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."

Comments

Like corn cobs?

[F34nor]

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 already have a CO2 storage device

[bhodikhan]

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.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[itsdapead]

I use another CO2 storage technology in my house already. It's called WOOD.

Hopefully sourced from any trees which were cut down to make space for your house...?

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.

Sadly, though, it looks like the idea of biofuels is going to get discredited by the lamebrained alcohol-from-corn debacle.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[Firethorn]

There's no reason we couldn't have transportation systems that run off local ocean driven power generation for all our costal cities

Quite a few reasons actually, for one tidal power generation systems haven't been perfected yet.

and make local personal transportation free of charge and free of pollution.

Free of pollution? Maybe so, but certainly NOT free of charge - you'd end up paying for it somehow, whether it's a per ride charge or a subscription service or out of your taxes depends, but just like 'free' healthcare in nations with nationalized healthcare services, you still end up paying for it.

Resources have pretty much always been in 'short supply', it's just that as we gain methods to extract more resources, so doesn't our desires to do stuff to exploit them.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[abigor]

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! Yeah, good point actually. People are really focused on the greenhouse gas thing and ignore the effects of particulates. If you've ever been to a place that has a lot of wood stoves and not much wind, then you'll know all about bad air quality thanks to wood burning.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[dubl-u]

But then we wouldn't need this fascist control, where companies and governments are in bed together keeping the power strucuture alive and the resources always in short supply.

Totally. Why, I hear that those bastards have suppressed some sort of globe-spanning communication network that would have allowed the populace access to vast amounts of information about every subject under the sun. Billions of pages, all at your fingertips, from a simple device in your home. Obviously, it would have made it much harder for them to control us. So those fascist parasites killed it.

Oh, wait. No, actually, the government funded the initial development of the Internet, and corporations funded a lot of the subsequent development and most of the rollout. Hmmm. I wonder if your world-view could do with a little expansion.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[MightyYar]

I once worked at a materials lab that studied how things hold up in a marine environment, and I grew up on the ocean. Nothing lasts very long. Not stainless steel, not titanium, and certainly not any kind of mechanism. Constant maintenance and replacement is required in a marine environment, and this is one of the reasons that tidal power has been so slow in coming.

And this is without getting into big storms, which can wipe out a whole island - let alone some man-made fixture.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[wumingzi]

Dude, you really need to cut back on the hydro, in more ways than one.

A pyramid is a static structure. All it has to do is sit year after year.

A power-generating station is full of moving parts. Things with moving parts break down over time. You may want to look at this handy informational link which shows maintenance over time on our local power plant. (since it's run by falling water, it provides some of the world's cheapest power, regardless)

When you start talking about tidal power, you are talking about putting devices which sit in salt water day after day. Go find someone who owns a boat. ANY boat, large, small, freighter or dinghy and talk about this idea of "set it and forget it". Watch as peals of laughter come rolling from their mouth. Boat owners in this part of the world (US Pacific Northwest) will pay a substantial rental premium to moor their boats in fresh water because it saves so much money on maintenance.

Finally, remember that electricity is like no other commodity on earth. You can not store it for a rainy day. You use it when it's generated, or not at all. Even fish (our other highly perishable commodity) can be canned or packed in salt. Good luck doing that with electricity.

Yes, oil gets some subsidies. Yes, euphemistically named "energy companies" almost certainly throw their weight around to discourage development of alternative energy sources. These are fairly small market-distorting effects which reinforce (but do not change) an underlying fact: historically, petroleum has been the cheapest and most flexible means of generating energy. While we get spoiled in this part of the world by abundant hydropower, there are some fairly serious environmental consequences (check out our vanishing salmon runs!) and hydro is a one-off. Once you've dammed the river, you're done. You can't scale this solution forever.

While more needs to be done with alternative energy sources, there seems to be this meme running around that there is cheap power floating around which is being withheld from the people by "The Man". Standing in the way of that cheap power in reality is not some gigantic conspiracy, but some really tough unsolved engineering problems (i.e. how do you store enough energy to power a city for when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow? A big pile of batteries doesn't really work).

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[itsdapead]

Uhmmm, *producing* and *transporting* biofuel emits CO2, so it's not really viable as a non-CO2 emitting technology.

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.

Powerplant Modernization

[esconsult1]

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.

Gasp!

[NetNinja]

Another use for dilithium crystals!

Great Scott!

And how does it affect the environment?

[bigattichouse]

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.

how much ENERGY does it take to make a crystal?

[victorvodka]

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.

Re:Solution without a Problem

[Waffle Iron]

CO2 is a lagging indicator of global warming, not a catalyst for it.

* [Citation Needed]

Re:Solution without a Problem

[ductonius]

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.

They would fill one room of your house every year

[giafly]

• 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.

Re:full?

[Tranzistors]

...thus solving the problem once and for all.

Re:Solution without a Problem

[Waffle Iron]

Well, the first article is actually a myth busting entry debunking the theory that the lag associated with the past couple of ice ages somehow proves that CO2 does not cause warming.

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.

More detailed link Re: . affect ... environment?

[Precipitous]

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:

Currently, the process of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants involves the use of toxic materials and requires 20 to 30 percent of the plant's energy output, Yaghi said. By contrast, ZIFs can pluck carbon dioxide from other gases that are emitted and can store five times more carbon dioxide than the porous carbon materials that represent the current state-of-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).

Re:Very Good...

[dubl-u]

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.

good old brute force science

[Gearoid_Murphy]

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.