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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.
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
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.
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?
My conversion to Solar, and Wind isn't about Climate Change, it's about Energy Bill, it's due the first of every month.
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