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New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2
Socguy brings us a story from CBC News about a recently developed crystal that can soak up carbon dioxide gas "like a sponge." Chemists from UCLA believe that the crystals will become a cheap, stable method to absorb emissions at power plants. We discussed a prototype for another CO2 extraction device last year. Quoting:
"'The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome,' said UCLA chemistry professor Omar Yaghi in a statement. The porous structures can be heated to high temperatures without decomposing and can be boiled in water or solvents for a week and remain stable, making them suitable for use in hot, energy-producing environments like power plants. The highly porous crystals also had what the researchers called 'extraordinary capacity for storing CO2': one litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2."
I wonder if this is similar to the charcoal briquetting technique shown about a year ago with corn cobs and natural gas. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108390/
wonder how this will advanced re-breathers, as you need to remove co2 from them.
So, you spill a few liters of the stuff - what does it do when it gets in contact with living creatures (like algae? birds? small children?) And how long does it take to break down and release all those gases? (That would be useful - like a CO2 tank for plants for long space voyages)... I think there are a lot of questions.
meh
and what happens when these crystals are full?
-I only code in BASIC.-
First, how much CO2 is produced in making those crystals and second, what shall we do with them once they're full? Dump them in some old salt min... no, wait, there's already that radioactive waste.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hate to be the grumpy old man throwing the wet blanket of thermodynamic skepticism on this fancy new idea, but since these are new crystals, I have to imagine they are not present in nature, and thus take lots of energy to make. Thus, to soak up a lot of CO2 takes a lot of energy - but using lots of energy is why we have CO2 to begin with. All the CO2 sequestration ideas I've read about so far don't make any sense from a macro-ecological perspective, since their use actually drives up energy usage, precisely the opposite of the response we should be making to the problem. "Oh, but we can make the crystals with clean nuclear power!" Really? If that's case, you can just not make the crystals and use that clean power instead! It doesn't take much of a puzzle for even smart people to fall for plans which, at their root, are just perpetual motion machines.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Spaceflight and oceanographic research. With cheaper rebreathers underwater research will become more affordable. It seems this chemical will absorb more CO2 than regular CO2 scubbers too, and having a scrubber media that isn't reactive to water would be a huge safety factor.
Sounds like a poor man's Aerogel! Not that many rich people are rich enough to buy this stuff. Unless they want scraps from United Nuclear. If you want green Aerogel and not stuff that is decribed as being more dangerous to make than TNT to make you can create some SEAgel buy freeze drying agar.
But seriously, the other neat trick is that even if you cut down the wood and burn it for power, you're only putting back the CO2 which the tree took out - not releasing carbon that has been safely out of the equation for millions of years.
But IMHO a better way to accomplish the same thing is to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as octane, like I suggest here (in a post that was modded down for no reason by the people that are stalking me), and get the energy to do that from nuclear power, like this guy has already worked out the details for. That way, the gasoline you would burn, would only return to the atmosphere, what was taken from it.
Of course, the purpose of the global warming alarmism is NOT, and never has been, to find ways to reduce net carbon emissions and prevent catastrophe. The purpose, for most such alarmists, is to shut down activity they don't like. "Global warming" is a pretense. Anything that stops global warming, but doesn't shut down those activities, will be vehemently opposed.
And btw, whenever someone tells me that woodburning is good for the environment, I always have to ask, *whose* environment? Not the environment of the people who have to breathe the surrounding air!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Well, you get up to 21 pounds of CO2 from a pound of crude oil - a 21:1 increase in "stuff". This sponge apparently can do a 1:83 reverse, so the whole system appears to be a 21:83 savings in space underground. Why not pump it right back into the ground?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The second website looks to me like a highly biased collection of cargo cult science put together by people who specialize in fields like economics, not climatology.
Use clean energy (such as nuclear, or hopefully in under 20 years, fusion) to turn it back into oil, or send it to space. Or dump it in middle of the deserts until we have the clean energy sources to turn it into plastic or something.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
So, you think the Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountains have all that haze from the massive car pollution there, vice the ozone-producing isoprene that plants, trees in particular, emit, with plant hydrocarbon emission being at a rate ten times that of all the world's cars?
I suppose listening only to that great bastion of unbiased scientific study, the 4:1 liberal:conservative press, is one option...
You'd be shocked on how little smoke is emitted w/ the new wood stoves. I have a Quadra Fire - and when you dampen it down (which is basically how one uses it the majority of the time) there is literally no smoke coming out the chimney. Versus a neighbor w/ a normal fireplace where the smoke plumes can be smelled a mile away. Technology is a good thing.
The chemicals that the blue mountains emit may be "hydrocarbons", but that does not mean they are greenhouse gases. In fact, environmental scientists are studying these regions to protect and try to REPRODUCE the effect they have.
Forgive me for being light on details about WHY these chemicals are good for the environment, but this is not my area. I simply recall this from a talk by Jose Fuentes at the University of Virginia, who is studying Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, which are similar to Sydney's Blue Mountains.
More details can probably be found here:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jf6s/
Only if you use coal and oil as the power source for producing and transporting it!
Honestly, this one gets trotted out so often that you'd think there was some sort of thermodynamic paradox behind using a biofuel-powered tractor (or solar-powered or hydrogen-powered - or even a fricking horse provided it was fitted with a fart afterburner to kill the methane) to harvest your biofuel.
The problem is the half-baked rush to promote a uniquely expensive and inefficent biofuel (corn alcohol) without first building the infrastructure or ensuring sustainable supplies.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Interestingly, I recently listened to a podcast where an (I think) civil engineer advocated the installation of such generators for (among other things) extra protection from storms! Essentially, his point was that putting up concrete barriers didn't work, because they didn't 'give' whereas turbines, etc, allowed the energy to pass, but dissipated it somewhat.
As a maintenance guy working for a company that extracts salt from sea water via solar evaporation, I can confirm this one hundred per cent. We have a saying: "at the salt works, everything rusts." As a result, we frequently resort to low-tech solutions straight out of the 19th century, such as wooden bearings, and yet can still barely keep up with the disintegration of the plant.
This ain't rocket surgery.
At 83x absorption, how many billions of tons of this will we need per year and how much CO2 will production/transport of same produce?
To me it doesn't sound like much of a solution to anything.
Nuclear power plants, OTOH, there's a technology which could help.
Same with wind power (where practical).
etc.
No sig today...