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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...
You needn't wait. Look in the acknowledgments section.
https://www.nature.com/article...
Nobody's going to bury coal. If we can make coal from CO2, we're going to burn it.
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.
"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."
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.
You could literally just flood depleted coal mines with the stuff and leave it.
. . . and what's even more . . . we can hire unemployed coal miners to bury it!
Clearly a win-win on all fronts!
"I used to be a coal miner . . . now I am a coal bury-er!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
No. You need fairly thick air.
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. . . .
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.
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.