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New CO2 Harvester Could Help Scrub the Air
sciencehabit sends this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of 'artificial trees' that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change."
From TFA:
The polymer could be useful for building massive farms of artificial trees that would aim to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But that's only if countries around the globe are willing to spend untold billions of dollars to rein in atmospheric CO2.
It also says:
So you have to expend a fairly large amount of energy heating the media to 85C/185F to get it to give up the CO2, (then more energy to store the CO2).
How long it takes to saturate the polymer is not mentioned, but unless its months between regeneration, the CO2 generated while collecting the polymer media, transporting it to a facility, HEATING it, capturing the recovered CO2, could exceed the amount it could capture. And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?
So the original purpose of this polymer, to keep C02 out of batteries seems to be a far better use for the polymer than environmental CO2 sequestration.
While far from perfect, farming real trees seems a less energy intensive method especially when treated as a crop, harvested at the optimal time, with the wood used for long duration storage.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But Global Warming was going to prevent the impending ice age!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
How about we bury it at Yucca Mountain? Dissolve it in seawater?
I HAVE IT! We separate the carbon and the oxygen, release the O2 into the atmosphere, and bury the carbon in abandoned coal mines!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Sorry, but that idea only flies on Fox News. Actually, human activities cause 135 times as much CO2 emissions as volcanoes do.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Extracting the carbon out of CO2 is going to require more energy than you'll ever be able to get from burning the products. You don't want to use fossil fuels to power that or else you're going to end up with a net increase in CO2 emissions.
And we're going to catch a significant fraction of it in plastic that we have to manufacture? Seriously?
How about we use something self-replicating instead, which does the same thing and produces useful by-products, like, say, trees?
--PM
I don't think of myself as an environmentalist or anything like that. I'm all for better energy efficiency and cleaner forms of energy, but something like this strikes me as rather dumb. You have to spend energy making these things, and then energy running them, not to mention time and money all to remove a bit of CO2 out of the air. Wouldn't it make more sense to plant more trees instead, and spend the rest of your time and money on cleaner and more efficient methods of powering well everything?
I don't deny that climate change is happening, it's always been happening and I believe that we have some impact on the way it changes, so being as responsible as we can with what we do with 'waste' like CO2 or other byproducts is always important, but things like this in the modern "green" movement just make me shake my head in disbelief.
Great, now once we remove all of the CO2 out of the air, what will the plants breath?
What is catastrophic climate change? Have we identified anything that will be catastrophic or an inconvenience? Or have we forgot to be adaptable?
removing a gas essential to all life on earth is quite foolish, when in fact we don't even know what percentage of the greenhouse effect is due to CO2. The best scientific estimates range from 9 to 32 percent. All we do know for sure is the dominant greenhouse gas on earth is water vapor.
...could we just plant regular ones? If even that is too much of a problem for most countries, we should maybe forget about expensive artificial stuff. Yes, expensive, regardless of what TFA says, because there's nothing cheaper than a real tree.
Wonderful. The researchers developed a plastic to capture CO2. I dunno, kind of sounds like this isn't green at all. Develop tons of plastic... to fix a problem, nope.
I welcome this kind of innovations very much.
But to be honest I think at the moment our biggest problem is our global energy consumption.
I can do without my computer for a week if we're low on fuel, but food...
Privacy is terrorism.
Might this instead just produce CO2 depletion zones, dangerous to plant life (and all that depends on plant life)? In any case, I would not trust any agenda-funded model of the "climatologists", the generate thousands of models and then cherry pick certain ones to fit what the weather is doing (not science, they are book cookers).
I was going to just plant some trees, but covering my property in plastic seems like a much better idea!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
it's very expensive! http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carbon-air-120911.html
Maybe some aliens will come by and trade us some magic beans that grow an orbital beanstalk.
Win-win all around.
Unless giants are real, too.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But think of the trees. How many trees will be starved to death over this!
Now we'll need to run our SUV's to produce more CO2 to satisfy the need for the raw materials...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/ja0771639
Obviously the marketing is enviroloonie and useless from an engineering perspective, because to store say, a barrel of crude oil worth of carbon, you need to use more than a barrel worth of crude as a raw material, refine the heck out of it using oil, burn refined diesel oil to ship it around, burn lots of refined gasoline for the factory workers to get to work to make the stuff, blah blah blah. The military analogy of this environmental plan would be the classic Vietnam era "we had to destroy the village to save the village".
Aside from that lunacy, I wonder what non-energy purposes this could be applied to. Could I make a scuba rebreather out of this stuff inside a stainless steel canister that can be reused by boiling it in water for 10 minutes or whatever? That is cool, and convenient.
I wonder if it is stable / biocompatible enough to be used in some kind of weird self carbonating drink, like instant carbonated hot coffee or something? Maybe using two cans, one boiling, and one in ice, I could carbonate drinks while camping or something weird like that.
Also if it outputs CO2 when really hot, could I make, say, childrens bedclothes out of it? In the olden days it was cool to invent kids clothes that would self extinguish when removed from a flame (you know, like the house is burning down?) but kids clothes made out of this would actually act to extinguish the fire... interesting. Obviously you don't want to output enough CO2 to suffocate the kid, but enough to put out a smouldering ember would be convenient. Or make mattresses out of this plastic for those stinky smokers who get drunk, smoke in bed, and incinerate themselves, well if the mattress gave off just enough CO2 as it burned to put the cigarette out... Now its humane and decent to save kids from fire but in sharp contrast saving adults from smoking in bed fires so they can die of lung cancer is probably immoral acting against Darwin and all that. Maybe just making chemistry lab fire blankets out of this CO2 emitting plastic would be a good idea?
Does it output enough CO2 so that lit on fire it could inflate a life jacket instead of traditional pressurized cylinders? Or does it spew out enough CO2 to make a "fire extinguisher grenade"? Could I mandate lithium battery powered laptops/phones be made of this plastic so when they explode into fire, once the lithium fire goes out, the CO2 prevented the surroundings from catching fire?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We are past the tipping point. Forward thinkers need to begin focusing on survival and recovery from catastrophe, not avoidance.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And hopefully the billions of tons of plastic waste that we're all going to generate when 3D printers hit the consumer market will go toward reducing greenhouse gasses.
Using a petroleum-based product to clean the air that petroleum-based products have polluted. Excellent!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Everyone has this idea that the "obvious" solution to our carbon/energy/global warming problems is to reduce consumption. I'm especially amused by authors who try to "guilt" the US into reducing consumption in order to let other cultures have a "fair share" at dwindling resources.
This is poppycock, and it's the wrong solution.
The reason the US has such a high consumption is that people *like* this level of consumption and there should be nothing wrong with that.
The solution is not for us to go back to the stone age, but to arrange things so that everyone can have this level of consumption and not have to worry about it.
What will this entail? Some way to continually produce fossil fuels sufficient for our transportation needs, some way to produce electricity for our home needs, some way to produce food for our nutrition needs, and some way to produce biochemical resources sufficient for our manufacturing needs.
This is, of course, unsustainable without recycling, but we also have to include gas (as in atmospheric gas) recycling as well as solid recycling. That probably means harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere and using it as a resource along with recycled waste from physical items.
This discovery could be one step towards that solution. Imaging a solar reflector dish with a core of CO2 capturing material. In a sunny environment (Arizona, Utah, Nevada) this system could capture CO2 at night (low temperatures) and release it during the day when the temperature rises. Other than moving the gases this would be largely automated and require no moving parts.
What to do with the CO2: How about using it to flood a greenhouse to promote plant growth?
I'm not saying that there's a simple and easy solution which fixes all our problems, but it's obvious what the fix should look like, and this discovery is just one more baby-step towards that goal.
Even if we have no present use for the captured CO2, it's an exciting development that puts us directly closer to solving our most pressing issues.
Now we just need to make a billion CO2 scrubbing fake trees.
I8-D
The thought of giant CO2 scrubbing plastic trees seems like hyperbole to me. Seems we could plant real trees that work about as well for that. But an obvious application jumped out at me. Undersea vehicles, labs, manned spacecraft, and any other artificially maintained environment that humans have to work in need to remove CO2 because it can be poisonous in sufficiently high concentrations even if there is enough to breathe.
So would this material make good scrubbers for sealed environments people have to work in? If there is a way to vent the waste gases, being able to drive the CO2 off with a bit of heat and using again seems a great feature too.
This is ridiculous, why try to beat nature? It has billions of years of experience, just plant trees.
I always throw a bucket of sleeping children on my kitchen fires.
Unless this "CO2 Harvester" answers to "Audrey II" I fail to see how it could remove more carbon then just planting a tree.
Currently, we're extremely efficient at cranking gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. Assuming for a moment that fake tree manufacturing was extremely energy efficient and carbon neutral, that's a lot of work just to keep up with conveyor-belting coal into power plants and pouring fuel into our vehicles.
However, tree manufacture won't be all that efficient, meaning we'd need several times more fake trees to compensate. Nice out-of-the-box try there, boys, but this dog won't hunt.
Once again, the actual solutions to so much as reduce the rate of gain in atmospheric carbon loading revolves around 1) reduce the consumption of carbon-based fuels, and 2) (unless we're all going back to organic gardening) energy source substitution. Geoengineering is an expensive diversion from reality.
Luke, help me take this mask off
More dicking around with the atmosphere. All for a myth of catastrophic climate change. Maybe the enviro-wacko religious nuts can pray at their plastic trees.
Evidently the permafrost is letting off tons of methane now that they're thawing, warming oceans letting methane clathrate melt and releasing even more; which is way worse than CO2 for global warming... what for that? We're past the tipping point on global warming and we've set off a slow to start chain-reaction, we need to stop trying to figure out how to prevent and deal with what we've done.
Given that the entire case for Co2 being evil is based on a lie, what's the problem?
Does this CO2 scrubber run off of energy that was produced in a CO2-producing generation process?
Then bury the charcoal in fields, improving soil fertility.
TADAAaaaa!
CO2 captured!
Energy produced!
Soil degradation reversed!
World saved!
Damn, I'm good. I am available on consultancy at ridiculously high rates.
Deleted
well. whoop-de-do. Courtesy of frink:
1.72 nanomoles * (carbon + oxygen * 2) / gram == 7.56 x 10^11 grams CO2 / gram
So 1 billion tons of this substance can absorb:
1 billion tons of substance * (7.56 x 10^11 grams CO2 / gram of substance == 68671 kg.
This is:
(68671 kg) / (32 billion tons ) -> .000000236%
of our carbon emissions. Not even resistant to heat, so useless for industrial processes. Unless a billion tons of this stuff can be produced, and this can be absorbed to saturation and released every .07 seconds, there is no way in hell this is going to make a minor dent in our emissions.
This just goes to show exactly how out of touch with larger reality a large portion of the alternative energy crowd is. They are so desperate for their solutions to work they come up with useless stuff like this and tout it for funding.
Nuclear power, all the way.
Let's make all water and soda bottles out of it and require littering.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I've been racking my brains to try to remember the name -- there's a "Law" used in the chemical industry which estimates the price required to concentrate a substance. It's not so much a physical law as an observation (much like Moore's Law). But like Moore's law, it gives some pretty good ballpark estimates.
If anyone here remembers the name let me know -- it's driving me nuts. I remember an article in either Science or Nature recently mentioned it.
We already have a great, natural, cheap (free, even!), way to sequester carbon. It's called a tree. Plant more trees, plant them everywhere. Unfortunately much of the work will need to be done in South America where their governments are even less inclined to listen to environmental arguments than the government here, but the process of natural reforestation in the rain forests is even faster than it is in the US and would happen in just 1-2 decades once human influence is removed from an area.
Finding a new livelihood for those people displaced from their slash and burn plantations and cattle ranches is the biggest problem. Although much of that activity is fueled by American over-demand for beef which is a problem we can solve with policy here at home.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Fake Plastic Trees
I am officially gone from
It sounds to me like the research is really carried out for the purposes of producing better batteries, and the application of "capturing CO2 to stave off climate change" was tagged on as an attention-grabber, either by the researcher or (more likely) the journalist.
When it comes to capturing CO2 from the air to reduce the impact on climate, I think most people aren't aware of the sheer scale of the amount of gas that needs to be captured to have any significant effect. If you burn a ton of coal, oil or your favorite fossil fuel, practically all the carbon is released as CO2. In the fuel, the carbon atoms are bound to each other and to hydrogen, whereas when released, they are bound to oxygen atoms, which are much heavier than hydrogen. Without actually doing a numerical estimate (which shouldn't be that hard, btw), it is fairly clear that the weight of the released CO2 would be in the same order of magnitude (and likely exceed) the weight of the fossil fuel burned. That is, to counterbalance the effect of burning a ton of oil, you would have to capture something similar to a ton of CO2. The volume of CO2 when compressed to a liquid would also be comparable to the volume of the oil burned.
In other words, in order to counterbalance the consumption of the oil carried by a single supertanker, you basically need another supertanker to carry away and sequestrate the corresponding amount of captured CO2 (assuming we have established a workable sink for sequestrating the CO2, which is a huge assumption in itself). For a society to base itself on carbon capture to counterbalance its burning of fossil fuel, it would need a whole parallel infrastructure of CO2 transport that would rival the infrastructure already in place for distributing the fuels in the first place.
So the logistics challenge of carbon capture in itself is enormous. Add to this the engineering challenge of actually capturing vast amounts of CO2, the challenge of finding proper sinks that are both large enough and long-term enough, and the huge amount of energy that would have to be consumed just to run the whole capture-transport-sequestration process, and the scale of the problem becomes apparent.
Stories such as these are in my eyes detrimental to agreeing on realistic solutions to the problems raised by climate change, as they generate some sense among the public that given enough time and money engineers will eventually come up with some technical device to "fix the problem" (if you even acknowledge it) .
In the end, the best we can do is probably the boring old solutions of restricting fossil fuel consumption (through regulation or taxation), reforestation, saving energy wherever possible and gradually moving towards a primary energy mix consisting of renewable and nuclear energy sources. Of course, we are always allowed to keep our fingers crossed that there will be a major technical breakthrough that will render energy and climate problems obsolete, but we shouldn't bet on it.
I wonder if I can get a patent for the traditional method for planting trees... just sayin' it could happen.
Wait ... what? Now we want more plastic? The fake environmentalists have jumped the shark for sure.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
LOL -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2613584&cid=38653296
They'll live in heaven with Jesus ... and Satan ... or Santa .. or virgins or the something.
Still what hasn't been accounted for is the amount of energy required to produce the polymer.
Good question. I was wondering something along the same line, mainly: Where does all this green energy come from? Because, unless you are very careful in how you generate this energy, won't you end up pumping more CO2 into the air to scrub that same CO2 out of the air? Thermodynamics might have things to say about how effective this strategy is.
Even 'green' technology has hidden costs that will probably release CO2. Suppose I go out in the middle of a really hot desert with a bucket of water, and a magnifying glass and generate electricity by using generating steam. The manufacture of the infrastructure elements will probably generate CO2.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
... from wetter places on the planet.
H2O has a half-life of about three weeks in the atmosphere. Let me know when you can change that in a way that establishes a new equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere. The climatologists are very interested in modeling the effects of changes in gas concentrations on the climate.
Otherwise, the only way I can think of to affect that equilibrium is to change the temperature of the atmosphere or oceans.
Wonder if anyone's working on a way to do that?...
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Hemp is the perfect plant for the job.
Thanks for the segue.
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good... Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
This is an insanely great idea. Of course, your burps would have to be done in a plastic bag so the CO2 doesn't escape.
The "magic beans" are automated carbon fiber factories. One starts at ground level making struts, from which you build an absurdly tall tower. The other starts from orbit, and makes carbon fiber cables, from which you build down. With current carbon fiber materials that does not quite let you do a full beanstalk, but you can use a rocket from the top of the tower to reach the bottom of the orbital cable, and still save vs using a rocket for the whole trip.
So you're saying that biodiesel from advanced algae farming cannot supply the country's needs? What's your evidence?
I once calculated that the area needed to supply the entire US supply of gasoline per year to be a square 20 miles on a side.
This was a back-of-the-envelope calculation and was just to get a ballpark estimate. It didn't take into consideration access roads between the systems, for instance and transportation costs.
There are plenty of areas in the US which get a lot of sunlight and are otherwise unused - the Great Basin area of Nevada comes to mind. Much more than the 20x20 mile square is available.
You said "I hate to break it to you"... what unknown secret are you referring to? The fact that we're running out of oil? That bit was patently obvious.
It's not a show-stopper, just another problem that needs to be solved.
Your objection would be a valid one... if growing trees removed CO2 at the same rate as this method.
If these systems can remove 1000x the CO2 in a year than trees, then it may be more effective to use these systems.
If these systems can be automated and largely left unattended, then it may be more effective to use these systems.
If these systems can remove CO2 in areas which are *not* conducive to growing trees (much of the Australian outback, much of the southwest US, the various deserts of the world), then it may be more effective to use these systems.
It's called "plastic grocery bags". Nearly indestructible, break down extremely slowly in landfills, and can be manufactured cheaply. Just make them, use them, and bury them. In a few millennia you'll have your oil back.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Any of the carbon sequestration schemes talked about in the last few years would be fine, but who is going to pay for it? You put air in, you get air out. How do you get people to spend money (tax or private funds) for something they can't see, touch, taste, or smell and might have a payoff in terms of things staying just the way they are for another 100 years? (yeah, OK, they suckered us into paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so maybe it isn't so difficult...)
Take a look at the comprehensive PDF report compiled by none other than Burt Rutan (ya know - the guy who designed SpaceShipOne?). The science is certainly there - and it says that we are just fine. In fact, more CO2 in the atmosphere would actually SAVE LIVES by providing more food production.
http://rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm
Anyone still drinking the "Climate Change" kool-aid needs to actually look at the DATA.
There is consensus - most real scientists agree that Climate Change is happening, and that it is a natural, and that it is not dangerous, and it has happened before (many times), and the "data" used by the IPCC to extrapolate is too minuscule to be meaningful, and that the 90% of the "data" collection stations do not meet site quality standards...., and...., and.... and...
Even if we stopped burning coal and gasoline, we are still going to need hydrocarbons for all sorts of things like pharmaceuticals and jet fuel and plastics. Processes like these show how we can get those hydrocarbons in a carbon neutral/ carbon negative way. Additionally this is a potentially a critical back-up technology to have developed as oil reserves are inevitably depleted. This particular process is neat, but the Green Freedom initiative at Los Alamos National Laboratory is even better because it can produce almost any form of hydrocarbon, not just methanol.
And, yes, if you burned coal as a power source for a synthetic fuel concept, you would be wasting energy and adding more CO2 to the air. Nobody is proposing doing that so that point is not relevant.
I guess they forgot about trees.
..... a rain forest and some of those other forests to do this?
Owh wait....... we cut those down for chairs and matches!
Never mind!
1.7 nanomoles of CO2 per gram of plastic. It's a long time since school, but isn't 1.7nm about 75 micrograms? Or 0.0075%?
Why not just plant trees?
They clean out CO2 too, plus do many, MANY other "byproducts":
- food
- wood/building materials
- habitats for animals
- foundations for tree houses
- seasonal shade for homes = energy savings
etc. etc.
...they want their MCM-41-PEI back. Same substance (pei polymer on a zeolite matrix), same properties (CO2 capacity, temperatures/partial pressures,...). Discovered more than 10 years ago and currently in use on the ISS as a CO2 scrubber. Some people really have no shame.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=MCM-41-PEI&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
Environmentalists have it all wrong. They want to save the planet - turn it back into the lush, green place it once was. This is simply letting the plants win. Think about it. Long ago the world was without life. It was hot, barren, and CO2 was plentiful in the atmosphere. Then life took hold. Plants started sucking up CO2 and storing it. Those plants then colonized the world; continuing to suck up and store CO2. They destroyed the Earth that was. They covered it from pole to pole, taking hold in every nook and cranny. They built large carbon stockpiles (oil, coal, etc.) and helped to reduce the temperature of the planet.
Then Earth's saviors came - humans. They saw what the plants had been doing. They quickly set to work eliminating the plants and reducing their carbon stockpiles - reintroducing CO2 to the atmosphere where it belongs. They will continue to do this until the Earth becomes the uninhabitable barren planet it was meant to be. Quite honestly, humanity is really a messiah figure for this planet. Earth First has it completely backward.
Of course, then the process will probably begin again...
I don't favor the idea of permanently sequestering CO2. With normal biological processes sooner or later the O2 is recycled.
Seems to me they need to come up with with something natural that produces long chains of pure carbon.