 1000 gigatons by when we debated it.
• 16:46
  Peter Fiekowksy: And 2050 is what landed like, hey, let's target 2050. And again, this is really serious.
• 16:55
  Peter Fiekowksy: Like, why did President Kennedy say land a man on the moon by the end of the decade? Because it felt right. And so that's the meaning behind 2050. And I think we'll do it by 2040, actually, but don't tell anyone. And so then okay, good that you do the maths yet to get 50 Giga tonnes 50 Giga tonnes of co2 out per year, in addition to anything that you that you put in, because the energy transition is going to take a few decades, and but you do the math that comes out to about 60 billion tonnes a year, we need to pull out on average. And we start in 2030, to give us six years to build up, which is actually reasonable, you'll hear and then 20 years of removing it. Okay, good. That's an engineering plan. And then, again, a lot of your listeners are prod do projects, you figure well, we need a plan A and plan B. So we knew we had to have at least two and hopefully three viable alternatives, because it's too important to only have a plan A.
• 17:58
  Peter Fiekowksy: And so we knew that going in that would be three alternatives. And you asked me before the show it but you know what, well, what alternatives do we have to throw away? As soon as I knew what the answer that the answer was 50 billion tonnes a year, I, I had to request from Congress to give some to give them some language for a bill for a climate bill that you want for climate restoration. And I use that as an excuse for carbon removal. And so that was a fun conversation. They had never gotten together again, before that, and came up with I think, seven different methods. And most of them were what's called direct air capture. And that makes sense, because that's what we've been doing in submarines, right submarine, you have people breathing and perhaps the motors producing co2, and you have to remove the co2. And there's chemical ways of doing it ammonia based and so on. You know, and just so you can picture get I love having a technical audience. co2 is acidic. And so if you have a basic thing like ammonia, it'll absorb the co2 met, it's really not much more complicated than that. Anyway, so so most of the methods we looked at, were similar were derived from what we had in submarines. And of course, that was right after the well, the Apollo programme, so we had read spaceships. And so we have to throw those away though, because they're just too freakin expensive. Now, I stuck with that. Yeah, everyone knew was going to be $1,000 a tonne back from decades ago. And I resisted along with everyone else. I'm sure we can get it to$100 it done? No, it's still$1,000 a time 10 years later.
• 19:55
  Peter Fiekowksy: Too expensive to scale up, just you know, if you multiply $1,000 per tonne times 60,000 tonnes, that's $60 trillion. That's almost the whole global GDP, right? That's not going to happen. So we throw a whole slew of direct air capture methods.
• 20:12
  Peter Fiekowksy: Now they're still in business because they're producing co2 that the oil companies need for manufacturing it for pumping underground, push out more oil.
• 20:18
  Peter Fiekowksy: But that's a whole different topic, which we don't probably want to go into. It took a long time took almost three or four years of talking to everyone.
• 20:32
  Peter Fiekowksy: Before I realised that nature had solved the problem and nature solutions weren't on on that list that we did with the eight scientists. So nature's if you think about it, our planet has ice ages periodically for millions of years, right? As the last one was just 12,000 years ago, right, so your Jesus was the 2000, Moses about 5000 years ago, and the last Ice Age was 12,000. This is like really recent, the last ice age, how does the Earth removed that 1000 gigatons is that to cool the planet, which is what we need to do, we're just going to remove 1000 Giga tonnes to get back to pre industrial. So how did nature do it? Well, nature did it by photosynthesis, in the ocean, as we all know about photosynthesis on Earth, you know, we have crops that we have trees, but I think we all know that those trees and crops they last the your trees a few decades, and then they die and rot or burn.
• 22:28
  Tim Montague: And that basic not basic chemistry is you suck in co2 plants breathe in co2. And they combine co2 with water to make carbohydrate. Otherwise known as biomass, or wood or plant material, right, and then they breathe off oxygen, which is something that we breathe. So it's a, it's a, it's a nice symbiosis that plants have created something that's been around for millions of years.
• 22:55
  Tim Montague: And, and so it is tried and true technology, so to speak. So let's continue that conversation. Good.
• 23:04
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, and so in, but and it's photosynthesis in the ocean that nature uses.
• 23:07
  Peter Fiekowksy: Because, as we said, on land, it's short lived a year, a few decades, maybe 100 years. And in a few cases, on the ocean, when plants die, they sink, or the animals that eat them sink, and there's almost no oxygen in the deep ocean, and so it doesn't rot. And that's how I say just happen is you get a lot of photosynthesis at the ocean surface. And then the bio carbon sinks, it doesn't most of it does not go to the bottom, only a little bit goes to the seafloor, most of it is suspended. They call it as dissolved organic carbon or dissolved inorganic carbon. And just to suspend it in the ocean, and then at the end of the Ice Age, the currents will change, oxygen will become available, and then it'll raw and come back out as co2 warming the planet again. Now we'll have to figure that out. But the trigger for getting that photosynthesis at the ocean surface, at the level needed is is a micronutrient iron. That is if you think about it, and why isn't the ocean all beautiful green, you like a like a field, right is that there's lots of water and sun. And if you've swim in the ocean, you can tell there's all sorts of nutrients, of course, they have salt, but there's, there's all sorts of minerals. The mineral that's missing is iron. And just like humans in your garden need iron, the ocean needs iron. And the reason The ocean is mostly blue is that the iron tends to sink, it doesn't tend to dissolve well. And the only source of iron in most of the ocean is dust storms blowing dust with iron from the land over the ocean. And before the ice ages, there was a lot of dust storms for various reasons, and providing the iron, which allowed the phytoplankton the algae to grow, and then eventually sink and sequester the carbon. So how so that's the number one solution. Because we know it works. We can talk a little more about it. Just as I said, we need to have a plan B as well. And the other thing that nature does is limestone 99.9% Of all the carbon on our planet now is sequestered on the seafloor as limestone from hundreds of millions of years ago, almost a billion years of the growth of the plant plants and animals and their skeletons and shells, they sink to the seafloor, those, those bones that those shells and bones are mostly are essentially limestone calcium carbonate, and that that also can be duplicated. And we'll talk about that in a second. What's cool about limestone is by weight, it's almost half co2, it's calcium carbonate, if you know the chemistry, you can see it's 44% co2. And if you think about an oyster and an oyster shell, you can see it's not complicated, right? This little oyster makes this beautiful oyster shell which is pure limestone, with a different crystalline structure than what's used in your buildings are your concrete. So those are the plan A and plan B.
• 26:35
  Peter Fiekowksy: There's others we may we may have time to talk about what's very cool about the first one plan a He is to make it happen is insanely easy. And it basically you're duplicating dust storms. The amount of iron required is about $10 million a year worth of iron sulphate. And that's enough for the whole planet to sequester 60 billion tonnes a year of co2. It's mind boggling like you mean $12 million of iron? Well, you have to distribute it. So call it 100 million or maybe 200 million because you have infrastructure and testing and, you know, safety and so on. But again, we're talking definitely less than a billion dollars and probably not much more than 100 million.
• 27:25
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• 28:01
  Tim Montague: Let's talk a little more about this the iron fertilisation. So it's called Ocean iron fertilisation or Oli F just Google that. And you'll see, there's been some pilot studies on this. And the theory is that iron is a limiting factor preventing more growth of plants and animals that that grow shells. And like diatoms, for example, they're microscopic organisms that are the bottom of the food chain. One of the problems with global warming is that the as the co2 levels go up in the atmosphere, the ocean gets acidified, and those creatures can no longer make their shells. But how do you distribute the iron? I don't doubt that iron is super abundant in the Earth's crust.
• 28:46
  Tim Montague: But, you know, it sounds like quite a problem just to get it out there. Is this by aeroplane or ship? Or how are we going to pump the iron and distributed into the ocean?
• 29:01
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, so iron is one of the most abundant elements on the planet. And the amount needed is just a few piles of dust from the steel mill. So the availability of it is is not a problem. It would be like 50,000 tonnes a year 60,000 tonnes a year. So it's a probably 10 car train car loads.
• 29:30
  Peter Fiekowksy: I just guessed that. Okay, very little iron required. And so then your question is, how do you get it out to the right place at the right time? And the best answer at this point is buy shit. You can do it by air. And that may ultimately be the way to do it. But the advantage of ship is of course, they use much less fuel. And you can put exactly the right amount at exactly the right place. If you do it by if you distributed by air, like a like a dust storm, that nature does that but it's pretty random. And most of it probably doesn't go to the right place at the right time to ship you can do a bullseye. And that way you're assured of less unintended side effects.
• 30:14
  Tim Montague: And so you're targeting areas of upwelling where there's already like nutrients coming up from the deep sea. This tends to be near the coastlines which tend to be very productive areas, right?
• 30:23
  Tim Montague: Which is very convenient for us because that's where we are, you know, 70% of the human population is is within a few miles of the coast and then harvesting the bounties of the sea so to speak the the fish and other sea life and plant life.
• 30:39
  Tim Montague: Seaweed Permaculture is also on your shortlist. So there's there's two forms of ocean you know augmenting ocean growth, so to speak on your list as the permaculture, the seaweed, permaculture angle, does that play in? You know, with this iron fertilisation?
• 31:01
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yeah, well, first of all the iron fertilisation would normally be done 100 miles or more out to sea. Because near the coast, the boys get run off from the land and there's plenty of iron in the water. The concentration of iron and the deep ocean is a million what it is in the coastal areas. So like the big, big, big difference. And yes, typically what's what's being planned is to add the iron dust to the ocean in eddies they're called meso scale Eddie's 100 miles in diameter. And that because it's an eddy it keeps the iron in one place. For a whole bunch of months, and that allows the ecosystem to go through his normal arc whenever like, like with growing plants to go ahead crop on land, because it really it's almost identical to farming. And you want the farm to go through the whole season from beginning to end. So they'll do it in an eddy where it'll last the fertilisation will last four to 810 months. And then you asked about the permaculture, the seaweed, permaculture, that also would be done everywhere. The most in the deep ocean, because the idea there is just like the the iron fertilisation, which grows micro algae, the seaweed is macro algae, so it's large algae, plants, and but they need to sink to the deep enough where there's no oxygen. And so that's going to be you know, at least 100 metres at least 300 feet deep. And so and it varies depending depending on where you are in the ocean. And so, so that is viable. That's our plan C. And you know, what's changed in the last year and a half since I finished writing the book is that the climate, of course, has gotten much worse, the wildfires, the droughts and floods, and the storms have gotten much worse. And so I'm now focusing really on just the top two solutions. I'm the limestone and the permaculture, that seaweed, I'm encouraging and supporting. But the both of those require a lot more infrastructure and will take more years and decades to get to scale. So we're I'm focusing on the iron fertilisation, which we could get the scale totally to scale by 2028. And then the one we haven't mentioned yet, which is methane oxidation, which we also could get the scale by 2020.
• 33:44
  Tim Montague: And so real quick, you know, it occurs to me that we already have a massive fleet of ships, ploughing the seas, we could just put some iron powder on all of those ships, these are fishing ships, these are passenger vessels, and of course, container ships that are moving stuff around, it doesn't seem like a big stretch to just ask them or, you know, mandate them to start adding this to their journey.
• 34:08
  Peter Fiekowksy: Right. And that may happen in the short term. We don't want to do it quite like that. Because for the sake of sanity, we want to make sure it's done safely. And so we want to do a few selected spots carefully. That worked. Because if you have if you ask the commercial ships in the short term to do it, the crew aren't going to be trained on on the pros and cons and how to do it carefully. In the long term that may happen in the short term.
• 34:36
  Peter Fiekowksy: It'll be but it'll be shipped.
• 34:40
  Peter Fiekowksy: But the test that had been done on the iron fertilisation, some of them are done with just old fishing chips, you know, which cost the one or $2 million. So it's not it not a big issue. And is there
• 34:53
  Tim Montague: is there a potential downside with the oaf solution
• 34:57
  Peter Fiekowksy: physically now, that is to say, in the physical universe, nature has been doing it for many millions of years.
• 35:05
  Peter Fiekowksy: And so the nature of and we're doing the exact same thing that nature does, it's just we're just rather than doing wild dusting of everything, we're using just the minut amounts of iron claw wrought iron sulphate, and so much less quantity. In the 13 scientific tests that have been reported, there's been zero reports of any bad side effects, which is not surprising, as I said, nature has been doing it and that though in 1991, month tubo erupted and put a lot of iron rich dust in this in the South China Sea near the between the Philippines and China and created so much phytoplankton growing that the see that the co2 level was flat the following year 1992. If you look at the Keeling Curve, the co2 curve, it goes up steadily flattens for one year 92. And then it goes back up at the same rate. And all the evidence is that that 20,000 tonnes of co2 that was removed were related to the the iron fertilisation we can't prove it because there weren't any satellites up then that could met that and recorded the chlorophyll recorded the greenness of the ocean, unfortunately, but so all we know is that worldwide fishing increased the in the years following it went up 15 to 20%.
• 36:45
  Peter Fiekowksy: And the fish catch increased a lot instead was steady went up after Mount Pinatubo and stabilised again. And yeah, and the co2 level well went down and that co2 never came back. So it's been done a lot. There's a point.
• 37:02
  Tim Montague: Okay, so the four the four solutions that you highlighted in your book are ocean iron fertilisation, seaweed, permaculture, synthetic limestone manufacture, and enhanced atmospheric methane, oxygen oxidation, EA Mo. Now we're gonna drill down on that on EMR why enhance atmospheric methane oxidation? Why is that so important?
• 37:26
  Peter Fiekowksy: What got me into the methane was because I figured methane is only 19% of global warming. And so let's worry about the big 81% first.
• 37:34
  Peter Fiekowksy: And once I realised that we had four different methods, three to three or three different methods to get the co2 back to historically safe levels, I danced the jig, and then realise that the methane was there. And the big problem with methane is what's called the methane burst.
• 37:55
  Peter Fiekowksy: And in the Arctic area, you have permafrost, which is where the water in the ground is so cold, it never melts. But it's warm, the Arctic is warming up three times faster than the rest of the planet. And so that permafrost is melting. And under in that ground, there's 1000s, and almost millions, or almost a million years of a bio matter in cotton matter that's been accumulated over the years. And when that melts, it essentially ferments and turns into methane.
• 38:30
  Peter Fiekowksy: And when, as that is historically, the last time our planet warmed up like it is now, which was about 54 million years ago, we lost the Arctic ice cap, we, you and I weren't alive 54 million years ago, but our planet was so our planet lost the Arctic ice cap because the planet warmed up. And there was a burst of methane from the melting permafrost, especially under the shallow ocean, there's a lot of continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. And that, that when sea level goes up and down, that continental shelf gets a lot of plants on it, and mostly moss and so on. And that melted and the met that burst of methane heated the atmosphere so quickly, that about a third of the species on our planet went extinct. And we want to avoid that, yet we're on the same path that is by in the next 15 years, almost certainly, our Arctic ice cap will have fully melted by in during summertime. And so the enhanced methane oxidation allows us both to cool the planet by, you know, 10 or 20%.
• 39:44
  Peter Fiekowksy: As we reduce the methane level.
• 39:49
  Peter Fiekowksy: More importantly, if the methane bursts starts and it's actually started as the methane burst gets bad, then we can oxidise it before we lose species and especially before we lose a harvest, and lose, lose our civilization. So it's mostly an insurance policy.
• 40:06
  Tim Montague: It strikes me as a very difficult problem. You know, you think of the Northern, the northern part of Russia and Canada, right? Where where this, this permafrost lies. It's a vast area. And so the the methane is just going to be bubbling out of the tundra. How do you how do you attack the methane? What is the methodology? Right?
• 40:33
  Peter Fiekowksy: I love your description. That's how I walked into it thing, basically, oh, my gosh, what do we do? It turns out that if you ask what would mother nature do? It took it took a while took me about six months of panic. I said, Oh, what Mother Nature does is if you know about methane in the atmosphere, you know that it has a lifetime of 12 years, which is equivalent to a half life of eight years. It just oxidises in the atmosphere, the sunlight and various chemicals that cause the methane to oxidise. Methane is the is the gas you use in your stoves and so on to heat your house and cook. And so this enhanced methane oxidation simply double double is intent designed to double the rate that nature oxidised the methane in the atmosphere. And so rather than having to do something in the Arctic, which is impenetrable, and you never know what politically is going to happen in Russia, of course, then if you just wait a few months for that methane to drift on South, then you can oxidise it in the atmosphere near the equator, where we have a lot of sunlight because these reactions are triggered by sunlight. And so that that's the enhanced methane oxidation. Very specifically, it uses iron chloride, which is chemical widely used in water purification. And the chlorine in the iron in the iron chloride is aerosolized. And nature does this with the, in the dust storms that come off the Sahara, there's the, what makes the Sahara dust pink is iron. And sometimes that iron from the dust will find chlorine from the sea salt and sodium fluoride, as its foot blows across the Atlantic Ocean, and it turns into iron chloride, that then and those chlorine atoms, if it's hit by sunlight will knock off and then that chlorine atom like chlorine bleach will oxidise methane. And so that's a natural reaction. And then we've demonstrated that it can be done at scale. It Right now we're in the middle of lab, lab experiments, but everything is going well.
• 42:53
  Tim Montague: So it's just a matter of pumping iron chloride into the atmosphere. Is that what you're saying? Suggesting?
• 42:58
  Tim Montague: Yeah,
• 42:58
  Peter Fiekowksy: and it's not very much it's 100,000 tonnes or something like that. So it's a lot, but it's not, it's not very much. So the trick is this, what's really cool is that the I, the chlorine reacts with methane, almost 10 times faster, I think 15 times 10, or 15 times faster than the usual things, mostly, it's O H radicals, what doesn't matter what those are, which oxidise, the methane, this is so fast, that we only need one or 2% of the air over the ocean, in order to produce the result that we need to cut levels in half and and ensure us ensure our our children and grandchildren, that if the methane bursts gets bad, we'll be able to oxidise it before it causes extensive ecosystem damage.
• 43:51
  Tim Montague: So let's talk about the cost of this. You know, you've come to surprising conclusion in your book that all of this is going to cost somewhere between a billion and$2 billion a year. Is that right?
• 44:06
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yes. Yeah, yeah. In fact, since then, it looks like it'll be less than a billion in total, not that both of those numbers are very close to zero relative to the, the the global economy is 100,000 billion dollars, right? This is 100 trillion. 1000s. Right? So about 100 1000s of the size of the global economy.
• 44:27
  Tim Montague: And how do you propose humanity kind of pivot and really start to shine a light on this and then focus these resources in the right areas? I mean, it's a it's a trivial number, in relation to the global economy. A single billionaire, like Elon Musk could solve the problem. Yeah.
• 44:51
  Tim Montague: Why don't they do that?
• 44:53
  Peter Fiekowksy: That that's where these interviews come in, is that with as a historical problem we're up against, and historical problems are pretty easy to solve, once you solve them. The historical problem is in 1990, in the 80s, and the night in 1990, was clear we had a climate problem and the UN decided that the solution was to stabilise greenhouse gas levels, stabilised co2 levels. And you know, if you remember the climate 1990 and almost no one does because it was just the climate. It was that there was nothing to see. stabilising it made sense. Well, at this point, co2 levels are already 40% higher than humans have ever survived long term. And so it's it's been 3035 years. And the goal we made in 1990 is no longer valid. We've got to say restore and stabilise. And so what we need is for professionals everyone to to say that we need to update the UN goals to today's situation which is a call for restoring and stabilising. On my website, Peterfiekowsky.com, you can endorse the resolution there, you can you can endorse the resolution, which was passed in California last month, which says that California is committed to restoring the climate for future generations.
• 46:31
  Peter Fiekowksy: And if you if you go up on the top, you can see the the the tab for endorsed the resolution. So we had the resolution As passed in California, and we're now looking to have it introduced into the into the House and the Senate, once the House and Senate discussed the idea that we want to give our children a historically safe climate, which is a new idea, then I think the Biden administration will adopt it, and the UN will quickly adopt it, because it's a no brainer. It's just no one.
• 47:04
  Peter Fiekowksy: Everyone wants to be second or third, not first. So the listeners can sign on to the resolution here. I talked to my local representative, and her staffer said, listen, get some sign on, get some endorsements, and then then we'll introduce it into Congress. So sign on, if you know someone in environmental organisations, Sierra Club, three fifty.org, any of those, have them sign on and mentioned that they're from that club, if they're an official in the club, we, we especially need endorsements from environmental organisations saying that this organisation actually supports the idea of giving our children a climate, historically safe climate.
• 47:52
  Tim Montague: So go to Peter Fiekowsky. That's peterfiekowsky.com. And then you'll find information about the book at the landing page and then go to endorse the resolution. This is a call to action to get Congress's attention, that there is a concrete solution to the problem, per se, and it's cost effective. And then this will lead to what Peter if we if we're successful, because you also have something called the grandparents Fund, which is a philanthropic initiative, right?
• 48:23
  Tim Montague: You've started a foundation, and you're raising, you know, donations for the grandparents fund. But how do these two play together?
• 48:35
  Peter Fiekowksy: Yes, well, with the resolution, both the UN and as you mentioned, Elon Musk could fund it. He actually knows about it in the past, I'm told that he has funded iron fertilisation back in around 2005. So but when these are endorsed, then it makes it easier for someone that of his level to stick his neck out. So that that's the main thing. The grandparents fun, similarly allows people to go beyond just signing their name and say, Listen, I'm willing to put in$10 a month, $100 a month,$1,000 a month, million dollars month, if any of your listeners that economic level, they can put in a million dollars a month. pretty clearly that would be enough to fund all of climate restoration right there. So it's crowdfunding.
• 49:29
  Tim Montague: Right? And then I guess there are, I mean, are there companies that are dedicating their lives to this iron fertilisation and enhanced methane oxidation?
• 49:46
  Peter Fiekowksy: There are two startup companies working on it.
• 49:51
  Peter Fiekowksy: They're both very small, in the in the ocean fertilisation, the one company that established is the is called OPR. World, ocean pasture wet restoration world.
• 50:02
  Peter Fiekowksy: Very small with just one or two people still. And then there is a methane oxidation, a company that I helped establish, with several years back called a blue dot change. And they're both looking for investment and, and support. I'm designing a nonprofit to do the same thing.
• 50:31
  Peter Fiekowksy: Because what I'm finding is that environmentalists and scientists are much more comfortable. If the climate restoration is done by a nonprofit which is accountable to the public. We're as for profit as accountable to the shareholders. And so that's a different kind of a game to play.
• 50:51
  Tim Montague: In our last couple of minutes together, Peter, you know, there are a lot of different solutions out there that people hear about one of them. One of the myths is well, why don't we plan to trillion trees? You know, Surely you've done the math on on some of these solutions. What were the solutions that got nixed off your list of obvious answers that surprised you the most?
• 51:17
  Peter Fiekowksy: Oh, well, as I mentioned, the first one was the direct air capture that was a quick strike it off the list because it's so expensive. That trillion trees never made it onto my list because I know that trees die after a few decades.
• 51:34
  Peter Fiekowksy: And so that's just not permanent enough. And then biochar where you basically They make charcoal from any kind of agricultural waste. That's, that's it's very good, but it's pre fairly expensive. But it's limited because there's just not that much agricultural land. And getting people to do something expensive is difficult. So we set that aside, there's another one, bio energy and carbon sequestration, where you do things like corn ethanol, and then you take the co2 that's produced and and bury the co2.
• 52:14
  Peter Fiekowksy: Again, it's fairly expensive, and you're competing on land against farming for human purposes. And so it's possible but again, just too expensive to scale up. There's a new one, which is getting a lot of interest, but again, is not viable. That's the ocean i ocean. alkalinity enhancement.
• 52:41
  Peter Fiekowksy: And the idea there that I mentioned at the, towards the beginning, that you capture co2 By using something alkaline that co2 is acidic, if you have something alkaline, it'll absorb the co2. And if you dump alkaline rocks into the ocean, then you can absorb a lot of co2 from the ocean and reduce ocean acidification. The problem with it is, if you if you want to do if you want to make a climate size difference, you need 50 billion tonnes of co2 a year that comes up to 100 billion tonnes of rock. That's twice the amount of every kind of mining in the whole planet. That's 10 times the amount of coal every year. And it's just that's just not practical. But you know, it's exciting idea. The government's putting a lot of money into it because well because the money government is and mainly because we haven't convinced the government that our goal is needs to be at 21st century goal of restoring the climate not the 21st century goal is stabilising it, and that's where your listeners can make a difference.
• 53:57
  Tim Montague: The CleanPower Hour is brought to you by Denowatts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 54:16
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at Denowatts.com.
• 54:24
  Tim Montague: That's D E N O W A T T S.com.
• 54:28
  Tim Montague: Now back to the show.
• 54:30
  Tim Montague: Excellent. Well check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. And most importantly, tell your friends and colleagues about the show. That is how more people will learn about the show. And ultimately get involved with the solutions to climate chaos, which are just staring us in the face. We have the technology, we just need to get busy putting a fraction of our resources into these technologies to step back from the brink of climate chaos and creating a safer, healthier future for humanity. I want to thank author, scientist and entrepreneur Peter Fiekowsky, for coming on the show today.
• 55:09
  Tim Montague: Thank you so much, Peter.
• 55:11
  Peter Fiekowksy: Thank you 10.
• 55:11
  Peter Fiekowksy: This is a pleasure. And listeners, thank you for the work that you've done. And thank you for the work that you're going to do promoting the future of the climate restored.
• 55:22
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage.
• 55:26
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• 55:59
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• 56:04
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• 56:23
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• 57:01
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• 57:06
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• 57:49
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