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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/
I use another CO2 storage technology in my house already. It's called WOOD. Doesn't have any patents tied to it and the more we plant, cut up and build with, the more CO2 we will remove from the atmosphere. Sure there might be a more high tech solution with a higher yield but planting trees and using them also produces oxygen as well. Nice idea but it's been done before. Way before.
So I can tell you that these guys with powerplants will take forever to modernize to use this technology. If you have a steady stream of income, and a reason to not go down, then you're gonna hate to do anything to cut into your profits and to also interrupt that stream of income for even a second. Inertia and income are the drivers for these plants to never, ever make any changes to benefit the environment.
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Another use for dilithium crystals!
Great Scott!
Slurm Extreme.. now with 83 times as much fizz!
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.
They are like Zeolites. For mobile applications, they're going to need a lot better than 83X. More like 1000X. This might be useful for stationary applications, however.
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
* [Citation Needed]
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.
That's 83 liters at STP.
Carbon dioxide weighs in at 1.98 grams/L at STP.
1.98*83 = 164.34 grams
They're absorbing 164.34 grams in 1 liter of the crystals. Definitely underwhelming.
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
Not really. They could be as chemically poisonous as plutonium, but still be useful. I mean, we're not talking about sequestering carbon dioxide with this stuff and then making Coke bottles out of it. It'll have to be put somewhere, of course, and that will pose problems. So which is worse? Global warming, or providing long-term storage of chemical residue?
One's opinion on that depends upon where one sits on the issue of global warming, I suppose.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
- The average US household produces 7.5 tons of CO2 equivalents per year.
- The density of C02 is 1.799 kg/m3
- So the average US household produces about 7.5*1000/1.799 m3 of CO2 = 4,169 m3 = 4,169,000 litres
- One litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2.
- So per family requires 4,169,000/83 = 50,228 litres of crystals per year
- I guestimate the average house (of say 10 rooms) has a floorspace of about 1500 ft2 = 150 m2, with each room being 10 ft or 3 m high,
- So the average house is 450 m3 = 450,000 litres, split between 10 rooms.
These crystals would about fill one room of every house every year, floor-to-ceiling.As about half the other commentators have already said, this does not allow for the financial and environmental costs of producing these crystals.
They might even cost more CO2 to produce than they store.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I'm guessing they decided to go by the volume ratio of 1:83 to hype it up a bit (Wow! That must be a lot!), but anyone who's had basic chemistry education would know that gas densities are so low that a high volume compared to a solid means nothing.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
I agree with you, but usually people stop adding up the energy costs of some new technology at some arbitrarily-premature place in the process. For example, once these crystals are soaked with CO2, where do you put them? How toxic are they? (CO2 is acidic and can be toxic when concentrated). How bulky are they? If I was Dictator, I would want to see the complete ledger of energy costs for this before I signed off on it. My guess is that conservation is cheaper, but conservation is always just TOO HARD because the betties just aren't attracted to guys driving cars with small engines.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
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.
I doubt that long term studies have been completed. It doesn't seem like ZIFs are extremely new, this process for creating them and this particular variation are new. That said, several other sources provide better information than the CBC link and speak directly to your question. The CBC article states in first paragraph: "the crystals are non-toxic and would require little extra energy from a power plant."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214144344.htm/ Suggests that this looks much cleaner than existing state of the art:
Yaghi's initial idea of what to do with the material afterwards appears to involve geologic storage.
It's also always useful to hunt down the primary source. I think this PDF is it (I only skimmed).
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
One where the lumber yards obviously think its easier to work with 'metric' wood .. because its easier to multiply with :P
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
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?
That is so wrong that I am forced to suspend your Slashdot license.
First, that page page doesn't say "pound of crude oil"; it says "gallon". That's like 7.5 pounds of oil. So that's a 3x increase in stuff. (Which some would call "mass".) Then these crystals do 1:83 in volume, but more like 10:11 in mass. So to get rid of your pound of crude oil, you'd need about 30 pounds of these crystals.
Please go study Dimensional Analysis (aka the unit-factor method or the factor-label method). Once you have mastered that, you will be permitted to post on science-y topics again.
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.
according to the article, they discovered these crystals after processing thousands of compounds, somewhat like the way Edison figured out a stable element for light bulbs, pretty cool stuff, would be even cooler if they could process the captured co2 and seperate it into o2 and carbon.
prepare the survey weasels.
If you understood the article, it should be pretty obvious that CO2 likely didn't trigger the end of the last few ice ages given that there probably weren't any large releases of CO2 like we're making now. (And before anybody gets any big ideas: Volcanoes aren't the culprit. They release a tiny fraction as much CO2 as humans.) As the article points out, the changes likely were triggered by other factors like changes in the earth's orbit.
If the CO2 didn't trigger the changes, but does participate in a positive feedback loop, then of course it would lag the temperature. But that has nothing to do at all with the question of whether an increase in CO2 levels could also trigger a warming cycle.
They still are. But you, like so many others, seem to be completely ignorant of the concept of rate of change. Humans are changing the CO2 levels orders of magnitude faster than natural factors have in the past, so those effects get lost in the noise.
So "humans are emitting lots of CO2" does cut it.
* [Citation Seriously Needed]
However, as I've explained to you in the past, the relative concentration of greenhouse gases is not really the important issue. What matters is the change in greenhouse effect above the natural baseline. The natural greenhouse effect is something like 30 degrees C. Anthropogenic CO2 has, so far, added less than 1 C to that. The natural baseline is much larger than the anthropogenic contribution, because there are more natural greenhouse gases than anthropogenic. But the anthropogenic GHGs are still important: 1 C matters, climatically speaking. And projected CO2 emissions are likely to add several more degrees on top of that, which is the point.
Where the new zeolite will come in handy is getting the CO2 concentrated enough for the compressors; the real use of zeolites is to first absorb, then later release. The 64 thousand dollars question isn't how easy it is to get the CO2 into the zeolite, but how easy is it to get the CO2 back out of the zeolite to recharge it for reuse.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I have made the judgment that the process has been overrun by politics and if you can't understand that your insistence of their being one true way with all other research needing to stop now is little more then politics, then I'm not sure how we can discuss this. But we are at a point where hiding in the sand and going my way wins or is better somehow -look at all these studies used to political justifications, and the mountain of evidence against Co2 global warming is piling up which means that more and more people are going to dispute it. Personally, I think it is productive to dispute it if not only because the entire process has been hijacked for political gain.
Now the question remains, is a the increase in something that is less then
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...