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Splitting Water For Fuel While Removing CO2 From the Air (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new study led by the University of California, Santa Cruz's Greg Rau highlights another tool for our CO2 removal toolbox: splitting seawater to produce hydrogen gas for fuel while capturing CO2 with ocean chemistry. In electrolysis, a device powered by electricity is used to split H2O, producing hydrogen gas. Several chemical modifications to this process have been proposed that can also grab CO2 from the atmosphere. Like the idea of using biofuels, this represents a "win-win" by producing an energy resource while capturing CO2, bringing the cost down. [T]he gist is that atmospheric CO2 goes into the ocean as bicarbonate -- which won't acidify the water or harm ecosystems. So if you power the electrolysis process with renewable energy, you can turn solar/wind/hydroelectric energy into hydrogen fuel while also removing CO2 from the air.
The new study focuses on a basic estimate of the cost and maximum potential of this technique. First, the researchers worked out its efficiency of CO2 capture -- about 0.3 tons captured per gigajoule of electricity input, including the losses from quarrying and crushing rock. That's around 10 times greater than biofuel schemes, but it depends on the assumption that there is demand for all the hydrogen fuel you make. The hydrogen can be used by vehicles, and there's the possibility of using hydrogen as a type of storage for the electric grid -- using excess power to make hydrogen that can run a power plant when needed. So it's not too farfetched that demand could rise to meet supply. The researchers' back-of-the-envelope estimate puts the cost of this system at between $3 and $161 per ton of captured CO2, depending on which type of renewable energy powers it. The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The new study focuses on a basic estimate of the cost and maximum potential of this technique. First, the researchers worked out its efficiency of CO2 capture -- about 0.3 tons captured per gigajoule of electricity input, including the losses from quarrying and crushing rock. That's around 10 times greater than biofuel schemes, but it depends on the assumption that there is demand for all the hydrogen fuel you make. The hydrogen can be used by vehicles, and there's the possibility of using hydrogen as a type of storage for the electric grid -- using excess power to make hydrogen that can run a power plant when needed. So it's not too farfetched that demand could rise to meet supply. The researchers' back-of-the-envelope estimate puts the cost of this system at between $3 and $161 per ton of captured CO2, depending on which type of renewable energy powers it. The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The gist that atmospheric CO2 goes into the ocean as bicarbonate and won't acidify the water is not correct.
Could we also use this as a desalination process to recapture the clean water produced when burning the hydrogen gas?
In electrolysis, a device powered by electricity is used to split H2O, producing hydrogen gas.
Yes but does it scale?
Won't this still affect the chemistry of the ocean, though? Been a long time since I took chemistry, but I think it will make the seawater more basic (potentially good in short-term if it helps mitigate acidification, but who knows what effect it might have longer term esp. regarding its impact on ocean ecosystems -- I'm certainly no marine biologist).
Also, this is just a rough estimate (using wikipedia), but given the stated efficiency of this process, I estimate you'd need on the order of 3 trillion gigajoules of electricity to return the Earth to average interglacial concentrations of atmospheric CO2. That's about the entire energy production of the Earth over a decade (assuming current energy production levels, again as per wikipedia). Is that feasible? Do we want to build out that much energy-generating capacity right next to the ocean (esp. w/ increased flood risks due to you guessed it)? Are we really going to need that much hydrogen anytime soon (although having that much fuel for fusion & getting off-planet may have its perks)?
Also, how much rock are we talking about? The synopsis alludes to crushing rock (presumably for 1 of the reactants for the bicarbonate process).
If you're generating electricity, it's much more efficient to use that to charge electric cars, and reduce the amount of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere, rather than using inefficient methods to get it out.
Also, hydrogen fuel is a dumb idea. There is no infrastructure, conversion/storage is inefficient and it makes metals brittle. It's much better to focus on electric battery cars.
Or.... we could just continue switching to ethanol based fuels, like the E85 Thailand uses made from growing palm trees for palm oil.
Sure ethanol is carbon neutral (not negative), but each cycle it displaces oil use, and that oil isn't then putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
It's boring I know, but it works, is already in production, cars already use, and as new cars can take E85, so more of them will switch over from petroleum.
I see Trump is subsidising coal power stations to try to prop up the coal industry, but coal fired vehicles went out with the steam age.
So, where are you getting all the electricity? Unless you are also building a lot of high density, carbon free power plants (which basically means Nukes) this is rather pointless. And if you are building a bunch of nuke plants (which I'm all for) why bother adding this extra step?
To possibly produce jet fuel from sea water on aircraft carriers while underway. In addition to obtaining hydrogen and oxygen from electrolysis of sea water you also liberate some of the carbon dioxide that's dissolved in solution as part of that sea water. The combination of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide can, with sufficient energy input, most likely from the nuclear reactors that power the ship, be converted to a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and some carbon dioxide in a mixture known as SynGas or "synthesis gas". From there it can be converted via the Fischer Tropsch Process into heavier hydrocarbons and eventually into a mixture of longer chain hydrocarbons approximating JP-5 jet fuel.
Why aren't we already doing this on land you might ask? Well, in a word, because it's expensive in both industrial plant and equipment and also from an energy input perspective. Much more expensive than simply pumping crude oil out of the ground and refining it. However, that matters less on a ship underway at sea, away from land supplies, and with nuclear energy to spare where cost is less of a factor than ease of supply, which is militarily advantageous.
So assuming the low-end cost of $3 per ton of CO2, we're talking a mere $3,030,000,000,000 to mitigate anthropogenic CO2 emissions Sounds like just the type of pragmatic negative emissions technology we so desperately need!
"cost of this system at between $3 and $161 per ton of captured CO2". With a range like this, who wants to read the article?
If renewable energy such as off-shore wind farms were used we could achieve carbon neutral hydro-carbon fuel, we could even pump the spare fuel into natural crude oil reservoirs for carbon capture.
We get to keep our gas guzzlers with a clear conscience.
Nothing about this makes sense, but let's start with the biofuels statement: "Like the idea of using biofuels, this represents a "win-win" by producing an energy resource while capturing CO2". There is no perpetual motion machine. You can't claim that biofuels capture CO2 when you are going to burn them, releasing the CO2 back to the atmosphere. And that's just the first completely bogus statement above
And *that* carbon dioxide was taken from the air during the growing of the Palm oil.
i.e. it's simply recycling the CO2 with each iteration, whereas oil moves carbon from the ground to atmosphere.
hence ethanol is carbon neutral.
Let's do a simple BS test: a gallon of gas generates 20 lbs of CO2 when burned. They claim this perpetual motion machine could capture a ton of CO2 for as low as $3. So do the math and laugh. That would imply that $3/100 is the cost to recapture the diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere from burning the gallon of gas. So three cents would recapture the 20 lbs of CO2 released by the gallon of gas. Please. Also review your basic thermodynamics and entropy concepts. Who funded this "study"?
I wish I'd known this was publishable. I wrote up a report on this years ago while working for the Navy... they actually funded someone to try this out, I think.
Short version: it's expensive. Slightly longer version: chlorine is a problem. If you think you're electrochemically evolving hydrogen gas strait from sea water, you're probably just going to kill a lot of people instead. Catalysts are the answer. Bonus detail: the ocean (for a few reasons) concentrates carbon. There's a lot of carbon in there, and the core of this idea is very good.
Photosynthesis:
CO2 + H2O + Sunlight --> Hydrocarbons + Oxygen
Combustion:
Hydrocarbon + Oxygen --> CO2 + H2O + Energy
Overall:
Sunlight ---> Energy
As long as you grow the plants you used to make the ethanol, they will remove the same or more* carbon from the atmosphere. (*'more' if you don't use all the plant, instead mulching it, turns airborne CO2 in soil and biomass.).
But you forget that 20 pounds of water vapor is also created! It's the the water vapor that is the problem not the CO2. It's the water vapor that causes the "greenhouse" not the CO2.
Hydrogen powered cars have annoyed me for years as I am convinced are not practical and mainly funded to muddy the waters around the development of pure EVs. However if this was used for grid storage it could be a practical idea. Make hydrogen when you have surplus renewable energy and burn it at the same location when you need to support the grid. No issues with transport or storage density and you could locate it a bit away from population centers if you worry about safety.
As much as I love Tesla I feel using Li-Ion batteries for grid storage is a bad idea as you don't have the same space/weight concerns for grid storage that you do in an EV and therefore such batteries are better deployed for EVs where they bring the most benefit.
Except in this case the fuel produced is hydrogen, so burning it does not release the CO2 back into the atmosphere. And even biofuels don't release all the captured CO2, as some is still tied up in the plant residue. RTFA FTW.
... except that it will alkalize the water (it is, after all, a proton acceptor) and throw off the natural electrolyte balance and cause potentially devastating changes in marine behavior.
In layman's terms, oceanic life depends far more on the electrolyte composition of the water than it does the acidity. While acidity is important, the concentration of various electrolytes has a huge effect on the survivability of the local ecosystem. If you throw that electrolyte concentration off, in this case by increasing it, animals will have to increase their bodies' concentration of salts to compensate. Most marine life can tolerate at least some variability in salinity, but many of those ranges are narrow. Some animals near facilities dumping this extra bicarbonate into the ocean will have to move to where the salinity is within their tolerable range. This can have dire effects on migratory patterns, reproductive behavior, and other pieces of the ecosystem that this study seems to completely ignore (but are obvious to actual marine biologists like me).
Go home Slashdot- you're high on climate change.
A new study led by the University of California, Santa Cruz's Greg Rau highlights another tool for our CO2 removal toolbox: splitting seawater to produce hydrogen gas for fuel while capturing CO2 with ocean chemistry.
So what? That's nifty and all but the obstacle to doing any of this is COST. It doesn't really matter what we can do if we cannot do it economically.
Hydrogen powered cars have annoyed me for years as I am convinced are not practical and mainly funded to muddy the waters around the development of pure EVs.
Certainly. They aren't a terrible idea but the fueling infrastructure problem alone pretty much dooms hydrogen fuel cells to power cars before they even get started. BEVs have their problems too but they have the one HUGE advantage that there already is a fuel infrastructure (the electric grid) in place. Needs some upgrades but we're not starting from scratch.
As much as I love Tesla I feel using Li-Ion batteries for grid storage is a bad idea as you don't have the same space/weight concerns for grid storage that you do in an EV and therefore such batteries are better deployed for EVs where they bring the most benefit.
The flaw in your logic there is that you are presuming using Li-Ion batteries in cars somehow precludes their use in grid applications. In reality optimal economic use of them almost requires multiple applications. To get the economies of scale for battery production you really need to try to meet as many use cases as you can to get the cost lower. This means making as many batteries as you can regardless of the end application because the battery doesn't care what device it is in. Putting batteries in a grid application actually in the long run will make the battery in your EV cost LESS because you have more units to amortize the fixed costs over.
Given the current EU CO2 Shortage can we not start using captured CO2 from developing countries like the USA to fix our beer and pork shortage?
hence ethanol is carbon neutral.
Not when you are burning diesel fuel from oil pumped out of the ground to manufacture it which is basically what happens in industrial scale farming. Ethanol production for fuel is mostly nothing more than a subsidy to farmers cloaked in a misleading lie about being eco friendly.
Hydrocarbon fuels are pretty energy-rich per kilogram, things like jet planes depend on that.
Spend some time in an actual greenhouse. Now spend some time in cloudy weather, or in a light rain shower, or anywhere there's "swamp cooling".
Water vapor cools the air. Water vapor also forms clouds which reflect sunlight, meaning less energy reaches the ground, meaning cooler temperatures.
Water vapor, in short, isn't the cause of the greenhouse. It's just an effect.
It is time for you learn the difference between news and opinion. If you even look at the link you had sent it was under the opinion section of CNN.
Yes, exactly. And that word "may have" is not the same as "Earth is doomed".
It takes more energy to split the water than you get back by burning the hydrogen. You're far better off putting the power directly into a battery and using that in your car. The whole CO2 bit is a handwaving boondoggle.
Can we get off cars? Sure Car pollution is a big problem. It is also what we feel the most, having to fuel up our cars. But they are other problems too.
A good point.
Cars are one of the many systems in our culture producing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. But there are many others.
And you have to put more power into splitting the hydrogen out than you get back by burning it. You aren't creating an energy resource, you're wasting energy.
Water vapor indeed is the main greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. But it has a temperature-dependent equilibrium in the atmosphere. If you add more, it removes itself from the atmosphere quickly-- that's called "rain". The amount that the atmosphere can hold increases with temperature.
So, water vapor in the atmosphere is driven by planetary temperature. It's a feedback cycle.
Water is what stores heat. If you create more water vapor you will be able to store more heat.
I assure you that neither CO2 nor water heats itself.
We need to stop 'burning' anything and everything. Electric and nuclear/solar/wind are the way forward.
I will be amazed if the study took into account the cost of installing renewable energy generation, both in monetary and environmental terms, because these studies literally never do. They always sound great at first glance, and they certainly get their authors a fuckton of grant money but, in the end, someone finally puts two and two together and the idea gets scrapped.
For example, an array of solar panels big enough to be used for massive-scale desalinization would likely put out more CO2 during the production of the panels themselves than the array could remove in its lifetime; and that's before factoring in the concrete that will be required for the installation (which, honestly, is negligible in comparison). Your typical utility-sized solar panel puts out 50g of CO2 for every KWh it will be able to produce during its lifetime, while this process supposedly removes 1 ton of CO2 for every gigajoule of electricity used, according to TFS. 1 gigajoule of electricity is 277.77777... KWh, which we'll refer to as 277.8 KWh, for simplicity.
50g per KWh produced, multiplied by 277.8 KWh to remove a ton, is just shy of 14Kg produced for every ton removed. Okay, that's actually not so bad and I'll admit, maybe there's something to this, assuming the 1 ton per Gj figure is achievable at less than ideal conditions, for more than a few moments at a time, if at all. Of course, that also assumes that 100% of the power generated goes to this purpose, which is all but guaranteed not to be the case.
But that's only considering one environmental factor: CO2. There are many others.
We have excess heat reflected back into the atmosphere by these massive arrays of panels, increased ocean acidity (despite what is claimed in TFS, I'll address this), loss of forest which may ultimately have been secluding more CO2 than we can recapture using this method (assuming we want to install these solar arrays in a climate that will maximize their lifespan; we could run them in the desert where they'll be covered in dust and sand constantly, not running at max efficiency for their lifespan, and run hot which shortens that lifespan, throwing their grams-of-CO2-per-KWh through the roof and creating a disposal issue), and pollution from the chemicals used in the production of the panels, as well as their disposal. Oh, and resource depletion, as we would need a lot of panels for something like this.
Let's tackle the first non-blatantly-obvious claim I've made, and one that affects every energy source and not just solar, first: increased ocean acidity. While we needn't necessarily worry about increased salinity, since there is a market for sea salt (which will suddenly become quite cheap if we're doing ocean electrolysis at this scale), a portion of the solid byproduct of ocean electrolysis is a group of pure acids, which would likely find their way back into the ocean. Combined with reduced water levels (the stored hydrogen represents lost water), acidity rises. Yes, very slowly over time, sort of like how our current situation happened, and sort of like how a solution like this will also act very slowly and over a long period of time; this is something that, if it works, we will have to keep up indefinitely. Unless the demand for hydrogen outpaces production via this method, we will eventually acidify the oceans simply by trying to maintain safe atmospheric CO2 levels, assuming it doesn't happen before we get there.
Loss of forest is, for me, a real concern. While you can throw a solar array in the middle of the desert and, at first glance, that appears to be the ideal solution, it's truly far from ideal. The increased heat during the day and extreme temperature swings at night wreak havoc on solar panels, shortening their lifespan and driving down their efficiency. This can be mitigated by water cooling during the panels the day and heating them during the night, but that means less of there output is used for this process, further reducing efficiency. Dus
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I heard about that. One scenario that they were looking at was putting a small nuclear reactor (like you would find in a submarine) at a base in Afghanistan and produce diesel-compatible fuel. Sure, the cost would be huge, but you would eliminate the need for lots of trucks that are being shot at. Obviously they would have to secure the reactor, as it would be a high priority target, but reducing dependencies on supply lines is a massive logistical win.
Generating fuel with excess electricity on an aircraft carrier is pretty much a no-brainer if they can get the process to work and produce enough fuel to be worth the effort.
Yes, water vapor can store more heat than dry air at the same temperature - which actually means it lowers the temperature for the same amount of heat. That's not the problem.
The problem is that greenhouse gasses scatter thermal infrared radiation, slowing the rate at which heat can be radiated from the planet's surface away into space by bouncing much of it back at the surface to be reabsorbed. That causes the temperature of the surface to slowly increase until the rate of radiated energy escaping the atmosphere again matches the rate at which energy is absorbed from the sun.
Meanwhile the Sun is hot enough that it's energy is mostly radiated in the visible spectrum, and so incoming energy is mostly unaffected by greenhouse gasses.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't know why you're modded as Offtopic. That's troubling. You're addressing the key problem - don't listed to any site's opinion when the topic is discussing science. Study the science.
how many miners will it put back into the coal mines?
So many silver bullets. More and more silver bullets. Yet none ever launch. Must be a conspiracy by the patriarchy.
Ocean water is naturally slightly alkaline (pH about 8.2). The problem we're currently facing is misleadingly called "acidification", which is the oceans becoming more neutral when they should be more basic. Estimates are that ocean pH has dropped by 0.1 pH since the start of the industrial revolution, and that's already stressing sea life; it's expected to drop by a further 0.3 or more, even if we cut carbon emissions.
The reason so much acidification is in our future is that CO2 enters the ocean at a limited rate. It was Roger Revelle's discovery of this fact in 1957 that shifted the scientific consensus from global cooling to global warming; before that it'd been believed that atmospheric CO2 physically could not increase.
So this is what we've got to look forward to as the relatively high levels of atmospheric CO2 slowly make their way into the ocean:
CO2 + H20 --> H2CO3 --> HC03- + H+.
H2CO3 is carbonate, a weak base; H+ is the hydron, a powerful Lewis acid. The net result is acidification. Adding HCO3- and taking away the H+ to use as fuel would tend to offset acidification.
As for throwing the electrolytic composition of the ocean off, bicarbonate is one of the most common minerals in the ocean, with a typical concentration of 140 mg/L. It's where the bulk of CO2 is going anyway.
The oceans contain 1.35x 10^21 liters of seawater. That means there is currently 1.89x 10^17 kg of carbonate in the ocean -- 189,000 gigatonnes. Humans currently emit 37 gigatons of CO2, with a molar mass of 44. If that were entirely converted to bicarbonate with a molar mass of 61, that'd be 262 gigatons of bicarbonate.
Of course that's not likely to be remotely feasible, nor is it what you'd do if you if it were. At the very least cost would be prohibitive. Annually the oceans emit 332 gigatons of CO2 and absorb 338, for a net absorption of 6 gigatons/year. So it'd make sense to add just enough calcite to generate the bicarbonate you'd need to neutralize that much CO2.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You aren't wasting energy, you are using it remove CO2 from the air... you know, the thing we've crossed the threshold and have to do above and beyond stopping putting CO2 into the air.
Water vapor neither cools nor heats the air but it increases the thermal capacity of air. Try going somewhere where swamp cooling actually works, now step out of the sun and into the shade, note the massive temperature change. Wait till night, note the dramatic and rapid cooling. Now go somewhere that is already a swamp like Florida. Step into the shade... note how the sun stopped beating on your but the air is just as hot.
Unfortunately, as soon as electric cars start going mainstream, they will easily consume all available production for decades - we can always build more battery production plants (and recycling - that's going to be a huge factor too), but the economies of scale will begin to diminish rapidly.
That could only be true if there was a limitation on some of the components. And even if your scenario did play out that's not actually a problem as far as grid utilization goes. We don't HAVE to use Li-Ion for grid applications if there is enough demand elsewhere (cars etc) to get to minimum efficient scale.
And it's not at all clear that there's enough lithium on the planet to satisfy the demand for a global conversion to EVs, especially if harvested in an ecologically responsible manner.
There is quite a lot of lithium according to the USGS. The problems for the next several decades will be most likely a series of short term shortages while we fully utilize existing sources and have to establish new mines which will take some time. We're not likely to exhaust Earth's supply for a long time to come but rather it will be a challenge to keep up with demand if it rises too quickly. A good sort of problem to have in a sense but a problem all the same.
Using Li-Ion batteris for the grid for now, as we're jump-starting the transition, does indeed make sense, but soon enough we're going to want batteries whose compromises have been optimized for grid applications
You understand my point then. In the short run using Li-Ion or similar batteries for grid applications has great utility (they work find for grid applications even if not optimal) in bringing the cost of batteries down. In the long run if we transition to some other chemistry better suited for static and grid applications then that's fine too. I'm not arguing that we need to only use Li-Ion but rather that using those batteries even for tasks where weight is not a pressing concern is fine for the next few decades if it helps bring costs down.
Heck, even lead-acid batteries are better suited to grid-scale applications than Li-Ion - They're cheaper for the same capacity, and can have a considerably longer working life, lowering the amortized cost even further.
Lead Acid batteries have some pretty big drawbacks too. They have FAR fewer cycles, the have discharge issues, they have efficiency issues, etc. They are cheap and they work well so you're quite right that they could see use in some grid applications.
If I burn the hydrogen + oxygen, say in a kiln or furnace, would the net cost per thermal units be cheaper then burning natural gas or propane?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I think you are seriously overstating the problem... we already have a network of fueling stations everywhere that can distribute hydrogen instead of or in addition to gasoline.
No we do not. Not on the sort of scale needed to actually get the general public to actually buy hydrogen powered vehicles anyway. Converting existing gas stations is a HUGE expense with a difficult chicken and egg problem. No gas station is going to install a hydrogen pump without there first being hydrogen powered cars. Nobody is going to buy a hydrogen powered car until the fuel infrastructure is already available. So unless you plan to convince the government to subsidize the problem it just isn't going to happen. Ever. Especially given that there is NO standard for how to store hydrogen on vehicles. Some use compressed gas, others use various hydrocarbons or other chemicals, etc. There are a variety of ways to do it but until there is an agree upon or de-facto standard there is no point in financing the refueling infrastructure build out. This limits hydrogen to powering local fleets of vehicles for companies and maybe buses but little more.
I don't have anything against hydrogen as a fuel source but the reality of it is that the fueling infrastructure problem kills it dead before it can really ever get any traction. EVs have their flaws but the electric grid pretty much already reaches everywhere people already go and people can charge their cars at home 99% of the time in most cases. Electrons are identical so there is no need to agree on anything more than a common plug. The batteries can be wildly different and that has no effect on the fuel infrastructure needs.
The electrical grid is already there but it is already buckling under demand
Not where I live it isn't. If it was buckling under demand then we would see routine blackouts or brownouts and that simply doesn't happen. Maybe if you live in India or some other country with an underdeveloped electrical grid you have that problem.
the infrastructure simply doesn't exist to handle the massive electrical load of everyone having and using an EV.
You don't seem to comprehend the difference between building infrastructure from scratch versus upgrading already existing infrastructure. Yes there will be upgrades needed but the hard work is already done. The wires coming into my house are already robust enough to handle powering an electric vehicle. So are the ones going to your house most likely. So is most of the electrical backbone. Charging an EV is not really worse that running an air conditioner. The rest of the problem is simply adding power plants and back haul wiring and/or solar arrays which would have to happen anyway. We just have to accelerate the pace if we add EVs into the mix.
There literally is no place within a 20 mile radius of my house where I can purchase hydrogen. I can plug an EV into literally every structure I see. EVs have won the day. Get over it.
"You don't seem to comprehend the difference between building infrastructure from scratch versus upgrading already existing infrastructure."
That is what I do for a living so i absolutely understand the difference. Upgrading existing infrastructure is almost never done correctly, rarely gives the same result, and is usually a lot harder than a clean fresh implementation.
You are correct about hydrogen storage, but picking a standard is no more difficult than picking a standard for anything else and once one is selected that is also just a question of upgrading existing fueling infrastructure.
"The wires coming into my house are already robust enough to handle powering an electric vehicle. So are the ones going to your house most likely. So is most of the electrical backbone."
That isn't accurate. Most owners of EV's upgrade their home infrastructure to support an EV, most owners have to upgrade their home infrastructure to run a welder in the garage let alone an EV. An EV battery capacity is likely to be about 5 times the consumption of your air conditioner in an hour and when those batteries are replaced by supercaps in the near future that entire consumption will need to happen in seconds not hours. As for the electrical backbone, the backbone currently can't handle everyone running their air conditioner at once and it you aren't talking about charging AN ev, we are talking EVERYONE charging an EV for their daily driving. I've lived on the east cost, I've lived out west, i've lived in florida, i currently live in Texas, I've yet to live anywhere where the grid didn't have occasional brownouts and energy saver programs to give you savings if they could remote disable appliances (mostly AC) because the grid could not handle that heavy demand. If a handful of people in your 10 block radius charged a supercap ev at the same time I guarantee everyone in that neighborhood would see the lights dim.
Interesting concept. Iâ(TM)m wondering for how long that can go on at the poles until we have another problem about where to put the stuff? Just asking.
If we take the CO2 out of the air, how are the trees gonna breathe?
The ice at the core of the poles is deeper than we can drill and we can build things extremely high, someone would actually need to run the math but thanks to three dimensional space I'd think we could reach equilibrium at some point and of course we can always use structural laying of rock or other materials. If we get more efficient at producing insulators we could produce "polar ice" that is extremely resistant to imbalances while we need to adjust things. If we reverse the process the ice caps won't just stop melting, they'll grow and we have a cooling solar cycle coming up that will provide a respite and buffer.
We could even reach a point where we want more heat retention and we'd have an easy place to extract greenhouse gases from. Over the long haul (the VERY long haul) that is almost certainly something we would need eventually because while our planet is getting warmer right now our universe is getting colder.
Someone else argued the salt would simply dissolve since you are building on ice but even saline freezes and anything it melts will cool it. Yes the salt melts the ice on the road but that salt dries back out. Also, there is no reason you can't put a layer of some barrier material at the bottom of the pit. If human activity can increase the greenhouse levels at a rate that can warm the entire planet then human activity can engineer a procedure to regulate and control the level of greenhouse gases on the planet. We find out about historic greenhouse gas levels by looking at deep layers of polar ice and we find ancient biomass and creatures buried in it that are tens of thousands of years old... seems like a pretty well established place to store biomass and greenhouse gas to me.
At some point this is a global effort and the entire world needs to pay for it. Those who agree to build and work this effort could be recognized as anarctic nation with their own national bank and currency backed by the global climate regulation effort which indisputably has value and that bank can value its currency vs other currencies based on their emissions. The operation could be powered with the heat output from nuclear waste instead of burying it in a mountain somewhere.
.... when we can just burn it without using the energy at all and start using the resulting purified seawater to refill our aquifers?
If South Africa isn't taking this seriously as a way to fix their problem then someone isn't using their noggin.
Dumping a bunch of rocks into the ocean
Genius.
Yeah, I recently heard about this and the goal is to have a functioning system that can be retrofitted to carriers within a decade. They're currently working on scaling up the process into modular plants and validating the synthesised fuel in aircraft engines.
Apparently the economics are favourable to the current situation where the navy is spending $6.60 per gallon of fuel delivered at sea. Tactically it's a boon not to have to rely on oilers.
The economics are looking even more favourable if the process is adapted to high-temperature reactors so electrolysis can be bypassed for direct thermal destruction of water molecules.
Apparently there's enough CO2 and hydrogen in seawater that 23,000 litres of the stuff can yield enough to make 1 litre of synthetic fuel.
It's an exciting development and the cost of the process is the cap on oil prices.
From what I read that is a far bigger problem in the USA where you only have 110VAC. Where I live, New Zealand, the standard voltage is 240VAC and a standard domestic heavy current outlet, normally used for stoves, can supply 15A. I can pull 3.6KW with no special wiring. The local Tesla dealer told me I can install a rapid charger in my home easily.
A recent public radio discussion with a local expert discussed the amount of extra power generation we will need when our local vehicle fleet has transition to EVs and compared that with current power generation projects already approved, the increased demand out strips the increased supply by about 3%. Add to that NZ has mostly used green power generation for many decades and things are looking here.
In practical terms I spend a lot of time in Shenzhen where I see approximate 100% of the bus fleet is BYD electric models and about 50% of the taxis are electric BYD e6s. I have never seen any kind of hydrogen vehicle moving on a public road, ever, and I am old and well traveled.
More like trying to wake up someone pretending to be asleep.
In actual impact, farmed shellfish (not shrimp or lobsters, but mussels, clams, other bivalves) in areas with farmed (and eaten, not let to degrade) seaweed beds works better at removing massive amounts of carbon from the ecosphere.
Most of Earth is water.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --