Goodbye Global Warming!...Hello Terraforming?

silance writes "Here is an article from Science Daily detailing a new method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale and at normal concentrations. Previous systems require placement near high concentration centers such as power plants, and do not address low-concentration sources (such as internal combustion engines) which are responsible for half of the world's carbon dioxide pollution. The article descibes the technology as scalable to the point of repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels! Next stop, Mars..." I seem to remember something like this in SimEarth ^? - but I'm not going to hold my breath (Ha! I pun!) waiting for this.

Comments

What about trees?

[evilviper]

When did trees go out of fashion?

Why invest so much money trying to replicate what just about all plants do naturally? I mean, geez, perhaps we will surpass plants' abilities to process Carbon Dioxide, but do you think it will run on water, Carbon Dioxide & dirt?

Re:What about trees?

[HiQ]

to harvest carbon dioxide from the air, reducing buildup of the so-called "greenhouse gas" in the atmosphere and allowing it to be converted into fuel.
Well, the last part says it all. They can convert it back into fuel. On the other hand, a tree is also fuel, but you try shove a tree up your tank the next time you go for gas!.
Mind you, hope they don't suffocate the trees by extracting too much carbon dioxide.

Re:What about trees?

[Cade144]

Trees went out of fashion because they are vulnerable to the very problem we are trying to solve, global warming.
Most species of trees have limited hability zone, raise or lower the temperature or annual rainfall, and the trees die. Dead trees decompose and give off methane (also a greenhouse gas) and C02.

Also, when was the last time you saw engineers tearing up a freeway, parking lot, or strip mall to plant a forest? Current land-use trends are for less greenspace, not more.

Re:What about trees?

[Exedore]

On the other hand, a tree is also fuel, but you try shove a tree up your tank the next time you go for gas.

In some parts of the U.S. we already do... up to 10% of the fuel at most gas stations around here is ethanol. Well, okay, it's grain alcohol not wood alcohol, but you get the idea.

It was an interesting concept at its inception back in the late 70's/early 80's (I think), but it hasn't quite lived up to expectations. I think it's stuck around more as a farmer subsidy kind of thing than an effective way of reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Oh, and I think engine and fuel system longevity is harmed somewhat, too.

Re:What about trees?

[sydneyfong]

if you want to turn carbon dioxide into fuel you'd need to input energy during the conversion. A LOT of energy too. Most of our energy comes from fossil fuels. and we aren't using the energy we got from fossil fuels to convert CO2 back into fuels!!! I don't think anybody is interested in doing that, unless the gas gets really annoying and there's a much better alternative energy source to provide the energy for conversion.

Re:What about trees?

[hansover]

Seems like a great technology to be coupled with Solar Cells, considering that some of the larger problems with Solar energy is the need to use it or lose it and the limited portability of large collections of cells. If Solar energy is used to supply the energy for the conversion process then we would again have storable, portable octane or other carbon based fuel of choice.

Re:What about trees?

[letxa2000]

The harvested CO2 is removed from the earth's carbon cycle. This is not a valid long-term way of dealing with the problem.

Why not? I thought the whole global warming problem was that we were pumping too much of it into the atmosphere. If we use this method, aren't we just counteracting our own CO2 production? (assuming we don't take out more than we put into the system).

Or is our CO2 production now considered "natural" and we should just let it run its course? I would personally agree with that, but it doesn't jive with the environmentalist platform...

Re:What about trees?

[morcego]

Well, isn't that tipical. Hey, let USA produce CO2 and all other green house gasses, and let the rest of the world take care of it.
Sorry, I don't mean to attack you personaly, but this is something really anoying. Why has the USA refused (AFAIK, the only one to refuse) to sign that protocol/treat that would stablish rules about CO2 production (and other atmospheric emissions) ?
The USA is currently the country that polutes our atmosphere the most, while also trying to boss all other countries what they can do with their forests. I live in Brazil, so I know every well how much USA is bossing about the Amazon Forest. Then I ask, where are YOUR forests ? Oh, did you cut all the trees ? Thought. Now, take care of your all problem.
If you really want to have a part of the Amazon forest, what compensations do you of offer ?
And that is not only the USA. It's a thing we see all contries doing. Brazil does it too with other countries (not about forest, but about other issues). It's the same old story about dumping ones junk on the neighbour's year. If each country would be primarily concerned about it's own junk, we would solve most of the problem.
This CO2 extractor follows the same principle. It tries to circunvect the problem, not solve it. How long before the production of CO2 is greater then these extractors can handle ?
Brazil is a small fish of a country, but we managed to reduce the polution created by cars in about 20%, using alchool based fuels, and another few percent points by mixing some of this alchool on out gas. As far as I know, it's the only country where the usage of alchool fuel for cars really worked (not like ethanol in USA, where it's only in some isolated places).
Yes, removing some of the CO2 from the atmosphere is good, but we don't work on reducing the amount of polution produced, we are only delaying the inevitable.

Re:What about trees?

[morcego]

• Kyoto has more to do with transfer of economic power from the US to other countries than it does with reducing greenhouse gases.
  This treaty is a sham designed to hurt the US

A sham to hust US ? You can't be serious. And of course it would hurts the USA. US would have to spend money to decrease poluting gasses production. Know what else ? All others would too.

• If you don't like losing them, stop selling them to us.

Again, you must be kidding. Brazil never sold one inch of the rain forest to USA, or any other country, for that matter.
And USA is trying to dictate what Brazil can do and can't do with the rain forest that is on its own territory.

• stop blaming the US on all the ills of the world

I'm blamming the US on all the ills of the US, not all the ills of the world. Please, reread my post.

• We may have increased our consumption our trees from Brazil,

Where did I say anything agains it ? If the Brazil is selling trees, what is wrong with USA buying it ? If there is something wrong with it, it's with Brazil seeing, not USA buying. But that has nothin to do with what I was saying.

• I'm no chemist, but I think you'll find that alcohol produces very similar CO2 output to Gasoline for the same energy produced. Alcohol doesn't produce the Sulphur, CO1 and other nasty pollution that Gasoline produces, but similar CO2, I believe.

Read what I said:
we managed to reduce the polution created by cars in about 20%
Not: we managed to reduce the CO2 emission.
And again, it does produce less CO2. Not that much less, but some.

Re:What about trees?

[electroniceric]

We didn't cut down all of our trees. There are huge forests in the US. I believe I read that there are more trees now than 30 years ago through careful management.
Be cautious - this is the Weyerhauser spin on trees. There may or may not be more than 30 years ago (which was a really low point of environmental stewardship for our country), but the trees which have been "carefully managed" are softwood - i.e., pulp trees. In places where trees have been replanted, the ecosystems are not the same as they were.

This treaty is a sham designed to hurt the US.
This is energy company spin. While your points about the transfer of economic power are interesting, putting the "they're just out to get us" angle back in there makes your reply a counter-screed to the parent screed. Second, if the US derives economic power from activities which put a burden on the rest of the world, then we gotta make restitution, even if that involves a transfer of power. You gotta pay to play.

If you don't like losing them, stop selling them to us.
The "just stop selling them" argument is a little simplistic. By the same rights, the US has no business fighting a war on drugs abroad - we should "just stop" buying them. Even worse, it's totally cynical. You're suggesting that because we as the US have money, we're totally devoid of responsiblity for what happens when we throw it around, because after all, all those Congolese people "chose" to "sell" us their diamonds. Yes, there is an onus on Brazil to control it's own population and make sensible policy choices about their resources. But the onus is also on us to help them, because it's in our interests, as well as theirs to have less CO2 in the atmosphere.

Re:What about trees?

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, it's now perpetual energy you're talking about. Doing work without introducing any more fuel; CO2 being the fuel in question.

You really don't have a clue do you?

This is not perpetial motion. The energy source is the sun. The sun has a lot of useful life left in it yet.

If no such energy source were avilable the deomposition process provides further energy anyway. It's taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere that needs energy.

Seriously, this needs no specialist knowledge. This is not obscure stuff. If you didn't know any of this then I'm surprised you can even read.

Other effects on the environment?

[jacobcaz]

OK, this sounds fine and dandy, but if we're vigorously scrubbing our environment of CO2 isn't there to much of a good thing?

I mean, at what low levels of present CO2 is plant life starting to be affected? I would hate to crank up a system like this and see vast forests just dissapearing because of lack of CO2 levels. I assume there have to be some checks to how much we remove, but if profit is as stake, will there really be those checks?

How can they really simulate this to test all the effects on our environment?

We're looking at MASSIVE changes in our environment if they think they can just rollback the air to pre-industrial revoluiton air quality!

The figures are extremely optimistic

[arivanov]

As a chemist I can say that the idea of capturing CO2 with CaO on an industrial scale is extremely optimistic.

It will consume huge amounts of energy to convert back and the efficiency will be very low. The figures come out so optimistic only if you forget about the fact that CaO gets covered by Ca carbonate quickly and in the absence of water the diffusion of CO2 to the remaining CaO will slow to a crawl.

Only alternative to this is to disperse the CaO to micron sizes which means emitting insane amounts of dust into the atmosphere. Same is valid for extracting back. Unless you make the CaCO3 granules of micron or less size the energy efficiency in recovering CaO is very low.In either case you either need huge amounts of water or you will pepper with CaCO3 dust everything several thousands miles windward.

This reeks of "reaserch" sponsored by specific global warming villains. Just the mentioning of "there is enough fossil fuels" about says it all. No names mentioned... We know them all...

[Insert rimshot here]

[eples]

a new method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale and at normal concentrations

In the study, the old method called Planting a tree, was found to be too conventional and made the landscape too pleasing to look at.

But seriously, this is a GoodThing(tm).

Power

[Kensaro]

Hang on, you'd have to cook the stuff to get your lye back as well as pure CO2, wouldn't that require power? Hmmm, lets burn some fossile fuels to get that, we can burn unlimited amounts of fossile fuels now since we can just extract the CO2 from the air again.

Oh, and I've got this model of a perpetum mobile for sale.....

other solutions?

[Apps]

For 20 cents per gallon, you could subsidise a better fuel such as Biodiesel which absorbs more carbon while growing than it emits while being used as fuel.

Also you could plant a lot of trees!!

Re:Good bye thin pages! Hello wide pages!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha!

Never again. I just installed the latest build of mozilla {Build ID: 2002031104}
and this post looks more like +1 Funny than troll.

I don't see a single wide page, to hell with you fucking slashcode programmers
and fake ass troll wannabe bitches like -the obviously gay- Kelrc.

Get mozilla, and say BYE BYE to wide pages.

Trees aren't necessarily the answer

[ObligatoryUserName]

I've seen a couple of highly rated posts here mentioning that everyone should just plant trees and then we wouldn't have this problem. As much as I agree with the sentiment there have been a few studies recently that point to the idea that forests aren't really all that efficient in storing carbon dioxide.

Study from this April
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSScience0204/10_carbon-ap. html

Study from 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2 36000/236276.stm

Also, don't forget that planting vast numbers of trees is something that in many places would be a huge ecological change. Just because they provide lots of nice benefits to people doesn't mean that trees wouldn't kill off native species in areas not currently forested.

The figures they are not releasing

[ipsuid]

Lets take the chemistry a bit further...

Converting the CaCO3 back into CaO will take a minimum of 176kJ/mol CaCO3. (CaCO3 + 176kJ -> CaO + CO2). Not even getting into thermodynamics, it will actually take more energy than that - since it can't be done in anything other than a CO2 atmosphere (since they want to recover the CO2).

But for sake of argument, we will use the 176kJ figure. Now, it will take an enormous amount of HEAT to to release the CO2. How are we going to create this heat? How about fossil fuels!

Let's say we use gasoline to heat the CaCO3 and recover the CO2. Gasoline is nearly the hotest burning fossil fuel. Oxidation(burning) of gasoline follows 2C8H12 + 25O2 -> 16CO2 + 18H2O + 5249kJ.

Wow that's hot! Problem though - we just released 16CO2's in that reaction! No problem, we'll just scrub them out with all the rest of CO2 in the atmosphere (notice this machine is getting more and more complicated as we speak).

The energy required to suck that CO2 that we just produced back into a bottle is going to cost us 2816kJ. Which leaves us with 2433kJ to extract more CO2. Unfortunately, the world isn't perfect and we are assuming 100% efficiency.

What does that mean in the real world you ask? Well, given a 100% efficient blackbox into which we feed gasoline and air:

To extract 1 ton of CO2, we will use about 1/4 ton of gasoline (.255ton), almost a ton of O2 (.894ton), and will produce nearly a half ton of H2O (.402ton).

So for all our time and effort, we just created a larger demand for fossil fuels for a process which not only removes CO2 from the atmosphere, but also a NEARLY EQUAL AMOUNT OF OXYGEN!!!

Distributed CO2 Capture makes even more sense

[oxytocin]

KISS:
Most cars have a catalytic converter as part of their exhaust stream, right?

Add this kind of contraption to cars and even slight reabsorbtion of CO2 would become very significant.

As well, as a technology slated for mass distribution, the price would drop fast, rather than a humungus plant in the desert, like they mention.

In summary, there could be a _good_ use for all these things called cars. FWIW I hate the love affair with cars we Americans++ have... Very simplistic calculations show me that with 15-20% less _new cars_ each year, there would be, as predicted in the late 60's by '2001:The Movie', moon bases and all that. Why? E.G.: Ford with about 15-20% of the total car market takes in about $US160B / year ... if you and me spent that $160B/year on 'other things', we could launch 4 missions to Mars!, even at a whopping $40B each -- and still pay lots of people to work their jobz (just for M2M rather than FixOrRepairDaily). And that does not include efficiencies that come from scaling... And, oh yeah, that was _every year_! Well enough OT ranting :)

So lets hope for new cars that consume CO2 rather than produce it! And if we buy a new car every 4 years rather than every 3, maybe someday in "just 30 years" we'll be able to take a Pan AM space elevator up to orbit to board the Mars Express. Any takers?

(btw my math is simplistic but if you want more details, just ask; I could use more eyes on the bugs)

Eh? Use more fossil fuels?

[Mike Hicks]

Maybe I'm just turning into a conspiracy theorist, but this looks like it's trying to get people to waste more fuel, and possibly support drilling in more places, such as the oft-contested ANWR.

I don't understand why the US government seems to be so intent on getting people to continue using lots of energy (/me says as he sits in an air-conditioned apartment with numerous computers running constantly..). Okay, I do know -- damn near everyone in the administration came from an oil company. Bush, Cheney, hell, even Condoleeza Rice..

Anyway.. Conserving just a little here and there can do quite a bit, especially since folks here in the US already use the most energy per capita.

I agree with the other comments. Plant a tree (or ten, or a hundred..) Get a slightly smaller car, or at least one with a better engine/transmission. Support biodiesel or other renewable energy sources.

Also, the article doesn't appear to say you can make fuel out of the carbon dioxide -- they just found another way to get a supply for people who already use it (the big one being oil refineries).. So, okay, it allows you to re-use CO2 that gets into the air, rather than just leaving it there. Still, I think trees are probably more efficient at it than this idea (an unscientific quick glance at it, unfortunately).

Somehow, this article just seems to be misplaced optimism..

Re:How irresponsible...

[bnenning]

You're proving the point of the poster above who wrote

How many people want to wager that environmentalists will think this is a bad thing. Anything that will allow me to drive my SUV, can't be good, can it?

Seriously, if there were a way to generate enough energy and other resources for our current lifestyles with no environmental impact, how would that not be a good thing? If your goal is to protect the environment, then problem solved. It's only if your goal is to force others to live according to the lifestyle that you deem best that you wouldn't be pleased.

60,000 acres is reasonable

[jeff.paulsen]

60,000 acres is the size of a moderate wheat ranch in Montana. It's a tiny fraction of the size of the US, and it doesn't have to be centralized. We're talking about facilities comparable in size and complexity to sewage treatment plants, on a per-capita basis. If we can build power plants and the infrastructure to support them, we can certainly build these.

As for the industrial side of getting all that quicklime, that's not a huge endeavor compared to any other kind of mining. We pull so much copper and bauxite and titanium and coal out of the earth that extracting a few million tons of quicklime wouldn't change the scale of the world's mining industry perceptibly.

Would it work? Maybe, maybe not. BUT, the argument against it on size and complexity does not appear valid.

Re:Can we check the math and the geography?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analysis is very interesting. But if you apply this shallow reasoning to any project it looks completely impractical on paper. There is no need to build a single facility (in fact it would be better the more spread out it is), there is no need to build it all at once, you can place it conveniently near your sources of lime, and as others point out, the area is a small fraction of the total land area. Plus the only really valuable land in the world is coastal, which is not needed for this.

If you'd told a scholar in 1880 that we would build millions of wells around the world to extract a subterranean liquid, and ship it halfway around the world in giant ships, he would think it was a ridiculous, insupportable project. When people suggest using wind farms or solar plants to replace fossil fuels, these also require huge land areas (like this idea, hundreds of square miles).

But the land area of the world is mostly untapped, since most of it is useless to us. Total land area is about 150 million square km. That is roughly 0.025 square km per person. 9 sq ft is much much smaller than that.

Geez. You can STACK it!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Okay--one square yard equals 9 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1 acre worth of quicklime would recapture CO2 for 4,840 people.

They're talking one square yard of SURFACE area, not a square yard of GROUND. (Unless the engineers are dumb enough just to let the quicklime lie around and scrape it up with bulldozers for recycling.)

You can STACK it - trays in rooms in floors in skyscrapers. You can GRIND IT UP into powder to get LOTS of surface area in a tiny volume, then put a massive volume inside a container.

Three-D has LOTS more surface than Two-D, as much more as you want.

It's time to think INSIDE a box.