You have reached the donation page for Carbon Negative Water and Energy (CanWE), a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to the mitigation of climate change. Thank you for considering your donation to CanWE. If you do decide to donate, the charge will appear as Carbon Negative Water and Energy, and the federal ID number (EIN) for tax deduction purposes is: 84-3767260. If you are not able to make a donation at this time, you can help CanWE by forwarding the main page ( www.canwenow.org ) to your network or social media (click “like” and “share”).
Our goal is to inform the public about climate and other sustainability issues, and showcase solutions to address the problems. That includes providing information to investors. If you are benefitting financially from the information you find here, the universe is calling upon you to contribute. The donation form below is not yet targeted to specific campaigns. See a note below from Dr. Hoaglund with brief summaries of current high priority projects that may become specific campaigns or earmarked options on this page at a later date.
Thank you for helping CanWE any way that you can. Like you, I receive over 100 emails per day from “non-government organizations” (NGO’s), seeking donations for those noble causes that fall outside the range of “markets,” government agencies, and even grant-driven research priorities. As a donor, you want to know what your contribution achieves. CanWE fills a need for fundamental research and the sharing of objective environmental information. Your donation funds the research and communication required for this, and enables CanWE’s objectivity in these pursuits.
We provide objective science-derived environmental information and science-driven evaluations of proposed solutions. We then communicate this information through media, social media, online courses, journal articles, news articles, internet publications, white papers, interviews, and we anticipate producing a podcast featuring experts in related topics or technologies.
We research both the human induced environmental crises themselves, and the human designed technologies or enhanced natural processes of purported solutions. We assess whether they are sustainable within the context of the Earth’s overall carbon and other nutrient cycles, and whether they are plausible given the limitations of the energy driving these cycles within the Earth’s ecosystems. We provide the information obtained from either original research, available literature, or the review of existing technologies and/or enhanced natural processes implemented for climate mitigation.
What does it mean for the research and evaluations to be “science driven”?
We use the fundamental principles of the conservation of energy and the conservation of mass (CECM) to fully account for the requirements and consequences of implementing a given technology.
What are some of the anticipated projects going forward?
- Carbon Shark Tank: An interview podcast format for guests to showcase environmental technologies, lure investors … and face the CECM review of CanWE scientists. Part of CanWE’s goal is to encourage emerging sustainability markets, collaborations, cooperations, partnerships, and investments in related environmental technologies. However, we are aware of the political and/or marketing agendas that can obscure the “true costs” and consequences of using a promoted technology. We will try to account for the required energy and raw materials needed for the process, and the byproducts, waste products, and other ramifications that can result. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” we’ll examine whether companies or even whole industries can benefit by working together “symbiotically.”
- The Carbonate System: Dissolving and Stabilizing CO2 into Water. A new course designed to assist researchers and practitioners in their R&D of carbon sequestration technologies, almost all of which require dissolving and stabilizing CO2 into water, at least as a first step. CanWE has already produced two free courses at Udemy, Arresting Climate Change and What’s in My Water and Where is it from? These courses meet the two-hour time limit required for free courses at Udemy. The Carbonate System will be more involved, eventually extending beyond two hours. At that point, to be fair to both Udemy and CanWE, the course will be a fundraiser for CanWE, with coupons for free enrollment used with future donation drives.
- The Chlorine Sequestration Problem: This will be an ongoing fundamental research project to deal with an anticipated problem with carbon sequestration technology: Capturing carbon from a gas state requires a base, whether derived from natural minerals or produced industrially. The chlor-alkali process is used to produce industrial quantities of base and results in oxygenated halogen compounds, most commonly chlorine oxides (ClOx). As these tend to be mole per mole chlorine to carbon, significant quantities of chlorine byproducts are produced for any significant quantity of carbon sequestered. The quantities produced are commonly beyond the market need for such chlorine products. The Earth “sequesters” chlorine as chloride in the ocean. One way to convert ClOx to chloride is to convert ClOx to hydrochloric acid (HCl) and react the acid with native metal, producing the native metal chloride and recovering hydrogen. With extreme care, these metal chlorides may be disposed of in the ocean as part of ocean fertilization processes, promoting further carbon sequestration from natural ocean carbon uptake.
- The “Search for M”: Chloride from sodium chloride (NaCl) and calcium chloride (CaCl2) road salting is currently salinizing groundwater. One solution is to use bicarbonate salts MHCO3 where M is a “cation,” and bicarbonate (HCO3) is a byproduct of carbon sequestration. For a variety of reasons, sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3 where M = Na) is not an ideal road salt. This project will look for substitutes, other M cations that could be used, especially nonmetal cations that would be less damaging to the environment.
- The Redfield Ratios Project: An Ecological Energy Economics Blueprint. This is an ongoing project to outline the carbon reservoirs and nutrient cycles that control the climate system, and to categorize both the natural and manmade transfers of carbon and nutrients between these reservoirs. In 2011, Dr. Hoaglund published the online book Entropy Happens: An Energy Blueprint Toward Sustainability where he presented an energy valuation of the Earth’s “ecological services.” The book attempted to categorize all of the environmental issues facing humanity, summarized in terms of energy, thereby subsuming the “energy crisis” [energy resource crisis] within the larger context of the overall sustainability crisis that is rooted in energy. Robert Baker, a dissertator at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia, is an algae ecologist and technologist using algae to treat waste water, concentrate nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients, and return these nutrients to the soil as a fertilizer product. In the style of Robert Berner (Yale University), Bob has quantified the carbon and nutrient exchange rates between carbon reservoirs and has documented equivalent industrial processes that can be used to augment these exchanges, to accommodate the excess human loading into these systems. Combined with Dr. Hoaglund’s energy analyses, we plan to create an integrated blueprint to mitigate climate change consistently within the Earth’s nutrient cycles. Regarding carbon, these are fundamentally described by the famous Redfield Ratios from oceanography, which summarize the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous levels associated with the photosynthetic uptake of carbon into oceanic protoplasm (phytoplankton and zooplankton): 106C : 16N : 1P. The “extended Redfield Ratios” enlist other elements and nutrients including H+ (acid), Fe, S, Ca, Mg, and Mn. With only modest changes, the ratios apply to almost all photosynthetic based ecosystems. Unlike terrestrial ecosystems though, ocean carbon sinks into the deep ocean CO2 reservoir. Thus 106C : 16N : 1P as extended is the main recipe for long term carbon sequestration.