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XPRIZE Projects Aim To Convert CO2 Emissions, But Skepticism Remains (scientificamerican.com)
The XPRIZE foundation exists to encourage particular innovations that might be useful but from which conventional financial backers are likely to shy away. Previous X Prizes have been awarded for feats such as flying a reusable spacecraft to the edge of space, and designing cheap sensors to measure oceanic acidity. This week, the foundation announced a new prize. From a report: One pioneering team hopes to use carbon dioxide to make a stronger form of cement. Another wants to use carbon to make bioplastic. Still another is planning to transform CO2 into solid carbonates that can be used as building materials. The XPRIZE Foundation unveiled 10 teams yesterday as finalists in its $20 million contest to find a solution to carbon emissions.
Its carbon competition is meant to find an economic use for planet-warming emissions. The basic idea: If emissions can be turned into a product, power companies will have an incentive to capture and sell carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. A group of 47 teams from across the world initially submitted proposals. The remaining 10 teams will compete in two groups. One will test their technologies at a coal-fired power plant in Gillette, Wyo. The other will compete at a natural gas plant in Calgary, Alberta. Winners will be announced in 2020. They will split the $20 million purse.
[...] Significant skepticism over carbon utilization's effectiveness persists, however. The chief concern is that global carbon emissions outweigh the market for carbon products. "There is no question you can do it. The question is whether it can be a meaningful contribution to climate mitigation," said Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Its carbon competition is meant to find an economic use for planet-warming emissions. The basic idea: If emissions can be turned into a product, power companies will have an incentive to capture and sell carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. A group of 47 teams from across the world initially submitted proposals. The remaining 10 teams will compete in two groups. One will test their technologies at a coal-fired power plant in Gillette, Wyo. The other will compete at a natural gas plant in Calgary, Alberta. Winners will be announced in 2020. They will split the $20 million purse.
[...] Significant skepticism over carbon utilization's effectiveness persists, however. The chief concern is that global carbon emissions outweigh the market for carbon products. "There is no question you can do it. The question is whether it can be a meaningful contribution to climate mitigation," said Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
This is a really neat idea, and even if the XPRIZE conversions only end up being some of the total carbon used, they could end up being a substantial chunk.
But one shouldn't lose sight that there are effective ways of sinking carbon now. Short term, the best carbon sink is rainforests. In terms of carbon negated per a dollar spent, the best option is Cool Earth https://www.coolearth.org/. For a typical American lifestyle, completely offsetting one's yearly CO2 production this way is in on the order of 100 to 500 dollars to Cool Earth. Now, that number will go up over time (since what Cool Earth is doing right now is essentially low hanging fruit), but even at slightly larger numbers this is hardly the purview of the rich.
Use CO2 with sunlight and water to grow useful plants.
Crazy idea right?
Instead of finding ways to use the waste products of power plants that create harmful waste products, we should be finding ways to get rid of power plants of this type and replace them with power generation that doesn't create harmful waste products. Creating incentives and investing money in making these kinds of power generation facilities more relevant instead of less relevant is going in the wrong direction.
Use CO2 with sunlight and water to grow useful plants.
Crazy idea right?
Stupid idea. Think about it. Where are you going to grow the plants that doesn't already have plants growing there. Next what do you do with the plants when you are done? If you let them rot you release the carbon as, C02, CH4 and other gases which are worse. You could convert the plants to fuel but, as we see in ethanol production that takes so much other energy that it might actually be worse. Forests aren't even a good carbon sink (despite what the government of Canada claims). Basically a mature forest is going to reach a carbon equilibrium. It's not like mature forests have kilometers of carbon they have deposited in the soil. It's more like an increase in the top meter.
To put all the carbon back into mines.
NO! Ecological improvement must hurt, infidel!!
In 13 hours it will be Friday. The 13th. No, no, not that.
It's that the Hellmouth is to open.
Speaking of doing lots of different things; wind power, geothermal, hydro, and passive solar are all more efficient than solar-electric, and in locations where they make sense, they are overall much better than solar-electric. Nuclear is an important carbon-free power source that can largely replace coal and other carbon-producing power.
Solar-electric gets the most press because those companies have the best political lobbying machinery and marketing, not because it's the best solution. Don't make the mistake of thinking "carbon-free" means "solar-electric".
Agreed that there are a lot of options; I generally push for donating to solar and wind because those are frankly the easiest ones to actually donate to. There's no really easy way to simply donate money to build more nuclear, geothermal or hydro. Solar and wind also have relatively fast turn around times which means that there's a short span between when one donates money to when it is used. A nuclear plant can take a decade or more to build (not that this is a criticism of nuclear power as much as simply recognizing the unfortunate political reality which we have to pragmatically work with).
The quote expressing skepticism is commiting a slight logical fallacy: Just because this might not be THE single answer doesn't mean it can't be PART of the solution. Anyone who thinks there is a single best solution to CO2 emissions is likely to be extremely disappointed.
The most likely solution is going to be a collection of initiatives such as cutting emissions, switching from coal to natural gas, using nuclear energy + wind + solar, geoengineering, creating carbon sinks, painting roofs/roads/whatever white, reducing deforestation, etc. It's very possible the winners of this contest could provide 5% of the solution, and that 5% (which I just made up) could be a very useful addition to the complete solution.
It's great that XPRIZE is putting up $20 million for contests like this.
...to supply the extra energy used for capture and conversion of CO2 from current coal plants. The problem has a solution if we can just narrow down the scope of it enough.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
It's gonna take a lot of megatons of carbon to construct a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes.
Better find a good hiding place when the nanobots start running low on materials and start disassembling superfluous carbon units.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Passive solar means having to deal with hot liquids. No thank you. Hydro is pretty much built out to its maximum capacity by now, so that is not relevant going forward. Geothermal is great if you to hit the hot spot you expected -- otherwise not so much. Nuclear takes 20 years to come online and its price is stagnant or rising, in a market where practically all other sources of energy are getting dramatically cheaper.
Solar electric and wind are the only options that are easy to deploy and scale. Geothermal and passive solar are relevant if you have district heating, but most of the world does not and this is unlikely to change.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Nothing more
After spending some time trying to find ways to get carbon out of air and more oxygen, I really don't see a more efficient process than reforesting, which will sequester CO2 along with H from water, releasing some O.
All in all, it's very inefficient but everything else takes much more energy, and doesn't scale.
Could be more efficient by making use of waste heat from Nuclear power plants on the coast to desalination.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Solar-electric has the highest public profile, because it's the easiest to retrofit to your house.
Try installing a geothermal plant in your backyard, see how far you get...
Chump change. Can't even buy a decent yacht with that. Oh well, just the fate of the earth we're talking about.
I wonder what the production rate for carbon capture plastics would be, is it viable for mass production? If you could produce it at a high rate for a low enough cost, even its quality/appearance wasn't great, you could turn it into building materials, road surfaces/subsurfaces, lane dividers, furniture framing, etc.
The X-prize project is hoping to find a way to make money (they call it incenttivize) by making a product using the concentrated CO2 and waste heat from a conventional power plant. That product is supposed to sequester the CO2 from the environment.
An alternative direct attack for reducing human generated CO2 is to pay people to substitute low CO2 activities for high CO2 activities. An example is, pay people to accept riders and engage in ride sharing. A gasoline burning commuter is paid to be a rider. The rider doesn't buy $30 a week of gasoline, so the rider's net wealth goes up $30, plus the rider is paid some number of dollars, like 5 dollars in Ethereum for 15Kg of CO2 not emitted (by the rider not driving). The driver still buys $30 in gasoline and he gets 5 dollars in Ethereum that can be spent to purchase an electric vehicle and a share of a destination charging station. As soon as the driver shows statistical likelihood of dependably carrying riders, the driver qualifies for a huge Ethereum loan switch to electric power and have $30 per week retained wealth also.
See my blog:
http://www.lowco2america.com/2...
In effect, we pay people to not burn gasoline, which results in retained cash in the individuals personal finance plus an accumulating amount of Ethereum that can be invested in activities that are alternative to the combustion of fuel. For the individual or family, the goal is to make not emitting CO2 more economically and socially advantageous than the conventional gasoline burning consumer life. Generous payment is needed because the program needs everybody to join in and conserve, no matter where they reside on the climate change denial scale. From the government point of view, we are buying down the globe's CO2 burden. The further development of this is to set off a conservation cascade. Think up ways to directly not emit CO2 and fund them. Suppose we establish the right to a low co2 emission public education for the child and her parents. Think three day work weeks, Local baseball and football teams. Four week long local music and dance festivals per year. Manufacture of 100 year roofs from locally collected plastic.
As a way to transport energy, hydrocarbons are much safer than batteries.
This is because hydrocarbons are dangerous only when they are mixed with oxygen, and it is possible to put a thick wall between them without impairing the efficiency of energy extraction. On the other hand, batteries are based upon separating, by a very thin membrane, two materials that would shortcircuit and burst into flames if they were to touch each other.
Another considration is the effective energy density of hydrocarbons relative to that of batteries. The high energy density of hydrocarbons is thanks also to the fact that one does not need to transport oxygen (unless one goes to space) - it is available for free when the fuel is burned to release energy.
Therefore, the most logical solution to the CO2 problem is to use solar energy to convert it and water back into hydrocarbons, which will be burned again. Airplanes and cars won't need to haul heavy batteries.
My understanding of passive solar is building design to maximise solar gain within it when warmth is desired
Solar thermal for domestic hot water should have been mentioned.
It is unclear that nuclear can replace coal power generation at its current scale, at least on a positive EROEI basis, as it's unclear that uranium ores will support this. It may be that either nuclear can only provide power for critical systems to cover shortfalls in renewables (which would be very valuable), new types of nuclear not dependent on uranium, or new sources of ore are required.
No, not the feelgood treehugger variant where you try to use less fuel. The physical one.
CO2 has a few very, very crappy properties. One of them being that it takes a LOT of energy to break up. Because forming it released a LOT of energy. Well, duh, why do you think we use ICEs burning hydrocarbons that produce CO2 and H2O (another one of those hard to split molecules).
You can now of course use a lot or energy to transform CO2 back to something useful. We could instead take that energy and use it as a replacement for energy that is now generated by burning something that creates CO2. Yes, we could of course also do both, but until we actually produce ALL energy by means that do not produce CO2, the energy is better used by fueling whatever it is that is now fueled in a CO2 producing way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's funny, during the summer here in Texas if you leave your garden hose in the sun, especially a black hose, the water inside will get hotter than than your water heater. Yet we're paying to run an electric water heater. Simply putting the tank by the back porch, in a black box, would allow it to stay hot for free.
Sounds neat except for the Ethereum. The only thing it's adding to your proposal is bullshit. All of it can be done with real money.