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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."
Don't they call things that absorb CO2 from the air Trees...?
And couldn't we sequester CO2 from the atmosphere by converting trees into an inert substance--such as paper--then burying it into landfills?
I mean--couldn't we get a 'win/win' here by simply outlawing the recycling of paper?
Meanwhile, in a competing lab, scientists have unearthed a competing technology, known in ancient times. These "plants" are rumored to absorb CO2, and unbelivably, some of them, it is rumored, are edible.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
We have this thing commonly known as "dry ice" ; otherwise as "carbon dioxide ice". They don't mine it, you know.
It comes from AIR. *gasp*. It's also been around for a very long time.
The article does not mention how much carbon needs to be burned to power the device.
I assume that this is more energy efficient than the usual refrigeration based methods for generating pure CO2. This is a good thing. However, they don't say what they're going to do with the CO2 once they purify it. If you can't answer that question, you haven't solved the sequesteration problem.
I find this idea somewhat concerning. All too often the human race is guilty of doing things because they can, before they learn whether or not they should. I'm all for reducing carbon emissions, but in all honesty, what the hell will we break if we start trying to extract too much carbon from the atmosphere.
Mind you, find a way to quickly and efficiently separate the carbon from the oxygen, install in long range space craft and you suddenly have near limitless air for deep space voyages.
...this project sucks, literally
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/
Bring back wolves.
Deleted
You don't really get the Environment, do you?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I love politics almost as much as I love reading ridiculous slippery slope arguments based on hate.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Perhaps it's just successful as in, seeming reasonably plausible. The first unsuccessful demonstration of CO2 capture was probably achieved by some nerd putting his own spin on that tireless got-yer-nose joke.
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/07041 8091932.htm
There's some work going on at UC San Diego to use solar power to convert CO2 into CO (carbon monoxide) and O. Apparently, CO is useful in industrial chemical processes like making plastic. There's also some talk of using it as a fuel.
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.
They made a nifty machine in the D.F. Jones novel "Collosus and the Crab" (third book of the Collosus trilogy) with which they planned to extract 50% of the O2 from the Earth's atmosphere. If they can do that, they can probably build a CO2 extractor instead. But at what cost?
They should so like, seperate the carbon and oxygen, turn the carbon into diamonds, and then sell the oxygen at an oxygen bar. They they would make like, infinity million dollars!
It makes no sense to me. It seems as though they promote the use of CO2 extraction as an aleternative to saving energy because they can avoid global warming.
While this may be true, but it still drains the limited energy supply of the planet.
This seems useful for closed environments (space stations, moonbase alpha, sea lab, etc), but is it more efficient than current methods? It does not compare to current technology, as this may be only valid for larger scale conversion.
Fight Spammers!
As others have pointed out, this article is almost entirely useless.
Can someone provide a link to something that answers the obvious questions:
1. How does it work?
2. How much energy does it take to extract it's 10 tonnes of CO2 per year?
3. How does this compare with refrigeration or plants as a means to reduce CO2 concentration?
4. What is it's likely cost?
Actually... The process of recycling paper is worse for the environment than simply "harvesting" new paper is. On top of that, creating more demand for new paper creates more demand for... you guessed it, trees! The majority of trees cut down to make paper are replaced by new trees (via reforestation, or tree farming).
Something very important that this project and other ideas to sequester CO2 have forgotten: what about the Oxygen?
If you start sequestering CO2 on a massive scale, it could work to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere - but at the same time you will permanently remove Oxygen from the atmosphere as well!
Now sure, at 21% there is plenty, but if removing CO2 is the plan, and it's a long term plan, slowly but surely there will be less and less oxygen in the air.
-Ariel
The sup tag wants in on the action.
Task Mangler
Doesn't that class as prior art?
Isn't this just a re-application of technique known since at least WWII?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It's not hard to understand. Say five of us are living in a closed environment (i.e. earth). All five of us want to eat potatoes. Okay, so we'll plant a five foot wide garden. What if ten of us want potatoes? We'll planet a ten foot wide garden. What if ten of us want to eat twice as many potatoes? We'll plant a twenty foot wide garden.
Now say five of us want to use paper. We'll plant five trees. What if ten of us want paper? We'll plant ten trees. What if we want twice as much paper, even if we're just throwing half away? We'll plant twenty trees. What if we recycle half that paper? Oh, now we don't need twenty trees anymore; we'll only plant ten.
I'm not saying recycling is bad, but the allegation that we're chopping down the rain forests is just plain wrong; it's sensationalism. We've been planting tree farms for over fifty years, and that's what we use today to make paper. That's why the amount of trees in North America has been steadily growing over the past hundred years. There are more trees today than there has ever been, and the simple reason is because we use a lot of paper.
Before reading the comments, I took a moment to RTFM. (Yeah, yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, but we all slip up once in a while.) In the second paragraph, they mention "...an esteemed array of global experts -- including former Vice President Al Gore..." What did Al Gore do to deserve being called a "global expert?" I mean, besides producing a heavily-slanted "documentary" filled with questionable "facts" and spending more each month on his electric bill than I earn?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Companies that produce greenhouse emissions will get to make fewer upgrades to their plants if they invest in technology like this.
It is cheaper to earn emission credits through investing in someting like this (plus good PR) than to upgrade your manufacturing/refining/whatever facilities.
Regards.
You know, it's this kind of uninformed scares that give environmentalism a bad name.
Do you genuinely think that anyone goes and wipes out rain forests for _paper_? No, seriously. It's a crop, same as grain or cotton or whatever. Relatively fast growing trees are planted, left to grow, then cut down, and new trees are planted. Maybe generously spread some fertilizer too. Repeat ad infinitum. It's that simple.
It wouldn't even be economical to go around the world and wipe out woods for paper, since then you end up having to carry those trees over increasingly long distances to your factory. Plus, you have to keep buying new land or logging rights, and that's more money down the drain. It's a model akin to throwing money down a rat hole.
The plan to let trees fix it and then burry it, isn't too stupid either. Originally Earth had a helluva lot of carbon in the air, in the form of methane and CO2. Not unlike Venus before it lost its hydrogen to solar winds, really. Then plants fixated it, and now it's under the ground. There's a reason why we have an age called Carboniferous, for example. That's where a helluva lot of coal comes from. It was basically a helluva lot of tree-ferns that fixated a helluva lot of carbon, and got buried.
Mind you, it wouldn't make that big a difference, since we don't use as much paper as to come even close to the other carbon emissions. But, purely theoretically speaking, it's one way.
About making paper, there's nothing inherent in that process that releases more CO2 into the air than those trees got from the air. Maybe if you powered it all with a coal power plant, you'd get that effect, but using hydroelectric/solar/nuclear power gets you a net effect of removing carbon from the air via those trees.
Recycling... here also you seem to have some fantasy idea that it's absolutely free, and all that used paper you recycle somehow just miraculously ends up pristine again without any extra energy use. It's not. That used paper has to be cleaned with a lot of chemicals first, for a start. E.g., to get rid of the ink. Not only those aren't necessarily environment friendly, but some energy goes into producing them too. Then it's going to be converted to pulp again, just like wood would, which is only _marginally_ cheaper than starting from wood. And finally it's going to be bleached just like paper from wood would, because it ends up the same kind of naturally-yellow paper it was in the first place.
And that's not even taking into account the effort and energy used to sort it, transport it, etc.
It may surprise you, but a lot of recycling we do nowadays is... well, bluntly put: show business. We're not really saving the planet, we just let some ignorant sheeple feel good about themselves. Paper is one such example. Glass is another. Glass is made out of sand, and it's not any more economical to re-melt used glass than to just melt sand. Recycling whole bottles also doesn't get you much, since you end up washing them with strong chemicals, since you don't know what that guy stored in the bottle or how long a jar has been left to turn into a petri dish before being recycled. Plus, again, you spend a lot on sorting, transport, etc.
And let me give you another example of something which isn't what many people assume: Tetra Pak style packaging. (E.g., milk cartons.) There seems to be a lot of mis-conception that its adoption had anything to do with being environmentally friendly. In practice it's just because it's cheaper than glass, weighs less, and it can be neatly packed in a truck without wasting much space. I.e., you can pack more of them in a truck.
Recycling them, again, actually is a bigger pain and uses more chemicals, than just making a new one. But, hey, you've been trained to sort your garbage like a good trained monkey and feel good about it. Carry on
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Join me in destroying the evil beaver so trees everywhere can be safe.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The best way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere still is and always will be to not emit it in the first place. Any other ways will just lead to the global reduction of Oxygen.
That hard to get?
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.
If true it is extremely interesting (use as a precursor). You (future generations) are going to need ways of making things when even the coal runs out. However, given the toxicity problems of coal gas, it's hard to see why we would want to go back to using it as a fuel, unless the solar converter does not generate electricity as an intermediate step - which case it would make sense. Generate CO in the day, sotre excess, driver generator 24 hours. A way of generating timeshifted electricity with no need to move CO long distances make sense.
Pining for the fjords
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.
All this recycling and tree replanting should be avoided in the first place. We should be planting hemp everywhere. It has many more benefits than growing pine, for instance. Less to no chemicals needed. It's a nitrogen fixer (in the soil). Grows quickly. Hemp is the answer. Leave the forests to become old growth again.
Read this page to know why charcoal is not only better than paper, but actually a viable way to solve CO2 emission problems:
l ity-energy-independence-and.html
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2006/11/sustainabi
Read this yesterday in the New York Times. A small company from New Zealand has developed a method to convert CO to Ethanol with modified bacteria.
Carbon Gas Is Explored as a Source of Ethanol
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Could it be used for terraforming? sending a bunch of these to Mars, they could change the planet's atmosphere to being breathable in a few decades.
Carbon dioxide concentrations is measured in ppm - parts per million Oxygen concentration is measured in % - part per hundred
Naturally, there is a certain limit below which we don't want to take the carbon dioxide, even if we could. (after all, it would be kinda sad if all the plants started dying on us.)
The oxygen which would be removed in this operation would be negligible.
1. Extract Carbon from the Air. ... ... (ad infinitum)
2. Sell extracted carbon as combustible fuel
3. Return to Step 1.
4. Profit
5. Profit
6. Profit
7. Profit
vaporware?
Anything that can be done to take some of the hot air out of blow-hard press releases masquarading as news stories like the physorg.com article linked to, should be. That was some seriously hyperbolic diatribe.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.
dropagianticecubeintotheoceaneverynowandthen
"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...
There is some farming, but there's always pressure to allow old growth harvesting. Often, that pressure succeeds.
The rainforests aren't being cut down to supply paper. They are being cut done for farmland since those farmers use suboptimal farming techniques which necessitate burning through a lot of the land.
Linking those two is disingenous to the end of providing meaningful environmental discussion.
...Sure some will slowly decompose and release carbon, but ultimately buried trees - isn't that what coal is?
Of course in tens of thousands (millions?) of years our ancestors may start burning it again but by then that's not our problem!
Maybe coal deposits were a carbon capture attempt by the dinosaurs to try and avoid becoming extinct through global warming!
So just why would you recover CO2 from the air when it would be much easier to do so before it leaves the chimney? Until every single fossil fuel plant uses CCS, this is a waste of time, and if every fossil fuel plant used CCS we wouldn't really have much of a problem anyway. The easiest way to recover CO2 is to not emit it in the first place.
and once you capture the CO2, you can use it to make gasoline.
;-)
TFA wasn't clear about the sequestration byproduct. What are they going to turn it into? We currently dump some 70 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere a day. Each and every day.
If all we do is turn that into some, even mildly toxic or useless power, what are we going to do with 70+ million tons of byproduct generated daily?
-[d]-
This article points out that carbon can be sequestered in soil with the right mix of plants. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314 /5805/1598. Those plants can at the same
time be used to make fuel.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get off carbon: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Would planting more trees and plants be a lot easier and cheaper to reduce the co2 ?
Sorry, but
And water vapor has some fairly quick ways of leaving the atmosphere - precipitation in solid or liquid form, for example. Carbon dioxide doesn't do that, at least not naturally.
Bah! Call me when they have bottled Lightning.
(and John McCain as well)
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
P.S. Did I just read that China is going to alter the weather to insure it doesn't rain during the Olympics?
k /
Yes, you did. It's been planned for a while now...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13107271/site/newswee
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Think about your logic. If it was true that they were planting trees, then we would have LOTS more, not less. The reality is that the lumber companies who take from federal/state lands do NOT replant. Their argument is that other trees will do the seeding. OTH, when they take from private lands esp their own, then they are forced by contracts to re-seed. More expensive, but better results. Here in American, we WERE moving to trees being taken for private lands, but W. re-opened the forests and now allow them to take a great deal more (including LOTS of clear cutting). EU currently does that (they developed their woods long ago). But a number of nations still have loads of national forests so they allow the timber industries to nicely cut through them. A good example is Canada and Russia.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In short, you have absolutely nothing to say, but you are very certain that you are smarter than everyone else?
Nothing to say that you can understand apparently. But that's usual.
E Proelio Veritas.
In the tropics and subtropics with temperatures in the vicinity of 35-40C we will find the concentration of water vapour is about 35,000 - 40,000 PPM and more. CO2 is about 375 PPM. This is about 100:1 and this is about the same as the ratio of a sheet of paper to a small tree stump. Mind you the change in CO2 levels is about 90 PPM estimated and we have no idea if water vapour has increased 90 or 1000 or if its decreased. We simply cannot measure water vapour accurately enough.
It is quite correct to say that water vapour can leave the atmosphere very quickly. It can also be replentished equally quickly. Plants transpire all the time and then we have straight evaporation. So pretty much all of the water that we use for irrigation except for that fraction which ends up in the water table will be forced into the atmosphere where it will cycle some number of times dependant on the local environment.
Thus one would expect that if we chop down the tropical rain forests and force massive areas into desserts that we should see reduced water vapour levels in those areas. If we reclaim desserts through irrigation and plant crops - then we should see increased water vapour levels in the areas we reclaim.
The increase will be a permanent as the crops are and the decrease will be as permanent as any desserts we create.
Also if we chop down enough tropical rain forests we might be able to shut down enough photosynthesis to cause a significant increase in CO2 from this factor alone.
Interesting, but no mention of cost. Plus, based on the articles figures, you'd need 1.1 billion of these by 2025.
I'd guess these costs around $25,000 each, but let's just assume a modest $5,000 each. That's $5.5 trillion dollars, not including maintenance.
I think it would costs less to rebuild our energy from scratch using renewable energy resources. More generally, the figures I've seen to make major differences are in the few hundred billion dollar range.
I think prevention is the economical way to go.
You're forgetting that different molecules have different greenhouse potentials.
As I said - the ratio of contributions of water and CO2 isn't even 1:10 in the worst case.
And the earth isn't all tropics and subtropics.
If this device can be solar powered and split O2 from CO2, we could terraform Mars!
We would only need to add some hydrogen to be able to form H2O, but that's another story...
So say we all
The Carbon started out as C(x)H(2x - 2). After we burned it, it becomes CO2. And since CO2 is very stable molecule, it takes lot of energy to split it. IOW, we long ago removed the O2 from the air. Now, we are talking about burying the CO2. If that happens it will remove the O2 from our useage. So it is no longer a lose of O2.
The real problem will be that we are taking CO2 and putting it in LARGE concentrations in one place. If it leaks suddenly, it will kill whoever is close to there. We would be better off using that CO2 and running it through acres of algae and allow it to convert it bio-fuel. In addition, it would be a LOT cheaper. The funny thing is that if we perfect this approach (using algae to create bio-fuels), it could be used to create oil on mars. And while most ppl like to think of oil as energy (increasingly expensive), its best use is for plastics and fertilizers. That is FAR more important to us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is important to remember that this is an added cost to the price of fuel. The cost, maybe $0.30/gal is not so large that it looks like a killer, but you can't make money from this without making this connection. To go beyond just compensating for emissions and beginning to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations requires further cash input. So, perhaps you require each pound of coal used to pay for 8 pounds of CO2 sequestered and that raises electric rates by 4 cents per kWh. Pretty soon you put coal generation out of business since renewables will fill in.
s -selling-solar.html
I think that what we should call this is potentially commercially feasable and reserve viability for things that increase economic activity.
--
Solar power for what you pay for coal power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
OK, so they've built the Cray Computer equivalent of CO2 absorption machines.
It'll get interesting if they can make them small and inexpensive, then stick them in car mufflers, factory chimneys and the like, stopping CO2 release at its' origin point, as well as using the large devices to restore an optimal equilibrium (for us) to the atmosphere. But today, we're looking at a big, expensive prototype. First steps.
I get excited when news of this sort comes out, as I like to consider myself an optimist, so I like to believe in the historical principle of extropianism, which means, in a nutshell: The next generation will find the way to clean up after their fathers' f**k-ups. I think we all have a vested interest in this principle being true.
Personally, I'd love to see a Manhattan Project style effort to make these things a reality in every home. Hopefully the next US president will have the conviction to fully explore the possibility of government funding for this type of technology.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
APPLAUSE.
Your comment should be printed on a T-Shirt.
It is just about the most applicable response to 90% of the kneejerk blowhard knowitall comments made on slashdot.
Please don't continue the dumbness. Water vapour also produces things called Clouds. Clouds are one of the most important factors driving our climate. It isn't as simple as saying "x is 10 times more potent a greenhouse gas than y". The plain fact is scientists don't know nearly enough about all of this to be driving policy makers. Not even a tiny amount of useful reliable data exists with which to make all of the shrieking predictions of gloom and doom the media are full of today. I read yesterday that palaeontologists have found a hippo fossil in the Antarctic FCOL. I mean please, was it a Woolly Hippo? Climate is variable. 10,000 years ago the North Sea didn't exist! IMHO this climate change thing is all completely insane. Reducing pollution is good in itself though but the problem is Carbon isn't a pollutant.
I didn't forget about absorption curves at all. Check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared and especially this curve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atmospheric_tra nsmittance_infrared.gif
Please note the scale is in microns = 10E-6 anot not nanometers. The visible spectrum is at wavelengths shorter than 780 nm which is less than one (1) um. We see our 1st CO2 hole at about 2.7-2.9 um and the next at 4.2-4.3 um and then a HUGE water vapour hole between 5.5-7.7 um. Water Vapour is a much more important absorber.
Can't you strip the carbon from the CO2, release the oxygen, and save the carbon for use in things such as flexible conductors (like the little LCD connector used in my DynaFlex Powerball) or even making carbon-fiber products?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I have said all along that green house gases will not be a problem until industry can make money out of some process to remove them from the air. After all, there is no 'real' money to be made in reducing output and thereby preventing the problem but there are piles of money to be made fixing it.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Some 10 years ago wasn't Engellhard (now a part of BASF) producing a compound which was painted onto Ford radiators. The idea was it would take CO2 out of the atmosphere?
I have curbed my Mtn Dew intake by 1/2 I'm down to six or 7 a day, in my fight against CO2. I think it's funny people still blame cars for CO2, when we drink it all day long.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Yes, obviously the SHEEP can't UNDERSTAND your UTTER BRILLIANCE.
A while back, I read a book which discussed Ocean Thermal Energy Converters (OTEC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTEC and how they can be used to produce energy from the latent heat of the oceans. The book was called "Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Projec t:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps.
Essentially a Turbine is anchored in deep equatorial waters where the surface temperature is much higher than the water in the depths. The system runs on low pressure such that the surface water boils to drive the turbine, and pipes bring cold water up from ocean floor to act as the coolant.
The bonus is that the nutrient rich water that is being sucked up comes to the surface which results in rapid algae growth which absorbs CO2. The algae can be harvested and then sequestered (or used as food).
AFAIK, roadblocks to using OTECs are high initial capital costs, and the fact that they would be located in international waters.
My god. How many steps back has Thermodynamics taken with this artical and others cited!
Why not just pick up the CO and CO2 at the tail pipe and run it through the magic chemistry and put the gasoline back in the tank?
Why can't people see it take more energy to reverse the reactions than it does to run them in the forward direction? If you can do these magic things then you have a perpetual motion machine.
The reason trees can do it is because the sun provides the required energy.
This might be very useful for terraforming planets with too much CO2 in the atmosphere. Or, for moving some from one planet to another.
This reminds me of technology that has been under study for over a decade (and about a century for Sabatier) for generating chemical feedstocks on Earth and fuel on Mars. Granted, that just moves the carbon around, but this proposal even mentions carbon dioxide sequestration.
This new process (or method) may cut out one step of the process, making the process simpler and easier for Mars and Earth alike!
The Christian Science Monitor article link I submitted five days ago has more details on the actual device: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0419/p13s01-sten.htm l. It is 3 meters tall and captures about 18 kg of CO2 a year or about
4.5 kg of carbon. At this scale, it is probably not so good as a tree. These devices need to be much larger to compete
with plants on the rate of carbon capture per unit area.s -selling-solar.html
--
Get off carbon: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Alert the administration.. they were right.. Global Warming has been solved! Let's make bigger SUV's! Let's party like it's 1999!
I've seen a number of comments here arguing that we should reduce emissions (abatement) instead of capturing CO2 (sequestration). After all, it's better to prevent the disease than have to cure it, and relying on "quick fixes" just encourages people not to face up to the real problem.
Well, that's nice in principle, but not fully realistic. It takes a great deal of economic and social change as well as political will to substantially reduce emissions. Even with full support from government and industry, it takes time to alter basic infrastructure. A "quick fix" buys time to put those slower changes into place. A lot of studies are showing that there are modest economic benefits to sequester early while abatement is ramping up, than not to sequester at all and try to do more abatement all at once: with a carefully planned combination of sequestration and abatement, overall CO2 concentrations may level out sooner and at less cost.
Or even better, fields of the fourth stooge as far as the eye can see.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
Here's how to make companies care about carbon sequestering: Make a machine that does CO2 -> O2 + Diamonds.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
One of the things that the article assumes is that removing meaningful abouts of CO2 from the atmosphere will reverse what most people call global warming (If you want a laugh, ask 10 random people what global warming is and what it's affects will be). Point of fact is that most our 'understanding' of global warming comes from computer models (the same computer models that can't yet predict the weather 10 days in advance, they can't predict ocean currents, they can't predict trade winds, they can't predict El Nino). I'm sure many evironmentalist will show you a computer model that shows that if we just remove all the CO2 from the air, the earth will be a nice comfortable place to live. Before we spend a huge amount of money on removing CO2, more engieering needs to be done to show that it will do us any good.
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.
The carbon contained in a piece of paper is 100% captured from atmospheric CO2, just like the carbon contained in a tree is 100% captured from atmospheric CO2. Those amounts are certainly not "minute".
Furthermore, recycling paper probably takes roughly the same amount of energy of making new paper.
Also, by outlawing the recycling of paper, you'll reduce the number of trees that are still alive,
Not at all. Paper can be made from trees grown specifically for that purpose, and a lot of paper is made just that way. Those trees don't grow any faster through recycling.
There's a simple market-driven solution:
(1) restrict international shipping of timber and timber products
(2) eliminate all cutting of old-growth forests
The market will take care of the rest; people will do tree farming or switch away from paper as necessary.
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.
To make CO2 sequestration work, it would have to use extremely tiny amounts of energy - both to build and to operate the equipment. Otherwise it defeats the purpose - the reason we have a CO2 problem in the first place is because of all the energy we use. This article reads like a press release for the company in that it has no caveats such as how much energy this tech uses. My guess is that the answer is "a lot."
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
So, all this carbon gets yanked out of the atmosphere and is at some storage site that nobody wants to deal with but we have this need for carbon to make nanotubes (like the internet but much smaller). We take what was in the atmosphere and stick it into everyday appliances to eventually fill the landfills with this stuff.
You see, it's a free resource used to build materials.
Plausible, sort of, maybe
good post, thanks.
I wonder if they will change their minds about the sell off of tree farm acreage as the housing bubble continues to collapse and demand goes up for much smaller and cheaper housing, and also as soon as a few more major breakthroughs in cellulosic ethanol production are made?
And do you have any references to the actual plots they have for sale? Thanks in advance if you do.
I've read that ice core samples definitely show a trend between the CO2 levels and temerature. But it isn't the cause...it lags behind temperature by about 800 years.
2 478442170&q=global+warming+swindle&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=449956202
So if that's true, this obsession with carbon emissions as absolutely pointless.
I find it disturbing that our planet seems to have taken the man-made global warming theory as Truth (thanks Al) but criticisms like this are never refuted, just dismissed as crackpot theories or (gasp) partisan politics!
...get logged because that is the only way they can stay on the farm. Urbanization results in bumping up property taxes, but farm profits (speaking very very generally now), aren't adequate enough to cover these increases in taxes. They get a company offer them enough to cover taxes for a few years, they take it. And a lot of times this process is done on purpose to enrich a few local fatcats. They'll acquire some acreage in the middle of productive farmland, throw up a huge subdivision. This results in the call to increase taxes, because now you need more and better roads, a new public school or two, increased police and fire resources, etc. so they bump up the taxes. Lather rinse repeat=farmers get to the point they try to save the farm, sell off the stumpage for cheap, put off bankruptcy for a few years, go under anyway. Local fatcats (or larger transnational "investors") pickup more prime acreage at the auction for cheap.
Consolidation of wealth, vertically, upstream. Same as what happened in the great depression, just now they are a little slicker about how they go about it. they are doing the same thing with a lot of public infrastructure as well, the proposed supercorridors being sold off to foreign wealthy investment groups, water rights and treatment facilities, etc.
I've actually had a pair of underwear with a filter built into the back to sweeten out farts for years.
This is essentially the same thing.
Wow, you read something somewhere and saw a video?
I guess all those scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can just screw off now, eh?
...or (gasp) partisan politics!I'd blame that more on the fact that one, rather specific group, was rather insistant that there was NO warming trend, dispite crazy amounts of evidence.
Lots of people are sure its due to humans, in one form or another, and thats debateable. But the core issue, a warming trend, was for qutie some, a partisan political issue. Or at the very least, the loudest ones made it so, rather then say a majority.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I mean. Nobody answers stuff like this on its own merit, they just get snarky and duck the question.
Yeah, good point. I personally don't care about the politics involved; I'd like to see all scientific viewpoints taken seriously, however.
Scientists have come up with a consensus that says CO2 is causing climate change. The dissenting theories remain on the fringe because they don't satisfactorily explain enough data. If they had merit they would attract more support and would over turn the current consensus. Thats the way science works.
The same thing happens over and over on Slashdot, some one points out an alternate view and says that because it exists that we can dismiss scientific consensus. Its enough to make a fellow snarky.
It's nice to have a definitive source for debunking why specific fringe theories are incorrect, instead of "you just have to trust the consensus". (It must be true, a committee said so!)
Ok, this is an honest question that just occurred to me, I have no clue what the answer is.
So we have CO2 which is supposed to increase the energy trapped on the earth raising temperatures.
We know that Water vapor does the same thing.
From what I have heard, one of the principle problems with global warming is melting ice caps/sea level rise.
In a system with higher energy, a lot more water will on average be in a gaseous form instead of liquid. Will this increased evaporation offset sea level rise at all? I would think it would at least as much as the increase in volume of the sea because of temperature increase, and I've seen that sited as causing something like 1-2 meters of the rise in sea level over the next 100+ years.
I'm not talking about the economic cost of removing carbon from the air. I'm talking about doing the carbon accounting. That is to say, how much carbon do you have to produce in power plants to build and power these one million extractors, and what are the carbon costs of all the support devices and facilities?
E Proelio Veritas.
...a variation on that scam with the klamath falls farmers vs the sucker fish deal back in 2000-2001. They used a scam, saying a non native sucker fish was endangered inside the dammed up lake the farmers paid for for their irrigation canals many years ago, and shut the dam taps off. They also kept insisting they pay their canal irrigation water fees! In addition, they used the water in a hydro electric dam, I think as part of the enron scam, to sell power at peak rates when they shut down other facilities for "maintenance". It was a pretty involved scam (I am greatly over simplifying all the angles involved), but it bankrupted a lot of farmers, caused divorces, suicides, etc. I was an online pretty serious activist trying to help them, until I found out the farmers leadership was seriously compromised with neocon insiders-quislings- who were faking out the farmers and letting the administration get a free skate on not intervening (the lake was full, there was no actual water shortage and those stupid fish were never endangered in the first place, and they kept claiming the ESA "trumped' the fifth amendment!!). So I quit trying to help them, a waste of time. Some "got it" and contacted me privately to say that I had nailed what was going on, but they kept getting shouted down in local meetings, etc, they wanted everyone to stick to neocon talking points only), but most of them remained brainwashed into the neocon party line (which is to enrich the transnationals and expand the power of the central government in the executive branch, with whatever it takes basically, all the time, every issue) and blamed it on "the librul enviros!", when it was really a handful of pretty rich corporations who profited from the ripoff.
that 'build a subdivision" deal is well established, one of the reasons the rich power brokers love the illegals invasion,(sudden influx of illegals and kids, whoops! need a ton more schools, expend the hospital, etc) because it helps them seize property and consolidate corporations into fewer hands. It's a quasi "legal" huge skim run by professional grifters. It works pretty well for them actually, seize property at auctions on the cheap, drive down wages,etc and they have misguided Dems (also faked out at gh levels by rich scumbags) supporting them, instead of trying to force those dipsquat corrupt foreign governments to pay a minimum *living wage* so those folks won't want or won't need to sneak over the border in the first place.
A lot of this stuff is conencted, once you follow the money and see who profits from it. It's designed to ripoff and disenfranchise the middle class as much as possible, to get to that two class global society model they really are after, the technofeudalistic society. the middle class actually produces the wealth, so that's where they concentrate forces on shifting ownership of said wealth. Pretty simple really.
Ya, sorta scary when you see them "win" all the time, but it gets less scary once you can see the congames (you have to see the problem and the perps to even begin to figure out some solutions), and the net is helping us to bust out of the media psyops that supports them in their congames and rackets, the stuff Ike warned us about that would happen. (I actually remember that speech, live, but didn't really understand it until some years later, I was a kid then. When they whacked JFK and got away with it, THEN I finally got it, epiphany for me, bigtime).
It takes one person at a time helping another to "get it" on what is going on.
And that is why I chime in on these topics at slashdot and have had at various other forums for years and years, and before that wrote nomme de plume pamphlets and news articles, etc. And why I will answer their online shills and expose them for their lies and half truths. I care about all peoples, my country, what goes on, and can't deal with the slimebag crooks by accepting their greed based BS.
Long hard road so far, but I am actually hopeful that eventually it will pay off as it gets harder and harder for them to cover their crimes with the forced media spin and blackouts. Cats outta the bag now.
a warmer atmosphere leads to more co2, not the other way round. visible particle pollution may be one problem, BUT NOT CARBON DIOXIDE. it's a friggin natural gas which makes up a fraction of our atmosphere. water vapor is causing way more greenhouse effect than this tiny bit of co2.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
In Australia we plant non-native pine trees for timber
Strange, in pinewood Europe we plant non-native eucalyptuses for timber!
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Where does carbon come from? Imagine that millions of years ago there was quantity X of carbon in the "carbon system". Since that time, quantity Y of carbon has been sequestered in the form of fossil fuels etc. 300 years ago there was quantity Z of carbon in the carbon system.
So does X+Y=Z? If so, then all of the carbon we are unsequestering is simply bringing the atmospheric levels back to what they were millions of years ago. Or is there a larger super-system of carbon, in which the carbon is naturally laid down in the form of oil and coal and stuff, but more carbon is introduced from some other source? I'm just a bit confused about how reintroducing all of that sequestered carbon could be considered so bad if millions of years ago the carbon was in the system and life was flourishing.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
You're confusing weather forecasts with climate prediction. They're two very different things.
Remind me again why the average temperature on Venus is higher than the maximum temperature on Mercury, even though the latter receives a whole bunch more solar irradiance ?
Back when we were emitting the most C02 during the industrial revolution
Uh ... you do know when the industrial revolution was, and that the CO2 output back then was a lot lower than today because, well, only very few countries were actually industrialized ?
Volcanoes alone emit more C02 than humans - not to mention the ocean!
Spoken like someone who can't do a simple balance. Is basic math really that difficult ?
Everybody - watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle" video and please stop spouting the nonsense.
If you got all the nonsense you're spouting from that video, then I definitely don't need to watch it.
"Hardwood is a piss-poor way to generate pulpwood, because hardwood grows so slowly."
I agree, my point is that in the large tropical rainforests of the world virtually nobody replants and no care is taken to ensure the resource can grow back naturally. The trees are in effect "free" and make excellent raw material for high quality paper. What makes you think these people give a flying fuck about regrowth, in many places they don't even give a fuck about the natives who have lived there for millenia. Natives are simply a hinderance to operations and are chased of their land by armed corporate mercenaries and prevented from returning because they don't have a bit of government paper that says they can continue to live there.
I also generally agree with the rest of your post, I was not attempting to say anything about US forestry practices in particular only that we have significantly better native alternatives for pulpwood here in Oz that can use the same harvesting equipment, produce a similar yeild in 1/3 of the time, and are good for the environment to boot. Yet we continue to plant pine for domestic pulpwood. (Not sure if they are useful for plywood or structural purposes)
We don't really have a problem with residential creep (imagine the US with only 20M people), most of our forests have dissapeared over the last 150yrs or so to make way for farmland or pasture but there are still large areas covered with virgin forests.
OTOH: I think the US does share in some culpability for negligent destruction and corrupt governments in the other two thirds of the world, western business and politics in general have, and still are, screwing the poor and "uncivilized" to profit from the rich on a global scale.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The main upshot: it's cheap to store the carbon. It's not so cheap to capture it in the first place, and doing so requires ramping up power generation at coal/gas plants. (Most of the carbon is captured from power plants that emit it, not sucked generically out of the air.) However, even with ramped up power production, net CO2 emissions still drop substantially: to maybe 10%. The side effects: greater amounts of air pollutants, and greater fuel consumption. The increased fuel consumption leads to greater carbon emissions from activities related to coal mining, but that is minimal compared to the current carbon emissions of the power plants themselves — the emissions which would largely be eliminated with capture and sequestration.
Can't you see the millions of angry hippies turning blue as they don't breathe in protest of the capturing of air?
I live in Wisconsin, which is one of the largest producer of paper in the country. I have known people who work in the business of cutting down the trees from which much pulp paper is made.
They're Poplars. Young Poplars, 10-15 years old. They cut em' down, and grow em' back. Poplar bark is easy to shuck off, and the wood is very white, which cuts down on the bleach needed.
I agree about recycling paper. I think it is silly, from a carbon footprint standpoint. What I think we should do is to gather waste paper, heat it anaerobically to boil off the flammable methane and methanol (use that to run the process and create extra energy) and use the remaining carbon to build a mountain (Wisconsin is a great place, but we don't have any actual mountains). I don't know how hard it is to turn charcoal into graphite, but if it isn't too hard, then we really need a mountain somewhere just west of the Fox River Valley. We also have a lot of PCB polluted sediment in the Fox river (from old paper mills, among other things) which needs a long, long, term home. I think that sediment would make a good center of the Wisconsin Mountain, and could be nicely walled off and isolated by giant blocks of graphite, which would form a huge carbon sink.
So toss that paper into the waste stream, and lets build a new green mountain out of charcoal and polluted sediment in Wisconsin!
Hmmm, maybe I gotta work on that slogan a little bit, but I've still always liked the idea...
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
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Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In Soviet forest, trees breathe YOUR CO2.
Uhhh wait..
- Ecsad Essemal
The Hexadecimal TV-REMOTE!