First Successful Demonstration of CO2 Capture Technology 521
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."
Uh... (Score:5, Funny)
And couldn't we sequester CO2 from the atmosphere by converting trees into an inert substance--such as paper--then burying it into landfills?
I mean--couldn't we get a 'win/win' here by simply outlawing the recycling of paper?
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, by outlawing the recycling of paper, you'll reduce the number of trees that are still alive, and eventually wipe out all the trees in the world, and thus, contribute MORE to global warming than minimizing its effect on the planet.
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Also recycling paper is a load of crap, it adds to polution by needing all sorts of nasty chemicals to bleach the paper so it can be re-used, not to mention all the petrolum needed to cart stuff from peoples homes to recyling centres, here they use multiple trucks, one for waste one for recycling.
It costs the US$8bill a yr in subsidies to pay for recycling and clea
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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*ahem*
I mean, maybe we should just design trees that DO do that.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Funny)
Trees that grow high into the sky. Trees that grow so big we can build cities in their overlapping branches.
Trees my friends that bear bounties fruits and sustenance for all mankind alike?
Trees so beautiful they would make a grown man weep in awe.
And these trees I sayeth, they shall become our new friend. Our new master. Our new servant.
All hail our new genetically modified tree overlords.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the plan is actually to stick this stuff in barrels and bury it?
Here in Canada, we've been hearing a lot about how the Conservatives plan to focus on capturing and sequestering carbon instead of actually reducing emissions, and living up to our Kyoto obligations. I think it might be a tiny bit shortsighted to think we can continue pumping this crap into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates, then capture it and stick it underground along with the nuclear waste and other garbage that we bury.
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Yeah, that's pretty much the idea. After a century of intense oil extraction at great expense and effort, we end up putting it back. The crowning irony would be if the most efficient manner of underground storage was as oil.
It would make things a lot easier in t
Confusion (Score:3, Insightful)
You're confusing weather forecasts with climate prediction. They're two very different things.
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(In Canada anyway) Not in barrels, but diffused through stable geological formations. And the CO2 that they're planning to capture is that generated by the oil and/or electricity production process, not from free air.
Sure the capacity of the geological formations is limited, but so is the amount of oil or coal that can be recovered from any particular place. While I agree that carbon sequestration have long-term sustainability issues,
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Speaking of electricity generation... Where does Alberta get off burning coal to product electricity with B.C. and Manitoba very close neighbours who produce more hydro electricity than than they can possibly use? That would be a great start if they just bought our excess hydro instead of burning fossil fuels. But they won't do that because coal is probably cheaper for the
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Funny)
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So the plan is actually to stick this stuff in barrels and bury it?
Here in Norway there has been a lot of talk about CO2 capturing technologies, especially a process using amines to bind the carbon. This is because we are running out of waterfalls to pipe into turbines, and some people want to build gas turbines to cover the energy deficit. The drawback is of course the CO2 emissions, and there are plans to capture this and use it as pressure support so as to extract more oil and natural gas from the oil fields in the North Sea. They way they want to do this is to pump i
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That's long term thinking. Won't somebody think of the ant children?
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This requires way too much energy to do.
Don't be ignorant. This is precisely what is being proposed. It is even being done in some places.
T
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Well, Giant Redwood [wikipedia.org], amongst others [wikipedia.org], has bark is that is (from the link) "fibrous, furrowed, and may be 60 cm (2 ft) thick at the base of the columnar trunk. It provides significant fire protection for the trees".
From the 2nd link "The thick, tannin-rich bark, combined with foliage that starts high above the ground provides good protection from both fire and insect damage".
Oh well. I suppose they might rot.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests, eg: Indonesia, Malaysia, S.America and even here in Australia. Some wealthy countries replant and/or carefully manage the natural regrowth, most just hack it down leaving large areas of barren hills. In Australia we plant non-native pine trees for timber resulting in vast areas of land covered with a pine tree monoculture that is largely devoid of any other lifeforms (even the bugs refuse to live in those forests).
Speaking of cost, how much do you think it costs to cut a ton of timber, turn it into chips, ship it from Australia to Japan and then turn it into paper that is shipped all over the planet. I will wager those costs are far more than the cost of an extra garbage run to collect a ton of used paper that is ready for pulping. Having worked at a sawmill many moons ago the waste timber that was chipped on site was collected by a truck and driven ~200miles to a sea port.
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We replant native species here and the forest area in the country has not changed in twenty years despite a thriving forestry industry.
Seriously, do you think any fancy process that involves heating things to 900 degrees that we come up with is going to be more efficient at absorbing carbon than a forest? A GROWING forest since a
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Informative)
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You can find referenced, peer-reviewed evidence below. However, it gets a little technical, and I honestly find it a little hard to follow since I'm unfamiliar with the terminology and acronyms. If you want anything more thorough than this, you'll have to l
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Again, I don't know where that carbon goes, but research seems to indicate that the carbon-absorption of old-growth forests may never really drop to totally insignificant levels. However, I'll grant that at some point, it would be more efficient to cut the trees down and and plant new ones, taking the short-term hit to CO2 absorption. However, the ideal time to chop down the trees (in terms of ecosystem carbon absorption) is much later than what intuition would suggest based on the growing cycle of the trees -- I would assume "mature" trees are past peak growth (or else we wouldn't use that term to describe them), and yet that is when the ecosystem is doing the most carbon storing. Based on the numbers given earlier, I would estimate those trees should be cut down no earlier than 150 years after planting, maybe closer to 200. I don't have enough data to calculate the actual optimal age, but I don't expect to be too far off.
I more-or-less agree with you in principal, but there must be better ways to store carbon than growing trees and throwing them in the ocean (where they'll still rot and release carbon unless we do something to seal them up). If tree stands did most of their carbon storing in the first 20-50 years of their life, then it would be a much better idea. But the reality is that it takes a long time (50-100 years, according to one of the linked papers) just to break even from planting new trees, much less to have a significant net carbon store. Maybe there are better trees for doing this, but I still bet we can come up with something (in terms of carbon capture technology) that would be better than those trees.
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Maybe they don't like the smell of cheap disinfectant.
No, not so much (Score:5, Informative)
Old, large trees of the hardwood variety are much more valuable for construction and thus you see them used there. No point in using an expensive tree for paper when a cheap one does quite well.
That's not to say there's no reason to recycle, but please let's not spread BS about paper production. It is not people sneaking in to the rain forest and cutting down huge, thousand year old trees. It's tree farms in the US growing some scraggly pine and pulping that.
Re:No, not so much (Score:5, Interesting)
If you look at my post I was not attacking US forestry, as I said most wealthy countries look after whatever they have left. But lets not kid ourselves that the bulk of the worlds woodchips come from from wealthy countries. High quality hardwood chips from the places I mentioned are extremely cheap when compared to what the original resource is really worth.
"It is not people sneaking in to the rain forest and cutting down huge, thousand year old trees"
Not sure about 1kyrs but the mill I worked at (early 80's) used 350yro mountain ash (Australian version is a huge tree) for house frames and bridge timber, the substantial amount of waste was chipped, the "hearts" are full of red dirt and are burned. The area is now a national park but the practice continues in other areas. Even in the eighties that was small scale and highly regulated compared to the modern day practices in the other places I mentioned, look it up - these people aren't "sneaking" they are large companies with the type of political clout the *IAA has wet dreams over.
And if bulldozing eveything in sight is not bad enough, take a look at the Shell's practices in Nigeria or Texaco in Ecuador, or any of the countless number of times that western society has shat on it's neighbours veggie garden.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Hardwoods for the most part can be sold as lumber and are more valuable in that form than as paper, even in the poorest countries. Making paper out of oak and maple is financially the equivalent to melting down dimes and reforming them in the shape of nickels. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is not the norm. Paper is generally made from fast-growth wood that doesn't make very valuable lumber, typically pine or other conifers.
What's really interesting is that it requires less total financial outlay, and less energy (discounting solar radiation that would otherwise not be harnessed), to maintain fast-growth pine plantations and make paper from those, versus recycling paper. Of all the things that you can recycle, paper is substantially the least worthwhile, both environmentally and economically. (The most worthwhile is probably glass, but just about any metal is quite worth recycling too. Plastics vary.)
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Paper recycling - shred, treat chemically, reform as paper (which, mind you, would be of a lesser grade than the original)
Plastic recycling - melt, remove impurities, reform as plastic (again, lesser grade)
Glass recycling - melt, reform. I believe impurities would be removed (burned off) during the melting process. I also believe that the streng
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Hi. I own a pine tree farm outside of Cleveland, Texas, and I am here to reply to your assertions.
Hardwood is a piss-poor way to generate pulpwood, because hardwood grows so slowly. The softwood pines, and some of the new varieties of grasses, are much more efficient. The majority of American industrial woodpulp comes from American and Canadian softwoods (although this is changing; see below). We are also seeing the slow rise of an industry around the pulpy grasses.
Not in America [heinzctr.org]. That means that if there is any brazen hacking going on, or urban sprawl, it is balanced by new plantings elsewhere.
While the pine-trees are indeed bred to be "supertrees", their resistance is aimed at diseases and at early competition (i.e. they are bred to grow a tall canopy as fast as possible in order to beat out woody competition). The bugs don't care -- in fact I will think of your statement next time I'm in my monoculture forest swatting (or running from) the hordes of insects. For that matter, part of my land is wettish river bottomland, completely covered in random wild trees, yet the larger critters and the birds seem to prefer the drier pines.
Still, you are right that a pine forest's understory and associated critters are relatively sparse... but that is not due to monoculture; it is true of any pine forest, even the much-vaunted old-growth redwoods in California. This is because pine needles naturally acidify the soil, and most other plants can't tolerate that. It is the pine's own natural anticompetitive practice.
Either way, pines (and other softwoods) are still the fastest way to sequester large amounts of airborn carbon. Your beloved understory vegetation has a fast grow/die/rot cycle which does not permanently sequester any carbon, and which slows down the trees which do. Perhaps you should disentangle your pro-carbon-sequestration argument from your pro-biodiversity argument, because the fastest and most profitable way to sequester airborne carbon is also the least biodiverse. (And if you compromise on "most profitable", then brace yourself for the world's unwillingness to do it.) The reverse is also true: the most biodiverse place in the world is the rainforest, and rainforests have so much rot that they do not consume any net carbon at all. (If you think they do, I'd love to hear an explanation of where they're storing it.)
True enough. Domestic timber production is the answer... and indeed was the answer here in America. We had a great pulp market until the feds, under pressure from Environmentalists, banned logging in national forestlands. That drove a lot of the domestic mills out of business, and when they died, the bottom fell out of the pulp market. Presently, I will be paid $0 for the pulpwood take from this year's thinning. Now what effect do you suppose that will have on
Re:Uh... (Score:4, Informative)
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So by recycling, less trees are cut... and in turn less are planted.
In fact, we have more trees on earth today than we had in 1970. Hell, even more than we have 70 years ago.
Source [gfagrow.org]
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but the paper companies only plant single species fast growing trees. Those can not replace the complex ecosystem in the rain forests.
Mod GP up (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but the paper companies only plant single species fast growing trees.
Exactly, and that's what goes into paper. We're not cutting down the rain forests. Something like 80% of the pulp that goes into paper comes from tree farms. By recycling paper, you're ensuring that less trees get planted. If you want more trees, waste more paper.
It's not hard to understand. Say five of us are living in a closed environment (i.e. earth). All five of us want to eat potatoes. Okay, so we'll plant a five foot wide garden. What if ten of us want potatoes? We'll planet a ten foot wide garden
And for one very simple reason (Score:5, Informative)
If you are going to go to the trouble of shipping rain forest wood over you are going to use it to build something. A tree fetches far more as some nice mahogany tables than it would ground up and made in to newsprint.
For whatever else you might think about companies, they don't waste things just for the fun of it. It all comes down to economics. No company in their right mind is going to waste money on importing expensive wood when cheap wood will do. Especially when rainforests are a touchy topic and doing so brings bad PR.
I really think people who wish to push environmental action would do much better if they got their facts straight and stopped trying to make everything out to be a crisis.
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Some of us think that pollution should be reduced because it sucks to breath pollution. If it helps a spotted owl, then thats good, too. Water should be clean because I drink it. Hunting should be allowed but reg
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right we are burning them, for bigMacs ...
(and the process of modernization and industrialization of previously subsistence populations into a global economic framework. Basically a lot of people became really poor and desperate to make money once neo-liberal policies forced the integration of local economies into the global market. Survival instincts quickly take over and once the race to the bottom takes full swing. Who can make deals with corrupt officials the f
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Modding that post as 5, Informative doesn't make any sense unless it was to illustrate popular misconceptions and propaganda.
Lumber companies, like any other farmers, would prefer to plant in places where the crops will grow and can be harvested for a profit and new crops grown. Rain forests are particularly POOR places to grow trees. The primary reason the U.S. imports so much lumber is because of Clinton-era restrictions on tree harvesting.
The myth of clear-cutting as a lumbering practice is also crazy. Think about it, the infrastructure needed to process and move the crop would have to be continually rebuilt. How many farmers do that? They will rotate the harvest areas as a way to let the soil regenerate but they don't strip the surface and continually move on.
Recycling paper, FWIW, yields a far inferior product in many, many ways. The more paper fibers are handled, the shorter they become. Compare an American corrugated box to one from China or Southern Europe. You'll find the recycled paper does not have the same strength. New fiber must be added or you eventually end up with a useless substance.
The idea that only one species of tree is planted by lumber companies is pure propaganda and incredibly naive. Like any other plant, different types of trees have different types of fibers. Different types of fibers are used to make different types of papers. It would no more be feasible to plant only one type of tree than it would to plant only one type of any other crop because the soil would become depleted. Paper companies are lumber companies. Are all the boards at a lumber store the same type of wood? Of course not.
Lumber companies are farmers. Remember that and use it as a way to filter out the propaganda. You might be interested to learn the opinion of one of the founders of Greenpeace: http://www.corrugatedmachines.com/2007-04-09%20BC
His comment that people should fight the auto and oil industries is more than a little whacked. Imagine what it would be like without plastics and the internal combustion engine. We'd be living the same as people did before the industrial revolution which would be a far shorter lifespan and much, much harder lives...burning coal and wood which genreate far more pollution/energy but that's a whole different topic...
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Modding that post as 5, Informative doesn't make any sense unless it was to illustrate popular misconceptions and propaganda.
Lumber companies, like any other farmers, would prefer to plant in places where the crops will grow and can be harvested for a profit and new crops grown. Rain forests are particularly POOR places to grow trees. The primary reason the U.S. imports so much lumber is because of Clinton-era restrictions on tree harvesting.
The myth of clear-cutting as a lumbering practice is also
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Do a GIS for clear cut [google.com] and you get 2,300,000 pictures.
I live in timber land, and while there are a few who cut responsibly, hardly any corporation does. They do it quick with a bulldozer, and they move on to the next lot. They don't pay attention to stream buffers, they don't pay attention to tree species, and they don't replant in a timely manner.
And while we're at it, where does the illusion that farmers are models of ecology come from? Erosion, topsoil problems, fertilizer and pesticides. They
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You need to re-read the parent first. He's talking about rainforests. How much rainforest does the US have ?
Uh, somewhat no, somewhat yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
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It was my understanding that lumber companies generally plant more trees than they cut down.
I think when you look at it closely, you will find that "more" is a more subtle and complex concept than it first appears to be.
In terms of simple counting, the "tree growing company" and others like it do plant more seedlings than the count of mature trees harvested. So if I pick up four pebbles while a backhoe picks up a single boulder, I'm holding more rock than the backhoe is. Yeah.
In context with air scrubbers, an appropriate kind of "moreness" would be the volume of air swept by needles. In a 10
Oops! (was: Uh...) (Score:3, Informative)
The scrubber volume of a mature 10 acre stand of douglas fir is around 600 acre-feet (not 60). The freshly replanted plot would have scrubber volume of no more than 0.8% of this; its effective scrubbing volume would be less than 0.1% of the mature stand that it replaced.
Apologies about the original figures. They were calculated using pre-coffee wetware, which has a local reputation for being notoriously unreliable.
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Trees that are used to make paper are farmed; that is, trees are planted and harvested in regular cycles on tracts of private land in order to provide the pulp and necessary for making paper.
We don't generally use old-growth trees and slow-growing trees for making pape
HEMP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:HEMP (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sure, hemp may be a great plant to fulfill many of our needs.
However, your plan fails to think of the children, and thus will be doomed to failure.
Why, hemp is sort of like mari-juana. You might as well inject heroin directly into fetuses.
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Kill the sheep (Score:2)
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/ [treesforlife.org.uk]
Bring back wolves.
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Re:Uh... (Score:5, Funny)
From TFA (or we could go to the Stern Report):
"A device with an opening of one square meter can extract about 10 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. If a single device were to measure 10 meters by 10 meters it could extract 1,000 tons each year. On this scale, one million devices would be required to remove one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to the U.K. Treasury's Stern Review on climate change, the world will need to reduce carbon emissions by 11 billion tons by 2025 in order to maintain a concentration of carbon dioxide at twice pre-industrial levels. "
So we need to absorb 11,000,000,000 tonnes per year.
Assume a tree planted today will weigh 50tonnes in 20 years time.
So 1 tree absorbs 50/20 = 2.5tonnes/year.
So we need 11,000,000,000 / 2.5 = 4,400,000,000 or 4 billion trees.
1 tree needs say a square of sides 3 meters, or 9 meters square.
A total land area of 4x9 billion square meters = 36billion square meters = 14,000 square miles, or just over one Belgium in old money.
Seems doable, we don't need Belgium, and the US can chip in a Wales to make up the shortfall.
Re:Uh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes we can.
But instead of trees, use fast-growing plants like switchgrass or elephant grass. Instead of making them into paper you can pyrolize them into a gas with high energy content and charcoal. Burn the gas to make electricity. Bury the charcoal.
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Interesting coincidence (Score:5, Informative)
Some grasses sequester AND give fuel (Score:3, Insightful)
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Get off carbon: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]
New Technology! (Score:4, Funny)
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For about 300 years, we wouldn't have to worry about that carbon.
I always assumed that was the entirety of carbon sequesterization. It pains me to know that I once again underestimated the stupidity of my fellow man.
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But save the seeds and replant those forests. You know, like forestry operations in most developed countries already do (Canada has a thriving forestry industry but the forested area in the country has remained the same for the last twenty years).
Bingo: carbon sequ
Dry ice (Score:2, Interesting)
It comes from AIR. *gasp*. It's also been around for a very long time.
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Re:Dry ice (Score:5, Informative)
No it doesn't. Dry ice is made from commercial CO2, which comes from fossil fuels. In fact, the manufacture of dry ice releases additional CO2 beyond just what ends up as dry ice. The reason is that air is only a few hundred ppm CO2, which is not normally economical to capture and do anything with. Industrially it often comes as a byproduct of ammonia production -- natural gas, CH4, is converted into hydrogen and CO2; the hydrogen is used in making ammonia.
See Carbon Dioxide [wikipedia.org] for details.
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Argon is a valuable inert gass used in welding and manufacturing. Oxygen is valuable in
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It comes from AIR. *gasp*. It's also been around for a very long time.
They do mine it. Dry ice is prepared industrially by reactions of acids with lime or carbonate minerals. It will condense on cold objects but its concentration is only 380 ppm so nobody makes it by distillation from air.
How much coal to power this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Blueprints or it's bullshit!
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The problem with converting CO2 into Oxygen on an industrial scale has always been one of energy. You need to dump in a LOT, whether by photosynt
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*gasp* An environmental use for nuclear power??
Re:How much coal to power this? (Score:5, Funny)
Dibs on the patent! Nobody's ever invented anything that uses solar power to split CO2!
Re:How much coal to power this? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a start... (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume that this is more energy efficient than the usual refrigeration based methods for generating pure CO2. This is a good thing. However, they don't say what they're going to do with the CO2 once they purify it. If you can't answer that question, you haven't solved the sequesteration problem.
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Re:It's a start... (Score:5, Informative)
There's a market for 11 billion tons of CO2?? Even if there were a market for that much CO2, the point of carbon capture isn't to use the carbon in a way that will be re-released into the atmosphere, the point is to store it away [wikipedia.org] for as long of a time as possible (millions of years, preferably).
The very specific problem with burning fossil fuels is that it's liberating carbon dioxide that hasn't been part of the natural carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years... it hasn't been in the atmosphere or part of plants or anything like that... it's been buried underground. By burning the fossil fuels, humans are introducing that carbon back into the atmosphere at a very rapid rate, and the only way to make sure we don't increase the amount CO2 in the atmosphere is to semi-permanently store as much carbon as we're mining from underground in the form of oil.
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Ironically, one of the biggest markets for CO2 is oil extraction: you pump CO2 into a dying well to force out the last of the oil. (Air is unsafe for obvious reasons.) Afterwards you leave the CO2 underground in the same chambers that previously held the oil, so you get sequestration for free. From the press release: For example, the CO2 originating from all those vehicles in Bangkok can be captured in an oil field in Alberta, Canada, where it could be used on
Re:It's a start... (Score:4, Insightful)
Google: "synthesizing hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox
Apparently they've been working on this technology for awhile. I think they were originally planning on using the exhaust gases from a coal plant or something as a source of raw carbon dioxide. But I don't see why you couldn't use this new technology!
http://www.inl.gov/videos/sc/syntrolysis.pdf [inl.gov]
http://www.kpk.gov.pl/images/i7pr/bb295736b8d250f
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/arti
I think this could work. Imagine a facility centered around a nuclear reactor. It draws water from a lake/river, uses what energy is needed to power an array of these atmospheric C02 extractors, and combines them to produce usable fuel! This could change everything. At our current level of technology, we don't have a problem with clean energy. If we had the will power, we could turn off all the coal plants, build a bunch of reactors, and remove that component of global warming overnight (relatively speaking). However, we would still need a source of portable power. A facility like this would be an "instant oil field." Any nation on Earth can become its own Saudi Arabia.
I really hope this CO2 extraction technology proves viable, because if it is, we have on our hands nothing less than the solution to the entire global warming problem.
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1) Burn oil like mad.
2) Using nuclear energy, extract the resulting CO2 from the atmosphere.
3) Using more nuclear energy, synthesize oil out of it.
3) Burn that oil like mad.
The problem is, steps 2 and 3 are incredibly inefficient, which means we'd probably be using five times more nuclear energy than if we simply powered all our activities with nuclear power in the first place.
Without knowing precisely how much energy it takes to sequester a given amount of CO2 in this fashion,
The spice must flow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this idea somewhat concerning. All too often the human race is guilty of doing things because they can, before they learn whether or not they should. I'm all for reducing carbon emissions, but in all honesty, what the hell will we break if we start trying to extract too much carbon from the atmosphere.
Mind you, find a way to quickly and efficiently separate the carbon from the oxygen, install in long range space craft and you suddenly have near limitless air for deep space voyages.
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All too often the human race is guilty of doing things because they can, before they learn whether or not they should.
QFT.
However this is not as bad as blocking the sun with mirrors or other such really really stupid ideas.
I think this is nice little though experiment. Say we *prove* beyond doubt (this is probably imposable) that we didn't cause the warming/cooling and that no matter what we do we going into a really warm/cold period. Would we still see it fit to "install" a planet wide airconditioning system?
You know because the change is natural so we shouldn't change it right? Or is that we just don't really wan
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I agree! The precautionary principle says that you should change with the natural world unless you know it's safe. Historically, atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising slowly for a hundred years or so.
Capture, then split into CO and O? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's some work going on at UC San Diego to use solar power to convert CO2 into CO (carbon monoxide) and O. Apparently, CO is useful in industrial chemical processes like making plastic. There's also some talk of using it as a fuel.
How it Works (Score:5, Informative)
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/oct/climate/?sea
Liquid sodium hydroxide turns to sodium carbonate as it absorbs CO2. Then you percolate it over solid calcium hydroxide and the calcium captures the carbon. Then you heat the calcium carbonate to 900 deg Celsius to get it to release the CO2.
They claim to have developed a new sorbent that isn't as nasty as sodium hydroxide, but none of the articles seem to say what it is.
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Hire the martians! (Score:2)
Don't store it! (Score:2, Funny)
This makes no sense (Score:2)
While this may be true, but it still drains the limited energy supply of the planet.
This seems useful for closed environments (space stations, moonbase alpha, sea lab, etc), but is it more efficient than current methods? It does not compare to current technology, as this may be only valid for larger scale conversion.
Can some provide a useful link? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone provide a link to something that answers the obvious questions:
1. How does it work?
2. How much energy does it take to extract it's 10 tonnes of CO2 per year?
3. How does this compare with refrigeration or plants as a means to reduce CO2 concentration?
4. What is it's likely cost?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
3. How does this compare with refrigeration or plants as a means to reduce CO2 concentration?
Plants die eventually. And when they do, they release the carbon dioxide again - that is why plants and bio-fuel are said to be carbon-neutral
Being able to extract carbon dioxide from the air and store it - for instance, in crevices deep in the ground (just like the oil we are so merrily pumping up!), will actually reduce the levels, though.
However, it would be more efficient and more interesting to apply this technique to power plants. Coal is really cheap, everybody knows that (besides which, there
What about the oxygen? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you start sequestering CO2 on a massive scale, it could work to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere - but at the same time you will permanently remove Oxygen from the atmosphere as well!
Now sure, at 21% there is plenty, but if removing CO2 is the plan, and it's a long term plan, slowly but surely there will be less and less oxygen in the air.
Re:What about the oxygen? (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, the atmosphere is 20.946% oxygen and 0.038% carbon dioxide (by volume). Even if we strip all the carbon out, the overall amount of oxygen nuclei in the atmosphere will remain essentially unchanged.
Obviously removing ALL of the CO2 would be an insanely bad idea; not because we'd be removing oxygen from the atmosphere, but because all the plants would die.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We are changing the atmosphere by raising the concentration of the second most important greenhouse gas by 30%. That's what you were trying to say, right ?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million, while O2 levels are measured in percentage points. The amount of oxygen that may get trapped by such a scheme is minute relative to the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Submarines... (Score:2)
Doesn't that class as prior art?
Isn't this just a re-application of technique known since at least WWII?
making gasoline from CO2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Commercially viable? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that what we should call this is potentially commercially feasable and reserve viability for things that increase economic activity.
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Solar power for what you pay for coal power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)