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Scientists Turn CO2 'Back Into Coal' In Breakthrough Experiment (independent.co.uk)
"Scientists have managed to turn CO2 from a gas back into solid 'coal'," reports The Independent, "in a breakthrough which could potentially help remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere."
Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru shared their report:
The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, developed a new technique using a liquid metal electrolysis method which efficiently converts CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the authors say their technology offers an alternative pathway for "safely and permanently" removing CO2 from the atmosphere....
RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: "While we can't literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock...." Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.
"A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles," she said. "The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
More coverage from Fast Company, Science magazine, and the CBC.
RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: "While we can't literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock...." Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.
"A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles," she said. "The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
More coverage from Fast Company, Science magazine, and the CBC.
See also Hydrogen production.
You needn't wait. Look in the acknowledgments section.
https://www.nature.com/article...
Converting CO2 into a usable or sequestered state is not a new process. It requires a very large amount of energy, but is essentially 100 year old technology. To suggest it "doesn't work" is incorrect, it "works" perfectly fine and has for decades. The basic chemistry goes back before the 20th century, and biology has obviously done this for a very long time. The problem is that none of this is economical. Economical carbon dioxide reduction would be a huge step toward stabilizing the climate and would make fossil fuels obsolete. This would be true even for high energy density needs like rocket and aviation fuel. (This is a bit of a fantasy, because "economical" is a very hard thing to pin down.)
So far, attempts to lower the cost have failed, and the part that needs the most help is the initial reduction of CO2. There are a lot of approaches to this, including engineering the enzyme RuBisCO (the main way biology reduces CO2), and looking for better chemical catalysts. The big deal with the paper here is demonstration of a better chemical catalyst.
We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
Nope, we passed that point a while ago.
Even if we stop adding CO2 completely we are still in a feedback loop where increasing temperatures means that the oceans won't be able to hold as much CO2 and will keep emitting it.
We need to both stop emitting CO2 and start removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
Photosynthesis does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere, unless the total amount of biomass increases. Or, alternatively, you take the biomass, turn it into charcoal (which is no longer biomass) and then, for example, bury it, or dump it at sea. The advantage with a chemical process for doing this rather than growing trees is that the chemical process is likely not to take up much land.
So trees grow leaves and then drop them and they rot, simplified version. For sequestration, the CO2 needs to be permanently removed, not tied up short term.
Here in BC, the forests are currently releasing about 3 times the CO2 as people, rather then sequestering it. https://www.nationalobserver.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Your numbers add up to more than 100%, and you're forgetting Argon, which, at around 0.9%, is more abundant that CO2. Dry air is typically quoted as having 78% Nitrogen & 21% Oxygen, give or take some hundredths of a percent. Water vapor varies from near 0% in dry cold places to about 3.6% in saturated air near sea level at temperatures around 80F.