New Material Can Selectively Capture CO2

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."

Like corn cobs?

[F34nor (321515)]

I wonder if this is similar to the charcoal briquetting technique shown about a year ago with corn cobs and natural gas. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=108390/ [nsf.gov]

Like Zeolite

[StCredZero (169093)]

They are like Zeolites. For mobile applications, they're going to need a lot better than 83X. More like 1000X. This might be useful for stationary applications, however.

Re:

[F34nor (321515)]

Sounds like a poor man's Aerogel! [wikipedia.org] Not that many rich people are rich enough to buy this stuff. Unless they want scraps from United Nuclear. [unitednuclear.com] If you want green Aerogel and not stuff that is decribed as being more dangerous to make than TNT to make you can create some SEAgel [wikipedia.org] buy freeze drying agar. [wikipedia.org]

So how many billions of tons will we need...?

[Joce640k (829181)]

At 83x absorption, how many billions of tons of this will we need per year and how much CO2 will production/transport of same produce?

To me it doesn't sound like much of a solution to anything.

Nuclear power plants, OTOH, there's a technology which could help.

Same with wind power (where practical).

etc.

Re:So how many billions of tons will we need...?

[steeviant (677315)]

Nuclear power plants, OTOH, there's a technology which could help."

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!

I already have a CO2 storage device

[bhodikhan (894485)]

I use another CO2 storage technology in my house already. It's called WOOD. Doesn't have any patents tied to it and the more we plant, cut up and build with, the more CO2 we will remove from the atmosphere. Sure there might be a more high tech solution with a higher yield but planting trees and using them also produces oxygen as well. Nice idea but it's been done before. Way before.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[antifoidulus (807088)]

Didn't you listen to Reagan, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do"

Not listening to Reagan? Friggin' pinkos....

Re:

[thrillseeker (518224)]

So, you think the Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountains have all that haze from the massive car pollution there, vice the ozone-producing isoprene that plants, trees in particular, emit, with plant hydrocarbon emission being at a rate ten times that of all the world's cars?

I suppose listening only to that great bastion of unbiased scientific study, the 4:1 liberal:conservative press, is one option...

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[itsdapead (734413)]

I use another CO2 storage technology in my house already. It's called WOOD.

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.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[Firethorn (177587)]

There's no reason we couldn't have transportation systems that run off local ocean driven power generation for all our costal cities

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.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[MightyYar (622222)]

I once worked at a materials lab that studied how things hold up in a marine environment, and I grew up on the ocean. Nothing lasts very long. Not stainless steel, not titanium, and certainly not any kind of mechanism. Constant maintenance and replacement is required in a marine environment, and this is one of the reasons that tidal power has been so slow in coming.

And this is without getting into big storms, which can wipe out a whole island - let alone some man-made fixture.

Re:

[wall0159 (881759)]

Interestingly, I recently listened to a podcast where an (I think) civil engineer advocated the installation of such generators for (among other things) extra protection from storms! Essentially, his point was that putting up concrete barriers didn't work, because they didn't 'give' whereas turbines, etc, allowed the energy to pass, but dissipated it somewhat.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[wumingzi (67100)]

Dude, you really need to cut back on the hydro, in more ways than one.

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).

Re:

[dubbreak (623656)]

A pyramid is a static structure.

Except for the boobie traps of course..

Re:

[dryeo (100693)]

Pumped hydro is insane. I can't imagine what your power loss is on taking water that you've run downhill and running it uphill again. Almost certainly in excess of 100%. If not, you have a perpetual motion machine on your hands. Go forth!

You don't use hydro to pump the water. In this thread the talk is about tidal power. Tidal power runs all night so you store the power for peak times by pumping water uphill. Wind is sorta the same, doesn't happen when you want it always so when it does get windy you store the power behind a dam for peak need.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[dubl-u (51156)]

But then we wouldn't need this fascist control, where companies and governments are in bed together keeping the power strucuture alive and the resources always in short supply.

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.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[abigor (540274)]

And btw, whenever someone tells me that woodburning is good for the environment, I always have to ask, *whose* environment? Not the environment of the people who have to breathe the surrounding air!

Yeah, good point actually. People are really focused on the greenhouse gas thing and ignore the effects of particulates. If you've ever been to a place that has a lot of wood stoves and not much wind, then you'll know all about bad air quality thanks to wood burning.

Re:

[wytcld (179112)]

bad air quality thanks to wood burning

Not all smoke is bad. Wood smoke is high in antioxidants [usda.gov]. Also, in the US in recent years, the only woodstoves legal for sale are EPA certified, with much lower particulate output [epa.gov] than older stoves and fireplaces.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[Black-Man (198831)]

You'd be shocked on how little smoke is emitted w/ the new wood stoves. I have a Quadra Fire - and when you dampen it down (which is basically how one uses it the majority of the time) there is literally no smoke coming out the chimney. Versus a neighbor w/ a normal fireplace where the smoke plumes can be smelled a mile away. Technology is a good thing.

Re:I already have a CO2 storage device

[itsdapead (734413)]

Uhmmm, *producing* and *transporting* biofuel emits CO2, so it's not really viable as a non-CO2 emitting technology.

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.

Re:

[budgenator (254554)]

Where the new zeolite will come in handy is getting the CO2 concentrated enough for the compressors; the real use of zeolites is to first absorb, then later release. The 64 thousand dollars question isn't how easy it is to get the CO2 into the zeolite, but how easy is it to get the CO2 back out of the zeolite to recharge it for reuse.

Powerplant Modernization

[esconsult1 (203878)]

So I can tell you that these guys with powerplants will take forever to modernize to use this technology. If you have a steady stream of income, and a reason to not go down, then you're gonna hate to do anything to cut into your profits and to also interrupt that stream of income for even a second. Inertia and income are the drivers for these plants to never, ever make any changes to benefit the environment.

Re:

[cunamara (937584)]

That and needing hundreds of liters of these crystals per hour to absorb the CO2 produced by a coal- or natural gas- fired powerplant. USG (United States Gypsum) was working on stuff like this to absorb acids out of smokestack emissions 20+ years ago and determined that, while it could be done, it just wasn't cost-reasonable.

Gasp!

[NetNinja (469346)]

Another use for dilithium crystals!

Great Scott!

Coming Soon...

[fictionpuss (1136565)]

Slurm Extreme.. now with 83 times as much fizz!

Increasing Oxygen content in the atmo!

[Bartab (233395)]

Some ecoterrorist will get ahold of these and soak up all the CO2 in the atmosphere killing us all!

(Probably through a personal and major misunderstanding of biology, not through any actual malicious intent)

And how does it affect the environment?

[bigattichouse (527527)]

So, you spill a few liters of the stuff - what does it do when it gets in contact with living creatures (like algae? birds? small children?) And how long does it take to break down and release all those gases? (That would be useful - like a CO2 tank for plants for long space voyages)... I think there are a lot of questions.

More detailed link Re: . affect ... environment?

[Precipitous (586992)]

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:

Currently, the process of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants involves the use of toxic materials and requires 20 to 30 percent of the plant's energy output, Yaghi said. By contrast, ZIFs can pluck carbon dioxide from other gases that are emitted and can store five times more carbon dioxide than the porous carbon materials that represent the current state-of-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).

full?

[theheadlessrabbit (1022587)]

and what happens when these crystals are full?

Re:full?

[Tranzistors (1180307)]

...thus solving the problem once and for all.

Raises two questions

[Opportunist (166417)]

First, how much CO2 is produced in making those crystals and second, what shall we do with them once they're full? Dump them in some old salt min... no, wait, there's already that radioactive waste.

how much ENERGY does it take to make a crystal?

[victorvodka (597971)]

I hate to be the grumpy old man throwing the wet blanket of thermodynamic skepticism on this fancy new idea, but since these are new crystals, I have to imagine they are not present in nature, and thus take lots of energy to make. Thus, to soak up a lot of CO2 takes a lot of energy - but using lots of energy is why we have CO2 to begin with. All the CO2 sequestration ideas I've read about so far don't make any sense from a macro-ecological perspective, since their use actually drives up energy usage, precisely the opposite of the response we should be making to the problem. "Oh, but we can make the crystals with clean nuclear power!" Really? If that's case, you can just not make the crystals and use that clean power instead! It doesn't take much of a puzzle for even smart people to fall for plans which, at their root, are just perpetual motion machines.

Re:how much ENERGY does it take to make a crystal?

[triskaidekaphile (252815)]

Unless those crystals are going at light speed or they are made from antimatter, we should not be confusing the energy creation cost with the crystals' chemical absorption ability. (It doesn't cost much water to make my sponge, but it sure as heck absorbs a lot of H2O!) Now if someone claims the full crystal could later be taken and converted into fuel that somehow released more energy than the cost of creating the crystal and the CO2 in the first place, then we would indeed be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

betties just aren't attracted

[victorvodka (597971)]

I agree with you, but usually people stop adding up the energy costs of some new technology at some arbitrarily-premature place in the process. For example, once these crystals are soaked with CO2, where do you put them? How toxic are they? (CO2 is acidic and can be toxic when concentrated). How bulky are they? If I was Dictator, I would want to see the complete ledger of energy costs for this before I signed off on it. My guess is that conservation is cheaper, but conservation is always just TOO HARD b

They would fill one room of your house every year

[giafly (926567)]

• 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.

Re:

[RembrandtX (240864)]

One where the lumber yards obviously think its easier to work with 'metric' wood .. because its easier to multiply with :P

good old brute force science

[Gearoid_Murphy (976819)]

according to the article, they discovered these crystals after processing thousands of compounds, somewhat like the way Edison figured out a stable element for light bulbs, pretty cool stuff, would be even cooler if they could process the captured co2 and seperate it into o2 and carbon.

Re:Solution without a Problem

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

CO2 is a lagging indicator of global warming, not a catalyst for it.

* [Citation Needed]

Re:Solution without a Problem

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

Well, the first article is actually a myth busting entry debunking the theory that the lag associated with the past couple of ice ages somehow proves that CO2 does not cause warming.

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.

Re:

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

It never actually gets around to explaining why these scientists don't think the ice core data throws the link into question.

If you understood the article, it should be pretty obvious that CO2 likely didn't trigger the end of the last few ice ages given that there probably weren't any large releases of CO2 like we're making now. (And before anybody gets any big ideas: Volcanoes aren't the culprit. They release a tiny fraction as much CO2 as humans.) As the article points out, the changes likely were triggered by other factors like changes in the earth's orbit.

If the CO2 didn't trigger the changes, but does participate in a p

Re:Solution without a Problem

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

The answer "because humans are emitting lots of CO2" doesn't cut it. Why aren't the natural causes of the past the causes today?

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.

Re:

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

And yes the amount of Co2 being emitted unnaturally by humans is less then .0001% of the total green house gases. And yes, you heard that correctly, less then 1/1000 or 1 percent of the total greenhouse gases in our atmosphere at any given time.

* [Citation Seriously Needed]

Re:

[Ambitwistor (1041236)]

And yes the amount of Co2 being emitted unnaturally by humans is less then .0001% of the total green house gases. And yes, you heard that correctly, less then 1/1000 or 1 percent of the total greenhouse gases in our atmosphere at any given time.

The most abundant greenhouse gas is water vapor, with an average concentration of about 0.25% by volume, or 2500 ppmv. The amount of CO2 emitted by humans over the last 150 years is about 100 ppmv (280 to 380 ppmv, a ~35% increase). So the ratio is only a factor or 25. (It would be more accurate to compare greenhouse potentials and not straight concentrations.)

However, as I've explained to you in the past, the relative concentration of greenhouse gases is not really the important issue. What matters i

Re:

[sumdumass (711423)]

However, as I've explained to you in the past, the relative concentration of greenhouse gases is not really the important issue. What matters is the change in greenhouse effect above the natural baseline. The natural greenhouse effect is something like 30 degrees C. Anthropogenic CO2 has, so far, added less than 1 C to that. The natural baseline is much larger than the anthropogenic contribution, because there are more natural greenhouse gases than anthropogenic. But the anthropogenic GHGs are still import

Re:Solution without a Problem

[ductonius (705942)]

Spaceflight and oceanographic research. With cheaper rebreathers underwater research will become more affordable. It seems this chemical will absorb more CO2 than regular CO2 scubbers too, and having a scrubber media that isn't reactive to water would be a huge safety factor.

Re:

[Anakron (899671)]

That's 83 liters at STP.
Carbon dioxide weighs in at 1.98 grams/L at STP.
1.98*83 = 164.34 grams

They're absorbing 164.34 grams in 1 liter of the crystals. Definitely underwhelming.

Re:

[Sinbios (852437)]

Well given that 1 mol of gas in STP is 22.4L, 83L of CO2 comes to about 3.7 mol. The molar mass of CO2 is about 44 g/mol (12 + 16 + 16), so 83L comes to about 162.8g. Now I don't know what the density of this crystal is, but it's hard to believe that it's less than 0.1628g/cm^3, at which point the absorption mass ratio is 1:1. So I think it's safe to say that the absorption ratio will be more than 1:1 (that is, more crystal mass is required to capture a significantly smaller mass of gas).

I'm guessing they

Re:

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Not really. They could be as chemically poisonous as plutonium, but still be useful. I mean, we're not talking about sequestering carbon dioxide with this stuff and then making Coke bottles out of it. It'll have to be put somewhere, of course, and that will pose problems. So which is worse? Global warming, or providing long-term storage of chemical residue?

One's opinion on that depends upon where one sits on the issue of global warming, I suppose.

Send it to outer space or turn it into oil

[backslashdot (95548)]

Use clean energy (such as nuclear, or hopefully in under 20 years, fusion) to turn it back into oil, or send it to space. Or dump it in middle of the deserts until we have the clean energy sources to turn it into plastic or something.

Re:Very Good...

[dubl-u (51156)]

Well, you get up to 21 pounds of CO2 from a pound of crude oil - a 21:1 increase in "stuff". This sponge apparently can do a 1:83 reverse, so the whole system appears to be a 21:83 savings in space underground. Why not pump it right back into the ground?

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.