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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."
...is a faith based proposition. Nature already has a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for long term storage: trees. Start planting trees on the monocrop, annual farmlands.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
And now it's once again time for those who scream "you're anti-science!" to rail against scientific solutions to the sins they religiously flagellate themselves for, when they aren't feeling smugly superior for bringing a bag to grocery store.
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.
Whetherthis works or something as-yet-invented works, THIS is how potentially significant problems are solved. From the population bomb to the threat of mass starvation, it has never been social engineering, but real engineering which has made a positive difference.
https://www.amazon.com/Bet-Ehrlich-Julian-Gamble-Earths/dp/0300198973/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1534338700&sr=8-6&keywords=the+bet
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/paul-ehrlich-was-wrong-julian-simon-was-right-and-won-the-bet/
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/22/7-enviro-predictions-from-earth-day-1970-that-were-just-dead-wrong/
Prohibition, punishment, moral posturing, prudish public policies lead to unintended disasters and plutocratic expansion into our lives.
Take a lesson. Technology solves the problems it creates for the same reason it creates them in the first placen because technologically savvy people want to hange the state of the world.
Or are growing trees and farming shellfish things that are too workable and don't require large grants to over long periods of time ?
Just where do they propose to get the magnesium? At what energy cost?
"...thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric CO2..." which is negligible compared to the warming effect of Methane, and even more negligible compared to the warming effect of water vapor.
Find a way to rapidly remove water vapor from the atmosphere and you may finally be onto something. The greenhouse effect of water vapor is 10,000 times stronger than the greenhouse effect of CO2, at current levels for each. Reducing water vapor by 1% would have 100 times the effect of removing ALL of the CO2 from the atmosphere (which is not to say we shouldn't try to remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere, because that would still be something).
A large industrial chiller hooked up to a nuclear power plant could drain literally hundreds of tons per day of water vapor from the atmosphere. At that rate it would take perhaps just a few years to remove 1% of the water vapor from the atmosphere, with the added benefit of creating potable water for underserved or neglected populations (for example Flint Michigan, which does not have safe water to drink) or even man-made lakes for recreation.
Build 100 nuke plants with these chillers and for 1/4 of one year of the US national budget you could solve global warming in a decade. I honestly don't know why nobody has proposed this, but it probably has something to do with right wing special interests like the Koch Brothers or others who have weaponized global warming against the poor (who are at the greatest disadvantage and have the most to lose as temperatures increase).
Similar to the production of lime, magnesite can be burned in the presence of charcoal to produce MgO, which, in the form of a mineral, is known as periclase. Large quantities of magnesite are burnt to make magnesium oxide: an important refractory material used as a lining in blast furnaces, kilns and incinerators.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesite#Uses
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 /
I wonder about the cost of this process, and how much more expensive it is than moving to renewable energy and not burning fossil fuels in the first place. (Of course, transitioning to renewable energy is hardly an option when the most powerful person in the world either doesn't believe in the science or wants to enrich his friends in the fossil fuel business.)
How exactly does a carbonate mineral sequester more CO2? MgCO3 + CO2 => what exactly?
Ah, the natural science It's-Always-Something school of thought. Yes, let's not do anything because crises are always made-up. Brilliant, have you notified the Academy of Sciences about your discovery. Or Fox News, they go for that sort of thing.
What do we do with all the Magnesite? Dump it into the oceans? Burn it?
How much C02 does the "process" of producing this material create and how much CO2 does it consume? The article doesn't say. Just being able to fix carbon doesn't mean it's a good thing.
Often the total CO2 being emitted from the total lifecycle is not being considered and we get things like raising corn to make ethanol to burn in our cars which produces more CO2 than it saves when you look at the whole process, end to end, including the growing, transportation, processing and waste removal. Such things need to be carefully considered, or we are spitting into the wind.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So currently humanity is emitting about 37 gigatons of CO2 per year, and that number is sadly increasing. Natural carbon absorption can take care of around half of that, so let's say 18.5 gigatons net is added to the atmosphere. To absorb that with this material, we need to produce and store 37 gigatons of magnesite per year.
To put that in scale, the Alberta sulfur ziggurats were collectively around 15 million tons in 2006 (although they're visibly much larger now), so we'd be looking at around 2500 Alberta sulfur ziggurat sets per year required. I can't find when the ziggurats were started.
Their collective footprint at that time looks like about a square kilometer, so if the magnesite were stacked up similarly and adjusting for the fact that sulphur is about 2/3 the density of magnesite, the ziggurats would take a storage area a bit smaller than Mauritius per year...which is a tiny dot of an island, so that could be reasonably buried at different locations around the world.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You have the MgCO3 on the wrong side of the equation.
CO2 + ? => MgCO3
Without looking up this process exactly, I'd guess something like:
CO2 + MgO => MgCO3
One way or another, it will be technological solutions that solve this, not ham fisted and highly selective demonization of modernity.
Step 1: Instead of storing carbon in trees, we'll store it in large animals.
Step 2: Kill them all and let the passage of time bury their bodies and turn them into goo.
Step 3: Find a way to turn the goo into something useful????
Step 4: Profit
Only science-denying idiots think that excessive CO2 isn't a problem.
Lol. Believe whatever you want, however there is a historical frame of reference for the premise. I'm not anti-science, but I sure wish we'd be a little more thoughtful rather than reactionary in our approach. Never did I say let's not do anything. But doing the right something is not the same thing as doing something.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
FFS, 80% of the earths surface is covered in water which is constantly evaporating as part of the water cycle.
"hundreds of tons per day of water vapor from the atmosphere"
Wow, that much! Newsflash - More than 1 million tons PER SECOND evaporates into the atmosphere. Google it. Thousands of tons of water is probably already taken out of the atmosphere each day just due to air conditioner condensation you moron.
You're an idiot, go get yourself an education.
Better yet, devise a system to produce magnesite at an industrial scale to capture CO2, then ship it to Mars, and use an extraction process to pull the O2 from the Magnesite for terraforming Mars.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I agree with your sentiment, but your sentence structure is annoying as fuck to read.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
We can mine it from the mid Pacific garbage gyre.
Have gnu, will travel.
So if I want to remove the 4.6 metric tons of CO2 that I added by driving my car last year, all I'd need is 9.2 metric tons of magnesite? Whoa, what a deal.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Water vapor is self correcting on extremely short timescales. You have heard of rain haven't you?
By the time they'd have an effect, severe permanent damage would have already been done.
This (quite possible) scenario doesn't preclude us from planting more trees, does it?
I mean, we should be planting more trees as a matter of course in conjunction with other measures to reduce CO emissions (at best) - or regardless of how much we fuck up on that front (at worst.)
Planting a damned tree actually cost little, specially if one were to pick moderate fast growing hardy species (like Moringa or Gumbo Limbo, depending on the climate.).
Doesn't even need to be trees, but hedges that can provide either wind barriers or foliage to cattle.
We don't even need to guarantee that a tree reaches adulthood, we just need green bodies to consume CO2. We could implement a "minnow spawn" approach and throw fast growing tree seeds already prepped to germinate by the millions on rows. Large numbers of disposable seeds would guarantee trees would grow.
And now it's once again time for those who scream "you're anti-science!" to rail against scientific solutions to the sins they religiously flagellate themselves for, when they aren't feeling smugly superior for bringing a bag to grocery store.
Could you diagram this sentence?
Sequestration is only being explored because we don't want to pay the energy price to break apart the carbon dioxide. The entire reason fossil fuels are such a tempting energy source is that their CO2 and H2O end products sit at very low energy states, meaning burning the fuel to produce CO2 and H2O gives off a lot of energy. But if you're willing to dump enough energy into CO2, you can simply break it apart into oxygen gas and some other carbon compound.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to do this with energy produced from burning fossil fuels. But doing it with energy from renewable sources and nuclear power makes sense. Nuclear is the more interesting option since we already have the technology available to do this and know how to scale it up to the massive levels necessary to counter and even reverse CO2 emissions. We'd just need to construct more nuclear power plants.
Why don't renewables scale as well? Replacing a Fukushima-sized nuclear plant (4700 MW nameplate capacity, about 4200 MW after factoring in 0.9 capacity factor) with wind power would require something like 18.7 GW of wind turbines due to wind's lower capacity factor (0.20-0.25). That would require around 430 km^2 of land area based on the land use of smaller wind farms. (Using Fukushima as a comparison since I already did the math back in 2011. Incidentally, the Fukushima evacuation zone is only 371 km^2. And the land area occupied by wind farms in most populated climates is not habitable due to the danger of ice throws.)
This plant would produce (4200 MW)*(8766 hours/yr) = 36.8 TWh of energy per year. Since the world produces about 130,000 TWh from fossil fuels each year, you'd need at least 350 such plants to offset global CO2 emissions. Multiply it by 2 to factor in inefficiencies in the process. And you get (2*350)*(430 km^2) = 301000 km^2 of land area covered by wind turbines, or about the size of Italy. But it can't just be any land area, the land also has to have strong and consistent winds. Otherwise you'll need even more turbines and more land area.
If you used 1.5 MW turbines @ $3 million each, 12,500 such turbines would have a construction cost of $37.5 billion, which is more than what the nuclear plant would cost. Solar is even worse since its capacity factor is lower than wind's, and its cost per MW about 3-7x higher. Of course, planting trees is a whole lot cheaper, as long as you're willing to chop them down after a few decades and bury them in deep abandoned mine shafts, and re-plant them.
Calcium carbonate makes much more sense, and even that is fraught with problems.
....about 5 quadrillion kg of this stuff, and we will be good to go.
The total oxygen sequestered would be far below the total amount in the atmosphere. 400 ppm worth of oxygen pales in comparison to the 200000 ppm that is already there, and ignores that the CO2 oxygen is already essentially sequestered (just as CO2).
Atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. Your post doesn't make sense.
That IS one heck of a sentence, isn't it?
Some people scream "you're anti-science" when someone points out problems with their arguments.
Some of those same people who scream about "anti-science" seem to get rather upset when scientific solutions are proposed, going quite anti-science themselves.
It seems perhaps their resistance to scientific / engineering *solutions* may be because:
a) they have more interest in either flagellating themselves or
b) feeling smugly superior while they wear their recycled rubber shoes to drive an extra 20 miles to get organic chick peas.
Speaking of sentences, here's an interesting sentence which uses correct grammar:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Just expand shellfish farming of bivalves like mussels, clams, and oysters combined with sea kelp and this will do it while growing carbon negative food.
You're welcome.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Original title was "Don't deforest the forests. Fight against wildfire"
Without solution to the greenhouse's CO2, everybody will be 'morenos' under the Sun.
Don't waste unneeded energies.
My dad was an ecologist and called as an expert witness in many cases. I am a software engineer, but invoke conversations with my father. Small wildfires every few years are a good thing. Smaller fires create open space for new growth. Some seeds only germinate after a fire event. Lack of a fire means the old forest growth builds up which will result in an uncontrollable fire when it is ignited. Also, a healthy ecosystem needs individuals of different ages so the whole patch doesn't die off all at once. An alternative would be selective harvesting of lumber before setting small, controlled burns.
What *I* wonder about is the production of the raw materials that they use to consume the CO2. It the stuff will normally form automatically (even if slowly), then the base material can't exist exposed to air, so they need to do *something* to make it available.
What are the external costs? I really doubt that it's as smooth and simple as the article would lead you to believe.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses. English is strange.
Nice, but I will post my usual caveat about mitigating global waming. Be careful lest you overshoot and induce another ice age, which can come on in as little as a year or two (just need one summer where the snow doesn't melt and you're screwed.)
Then you won't cause inconvenience moving in from the seas over decades to a few centuries, but will catastrophically and quickly kill billions via starvation.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The base material is Magnesium.
As you pointed out, it does not exist on earth in raw form.
The idea that we could mine enough Magnesium (ore and refine it), to even make a dent in the amount of CO2 we have in the atmosphere, is absurd.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses. English is strange.
English are strange. Strange for having such a strange language.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Theoretically, platinum (and a lot of heat) could reduce carbon monoxide levels. Do you think that's practical?
And you'll suck all the Co2 out of the air and every d*mn plant will die, and us along with it!
You mean scientific solutions like nuclear power? The complaints against nuclear power boil down to it being unsafe. Okay, which is the greater risk to our safety, nuclear power or global warming? If someone wishes to make a case that nuclear power is in fact a greater threat then my response is, "Problem solved!" If nuclear power is a greater threat to humanity than global warming then we have solved all our energy problems. Move along, nothing to see here.
If nuclear power is less of a threat to humanity than global warming then we need to build nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow, because if the fear mongers on global warming are to be believed then there may not be a tomorrow.
So, you "scientifically minded" global warming fear mongers, which is it? Have we solved the problem or not?
The science tells us that nuclear power is as safe and "green" as wind, water, and sun for power. Science tells us we can build nuclear power plants that are "walk away safe", and will shut themselves down if there is a problem and no one is there to activate the safety mechanisms. All the safety systems would be driven by natural processes like gravity to dump in neutron absorbing solutions and convection of air to cool everything. The production of CO2 in building and operating a nuclear power plant is as low as any "carbon free" energy source like wind and solar. The problems of waste products from nuclear fission are solvable with proper processing to extract the valuable isotopes that are produced (and direct them for use in medicine or industry, if not for making new fuel), and the rest can be vitrified and buried underground where it can hurt no one. Any problems with nuclear power is either a myth or solvable with application of science.
Here's what really boggles me, with all the scientific advancement we've had in reducing humanities impact on the environment there are very few people that will recognize how far we have come. We are doing an excellent job in protecting the environment. This isn't just in relation to the shit job of environmental protection in the past but in absolute terms in getting more food from less land, using fewer resources (in money, manpower, etc.), and creating more open land for wildlife than would have happened naturally. It would be nice if once in a while I was able to see some recognition of how well things are going. Things can certainly improve but we are already doing very well right now.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Seriously, this can really help ONCE we have stopped adding massive CO2 to the atmosphere. Until we stop the fossil fuels, esp coal, this will not make sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ah darn.
It would have been much more fun if you had been in a hurry, drunk, or stupid and didn't think about catalytic converters. You could have declared the use of platinum to reduce carbon monoxide levels "ridiculous". Then hilarity would ensue.
One ton of rock to absorb half a ton of CO2. One ton of carbon burns to produce nearly 4 tons of CO2 (C mass 12, CO2 mass 44) So for every ton of coal you mine and burn, you'll need to mine about 7 tons of ultramafic rock to absorb it - and this is before we consider the energy requirements of the mining and reacting of the rock.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Go ahead, make it and distribute it...I'm fine with that.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Can you imagine if there were some sort of mechanism that could extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and then......(I know this is crazy)....use the CO2 to build *more* CO2 extracting mechanisms. They could exponentiate and cover entire continents or oceans.
Iron sulphate initiates massive algal blooms. If done outside of shallow waters, the blooms are healthy ones, not the fish killing kind. In fact the one test Canada did created such an abundance of salmon they cancelled the season part way through. It also sequesters massive amounts of co2, much more than the weight of iron sulphate used. No one is sure about the long term effets, but the one test had no measurable impact on biodiversity.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
People just don't want to spend the money.