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First Successful Demonstration of CO2 Capture Technology
An anonymous coward writes "Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT), a technology research and development company, and Klaus Lackner from Columbia University have achieved the
successful demonstration of a bold new technology to capture carbon from the air. The "air extraction" prototype has successfully demonstrated that indeed carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured from the atmosphere. This is GRT's first step toward a commercially viable air capture device."
You create more carbon dioxide emissions by making paper and burying it to get rid of the minute amount of carbon that the tree(s) obtained from its photosynthesis process.
Also, by outlawing the recycling of paper, you'll reduce the number of trees that are still alive, and eventually wipe out all the trees in the world, and thus, contribute MORE to global warming than minimizing its effect on the planet.
Dry ice is usually made through chemical reactions that produce CO2.
No it doesn't. Dry ice is made from commercial CO2, which comes from fossil fuels. In fact, the manufacture of dry ice releases additional CO2 beyond just what ends up as dry ice. The reason is that air is only a few hundred ppm CO2, which is not normally economical to capture and do anything with. Industrially it often comes as a byproduct of ammonia production -- natural gas, CH4, is converted into hydrogen and CO2; the hydrogen is used in making ammonia.
See Carbon Dioxide for details.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It was my understanding that lumber companies generally plant more trees than they cut down.
So by recycling, less trees are cut... and in turn less are planted.
In fact, we have more trees on earth today than we had in 1970. Hell, even more than we have 70 years ago.
Source
There's a market for 11 billion tons of CO2?? Even if there were a market for that much CO2, the point of carbon capture isn't to use the carbon in a way that will be re-released into the atmosphere, the point is to store it away for as long of a time as possible (millions of years, preferably).
The very specific problem with burning fossil fuels is that it's liberating carbon dioxide that hasn't been part of the natural carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years... it hasn't been in the atmosphere or part of plants or anything like that... it's been buried underground. By burning the fossil fuels, humans are introducing that carbon back into the atmosphere at a very rapid rate, and the only way to make sure we don't increase the amount CO2 in the atmosphere is to semi-permanently store as much carbon as we're mining from underground in the form of oil.
The article doesn't say how it works. They link to a Discover Magazine article that describes one of their methods.r chterm=heading%20toward%20twice%20the%20CO2
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/climate/?sea
Liquid sodium hydroxide turns to sodium carbonate as it absorbs CO2. Then you percolate it over solid calcium hydroxide and the calcium captures the carbon. Then you heat the calcium carbonate to 900 deg Celsius to get it to release the CO2.
They claim to have developed a new sorbent that isn't as nasty as sodium hydroxide, but none of the articles seem to say what it is.
Yes, but the paper companies only plant single species fast growing trees. Those can not replace the complex ecosystem in the rain forests.
Your post doesn't make any sense. If we start stripping CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will not (immediately) affect the amount of oxygen. They are two entirely different molecules which interact differently with matter, and in this context the fact that CO2 actually contains oxygen nuclei is irrelevant.
In any case, the atmosphere is 20.946% oxygen and 0.038% carbon dioxide (by volume). Even if we strip all the carbon out, the overall amount of oxygen nuclei in the atmosphere will remain essentially unchanged.
Obviously removing ALL of the CO2 would be an insanely bad idea; not because we'd be removing oxygen from the atmosphere, but because all the plants would die.
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million, while O2 levels are measured in percentage points. The amount of oxygen that may get trapped by such a scheme is minute relative to the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Wood pulp is mostly soft wood, with spruce, pine and fir being real popular. Hardwood is sometimes used, but much more rarely and then generally birch. In the US at least a large amount of it is grown just for that purpose. There is neither the need nor reason to use old growth. Young, small, even diseased and dying trees do just fine. Thus it is fairly economical to farm them.
Old, large trees of the hardwood variety are much more valuable for construction and thus you see them used there. No point in using an expensive tree for paper when a cheap one does quite well.
That's not to say there's no reason to recycle, but please let's not spread BS about paper production. It is not people sneaking in to the rain forest and cutting down huge, thousand year old trees. It's tree farms in the US growing some scraggly pine and pulping that.
Cost. Pure and simple there is no reason to cut down trees in another country and ship them back here to make paper. Paper is made form pulp, you literally grind up a tree. Thus really any tree will do. Softwood is fine, young trees are fine, even dying trees work fine. Thus is is by far the most economical to just grow them.
If you are going to go to the trouble of shipping rain forest wood over you are going to use it to build something. A tree fetches far more as some nice mahogany tables than it would ground up and made in to newsprint.
For whatever else you might think about companies, they don't waste things just for the fun of it. It all comes down to economics. No company in their right mind is going to waste money on importing expensive wood when cheap wood will do. Especially when rainforests are a touchy topic and doing so brings bad PR.
I really think people who wish to push environmental action would do much better if they got their facts straight and stopped trying to make everything out to be a crisis.
Ironically, one of the biggest markets for CO2 is oil extraction: you pump CO2 into a dying well to force out the last of the oil. (Air is unsafe for obvious reasons.) Afterwards you leave the CO2 underground in the same chambers that previously held the oil, so you get sequestration for free. From the press release: For example, the CO2 originating from all those vehicles in Bangkok can be captured in an oil field in Alberta, Canada, where it could be used on-site for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations or it could be captured in South Africa to feed a growing demand in that country for feed stocks for petrochemical production. If the goal is to sequester a given quantity of CO2 in a specific geological formation, the air capture system could be located at that physical location.
Plants die eventually. And when they do, they release the carbon dioxide again - that is why plants and bio-fuel are said to be carbon-neutral
Being able to extract carbon dioxide from the air and store it - for instance, in crevices deep in the ground (just like the oil we are so merrily pumping up!), will actually reduce the levels, though.
However, it would be more efficient and more interesting to apply this technique to power plants. Coal is really cheap, everybody knows that (besides which, there are huge amounts of coal lying around). What if we could actually use this coal in power plants without the environmental cost that carbon dioxide introduces? Simply imagine one of these carbon-dioxide sequestering gadgets at the top of the chimney of the power plant, and you have that. (Well, there would of course not be a need for any chimney. But you get my point, I think.)
That is the future. (or will hopefully be, anyway - the IPCC recommendations for how to survive global warming relies heavily on carbon sequestering later on.)
(Granted, as people have pointed out, this requires that you solve ways of doing this storage - for instance underground - securely. Having the gas leak back out again wouldn't be such a big hit once you have some thousands of these facilities.)
The MIT Technology Review has just posted an article titled The Case for Burying Charcoal. It showed up on my RSS reader shortly after I posted my comment.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"Another exciting benefit of the GRT device is that it faces down this challenge by capturing the emissions from existing power plants without imposing retrofit costs." It is certainly true that it opens a possibility for the Energy companys to keep spewing out CO2 and take little or no responsibility for their operations. Who is going to pay for these CO2-extraction units? Swedish company Vattenfall (Watter fall) made a profit of 150 000 000 000 SEK last year (divide by 9 to get the numer in euros) and invested less then 0.4% of the profit in R&D into renewable energy and CO2 emission control technologies. So who would be paying for these installations? I think it's pretty clear who I think should pay for it...
> I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests
Hardwoods for the most part can be sold as lumber and are more valuable in that form than as paper, even in the poorest countries. Making paper out of oak and maple is financially the equivalent to melting down dimes and reforming them in the shape of nickels. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is not the norm. Paper is generally made from fast-growth wood that doesn't make very valuable lumber, typically pine or other conifers.
What's really interesting is that it requires less total financial outlay, and less energy (discounting solar radiation that would otherwise not be harnessed), to maintain fast-growth pine plantations and make paper from those, versus recycling paper. Of all the things that you can recycle, paper is substantially the least worthwhile, both environmentally and economically. (The most worthwhile is probably glass, but just about any metal is quite worth recycling too. Plastics vary.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Well, Giant Redwood, amongst others, has bark is that is (from the link) "fibrous, furrowed, and may be 60 cm (2 ft) thick at the base of the columnar trunk. It provides significant fire protection for the trees".
From the 2nd link "The thick, tannin-rich bark, combined with foliage that starts high above the ground provides good protection from both fire and insect damage".
Oh well. I suppose they might rot.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Bull. Shit.
Do a GIS for clear cut and you get 2,300,000 pictures.
I live in timber land, and while there are a few who cut responsibly, hardly any corporation does. They do it quick with a bulldozer, and they move on to the next lot. They don't pay attention to stream buffers, they don't pay attention to tree species, and they don't replant in a timely manner.
And while we're at it, where does the illusion that farmers are models of ecology come from? Erosion, topsoil problems, fertilizer and pesticides. They're out to make a buck, just like the damn timber companies.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think the reason that Glass recycling is mentioned is that it is relatively "lossless" and probably uses less power to recycle than it does to produce initially.
Paper recycling - shred, treat chemically, reform as paper (which, mind you, would be of a lesser grade than the original)
Plastic recycling - melt, remove impurities, reform as plastic (again, lesser grade)
Glass recycling - melt, reform. I believe impurities would be removed (burned off) during the melting process. I also believe that the strength of the recycled product would be no less than the original product.
Metal recycling - melt, seperate, reform. Impurities and strength comments similar to glass.
So, from an economical perspective, glass recycling is "easy". The question would be if it was cheaper to make new or recycle old. I have to think that recycle old is cheap, what with it being done for so long (I remember doing it in the 80's) and in fact the most notoriously rewarded (Seinfeld episode anyone?)
Layne
Hi. I own a pine tree farm outside of Cleveland, Texas, and I am here to reply to your assertions.
Hardwood is a piss-poor way to generate pulpwood, because hardwood grows so slowly. The softwood pines, and some of the new varieties of grasses, are much more efficient. The majority of American industrial woodpulp comes from American and Canadian softwoods (although this is changing; see below). We are also seeing the slow rise of an industry around the pulpy grasses.
Not in America. That means that if there is any brazen hacking going on, or urban sprawl, it is balanced by new plantings elsewhere.
While the pine-trees are indeed bred to be "supertrees", their resistance is aimed at diseases and at early competition (i.e. they are bred to grow a tall canopy as fast as possible in order to beat out woody competition). The bugs don't care -- in fact I will think of your statement next time I'm in my monoculture forest swatting (or running from) the hordes of insects. For that matter, part of my land is wettish river bottomland, completely covered in random wild trees, yet the larger critters and the birds seem to prefer the drier pines.
Still, you are right that a pine forest's understory and associated critters are relatively sparse... but that is not due to monoculture; it is true of any pine forest, even the much-vaunted old-growth redwoods in California. This is because pine needles naturally acidify the soil, and most other plants can't tolerate that. It is the pine's own natural anticompetitive practice.
Either way, pines (and other softwoods) are still the fastest way to sequester large amounts of airborn carbon. Your beloved understory vegetation has a fast grow/die/rot cycle which does not permanently sequester any carbon, and which slows down the trees which do. Perhaps you should disentangle your pro-carbon-sequestration argument from your pro-biodiversity argument, because the fastest and most profitable way to sequester airborne carbon is also the least biodiverse. (And if you compromise on "most profitable", then brace yourself for the world's unwillingness to do it.) The reverse is also true: the most biodiverse place in the world is the rainforest, and rainforests have so much rot that they do not consume any net carbon at all. (If you think they do, I'd love to hear an explanation of where they're storing it.)
True enough. Domestic timber production is the answer... and indeed was the answer here in America. We had a great pulp market until the feds, under pressure from Environmentalists, banned logging in national forestlands. That drove a lot of the domestic mills out of business, and when they died, the bottom fell out of the pulp market. Presently, I will be paid $0 for the pulpwood take from this year's thinning. Now what effect do you suppose that will have on
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The scrubber volume of a mature 10 acre stand of douglas fir is around 600 acre-feet (not 60). The freshly replanted plot would have scrubber volume of no more than 0.8% of this; its effective scrubbing volume would be less than 0.1% of the mature stand that it replaced.
Apologies about the original figures. They were calculated using pre-coffee wetware, which has a local reputation for being notoriously unreliable.
You can find referenced, peer-reviewed evidence below. However, it gets a little technical, and I honestly find it a little hard to follow since I'm unfamiliar with the terminology and acronyms. If you want anything more thorough than this, you'll have to look for the information yourself.
Here is the abstract of a 2003 paper (cited 40 times according to Google Scholar) which compares stands of ponderosa pines in Oregon based on their age. One statistic they compare is "net ecosystem productivity":
- "initiation" stands (9-23 years old): -124 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1) (note that this value is negative -- that's not a typo)
- "young" stands (56-89 years old): 118 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1)
- "mature" stands (95-106 years old): 170 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1)
- "old" stands (190-316 years old): 35 g C m^(-2) yr^(-1)
I wouldn't know what "net ecosystem productivity" is, except that this other paper summarizes those numbers from the first paper, but uses the terms "carbon uptake" when referring to the young, mature, and old stands, and "carbon release" when referring to the initiation stands. This leads me to conclude that "net ecosystem productivity" refers to the net carbon stored by the ecosystem. Note that the stands labeled "mature" (~100 years old) were doing the most carbon storing, while the initiation stands (the youngest, at 9-23 years old) actually produced more carbon than they stored. The gap in the data for stands in the range of 106-190 years old leaves me wondering where exactly they hit their peak -- it's quite possible the peak is somewhere in the 120-150 years old range, though admittedly I could also easily believe the peak is as young as 80 years, based on those numbers.Here is the abstract of a 2001 paper (cited 102 times according to Google Scholar) which has a three-author overlap with the first paper, and which concludes (among other things), that for ponderosa pine stands in Oregon it takes 50-100 years of regrowth to replace the stored carbon which is lost as a result of a clear-cut or "stand-replacing fire". I can't tell you whether that estimate is accurate for "modern" logging techniques or not.
Care to find similarly-respectable evidence to the contrary? These two papers studied only one particular type of forest in one particular region of the US, so I admit that the results could be idiosyncratic, but until I'm given some reason to think these trees and/or that region is unusual, I'm going to assume something at least vaguely similar holds true in most parts of the world.
This requires way too much energy to do.
Don't be ignorant. This is precisely what is being proposed. It is even being done in some places.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
The problem is that the reaction is endothermic by nature. Even by splitting it apart using solar, you're essentially just making a *really* inefficient battery (as most energy producers that use carbon compounds as fuel run at about 25-50% efficiency though, there are those with better returns. Still the best I've seen is DMFCs, which get about 80% efficiency).
The problem with converting CO2 into Oxygen on an industrial scale has always been one of energy. You need to dump in a LOT, whether by photosynthesis in plants or through electrolysis. Since it's endothermic, catalysts won't help; all a catalyst does is reduce the starting energy for an exothermic reaction, which is great for a fuel cell, because it allows you to control the rate of reaction so that you don't need to actually combust fuel to get it to react, as in an ICE.
The best bet for carbon sequestration, in my mind, is using something like a large scale scuba scrubber to sequester CO2 from the air, and feed it into greenhouses and tree farms; the plants like it a LOT, and it essentally traps CO2 by bonding it to the plant's materials.
And, of course, to stop dumping it into the atmosphere.
Power plants dump a significantly larger percentage of CO2 into the atmosphere than our cars do, on the whole (though smog is icky, car exhaust constitutes a minority slice of the human CO2 production pie). Of course, you can SEE car exhaust; you can smell it. It's very easy for power comanies to make us feel guilty for a problem that, by and large, they're causing by resisting the shift to cleaner energy production technologies.
In my opinion, we really need to move our coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear plants to something clean, like liquid thorium flouride reactors (which are also nuclear, but don't produce a significant amount of transuranic compounds - ie: industrially useful products as nonradioactive nucelar waste). Also, I think wind needs to be moved from windmills to helical turbines - they're more efficient and less dangerous than their propeller-based cousins, and you don't need a servo to point them at the wind. Lastly, I think it would probably be wise to cover a few strips (and I mean, like a highway's worth) of desert with solar, once if becomes affordable enough to push such a venture.
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