New Plastic to Cut CO2 Emissions and Purify Water

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have lots of imagination. After developing plastic as solid as steel, other scientists from in Australia, Korea and in the U.S. have created a plastic which could cut CO2 emissions and purify water. Their new material mimics pores found in plants and is exceptionally efficient. As said one of the lead researchers, 'it can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas.' Now it remains to be seen if commercial companies are interested, either for water desalination or for natural gas processing plants."

Esculation of promises

[EmbeddedJanitor]

"could cut" becomes "to cut". Probably previously in the chain there's a "might cut". No wonder we get so many hyped technologies that never deliver.

Artificial Kidney?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can any medical types address the application of this material to artificial kidneys?

Re:Esculation of promises

[jfengel]

Just wait. This is Slashdot, where there's at least a vague hope of somebody understanding a bit of science. By the time this hits the regular papers it will be "cuts".

Net reduction -vs- Net produced

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be curious if this is a net reduction of CO2 considering the processes of getting oil from oil sands in the ground to final molded plastic CO2 trap. It takes a lot of CO2 to get that oil out of the ground, process it into resin for plastic manufactoring then make the final molded CO2 trap. 4 + 4 - 2 != 0 CO2 Seems like marketing has jumped on the CO2 product marketing band wagon.

Re:'Nah', say industry groups.

[RyanFenton]

If you're implying I lack complete understanding here - you're right. But all that I've seen of filtering plastics have been macroscopic plastic forms that either hold a solution in a shape that maximizes some process (evaporation, condensation), or are otherwise just the container for the real filtering process. The single-piece plastic with inherent filtering properties like a cell wall is what seems new to me.

Ryan Fenton

Re:'Nah', say industry groups.

[tcolberg]

The hope is that the may be the or one of the few steps necessary to making water desalination reasonable on a massive level. For example, the Western States of the US are in constant bickering over limited water rights. This and similar technologies may bring water desalination costs down to a point where such worries about fresh water are unnecessary.

I know a lot of people love to point to conservation, but cities like Los Angeles are already conserving a lot of water. Urban areas in California only use around 10% of fresh water in the state, with agriculture using most of the rest.

purify things other than water

[OrangeTide]

I would like to see a plastic that can purify ethanol, instead of using the extremely inefficient method of boiling to distill the ethanol. All that boiling is one of the big reasons ethanol is impractical in the US. (we don't have the climate for sugarcane)

Then What?

[headhot]

What happens to the plastic membrane after it absorbs the CO2? Does it get recycled? thrown out? Burned?

Re:'Nah', say industry groups.

[BiggerIsBetter]

There is a catch, of course: Plastics are often derived from oil.

separate CO2 from air?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could a variant of this extract CO2 directly from air, by making the pores big enough for O2 and N but not CO2? Probably not scalable to scrubbing global-warming agents from the atmosphere, but might be useful for extracting carbon from air to combine with hydrogen from wind or nuclear, to product synthetic methane or liquid fuel. The alternative is to use carbon from biomass, but that requires harvesting and transportation; pulling it straight out of air would be simpler.

Re:Artificial Kidney?

[Abeydoun]

IICAMS (I am currently a medical student) Unless it has some other interesting characteristic not mentioned, the only potential use I see in dialysis/an artificial kidney would be to increase serum pH. But in someone with renal problems and is likely to be fairly physically inactive, the lungs already do a fairly decent job at regulating high pH by C02 removal. Nonetheless, the lungs' ability to regulate pH is more of a redundancy/tweaking technique to make the system more robust and as such they don't do as good of as job as the kidneys.

For those interested, in the physiology of it, red blood cells carry an enzyme (carbonate anhydrase) that helps establish the equilibrium of

H+ + HCO2- <---> H2CO3 <---carb anhydrase---> H20 + CO2

So by Le Chatelier's principle, if you can actively tweak the concentration pH by actively removing CO2 from the system, driving the equilibrium to the right and decreasing the amount of H2CO3 (and as a result H+) increasing the overall serum pH up.

Re:purify things other than water

[technococcus]

The other big reason ethanol is impractical everywhere is that its lower heating value is less than half that of gasoline. Translation: You have to burn at least twice as much (by weight; more than that by volume) to get the same energy output. Considering the carbon content of a kg of ethanol vs. that of a kg of gasoline, there's absolutely no reason to support such a terrible stopgap. Get on board with gas-electric hybrids, all-electrics, small light diesels (efficiency, go!), and fast-breeder nuclear plants to reduce emissions, please.

Re:Esculation of promises

[rtb61]

It would be more accurate to say that they can make the material in highly complex limited run laboratory setting but they have not yet gone onto developing mass production techniques for creating the plastic film on a large scale.

The current Australian government has shifted CSIRO's focus from working in the interest of all Australian citizens to working in the intrests of corporate profits. Where as before they would immediately have gone on to develop mass production techniques due to the obvious benefit to all Australian citizens and the rest of the world, now, there is just the drive to pass it onto corporate friends of the current administration for high profit exploitation.

So this is the marketing to sell the product on to a selected corporation for some token value, which the citizens of the three countries involved can then buy back at a greatly inflated mark up.

It is likely in the near future Australia will be shifting to nuclear power and using a substantial portion of the energy generated for quite a few desalination plants in the southern half of the country.

Re:'Nah', say industry groups.

[SEE]

It's like sulfur. If you were to commercially mine coal just for the sulfur, you'd lose money competing with other sulfur sources. But scrubbing sulfur from coal smoke to comply with environmental rules extracts the sulfur anyway. The result has been a total collapse of the commercial sulfur-mining industry as power plants try to sell off the huge stockpiles of sulfur they're amassing.

Similarly, high-concentration brine is an excellent source of salt. Other sources of salt are currently economically competitive with and even somewhat superior to extraction from seawater. But the byproduct brine from a commercially viable desalination plant will be much more concentrated; converting that into salt will be much cheaper than direct extraction from seawater. Throw in environmental rules against just dumping the brine, and you wind up with lots of cheap salt replacing other commercial sources.

True, you might wind up with impressive stockpiles of salt after a while (like we have with sulfur), but that's just an open invitation for somebody to develop a productive use for it all. (Gasoline was once just a mostly-useless byproduct of kerosene production . . . ) Fill in the existing salt mines with it, maybe.