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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.
Newsfollow.com
Another use for dilithium crystals!
Great Scott!
Slurm Extreme.. now with 83 times as much fizz!
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
* [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.
- 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
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."
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear power plants, OTOH, there's a technology which could help."
Yes, that's the mentally balanced answer!
After all there's nothing more benign a powerplant that outputs high-level "spent" nuclear waste that we have nowhere in the world to store, and is going to remain "hot" for at least another hundred thousand years, not to mention the radioactive contamination left behind when they finally close down, that sees their former site uninhabitable for about the same time as the aforementioned waste.
As for those trifling concerns about how such reactors safely contain and process the constant stream of radioactive steam and water created during their operation, all the aforementioned concerns rightly pale by comparison to the proven unquestionably armageddon-like catastrophic effects of carbon dioxide and smoke particles escaping into the environment.
And if there's one thing we can be unquestionably certain of, it's that absolutely no carbon whatsoever is released into the environment during the extracting, (re)processing, transporting and safe-storage of all that radioactive material. I mean, imagine the dirty bomb they could create if Al Qaeda got their hands on some coal or oil.
Oh please! Won't somebody think of the environment!