Bullwinkle oil platform being towed out to sea, via Wikipedia.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at enhanced rock weathering, driverless trucks, Home Depot’s garden experiments, hydrogen airplanes, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Enhanced rock weathering
Enhanced rock weathering is a proposed method of removing CO2 from the air by breaking up large volumes of rock into small particles, and letting carbon dioxide in the air react with those particles to form carbonate minerals. It’s attractive as a method of carbon sequestration because it could potentially remove very large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere relatively cheaply. Austin Vernon crunches the numbers on it, and finds while the most optimistic projections of $10 per ton of carbon removed aren’t doable, it still seems promising:
Overall, achieving an undiscounted cost of CO2 removal that is less than $100/ton at the billions or even trillions of tons scale seems doable. And while the market might not support that scale of effort, there is a profound impact on policy. Most environmental subsidies cost more than $100/ton of CO2. For example, assume an existing natural gas power plant costs $40/MWh to run and emits 0.4 tons CO2/MWh. Replacement generation that costs $100/MWh would have an abatement cost of $150/ton of CO2. Targeted subsidies for specific technologies look even worse compared to blanket carbon taxes/removals than they did before. $1 billion would buy a fully-scaled first site to prove that globally relevant weathering amounts are viable. Field studies to verify a location and rock reactivity might cost 1/100th of that.
Here's to a future where every Omani is a millionaire from peridotite excise taxes.
For reference, $100 per ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere is the equivalent of adding ~$1.00 to the cost of a gallon of gas to make it carbon neutral.
Driverless trucks
We hear a lot less about driverless cars than driverless trucks, but apparently the latter is making progress as well. Via Axios:
Autonomous trucking companies have been testing their fleets on Texas highways for several years, but always with backup safety drivers in the cab.
Now, one company, Aurora Innovation, says it plans to go completely driverless at the end of the month, a key milestone that promises to reshape the trucking industry.
Driving the news: After years of development, Pittsburgh-based Aurora is launching commercial driverless operations this month on a popular freight route between Dallas and Houston.
The first autonomous truck is expected to roll down I-45 in the coming days, although Aurora officials declined to share any details.
The company has said it will begin slowly, with one truck, and will gradually expand the fleet over time….
At least 10 companies are known to be developing driverless technology for trucks.
Most expect to "pull the driver" — or go fully autonomous — on public roads later this year or in 2026.
I’d never heard of Aurora Innovation, but it seems to be a serious operation. It was founded by former Waymo CTO Chris Urmson (before it became Waymo) and former head of Tesla Autopilot Sterling Anderson, and has raised several hundred million in VC and another $2 billion after going public via a SPAC.
It’s also interesting that Texas is such a hotspot for self-driving truck development, given that it’s also a major hub for drone delivery startups.
DJI was a major player early on, but the early drones were in many ways quite limited and janky. DJI’s first drone had no camera, and when the company released a camera mount installing it required opening up the drone and modifying the electronics with a soldering iron
The early industry was heavily driven by Kickstarters. Lots of folks would set up a Kickstarter for some impressive drone concept, and raise an enormous amount of money. More often than not it seems like these folks failed to deliver.
Drone-redirected lightning
Also on the subject of drones, Japanese telecom company NTT has been running experiments to use drones to trigger lightning strikes, directing the lightning away from areas where it might do damage. Via NTT:
On December 13, 2024, during the approach of a thundercloud, the electric field strength observed by the field mill increased. At that moment, a drone equipped with a conductive wire was flown to an altitude of 300 meters. The drone was then electrically connected to the ground via a switch installed on the ground (Figure 2). As a result, a large current was observed flowing through the wire, accompanied by a significant change in the surrounding electric field strength (Figure 3).
Just before the lightning strike, it was confirmed that a voltage of over 2000 volts had developed between the wire and the ground. This rapid increase in local electric field strength triggered a lightning strike directed at the drone. This marks the first successful case in the world of triggering lightning using a drone.
At the moment of the strike, a loud cracking sound was heard, a flash was observed at the winch, and partial melting occurred in the drone's lightning protection cage (Figure 4). However, the drone equipped with the protective cage continued to fly stably even after the lightning strike…
NTT aims to protect cities and people from lightning damage by flying drones—designed to withstand direct lightning strikes—to accurately predict lightning-prone locations, actively trigger strikes, and safely guide them away.
Also on the subject of lightning strikes, there are apparently several cases of people dying from electrocution after lightning struck their house while they were using a plugged-in smartphone.
