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Carbon Capture System Turns CO2 Into Electricity and Hydrogen Fuel (newatlas.com)
Researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and Georgia Tech have developed a new system that absorbs carbon dioxide and produces electricity and useable hydrogen fuel. New Atlas reports: The new device, which the team calls a Hybrid Na-CO2 System, is basically a big liquid battery. A sodium metal anode is placed in an organic electrolyte, while the cathode is contained in an aqueous solution. The two liquids are separated by a sodium Super Ionic Conductor (NASICON) membrane. When CO2 is injected into the aqueous electrolyte, it reacts with the cathode, turning the solution more acidic, which in turn generates electricity and creates hydrogen. In tests, the team reported a CO2 conversion efficiency of 50 percent, and the system was stable enough to run for over 1,000 hours without causing any damage to the electrodes. Unlike other designs, it doesn't release any CO2 as a gas during normal operation -- instead, the remaining half of the CO2 was recovered from the electrolyte as plain old baking soda. The research was published in the journal iScience.
You're getting electricity AND hydrogen? That sounds odd... where's the power coming from? I mean, great if it's true, but where's it coming from, seriously.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
I guess I can feel ok about buying that gas-guzzling SUV I've been wanting now.
This isn't really a CO2 capture system because it does nothing to actually capture CO2. Instead, this is a use for captured CO2: batteries. This is a good thing because we need to start pulling billions of tons of the stuff out of the sky.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It just had to come during a CO2 shortage, figures.
We need more of this kind of research if we're going to successfully attack the problems involved in climate change and excessive atmospheric CO2.
Because gamified economic schemes aren't going to cut it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Absolutely. We will need several or many tools to take care of these problems. Economic carrots and sticks are only one method, albeit a proven one, that can help.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Sell it to NASA.
They've been looking for ways to get rid of captured CO2 for decades. If you can use it to generate electricity too, I'm sure they'll be interested.
Much more likely though - this requires an input (the sodium?) that will cost more to source than you'll ever save.
It takes CO2 as an input? But that's food for plants! Won't someone please think of the plants?! They remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, leave them alone! /s
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Yeah, but turning that sodium bicarb back into sodium is going to need lots of electricity. Not a new win in other words - possibly better overall that OTHER carbon capture systems but still a new loss to the planet.
Great. More simple: throw sodium in water: a loud and spectacular reaction ensues -- hydrogen out.
The water left behind has NaOH: this reacts with CO2 and you get... soda!
But now: where do you get that sodium from, to begin with? This is chemistry and not magics...
Hey Chas, nobody is taking your right wing nazi shit seriously since you're a transgender now you can't even be a mall cop. God Bless Satan Trump!
The question is the material budget.
This process consumes Na and produces NaHCO3.
Where can we get wast amounts of Na? From seasalt? What do we do with the Cl ?
What we do with the NaHCO3 produced? It is not that stable and all uses mean it releases CO2 again.
It's called "affects", not "effects". You Trumpites are always so uneducated...
This basically uses Na (sodium), water and CO2 to produce NaHCO3 + H2 (hydrogen) + electricity.
But consider the following. Just react Na with water and you get NaOH + H2, plus some heat (and usually some explosions but that can be worked around). NaOH can react quite easily with CO2 in aqueous solution to form NaHCO3, netting you virtually the same result. Well, except that you get heat instead of electricity, and of course electricity is more useful, I agree.
The problem is, to capture CO2 with this process on the needed scale of gigatonnes, you would need gigatonnes of metallic Na. Current worldwide global production I found out to be around 100,000 metric tonnes, and it production requires a lot of energy.
So this process can't really be used to pull CO2 from the atmosphere.
Carbon Dioxide is a very stable molecule, getting it to react requires a large amount of input energy. While TFA make it sound like we are gaining energy from this process, there is no free lunch.
The reason why this reaction produces energy is because it is consuming pure metallic sodium and converting it to sodium bicarbonate. Pure sodium does not exist in nature at all, because it is so reactive. Manufacturing metallic sodium is an extremely energy intensive process that involves splitting molten salt (Sodium Chloride) into sodium and chlorine gas using electrolysis. This is Downs' Process. The sodium bicarbonate that this process produces has industrial applications, some of them involve reactions that release the CO2 we just spent of ton of energy capturing back into the atomsphere, baking breads and cakes for example.
Any method that involves electrolysis is going to use a ton of energy. If we are going the electrolysis route, then might as well produce hydrocarbons using electrolysis to convert water and CO2 to syngas, which can then be used to produce hydrocarbons via the Fischer–Tropsch process. Hydrocarbons are way more useful from an industrial standpoint. The most obvious is we can burn them to power legacy Internal Combustion Engine vehicles, which closes the carbon feedback loop; but that is just one use. Hydrocarbons can be used as feedstock for all kinds of organic chemistry processes, we can make tons of plastics, polymers, lubricants, carbon fiber, etc. All of these things cannot be produced without oil mining today. The nice thing about hydrocarbon synthesis is that it can replace mined fossil fuels in all our existing petrochemical manufacturing processes. The same cannot be said about baking soda.
Out of curiosity, where are you located?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Absolutely. We will need several or many tools to take care of these problems. Economic carrots and sticks are only one method, albeit a proven one, that can help.
Sure, we could hope that a host of technological innovations in battery technology, electric grids, improved solar cells and more efficient turbines can patch together a solution that over time takes the place of fossil fuels at great cost over 30 years (and that doesn't consider fuels or any of the other major sources of CO2 other than electricity). That *could* work even though all the rates of improvements of those technology are nowhere near what we need to replace fossil fuels.
Or we could just use nuclear and take care of all the problems at once doing far less damage to the environment in the process. With nuclear you can cheaply make synthetic fuels to replace gas, diesel and natural gas that renewables can't really do anything about (I like EVs too but that's shifting a significant part the problem). I'm sure ignoring nuclear will make you popular with your less educated greenie friends but really, are you doing anyone any favors by doing that? Are the hard ideological stances of environmentalists groups doing anyone any favors? Or are they ignoring the one technology that can actually scale to take the place of fossil fuels?
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Underwater. **Blub blub blub**
Transforming CO2 in something else requires an amount of energy comparable to the creation of that CO2. So unless this device gets its energy from an otherwise inaccessible (or not efficiently accessible) source, this is not a solution for anything as long as we're still producing CO2 for energy because obviously, it's a better idea to not turn on this device and in turn shut down a CO2 source. Only once we have eradicated all fossil fuel use, using energy to take CO2 out of the system begins to make sense.
That is: unless the energy powering this thing (the energy making metallic sodium if I understand correctly) is obtained in an otherwise not (efficiently) accessible means. I don't know how metallic sodium is created, but if we could use concentrated solar power for that, which is potentially way more efficient than PV, this might actually make some sense. But other than that, in general, there's no free lunch.
0x or or snor perron?!
Ok, then rising sea levels ain't that big a problem for you, I have to give you that. Actually, with a hint of luck it might even increase your real estate soon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
yriiuieuuio
This is interesting technology, no question. For the situation of more CO2 in the atmosphere than may be healthy, this isn't going to be much help if any. Nor will it add to the usable energy resources of technological humans.
Basically, interesting technology being spinmeistered into a salvation that it isn't.
As a battery, this is generating energy by oxidizing sodium metal, and removing the reaction products. Obtaining the reduced sodium (ie the metal) takes energy, as you can not mine sodium on earth. So coal, oil must be burned (yeah CO2!!!!) to produce the sodium metal, with the additional release (probably) of chlorine gas (slightly more toxic than CO2). Crank in various chemical and energy inefficiencies, and we are in worse shape faster than before. Nuclear power generated electricity largely removes the initial CO2 emission - but we still haven't beaten anybody up to store nuclear waste since the late 70's. Another non-starter.
If this is coupled with renewable (solar/wind) energy sources during periods of excess power production to produce the sodium metal, maybe we can talk since there is a storable energy component in the hydrogen gas, and a commercially useful product. I am not an engineer, nor able to properly work out the details in this option.
As written and presented, however, I claim pure BS.
It would require a lot more energy than is actually being created. This is a stinking pile of horse poop.
Or we could just use nuclear and take care of all the problems at once doing far less damage to the environment in the process. With nuclear you can cheaply make synthetic fuels to replace gas, diesel and natural gas that renewables can't really do anything about
How can we make synthetic fuel using nuclear plants? At scale to replace gas, diesel and natural gas?
Yes we need to attack the problem in multiple ways. But the evidence is that carbon pricing / taxing (choose your name) can be very effective at improving efficiency and reducing waste - and it's something that can be implemented relatively quickly.
If you have 5 min, this video includes some good reporting of what happened when Australia brought in, and later repealed (for bonkers political reasons), a carbon pricing scheme. And it lists some of tangible changes that it (briefly) made:
https://youtu.be/6fV6eeckxTs?t=371
tl;dr - the kicker around 12m: the companies who were initially opposed it, then asked for it back.
Environmentalist don't like wind turbines or hydro power plants either they kill the wild life. Wind turbines are illegal where I live, for an individual solar isn't always an option, and hydro power isn't an option. Leaving me with no options as an individual though a wind turbine would be a great investment in my area.
You could replace gasoline and diesel easily enough. Carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon production is a fairly well refined process, the product is just not economically competitive with the stuff you pump out of the ground, because it requires energy to produce. The US Navy Research Lab developed a demonstration system that made jet fuel.
Making natural gas is even easier, but you probably wouldn't do that as much because most of the places we use natural gas would be fine using the raw electricity.
Or lower them as homeless refugees from low-lying areas flood your neighborhood.
Right now, nat gas is replacing coal for electricity for many nations. This is true all over, except for china, India, nations that china is installing coal plants into, Eastern Europe, and Germany. Coal plants are very likely too dirty to be used with this, BUT nat gas is pretty much CO*, and this could clean up the CO2 emissions. Of course, many solutions that have popped up have over and over had issues that the authors knew, but choose to not disclose. Hopefully, this is not one of them. For America, we could cut our CO2 emissions by ~11% rather quickly. Globally, it would be at least a 5% or greater drop .
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's not an "either/or" problem.
They can be used together.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Build in sufficient capacity with a non-peaking source like nuclear.
Use excess power production during low-demand times to do things like desalinate seawater and crack CO2 to produce hydrocarbon fuel.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Solar also kills wildlife.
And the land usage involved can create ecological disruption problems.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sodium metal is a byproduct of production of chlorine, used for lots of things. I once worked on a tug-n-barge tasked with disposing of barrels of sodium metal waste way out in the Gulf of Mexico. It was quite a fireworks show! So the cost of sodium metal is already defrayed somewhat.
We have a solution: fast-growing plants buried in non-biodegrading landfills. Or used as construction if wood. Hint: "Running out of landfill space" is leftover 1970s innumeracy, and chemical leeching isn't an issue.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The problem is, simply implementing such gamified carbon trading systems locally are masturbation.
They don't make a huge dent in the problem.
Unless we're talking universal buy-iin from places like Europe, China and India as well, you're pissing into the wind.
The problem is, China and India aren't ever going to actually implement and follow this.
They'll game it at every opportunity. Or just outright ignore it.
We need to concentrate on real-world engineering solutions for this, because you're not simply going to "carrot and stick" 7 billion people.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Dr. Flammond: Do you realize what that could mean to the starving nations of the Earth? Nick Rivers: Wow, they would have enough baking soda to last them forever!
As an individual just putting up panels on my roof isn't feasible unless I want to cut down a bunch of trees and even then it might not be since I live part way up the east side of a hill.
I live in eastern kansas with an average 13.1 mph wind speed for the area though I live between some rolling hills that channel the winds coming off the great plains and get a just little bit better than the average.
Gas isn't replacing coal in China?
Why would anyone take you even remotely seriously?
America needs to cut 50% just to be comparable with EU and China. 11% is barely scratching the surface. Where will you get the other 40% from?
You pulled the 11% number from your ass anyway, like most of your numbers.
China's coal percentage has been dropping for over a decade. Gas is also growing very quickly.
What are you smoking to come up with such idiotic lies? Where can the rest of us get some?
How can we make synthetic fuel using nuclear plants? At scale to replace gas, diesel and natural gas?
Easy, we just have to build a few thousand nukes.
Per country, of course. Bigger countries more, smaller countries less, of course.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This smells of Toyota trying to push their hydrogen fuel cell future.
Propaganda piece. No more.
Find an efficient, carbon neutral way of making hydrogen and I'm in.
Shouldn't the headline read "FREE BAKING SODA!!!"