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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."
The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"...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).
The trouble is that trees store carbon far, far slower than we dig it up. You cannot stabilize CO2 levels on human-relevant timescales with trees alone, artificial CO2 sequestration is absolutely necessary.
They would be part of a good long term strategy even if they're not a good short term strategy and not the answer by itself.
Like most complex problems- the best answer is probably a multi-directional approach.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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 can't tell if this is humor, sarcasm, or trolling.
But since trees can and will both decay and burn, they are not a long-term solution. Plus it would take so many trees that you would have to destroy most natural ecosystems and farmland for us to plant our way out of the 2-degree rise by 2100 even with really productive plants like poplar trees and switchgrass.
Tree planting can help some though, particularly in equatorial regions. Like most things, rarely are the solutions simple to very complex problems. A multi-pronged attack with rapid reduction in fossil fuels, in combination with various CO2 sequestration efforts (like biomass) appears to be the quickest, most effective approach at the moment.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
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.