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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?
...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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
But the atmosphere is basically saturated with water, and its greenhouse contribution (something on the order of 20C IIRC) is part of the baseline climate with or without humans. In other words water vapor's contribution to climate change is zero, since the amount hasn't (can't have) risen or decreased meaningfully since the dawn of civilization.
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
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
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.
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
Calling him skeptical is like calling someone who doesn't believe in germs a 'skeptic'.
There is a point where the leave being a skeptic and enter straight up denier.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All we do know for sure is the dominant greenhouse gas on earth is water vapor.
Dihydrogen monoxide strikes again! Is there any problem that we face that cannot be traced back to it? ;-)
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
That range isn't an uncertainty, it's an ambiguity.
Because of overlaps with other contributions, saturation effects at some wavelengths and other non-linearities, the answers to the questions "How much of a greenhouse effect would CO2 provide on its own" and "How much would the greenhouse effect reduce if we removed all CO2" are different. The net forcing is very well characterised, both from known absorption characteristics and spectral measurements - it's the feedbacks to the system which contribute the uncertainty.
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?
"removing a gas essential to all life on earth"
and you title your post "idiocy"
sheesh
1. no-one is planning on removing all CO2, just some of it
2. CO2 can kill you, as well as keep you alive. the same is true for O2, a point made rather wonderfully in a book by RAH that you ought to read called "have space suit, will travel". Concentrations and context matter
The reason the estimate range from 9-32% is that the effect of CO2 varies depending on the level of water vapor in the atmosphere and any particular location. When the air is extremely dry then CO2 may well cause (using your numbers) 32% of the greenhouse effect. The the relative humidity is 100% and clouds come into play then CO2 may only be 9% of the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is the majority of the greenhouse effect but it has no power to drive climate change on its own. Its level in the atmosphere is dependent on temperature and it can never rise above the 100% humidity level.
CO2 in the atmosphere is so well and quickly mixed that there is no danger of depletion zones substantial enough to seriously affect plant life.
There is consistent proof that the rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere are due primarily to human burning of fossil fuels. I'd like to see you try to disprove that.
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...)
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.
You (assuming you are the same AC) said:
I gave you an example of one thing that is consistently provable. Humans emitted about 30 gigatonnes of CO2 in 2010. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increased by about 13 gigatonnes. The isotopic ratio of c12 to c13 in the atmosphere has changed because fossil fuels have a higher c12/c13 ratio. Further evidence that burning fossil fuels is the source of the atmospheric increase.
Another consistently provable thing is that carbon dioxide absorbs radiation in the infrared band. That is easily measured in the laboratory.
I didn't mention any of those other things you talked about but it was amusing to read.
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.
You are making assertions without proof or knowledge. We DO know poison gases can linger in a very large area (square kilometers) hazardous to life.
...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...
no, even in waterless atmosphere CO2's absorption function will vary. the sun's output will vary. it is too complex to model, so thousands of models are made by a process that includes ex post facto "book cooking". It is not science, it is at best the same as stock market modeling.
no, the absorption characteristics constantly are in flux, that's the whole point. the net forcing function is NOT known, we don't know net heat in, we don't know where heat the goes and what amount is stored, we don't know heat amount re-radiated into space at all points on the globe, there is not a network of sensors for that.
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.
I think you are wrong. In a completely dry atmosphere, no water vapor, no clouds and other greenhouse gases and aerosols not varying I think the percentage of the total greenhouse effect from CO2 would be pretty close to constant. The Sun's output varying wouldn't affect the percentage much, just the absolute amount of energy captured by CO2.
Just 13 gigatonnes? So, an increase of less than ~0.5% of total CO2 and ~0.00000025% of total mass of the atmosphere? Is that really enough to change the temperature of something that has a volume of 1.332×10^9 cubic kilometers and a mass of 5.98×10^24 kilograms? Citation needed.
Bow before me, for I am root.
That's 13 gigatonnes per year currently. From the Wikipedia reference on CO2 there is about 3,160 gigatonnes of it in the atmosphere with a concentration of 390 ppmv. That means each 1 ppmv in the atmosphere is about 8.1 gigatonnes of CO2. In 1830 CO2 was about 280 ppmv (and 260-280 ppmv for 10,000 years before that.) Now it is 390 ppmv, an increase of 110 ppmv, nearly all of it from human emissions. That's an increase of 891 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1830, over 80% of it since 1940. Only about 43% of the human emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere, the rest is absorbed by the oceans, plants and some other minor sinks. That means total human emissions of CO2 since 1830 amount to around 2,073 gigatonnes. That's a significant number compared to 3,160 gigatonnes of total atmospheric CO2.
According to the Wikipedia article on greenhouse gases CO2 is 9-26% of the global warming effect (being conservative I'll use 15% as the average). According to the Wikipedia article on the greenhouse effect the current surface temperature average is 14-15C (~58F) but without any greenhouse effect the surface temperature would be -18 or -19 C (~-1F) or around 33C of greenhouse warming. So using the 15% number CO2 in the atmosphere causes around of 5C (11F) of the warming directly but that warming from CO2 also causes elevated water vapor and other feedbacks which cause their own warming (and in some cases cooling). The direct climate sensitivity (temperature increase for a doubling of CO2) is about 1.2C but including feedbacks it's probably around 3C) That means the total warming (direct and indirect) from CO2 in the greenhouse effect is considerably larger than that, probably in the 10-15C range out of a total of about 33C. So if CO2 is responsible for 33--45% of the total greenhouse effect isn't it reasonable to expect a nearly 40% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere would cause a temperature increase?
I know Wikipedia isn't particularly authoritative but their numbers for stuff like this are usually pretty good. Is that citation enough for you?