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Removing CO2 From the Air Efficiently
Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes CO2 from the atmosphere. "The proposed air capture system differs from existing carbon capture and storage technology ... while CCS involves installing equipment at, say, a coal-fired power plant to capture CO2 produced during the coal-burning process, ... air capture machines will be able to literally remove the CO2 present in ambient air everywhere. [The team used] ... a custom-built tower to capture CO2 directly from the air while requiring less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide."
Don't we have a device that removes CO2 from the air? I thought they were called "trees."
I almost forgot, these machines and the clean energy they need could be paid for using carbon credits. Nuclear energy in Northern Illinois (where I live) can be had for about a penny per kWh between midnight and 4 am (when base load is extremely low). So, if they can pull out a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere for 100 kwH of energy, you're looking at between $1-$2/ton in energy costs (capital costs for the equipment needs to be considered, as well as people to maintain everything).
G-God? Is that you?
> Canadian scientists have created a device that efficiently removes CO2 from the atmosphere.
As a Canadian, I have to say I'm disappointed in my fellow countrymen. Just when you thought global warming would make our climate mildly tolerable, they go and mess it all up.
Thanks, guys. I'm sure you'll regret this in a few months. No, I will not shovel your driveway.
Assuming that 1 tonne = 1000kg, this machine requires approximately 1 kilowatt hour of electricity to remove 10kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. How efficient is this?
From http://www.glumac.com/section.asp?catid=140&subid=152&pageid=564
"For home energy use, carbon dioxide emissions vary widely from state-to-state and from day-to-day. The national average is about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used in your home."
Not bad. If it really works, you can redirect 10 to 15% of your electricity to achieve Carbon neutrality.
Goto where the farmers are burning down the rain forests, teach/give/train them how to plant high yield crops and stop them from clear cutting/burning them down. And shock...you'll get somewhere.
Sometimes the most obvious solutions are sitting in front of their faces.
Om, nomnomnom...
Only a lot more efficient. An average tree will use roughly 22kg of CO2 per year. These things are estimated to remove 20 tonnes per year per square metre, so it's in excess of 1000 times more effective. Even after you factor in the CO2 produced to provide the power needed for these things, you're still likely coming out way ahead.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
expedient and efficient removal of CO2 at atmospheric concentrations could have profound implications in space.
Currently, CO2 is scrubbed using lithium salts, which are not only heavy, but also caustic, and have a limited service life before requiring replacement.
A purely electric, and solid state device capable of continuous operation would allow for superior space vehicle designs which could theoretically operate much longer than currently available ones.
If they discover a way to electronically reduce the carbon dioxide into elemental carbon, things will be even more interesting.
But the big question is where is all this CO2 going to go. We have the ability to store CO2, but eventually we are going to run out of room to store it all, and even worse, if it leaks you've screwed over the area around the storage. I can't imagine that storage containers would last forever too, eventually, we would have to do something with it all.
This extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere is all well and good, but are there any reliable and cost-effective ways to store it or dispose of it?
Probably because that gas was coming out anyway, as the wells are tapped for the oil in them. The only thing the natural gas plants do is reduce the overall need for the oil (by taking up some of the load) and convert greenhouse gases into weaker greenhouse gases.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
First of all don't diss the benefits of pushing problems off to the future.
I mean the only real problem of CO2 is the cost of energy. We want energy and produce CO2 by running an energy positive chemical reaction (burning). If energy were sufficiently cheap we could simply take the CO2 and transform it into some non-greenhouse form of carbon.
Energy gets cheaper over time, the same amount of CO2 will be less of a problem for future generations with their superior technology and better infrastructure. Besides, it was underground to start with so long as it doesn't leak that seems like a fine place to leave it.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
They won't be making a pile of cash out of trees.
Can't resist:
1) Identify a possible source of trouble 2) Invent a fix, no matter how convoluted it is 3) Patent it and market it 4) Profit
Just wonder how much do we have to wait for a fart capture device (cow farts are actually a major source of trouble)
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
A warmer planet is good.
Good for who? Norway? Or West Africa?
A warmer climate leads to more arable land and longer growing seasons.
Depends on where you are. If your plants are temperature limited in a temperate climate, maybe. If they're already in a warm climate, maybe not. And don't forget precipitation. When rain belts get shifted around, a lot of people end up unhappy.
CO2 is good - it is the world's best fertilizer.
This has got to be the most oversold benefit of CO2. CO2 fertilization helps, up to a point, if you have C3 photosynthesizers; C4 plants don't benefit. But direct manipulation FACE experiments show that this effect quickly saturates, and CO2 is often not the rate-limiting nutrient in photosynthesis; often it's water or nitrogen availability. The initial promise of CO2 fertilization hasn't really panned out; see here. It does help, but it doesn't quite help as much as one thinks, and it is often more than offset by negative climate changes.
Of course, all recent evidence points to warming having ended,
I hate to break it to you, but 10 years of below-average warming in a highly noisy system doesn't exactly overturn anthropogenic global warming.
and having been due to natural climate variability and/or solar cycles.
Natural climate variability counts against your claim, not for it. See the above: natural climate variability is quite large on short time scales, which makes short-term trends very unreliable evidence of anything. Over the long term, "natural climate variability" utterly fails to account for temperature trends over the 20th century; the only really long term cycles within the climate system itself are oceans, and the space/time pattern of ocean warming indicates the atmosphere is warming the ocean, not the other way around. Turning to external influences, there are solar cycles. Solar trends have been pretty much flat since the 1950s, and completely disagree with the warming experienced since then. They can account for some of the warming in the early 20th century, but very little of it since then.
Let's stop cutting down the Amazon already, shall we?
you had me at #!
According to David MacKay:
In other words: It'll be at least 200kW per tonne, unless they think the CO2 will somehow magically compress itself to be stored, which is not going to happen. That, or they just invented a perpetuum mobile.