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Carbon Dioxide From the Air Converted Into Methanol (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: The danger posed by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide has seen many schemes proposed to remove a proportion it from the air. Rather than simply capture this greenhouse gas and bury it in the ground, though, many experiments have managed to transform CO2 into useful things like carbon nanofibers or even fuels, such as diesel. Unfortunately, the over-arching problem with many of these conversions is the particularly high operating temperatures that require counterproductive amounts of energy to produce relatively low yields of fuel. Now researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) claim to have devised a way to take CO2 directly from the air and convert it into methanol using much lower temperatures and in a correspondingly simpler way.
how about growing and developing trees & plants that capture co2 more efficiently and can grow in places where there weren't any? why is there not much attention to this method? too easy? less news worthy? less grants?
Trust me, it makes no sense... I can guarantee you that it takes a lot more energy input than you can get out of the methanol.
Every energy storage process takes more energy to store it than you get back out. I don't think getting energy back out of the methanol is the goal. Using it for other industrial processes that require methanol would be more useful.
but if you wan to produce methanol, just produce it the normal ways.
This method can be used on the output of current industrial processes that produce carbon dioxide and prevent it from being released in the first place. It's less efficient to loose the dragon and then hope a tree eats him than to just keep the dragon in the dungeon to start with.
Actually, it sounds like a perfect process for clean coal or other already existing energy production. The cooling towers alread carry enough heat to raise the temperature. As for pumping, well the generating already runs a bit under capacity so turning it up a little more shouldn't be too costly.
With a little tweaking, it could relatively easily reduce the carbon footprint of existing power plants.