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New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:27 AM
from the who-needs-plants-anyway dept.
from the who-needs-plants-anyway dept.
Socguy brings us a story from CBC News about a recently developed crystal that can soak up carbon dioxide gas "like a sponge." Chemists from UCLA believe that the crystals will become a cheap, stable method to absorb emissions at power plants. We discussed a prototype for another CO2 extraction device last year. Quoting:
"'The technical challenge of selectively removing carbon dioxide has been overcome,' said UCLA chemistry professor Omar Yaghi in a statement. The porous structures can be heated to high temperatures without decomposing and can be boiled in water or solvents for a week and remain stable, making them suitable for use in hot, energy-producing environments like power plants. The highly porous crystals also had what the researchers called 'extraordinary capacity for storing CO2': one litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2."
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First Successful Demonstration of CO2 Capture Technology 521 comments
An anonymous coward writes "Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT), a technology research and development company, and Klaus Lackner from Columbia University have achieved the
successful demonstration of a bold new technology to capture carbon from the air. The "air extraction" prototype has successfully demonstrated that indeed carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured from the atmosphere. This is GRT's first step toward a commercially viable air capture device."
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New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2
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Like corn cobs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So how many billions of tons will we need...? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, that's the mentally balanced answer!
After all there's nothing more benign a powerplant that outputs high-level "spent" nuclear waste that we have nowhere in the world to store, and is going to remain "hot" for at least another hundred thousand years, not to mention the radioactive contamination left behind when they finally close down, that sees their former site uninhabitable for about the same time as the aforementioned waste.
As for those trifling concerns about how such reactors safely contain and process the constant stream of radioactive steam and water created during their operation, all the aforementioned concerns rightly pale by comparison to the proven unquestionably armageddon-like catastrophic effects of carbon dioxide and smoke particles escaping into the environment.
And if there's one thing we can be unquestionably certain of, it's that absolutely no carbon whatsoever is released into the environment during the extracting, (re)processing, transporting and safe-storage of all that radioactive material. I mean, imagine the dirty bomb they could create if Al Qaeda got their hands on some coal or oil.
Oh please! Won't somebody think of the environment!
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I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:4, Funny)
Not listening to Reagan? Friggin' pinkos....
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully sourced from any trees which were cut down to make space for your house...?
But seriously, the other neat trick is that even if you cut down the wood and burn it for power, you're only putting back the CO2 which the tree took out - not releasing carbon that has been safely out of the equation for millions of years.
Sadly, though, it looks like the idea of biofuels is going to get discredited by the lamebrained alcohol-from-corn debacle.
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Interesting)
Only if you use coal and oil as the power source for producing and transporting it!
Honestly, this one gets trotted out so often that you'd think there was some sort of thermodynamic paradox behind using a biofuel-powered tractor (or solar-powered or hydrogen-powered - or even a fricking horse provided it was fitted with a fart afterburner to kill the methane) to harvest your biofuel.
The problem is the half-baked rush to promote a uniquely expensive and inefficent biofuel (corn alcohol) without first building the infrastructure or ensuring sustainable supplies.
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite a few reasons actually, for one tidal power generation systems haven't been perfected yet.
and make local personal transportation free of charge and free of pollution.
Free of pollution? Maybe so, but certainly NOT free of charge - you'd end up paying for it somehow, whether it's a per ride charge or a subscription service or out of your taxes depends, but just like 'free' healthcare in nations with nationalized healthcare services, you still end up paying for it.
Resources have pretty much always been in 'short supply', it's just that as we gain methods to extract more resources, so doesn't our desires to do stuff to exploit them.
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Informative)
And this is without getting into big storms, which can wipe out a whole island - let alone some man-made fixture.
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:5, Informative)
A pyramid is a static structure. All it has to do is sit year after year.
A power-generating station is full of moving parts. Things with moving parts break down over time. You may want to look at this handy informational link [usbr.gov] which shows maintenance over time on our local power plant. (since it's run by falling water, it provides some of the world's cheapest power, regardless)
When you start talking about tidal power, you are talking about putting devices which sit in salt water day after day. Go find someone who owns a boat. ANY boat, large, small, freighter or dinghy and talk about this idea of "set it and forget it". Watch as peals of laughter come rolling from their mouth. Boat owners in this part of the world (US Pacific Northwest) will pay a substantial rental premium to moor their boats in fresh water because it saves so much money on maintenance.
Finally, remember that electricity is like no other commodity on earth. You can not store it for a rainy day. You use it when it's generated, or not at all. Even fish (our other highly perishable commodity) can be canned or packed in salt. Good luck doing that with electricity.
Yes, oil gets some subsidies. Yes, euphemistically named "energy companies" almost certainly throw their weight around to discourage development of alternative energy sources. These are fairly small market-distorting effects which reinforce (but do not change) an underlying fact: historically, petroleum has been the cheapest and most flexible means of generating energy. While we get spoiled in this part of the world by abundant hydropower, there are some fairly serious environmental consequences (check out our vanishing salmon runs!) and hydro is a one-off. Once you've dammed the river, you're done. You can't scale this solution forever.
While more needs to be done with alternative energy sources, there seems to be this meme running around that there is cheap power floating around which is being withheld from the people by "The Man". Standing in the way of that cheap power in reality is not some gigantic conspiracy, but some really tough unsolved engineering problems (i.e. how do you store enough energy to power a city for when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow? A big pile of batteries doesn't really work).
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Re:I already have a CO2 storage device (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally. Why, I hear that those bastards have suppressed some sort of globe-spanning communication network that would have allowed the populace access to vast amounts of information about every subject under the sun. Billions of pages, all at your fingertips, from a simple device in your home. Obviously, it would have made it much harder for them to control us. So those fascist parasites killed it.
Oh, wait. No, actually, the government funded the initial development of the Internet, and corporations funded a lot of the subsequent development and most of the rollout. Hmmm. I wonder if your world-view could do with a little expansion.
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Powerplant Modernization (Score:5, Insightful)
Gasp! (Score:5, Funny)
Great Scott!
Coming Soon... (Score:3, Funny)
Increasing Oxygen content in the atmo! (Score:2)
(Probably through a personal and major misunderstanding of biology, not through any actual malicious intent)
other uses (Score:2, Interesting)
And how does it affect the environment? (Score:5, Interesting)
More detailed link Re: . affect ... environment? (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt that long term studies have been completed. It doesn't seem like ZIFs are extremely new, this process for creating them and this particular variation are new. That said, several other sources provide better information than the CBC link and speak directly to your question. The CBC article states in first paragraph: "the crystals are non-toxic and would require little extra energy from a power plant."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214144344.htm/ [sciencedaily.com] Suggests that this looks much cleaner than existing state of the art:
Yaghi's initial idea of what to do with the material afterwards appears to involve geologic storage.
It's also always useful to hunt down the primary source. I think this PDF [ucla.edu] is it (I only skimmed).
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full? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:full? (Score:4, Funny)
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So when's the IPO? (Score:2)
Solution without a Problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Solution without a Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
* [Citation Needed]
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Re:Solution without a Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The second website looks to me like a highly biased collection of cargo cult science put together by people who specialize in fields like economics, not climatology.
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Re:Solution without a Problem (Score:4, Informative)
They still are. But you, like so many others, seem to be completely ignorant of the concept of rate of change. Humans are changing the CO2 levels orders of magnitude faster than natural factors have in the past, so those effects get lost in the noise.
So "humans are emitting lots of CO2" does cut it.
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Re:Solution without a Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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Raises two questions (Score:4, Interesting)
Measuring a gas in litres? (Score:1, Informative)
Very Good... (Score:1)
Re:Very Good... (Score:5, Informative)
That is so wrong that I am forced to suspend your Slashdot license.
First, that page page doesn't say "pound of crude oil"; it says "gallon". That's like 7.5 pounds of oil. So that's a 3x increase in stuff. (Which some would call "mass".) Then these crystals do 1:83 in volume, but more like 10:11 in mass. So to get rid of your pound of crude oil, you'd need about 30 pounds of these crystals.
Please go study Dimensional Analysis [tamu.edu] (aka the unit-factor method or the factor-label method). Once you have mastered that, you will be permitted to post on science-y topics again.
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How Much CO2... (Score:1)
only 1 thing (Score:1)
how much ENERGY does it take to make a crystal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:how much ENERGY does it take to make a crystal? (Score:4, Interesting)
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use as a fertilizer? (Score:1)
They would fill one room of your house every year (Score:5, Informative)
- The average US household produces 7.5 tons [whatsmyco2.com] of CO2 equivalents per year.
- The density of C02 is 1.799 kg/m3 [answers.com]
- So the average US household produces about 7.5*1000/1.799 m3 of CO2 = 4,169 m3 = 4,169,000 litres
- One litre of the crystals could store about 83 litres of CO2.
- So per family requires 4,169,000/83 = 50,228 litres of crystals per year
- I guestimate the average house (of say 10 rooms) has a floorspace of about 1500 ft2 = 150 m2, with each room being 10 ft or 3 m high,
- So the average house is 450 m3 = 450,000 litres, split between 10 rooms.
These crystals would about fill one room of every house every year, floor-to-ceiling.As about half the other commentators have already said, this does not allow for the financial and environmental costs of producing these crystals.
They might even cost more CO2 to produce than they store.
What to do with all those saturated crystals? (Score:2)
"But..."
"ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!"
If we take it out of the air... (Score:2)
Please explain the math (Score:2)
From the original article at UCLA [ucla.edu] "synthesized 25 ZIF crystal structures and demonstrated that three of them have high selectivity for capturing carbon dioxide (ZIF-68, ZIF-69, ZIF-70)."
Would someone please tell me how we extrapolate the CO2 capture from 3 crystal structures to an entire liter of crystals and can accurately predict an 83-to-1 capture ratio? The math is never that simple in real applications.
Trees? (Score:1, Funny)
Selection (Score:1)
New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2
What if it goes on strike and chooses not to capture CO2?
good old brute force science (Score:4, Insightful)
The next nuclear waste (Score:2)
The usual common-sense solutions like dropping it into a deep ocean subduction zone where they'll be folded into the earth's core will make a whole lot of sense, but the same irrational arguments against dropping nuke waste in there will still apply.
It's better than you think (Score:2)
The point is that you can capture the CO2 and then perform some treatment on the crystals (perhaps heating or reducing the surrounding air pressure) to re-extract the CO2--much like soaking up water in a sponge then squeezing it to get the water back out. In that light, it becomes a bit more interesting since now you have the possibility of extracting carbon dioxide selectively and putting it somewhere else with a relatively small quantity of the crystals. This brings a new issue: what, exactly, do you do with this huge volume of stored CO2?
They say they can tailor this to specific molecules. Right now, some of the worst pollutants coming out of coal and oil burning devices are your sulfur and nitrogen oxides. By modifying the crystals to selectively extract these you could cost-effectively reduce these serious but trace pollutants from your exhaust, or even selectively filter them from air entering buildings through intakes and reasonably. All you'd have to do is periodically cycle your crystals into a regeneration system as described above and run the extracted gas through a catalyst.
~Ben
hmmm; what about the O2? (Score:2)
CO2 - C + O2 conversion? (Score:2)
Biochar works better AND fertilizes the soil (Score:1)
Basically we take agricultural waste, cook it up into synfuel that can maybe run the agricultural sector (not much more... I doubt the fuel volumes will even run farming, but it's worth a try) and then use the charcoal granules to fertilize the soil. The charcoal encourages fungi to grow, and this in turn draws more Co2 out of the air than the charcoal!
It's win win win.
See the ABC's Catalyst or google Biochar for more.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s2012892.htm/ [abc.net.au] Rather than waste money on this crystals thing don't we need to fund our farmers with fuel and fertilizer as peak oil becomes fundamentally frantic? (Woah, need some sleep.)
Good, No CO2 (Score:1)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=US+Code+Title+50+CH+32+Section+1520a&btnG=Search [google.com]
Maybe carbon should be released? (Score:1)
Maybe we should be freeing carbon? Maybe what we have been doing is actually turning the clock back to more lush and life-sustaining Earth? (With a reduced landmass......true...)
The porous structures can be heated to high temper (Score:1)
Also what is this "new material", and how much energy is required to produce it?
Might it not be better/more efficient to use a process that separates carbon from oxygen?
All kinds of clever fiddly approaches cropping up (Score:1)
i had to say it (Score:1)
Is this the first step towards ST?
Re:Carbon Sequestering (Score:1)
You're obviously a shill for the toilet companies, with plans to sell a 100 meter tall super-toilet to each and every power plant...
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