Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere (phys.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston. Now, for the first time, researchers have explained how magnesite forms at low temperature, and offered a route to dramatically accelerating its crystallization. A tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite can remove around half a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere, but the rate of formation is very slow. The researchers were able to show that by using polystyrene microspheres as a catalyst, magnesite would form within 72 days. The microspheres themselves are unchanged by the production process, so they can ideally be reused. Project leader, Professor Ian Power from Trent University in Ontario added: "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude. This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient. For now, we recognize that this is an experimental process, and will need to be scaled up before we can be sure that magnesite can be used in carbon sequestration (taking CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently storing it as magnesite). This depends on several variables, including the price of carbon and the refinement of the sequestration technology, but we now know that the science makes it do-able."
So one tonne of this mineral will remove 5 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 per year. One article I found based on a quick Google search gives an estimate of about 1,100 tonnes of CO2 emitted every second. Perhaps some of this could be captured more easily where it's being generated, but we'd need to manufacture a lot of this stuff if we wanted to be carbon neutral with just this technology alone.
The annual yield of magnesite is more or less 30000000t per year. The amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere is 1090t per second. If we used all the annual yield to bind CO2 we could stop the increase of CO2 for whole 7 hours.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
You linked to a chart that shows an x-axis with a thousand-year increment, and zoomed in "recent proxies" inset shows a 0.5 degree C anomaly as of 2004. This is entirely consistent with models. I'm not sure what you are getting at, but your conclusion that "there's really zero indication that things are different now than in the past 10, 20, or 500 thousand years" is completely unsupported by the linked chart.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You're confusing a few things.
Oil was formed many hundreds of millions of years ago, mostly from dead animal and plant life in shallow seas. Trees did not exist yet.
Around 300 millions years ago, some plants evolved the ability to produce a protein called lignin. Lignin is the primary structural component of wood. That allowed those plants to get taller than their neighbors and eventually evolve into trees.
At the time, there was nothing on the planet that could digest lignin. So, tree dies and falls over and it just sits there. It can't rot because nothing can eat it. And it did not help that the first trees had very shallow root systems, so a lot of them fell over. Eventually the dead trunks get buried by sediment and other tree trunks, get compressed into peat, which then got further buried and heated and compressed into coal.
It took about 60 million years for bacteria and fungi to appear that could eat lignin. So a whole lot of trees got piled up before any could rot.
Btw, there are still no animals that can digest lignin. Termites and carpenter ants have a species of fungi in their gut that digests lignin for them.
Planting trees is a no brainier tho. Option 1) let sun's heat be absorbed by ground warm things up. Option 2) let it be converted by solar panels, natural (leaves) or man-made, to drive other processes than heating things up. It's not all about carbon
It's all about carbon.
The sunlight hitting a leaf is still an energy input. The sugars made by the tree will be consumed and result in heat. It's similar with the solar panels - the electricity will be used to do something, and that process will release heat.
The released heat is not 100% of the energy input from sunlight, but 100% of the energy input from sunlight on dirt isn't released as heat either.