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Researchers Create Renewable Carbon Dioxide Sponge
First time accepted submitter Babu V Bassa writes "Concerned about adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Consider a roof top coating on your car with this new material. A multinational team of researchers have developed a renewable sponge like material to capture and store gaseous carbon dioxide. The organic material is made up of gamma-cyclodextrin. Conventional metal-organic frameworks, which also are effective at adsorbing carbon dioxide, are usually prepared from materials derived from crude oil and often incorporate toxic heavy metals and are also non-renewable. The research paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society claims that its synthesis is essentially carbon-neutral and have the demonstrated ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere makes them promising materials for carbon fixation."
Wood already works for "carbon fixation" and you can make things with it that people will actually keep. My mother has some "fixated carbon" in the living room over 100 years old. Just grow a tree and make a desk.
A way to fix carbon permanently is to bury it underground in a specially capped storage facility. Just so long as it doesn't decay, and just acts like a rock under the dirt, we're doing good.
I call the above 'burying paper in a landfill'. Al Gore has an old newspaper he keeps on his desk that was perfectly preserved in a landfill.
So we take trees, that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, turn them into paper to sell and finance the operation. Collect the paper and "carbon sequester" it underground in a capped storage facility (landfill). We're saving the planet!
Given the above, the worst thing you can do is recycle paper.
The more recycled, the less new produced.
The less new paper produced, the fewer Douglas Fir trees planted in the managed forests.
The fewer new trees planted, the less CO2 pulled from the atmosphere.
Someone with more environmental awareness please show me where the logic is flawed. I'm unable to find it, and I've looked.
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Sounds good to me. All we have to do is get everyone on the planet to plant several tons of trees every year (30 billion tons CO2 emissions per year / 7 billion people). Should be easy!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It says "Consider a roof top coating on your car with this new material." I don't see why anyone would want that. The coating would saturate with CO2, then it would absorb no more. And it would remain on your car for years, uselessly full. How is this useful? Alternatively, what if it absorbed the carbon, then released it later, so as to be reusable? Why would that be any use as a rooftop coating? The release of the carbon would go back into the atmosphere. The whole idea of a rooftop coating for your car is pointless. Surely the scientists who developed it would not say that. Is this from a marketing person?
Concerned about adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?
No.
Meanwhile the Chinese are building new coal plants, driving more automobiles and generally becoming a western style consumer culture. Any action which might be undertaken by individuals, like this carbon capture sun roof, is meaningless by way of comparison; it's spit in the ocean. I am now more convinced than ever that the target audiences of these products are wealthy European and American liberals who wish to absolve themselves of "green guilt" associated with their high carbon affluent lifestyles through purchases of what amounts to indulgences. I have no problem with this. Let everyone spend their own money as they choose. However, I do have a problem with these same liberals attempt to use the power of the state to force their bullshit green attitudes on the rest of us. The Chinese, Indians and everyone else laughs at how stupid these green Americans are while building more coal plants and driving around in dirty two-stroke diesels. Face it, environmental quality is a luxury good and its becoming a luxury that even wealthier Americans can no longer afford.
Does this have any sort of implications for our current/future space efforts? I guess there might also be some implications for submarines? though I assume most submarines would just surface and pop their top. Then again maybe it would matter for stealth subs or perhaps extreme depth missions? I can't for the life of me find any point for using this in atmospheric conditions, I mean we have trees and plenty of other stuff dealing with carbon dioxide and such.
Better to make the car (or large portions of it) from wood.
Morgan has been using wood frames forever.
http://www.morgan-motor.co.uk/carpages/44/44.html
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its 20 times worse than c02in regards to global warming.
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There's a lot more of it?
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Sometimes, people need to get banged in the head with the obvious.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Nope. My dad had some problem with the speakers on his computer, when I got it fixed the first thing he did was rickroll himself. i lol'd so hard, he didn't get it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And I got a +3 Insightful for it... Go figure.
Make underwear out of these and it will be much more effective.
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I always love how processes that claim to be carbon neutral exclude the largest sources of waste such as reagents and solvents used in processing which are in excess to 1000x the product achieved.
And yes while some of these can be recovered somewhat on an industrial scale their recovery is highly energy intensive process.
Except wood is one of the last materials you'd want to use in a car (well, in many things, but especially a car). It's heavy, weak, and highly susceptible to environmental degradation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
everyone and their dog are all so fixated with carbon dioxide
Oh the pun in killing me!
Come on now... I am an American and can only concentrate on one evil at a time.
Because methane is a pretty reactive molecule. So it reacts spontaneously. In the atmosphere Methane has a half life of about 8 years.
We don't worry much about methane for the same reason we don't worry about H2O. Water vapor causes roughly 60% of all greenhouse effects yet since a water molecule on is in the atmosphere for about 9 days there is not much to worry about.
Co2 has a half life of centuries. So while boiling water on the stove stays in the atmosphere for a few days and cow farts stay in the air for a decade, CO2 stays up there for centuries.
The GP was both unnecessarily rude and wrong, and the parent addressed both issues nicely.
I wasn't aware of any dementia that turned him into a teabagging denier.
I'd be very surprised if most commercial sources of CO2 didn't come from Natural gas combustion rather than acid+carbonate reaction.
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Trees do the job well, and they are extremely useful.
I do not understand why you were rated offtopic - I think you're right on the nose.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The problem is that much of the paper is not produced from plantation wood, but from old growth forests.
After a quick google...
Woodchipping in Australia
Ethical Paper
I do not understand why you were rated offtopic - I think you're right on the nose.
Because we do not have a "-1 I do not agree with you" moderation. I am used to it...
Um, Venus doesn't need any more CO2. The atmosphere there is 96.5% (965,000 ppm) already.
What we're engaged in now, carried to a ridiculous conclusion is "Venus" forming the Earth increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere. There is some speculation but plenty of disagreement that we could release enough CO2 to cause a runaway greenhouse effect as has happened on Venus. That would require burning nearly all of the available carbon sources such as tar sands and oil shale and I don't expect it to happen but it's not totally out of the question.
This material is usefull in a pressure swing adsorber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption) for seperating CO2 from a gas mixture in an economical way. What you do with your pure CO2 afterwards is another matter.
Combine it with a plentiful, but potentially unreliable, source of clean energy (like a desert solar power plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert) you can turn that electricity into methane, and from that into higher hydrocarbons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids) - and voila! .... you could have cars running one gasoline made from carbon fixed from the air using solar power.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
No, not every "too-whatever" weather event is said to be due to climate change. That's just your straw man.
You deniers aren't just "naysayers" - you're a stubborn part of a problem that'll soon be too late to fix. Maybe somebody shrilly equated you to a nazi - who cares? There's shrill nazi-callers in every crowd - especially in your Teabagger crowd.
Humans adapted to Ice Ages during past climate changes. I'd rather plant more trees and stop burning coal. The idea that the climate change will be good for plants when it will extinct a large percentage of species, possibly including ours, probably including your family, and destroy our civilization, is an aggressively stupid idea.
You're a fallacious denier. Shut up already. It's bad enough we have to save you and your descendants from your stupidity without listening to you cry all the time about how the mean hippie called you a nazi.
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Every carbon capture technology has one slight problem: The amount of energy required to release the CO2 thereby recycling the capture material. Yeah ... "very simply" given infinite energy.
TFA says nothing about how much energy is required to "recover it at a later date" but we are assured it is "simple". Nor does the scientific journal article's abstract state the energy requirement. It, too, is stupid.
Seastead this.
Can someone please explain why everyone and their dog are all so fixated with carbon dioxide when methane is an order of magnitude worse as a greenhouse gas?
While each molecule of methane causes much more warming than CO2, there has been much, much more CO2 released during the industrial revolution, so the warming component of CO2 gas is still larger (60% according to here, which is also a source for the other Methane facts I say here) than the component from CH4. Also, the increase in methane levels mainly comes from the increased scale of our agriculture as our population grows, and most of that comes from our cattle farming. Large developing countries like India and China have already begun industrializing in a way which rapidly raises their CO2 levels on par with the West, however they are showing little indication of adopting the Western diet anywhere near the level that would cause their CH4 production to match that of the US, so it looks like in the near future the CO2 production will outpace methane production by an even greater extent.
Additionally, methane is a useful fuel source, that means that there is an economic incentive to capture it, so that is the sort of thing the private market will take care of by itself as the techniques arise to do so, and this has already begun to happen. New landfills have systems to capture the produced methane, and there are even people experimenting with ways to capture cow farts. There is no money in sequestering carbon in a free economy, and as long as the global and societal costs of burning carbon are not transferred to the market as a financial cost then those methods of energy production will remain cheaper than cleaner methods for the foreseeable future, meaning that that is where our political (to apply those costs) and technological (to lower the costs of the alternatives) efforts need to go.
Lastly and most importantly Methane only persists in the atmosphere for around a dozen years, while CO2 remains for centuries. That means that we canafford to hold off on addressing methane while we work on CO2, since all of the CO2 we produce will stay in the atmosphere basically indefinitely, unless we recapture it at enormous expense, we need to get a grip on it as soon as possible. Once CO2 has started down the road towards sustainability we can address Methane (if it still needs to be addressed), then watch the environment scrub that out naturally within a generation.
Forget scrubbing CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere for a moment and consider a smaller-scale application: life-support systems for underwater colonies, underground colonies, and space ships/stations/colonies.
From what I've heard, scrubbing CO2 from the enclosed atmosphere is one of the more difficult challenges of designing such systems for long-term human habitation. It sounds like this material could be very useful for building such CO2 scrubbing systems cheaply and simply.
A simple design would be to have 2 chambers full of this stuff, one of which is connected to the internal atmosphere while the other is connected to the external atmosphere/vacuum (which is assumed to have low concentrations of CO2). When the inward-facing chamber is full, they swap and the now outward-facing chamber can dissipate the collected CO2 outside. Rinse and repeat. Of course, this would eventually lead to a lack of O2 (and C) unless there was some nearby source that could be exploited.
Another use would be reducing CO2 variation by having a large reservoir of the stuff in the enclosed environment. If CO2 levels were getting too high, the material would absorb some of it (at least up to the point it became saturated with CO2) and if the CO2 levels were getting too low, the material would release some of the CO2 stored in it (at least until it ran out of CO2). Though this wouldn't be sustainable by itself, it would prevent CO2 spikes in small environments. For instance, if a separate CO2 recycling system could handle the 24 hour CO2 output of a human crew but couldn't handle the peak demand during the middle of the day, then this would allow that system to be used without needing to scale it up to handle the peak demand (which would save on both energy and production costs).