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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.
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
No sig today...
...of who funded this research and how many lobbyists they have.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
So, now there can be a revision to the song. The Weather Girls could sing It's raining coal. Suddenly they are on the music charts again.
I don't think vehicles are the best application for this proposed supercap, as i doubt it has the same power density as lipo.
But if this "coal" offer a really good power storage per dollar, you could make huge supercaps to help up with solar/wind.
Nobody's going to bury coal. If we can make coal from CO2, we're going to burn it.
1: Simple chemistry/physics states that if you get X amount of energy combusting carbon, it takes X amount of energy to reverse the process; there are no free lunches.
2: Trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is like trying to remove pee from a pool; it's a lot easier to put it in that take it out because of the concentrations (may I remind you that 400 ppm is hideously small).
3: There are already several natural processes that extract CO2 from the atmosphere on a global scale, such as rain and plant life; no human proposal has any hopes of being deployed on a global scale.
If this material could be used to capture carbon at it's source (like smokestacks), I could at least see it as useful to stem the flow of CO2 into the atmosphere; it has no hopes of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
for tax breaks?
http://content.time.com/time/m...
Mostly random stuff.
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.
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
I read through the paper when the article appeared in the firehose.
Yes, this method uses electrochemical decomposition to change CO2 into various forms of carbon. It essentially undoes the action of burning, and for that you have to replace the energy you got out when the carbon was originally burned.
CO2 is very stable and difficult to decompose - typical methods are inefficient. There are metal catalysts such as Cerium that bring the efficiency up nearer to the Faraday limit, but they tend to get oxidized during the process.
The paper talks about dissolving Cerium metal nanoparticles in molten Gallium at largely room temperature and using that as one electrode in electrochemical deposition against CO2 dissolved in dimethylformamide. The by products are carbon "chunks" that float on the surface of the mixture, and the Cerium is not oxidized because the liquid Gallium is an oxygen-free environment.
So to remove CO2 from the atmosphere you would need an awful lot of energy - the equivalent of all the energy we got from burning the CO2 in the first place. Possibly frickin' huge tracts of solar panels in an area that gets a lot of sun and little human use (Sahara desert, Utah salt flats, or similar) could capture CO2 in an automated process.
(For scale: A square of solar panels 20 miles on a side, working automated for about 100 years would be in the ball-park for reducing CO2 levels to pre-industrialized levels. With a lot of unknowns in the estimate.)
An unrelated question: Can anyone point me to a reference that tells how soluble Nitrogen is in dimethylformamide? I wanted to compare this to the solubility of CO2, and couldn't find that info anywhere.
Please post if you either a) have that information, or b) have a link that has it.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019...
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Just make more Cola.
"Mr President, what we have here is a great new coal-based technology. Not only does it involve coal, it actually creates coal in the process. Now, the sooner you sign the bill, the sooner we can start building coal manufacturing plants. Yeah, you heard me. COAL MANUFACTURING PLANTS. How awesome is that? Other presidents settled for mining it, but you will be the president that made coal production a reality."
This is a great solution to "what do we do with captured carbon". Sure, you can inject a ton of CO2 into the ground... but can you do that for a thousand tons.. how about a million, a billion, a trillion? What this does is turn CO2 into something that can easily be stored without the need for special equipment. You could literally just flood depleted coal mines with the stuff and leave it.
The other thing this does is allow us to put a definitive cost on capturing and sequestering CO2. The sane response to this is to begin taxing CO2 output and using the money to fund CO2 capture and sequestration sites.
"B-b-b-but other countries pollute too!" but knowing the monetary cost of the damage they are doing will allow all countries to tax imports based on their originating country. As such, they will either end up paying for the pollution and/or lose to competing eviromentally friendly nations.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I.e. almost never pans out due to cost, scalability and other problems. I do think this is a serious form of scientific misconduct: Misleading the public about what something can actually realistically be expected to do.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
another energy intensive way to break CO2... whoop die do, that's been done in various ways for over a century. This is not a solution to anything. A doable way to keep internal combustion and reduce CO2 emissions is to go to biofuel. Also to seed the ocean to make more plankton, nature does the CO2 to calcium carbonate very well.
So does this mean we can now start manufacturing diamonds out of thin air?
Let's hope it will be "almost none" of this stuff that works in the real world pr we are really, really screwed. I do think these grand claims are scientific misconduct though, because it is essentially lies by misdirection. Not acceptable. I think this should get their funding cancelled and, if repeated, their PhDs removed for grossly damaging the reputation of their field.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Can it efficiently turn coal directly into electricity and CO2? That would acrually be more useful.
But take it one step further and create a diamond from that lump of coal you just created and you just made yourself a gazillionaire.
Caution: Contents under pressure
The best use of this technology might be lower cost carbon-black dye.
227-3517
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
Use any excess generation capacity from renewables and nuclear. Yes nuclear, the power source that has killed fewer people than coal, oil, etc.
Sheesh, the obsession with OAC is growing day by day. I thought you were going to show a solar panel.
Just like the obsession with Palin. Both are a constant source of humor. Like most people on the two political extremes that substitute wishful imaginary thinking for science and engineering.
The normal stoichiometric equation for hydrocarbon combustion is:
CxHy + (x + y/4)O2 --> xCO2 + (y/2)H20.
As you see, you get a significant energy contribution by oxidizing the hydrogen. Graphite can be made to burn, but only with considerable preheating; it does not burn energetically.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why are we trying to stop it?
We aren't.
People are just talking about it, but at the same time, rate of CO2 production is only increasing.
Put a number of nuclear plants in the Nevada desert, right by Yucca mountain, where waste in theory can be stored for a long time. Manufacturer coal, and ship it where needed, while extracting CO2 from the air. Unlike most nuclear plants, where you want near the end user to reduce transmission delay, this would resolve several issues surrounding nuclear power, including the NIMBY problem.
Scientists Turn CO2 'Back Into Coal'
Trump's new National Security climate council head William Happer has long said increased CO2 is "good for humans and the planet" and would like to have more CO2 *but* Trump's new EPA head Andrew Wheeler is a former coal lobbyist and would like to have more coal.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
How about turning CO2 to carbon fiber, or to a carbon-based material that can replace cement? Then this process would not only remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but also create a valuable material that could replace other environmentally costly materials (such as cement).
When I was a kid, we had three major TV networks in the U.S. with well respected news services, radio, and news magazines like Time and Newsweek. Technical geeky stuff was in professional or industry journals that you could read at the library if you were so inclined. Now, we have personal and network technologies that allow anyone to be their own self appointed news outlet. For a moment, discount the fraud and fake news, hostile state actors and propaganda, and any other self serving self interest group that abuses the internet for stupid or evil purposes. Instead, just think about those channels or outlets that aspire to be honest outlets for legitimate even if trivial news. There are so many that the capacity exceeds supply. Radio, TV, print news, and internet blogs cannot permit "dead air", so you go to press with whatever nonsense you can muster up on a slow news day.
The consequence is that non-technical non-professional general interest sites for public consumption are "reporting" on anything they can get their hands on, with what seems to be juvenile "uncooked" editorial oversight. Stories like this one would never have made it to public reporting in the past. The chemistry that the authors did is wonderful (follow the second link in the post), and it adds to a body of knowledge, but so what? For anyone interested in an "efficient" catalysis of CO2 -> C + O2, they know where to look up this kind of research. But the reason it got reported on (the first link) is solely because CO2 and the environment are hot topics, not because of the inherent value or game changing nature of that research.
As evidenced by the posts so far, everyone here on Slashdot immediately recognized that this would be untenable for large scale CO2 sequestration - it uses too much energy, spending two bucks to make one so to speak. This chemistry could be useful for instance in some sort of closed circuit biological respiratory gas system, such as on space stations or on the moon where abundant sunlight could power the process on more modest scales. However, the public media reporting implies that here is a potential solution to global warming and greenhouse gas effects. It is foolish reporting. It provides scant (none) of technical information for people who know enough to ask. It does not use it as a jump off point for insightful discussions about realistic versus pie-in-the-sky versus miss-the-mark technologies. It just gives public notice of a paper they found in a technical journal, the reporting written at a 3rd grade level with a comprehension level below that. It is a sorry excuse for legitimate reporting, it assumes that the readership is dumb, it betrays that the reporters and editors (if we dare call them that) are even dumber, and that writing infantile gibberish is a form of prostitution to make money by selling ads no matter how bad the report or the product advertised.
The researchers' paper is good, and they do not make arrogant or preposterous claims, focusing mainly on the chemistry and potential use of the generated carbon to be used as capacitors. To me, it seems to serve no purpose or bring any value to society for The Independent to write about this in a context other than what the researchers intended. Reporting on STEM subjects ought to respect the material, the spirit of knowledge and academia, the intellect of the scientists, and especially the intellect of the public that wants to read about it, rather than turning out drivel of no more scholarly or literary value than a kindergarten Valentine's card.
If you bury it in the ground will it turn back into dinosaurs?
Yea yea I know. Ferns and moss. But a guy's gotta dream a little.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
You're insane. A synthetic way to store energy in carbon bonds that uses CO2 is the holy grail of battery technology. There is quite literally no other (useful) storage medium with higher energy density, other than nuclear or antimatter.
You did not read the story. They _cannot_ store energy like a battery. They can just make coal. This is also not really the great breakthrough the story claims. For liquid hydrocarbons, this already works and prototype installations are running.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From where I sit (not in USA), Palin is extreme, no doubt, but OAC is one of the few American politicians that is not a nutjob.
You are a victim of false equivalence if you equate the two.
Doesn't achieve the same end, because the fine particles don't return from the atmosphere+surface to the depths of the Earth. Not easier to 'handle and export' because it needs bins and load/unload instead of flowing in pipes. 'The grid' is in continuous re-tooling, either way. Burning H2 makes rain, burning C makes acid rain. Acidification of oceans is not a negligible problem. There aren't a lot of brand- new coal plants, the old 'uns can retire when it's time. Now, for instance. Very little sanity checking was done before Anonymous Coward hit his 'submit' button.
This is why you can't get a date.
Das schwarze Gold ist weiß geworden
Man nehme eine einfache Rezeptur
Und aus Koks wird wieder Kohle