Oswald Petersen & Renaud de Richter: Enhanced Atmospheric Methane Oxidation

Watch recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9gJd48ocAU&t=1s

Mankind has more than doubled the atmospheric methane content, within the last 150 years, from 0.7 ppm to 2 ppm. Nature needs around 12 years on average to remove methane (6). We keep adding and adding and nature cannot cope – so, what can we do? We can assist nature to remove methane. All we have to do is add a little more iron salt aerosol (ISA) into the atmosphere. ISA is a natural component of the atmosphere, like methane and CO2. However, unlike those gases, ISA is an aerosol, solid particles suspended in the air. ISA particles are so small, that they can remain airborne for several weeks before sinking down into the ocean or onto the land. EAMO means adding ISA to the atmosphere. If we can halve the average lifetime of methane from 12 years to 6 years, we can remove around 50 MT of methane per year. This would stop the current growth of atmospheric methane and would even make that methane content shrink, slowly. Within around 20 years the methane content would sink to pre-industrial levels. The average global temperature would cool by around 0.5 degrees, compared to what we would get without EAMO (15). 

Source: https://amr.earth/enhanced-atmospheric-methane-oxidation/ 

Disclaimer: This description comes from AMR and does not necessarily represent the views of META and its organizers. Hopefully this talk and the following discussion will help us all get a clearer picture of what this technology might be capable of and what questions we should ask if we end up deploying it.

Bio

Oswald Petersen, born 1960, is a German economist and IT-consultant who went to school in Schule Schloss Salem and graduated with a diploma in Volkswirtschaftslehre (National Economics) from Freie Universität Berlin in 1989. He lived and worked in Germany, Australia and Switzerland where he currently lives with his wife Maria. Since many years his main professional focus is in the health industry. Oswald heads a Swiss initiative against tax-exempted shopping tourism, the Kreuzlinger Iniative gegen die Mehrwertsteuersubvention, and invented a system to deliver pizza without a one-way package, the Pizzacarrier. In 2008 he worked with Renaud de Richter on solar-updraft towers where he learnt a lot about lattice steel towers. In 2020 he became a member of Restore Our Climate and in 2021 he founded AMR AG. 

Source: https://amr.earth/finance/

Dr. Renaud de Richter is French and lives in France. He is a chemical engineer and holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the ENSC Montpellier, France. Renaud performed a post-doctorate at the School of Pharmacy in Minneapolis, MN, USA (1990). Dr. de Richter was manager of R&D (1991–1993) at a pharmaceutical start-up in Paris, France. Later, Renaud has been manager of a team of 32 scientists and technicians of a physical-chemistry laboratory (1998-2007). He and his co-authors were the first to propose two different methods to remove at a climatically significant scale several greenhouse gases, such as methane + nitrous oxide + chloro-fluoro-carbons (May 2017), methane + tropospheric (surface) ozone + soot (August 2017), methane and carbon dioxide (March 2021). Among Renaud’s other key contributions to science are his proposals to improve solar updraft chimneys in order to produce CO2 free renewable energy and fresh water in arid regions. View the list of Renaud’s scientific peer-reviewed publications. 

Source: https://amr.earth/science/