Solar-Powered Electrochemical Cell Used To Produce Formic Acid From CO2 133
Zothecula writes Rising atmospheric CO2 levels can generally be tackled in three ways: developing alternative energy sources with lower emissions; carbon capture and storage (CCS); and capturing carbon and repurposing it. Researchers at Princeton University are claiming to have developed a technique that ticks two of these three boxes by using solar power to convert CO2 into formic acid. With power from a commercially available solar panel provided by utility company Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G), researchers in the laboratory of Princeton professor of chemistry Andrew Bocarsly, working with researchers at New Jersey-based start-up Liquid Light Inc., converted CO2 and water to formic acid (HCOOH) in an electrochemical cell.
Efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
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Claimed efficiency is only 2%, using PV panels. It would make more sense to just use the PV panels to replace coal fired plants for generating electricity.
The point is, those solar lights at the dollar store? Yea... Make millions of them, throw them out in the desert, viola, carbon sink. You need to do something more with it beyond the acid, but this is the sort of idea we need to reduce already emitted CO2 after we've stopped creating all the extra.
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The point is, those solar lights at the dollar store? Yea... Make millions of them, throw them out in the desert, viola, carbon sink. You need to do something more with it beyond the acid, but this is the sort of idea we need to reduce already emitted CO2 after we've stopped creating all the extra.
And how much greenhouse gas are you going to add to the atmosphere when you make 'millions' of those 'solar lights'? That manufacturing process had better have a very small carbon footprint if you're going to come out ahead with only a 2% conversion efficiency...
Re:Efficiency (Score:4, Informative)
The point is, those solar lights at the dollar store? Yea... Make millions of them, throw them out in the desert, viola, carbon sink. You need to do something more with it beyond the acid, but this is the sort of idea we need to reduce already emitted CO2 after we've stopped creating all the extra.
Even if we ignore the carbon (and other toxic) footprint of creating and strewing millions of semiconductor devices across the desert, I really think you need to think about what happens to the formic acid. Left to its own devices, formic acid slowly and spontaneously decomposes to water and...carbon monoxide. Which is unpleasant enough by itself (and a greenhouse gas in its own right), but which in turn is slowly oxidized in the atmosphere right back to...carbon dioxide.
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Solar doesn't work at night, but if you can store the solar energy as formic acid, you can burn the formic acid at night, to get a nice 24-hour baseload power source. Unfortunately, at 2%, it's worse than just storing it in lead/sulfate batteries.
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Re:Efficiency (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppose, however, that you could alter the chemistry to get oil? Even at 2% efficiency, we'd be looking at an infinite, carbon-neutral, enviromentally nondestructive alternative to oil shales and tar sands.
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If you're producing plastics, or anything else that doesn't involve burning the fuel and producing CO2, then you're not really contributing to global warming so it's not a particularly urgent problem. Sure there's still some geopolitics involved, but I'd bet good money that we'd care a lot less about the Middle East if we only needed their oil to produce cheap plastic crap rather than to fuel all aspects of our civilization.
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Electrically-powered synthesis of methane from H2O and CO2 already exists, and the process of forming longer hydrocarbons from methane do, too.
It's just a bit too expensive right now (or rather, oil and coal are still too cheap).
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> Electrically-powered synthesis of methane from H2O and CO2 already exists, and the process of forming longer hydrocarbons from methane do, too.
Yep. I think we ought to focus more of our research dollars on making this cheaper.
If we start having more solar/wind than we know what to do with, using excess capacity to build up hydrocarbons is theoretically a great way to store the energy that would play nicely with our existing infrastructure, and would suck carbon out out of the atmosphere (though it'd ge
Ta Da (Score:2)
More here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.... [discovermagazine.com]
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Coal is baseload solar is not a replacement for baseload. The only good renewable replacement for baseload is hydro "the original baseload source of power". Wind is a marginal replacement for baseload but you really need large natural gas peaking plants to back up wind.
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Coal is baseload solar is not a replacement for baseload. The only good renewable replacement for baseload is hydro "the original baseload source of power". Wind is a marginal replacement for baseload but you really need large natural gas peaking plants to back up wind.
That's a false premise. You can build large cisterns that store excess energy by pumping in water, then using that during peak periods to meet demand. It's 100% solar. These could be built on the coast or even slightly in the sea, so there's no shortage of water until we run out of sea water. It also serves to level demand, since all excess demand can always go to the cisterns, even if they're full, since they'd just overflow and form a nice waterfall or similar water feature. The same could be used to stor
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Solar efficiency (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. For the foreseeable future you'll reduce CO2 more by using the panels to displace coal power and even Natural Gas. Only after you've shut ALL of them down and still need to reduce CO2 does this make sense.
Even in ~20 years we'd be better off doing something like use all the retiring EV batteries* to help stabilize the grid and shift solar power to the 7-9 pm peak.
*10 years for EVs to actually reach significant market penetration, 10 years more before people start replacing the batteries in them.
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So basically you're saying that now is the perfect time to be doing this research so that it can possibly reach useful levels by the time fossil fuels have been largely phased out within some jurisdictions? After all even if we shut down all fossil fuel plants today, we'll still have a century or so of elevated CO2 levels and continuing warming if we only rely on natural processes.
On the other hand, this fellow seems to be on to a way to capture atmospheric CO2 much faster and more profitably with nothing
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So basically you're saying that now is the perfect time to be doing this research so that it can possibly reach useful levels by the time fossil fuels have been largely phased out within some jurisdictions?
Depends. I don't mind research, indeed I love it. But research isn't magic; there's a definite 'law of reducing returns' out there in general, especially when we're playing with energy. There are huge numbers of vastly different ways to reduce or sequester CO2.
As for the wolves, very interesting article. I don't think it'll work everywhere, but we can duplicate at least some of it.
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Actually there are - it fluctuates of course, but there is a normal range of fluctuation - ice cores going back over the last million years show fluctuations between about 175 and 275ppm, with the highest peaks occasionally, and very briefly, just breaking 300ppm. At ~400ppm we're currently almost as far beyond the highest historical peaks as the peaks are above the troughs.
But that's neither here nor there - reread that sentence, I was discussing the density of *grazing animals*, not CO2. Since the ecosy
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but the panels need to be replaced after about a decade.
You're using very old information. Current generation solar panels are guaranteed [energyinformative.org] to produce 80% of original power after 25 years. The original 'modern' panel is still working 60 years later, and there are lots of evidence they last at least 30.
Though I agree on the nuclear power. I'd be building at least 300 new reactors if I could. It's just that in my original post I was saying that using solar electricity to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere is stupid, especially at those efficiencies. Note that I sai
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There's no point at removing a small amount of CO2 if you continue to add 10 times the amount somewhere else.
The point is, we may very well reduce our CO2 emissions at some point... then what?
Maybe this tech works out and we force fossil fuel producers to make enough of these gadgets to offset what they're putting out?
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The point (Score:2)
There's no point at removing a small amount of CO2 if you continue to add 10 times the amount somewhere else.
Sure there is. It keeps you from adding 11 times the CO2. Granted you could accomplish more by getting rid of whatever is adding the CO2 but that doesn't make this a futile endeavor. Furthermore if we eventually are going to need CO2 scrubbing technology to survive then we may as well get busy developing it now. This strikes me as the sort of technology we don't want to start thinking about after climate change gets out of hand.
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And then what happens after the sun goes down and we don't have enough storage capacity to run the peak times ? We just fire up more solar... oh wait no sunlight. A well balanced approach is much better, replace some with solar and wind, and also try and scrub out what we can when we can.
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Coal isn't going away unfortunately (Score:2)
On the other hand, if you shut down the coal plant, and use the PV panels to generate the same amount of electricity, you've saved all 10 units.
Except we aren't going to shut down the coal plants any time soon and we do not presently have the ability to use PV panels to replace it. There is NO energy scenario for the next 40 years which does not involve substantial amounts of burning fossil fuels, including coal. Even if we reduce the amount of coal used and thus reduce CO2 emissions, why would we not reduce them further (even if only a little) by other means if those means are economically viable? Your point is valid theoretically but it's a bit
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Re:The point is lacking (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure we can - our current usage is rife with waste. We could easily cut US energy consumption by 50+% simply by wasting less energy, we'd only need to drop per-capita energy usage to levels comparable to such backwards wastelands as the UK and France - and even they've really only taken advantage of the low-hanging fruit so far.
Meanwhile even at current energy consumption levels US per-capita energy consumption is 308 million BTU per year, or 247 kWh per day. At 5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day (a conservative number achievable almost anywhere with low-to-mid-range solar panels) that's only 49.5 meters of panels per person, or 532 square feet. A little high, but not unachievable.
Meanwhile we've recently made some great breakthroughs in solar panel technology, for example discovering that panels made with relatively common and non-toxic magnesium salts can perform on par with our current best-of-breed panels based on gallium arsenide and other extremely rare and toxic elements. Let that hit mainstream and we can cut those panels to 266 sq.ft. Add in European-class efficiency and we'd only need 133 sq.ft. of solar panels per person. Eminently achievable - all we need is decent batteries for daily power buffering and we're set. And advances in virtually "immortal" ultra-high-power liquid metal batteries look quite promising, not to mention businesses like Aquion that are already scaling up production for grid-focused saltwater batteries. And if you happen to live in mountainous areas pumped water gravitational batteries are a moderately mature and inexpensive technology already, if not quite so efficient.
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That's the panel's peak output - what it produces when it's oriented normal to incident sunlight on a cloudless day at noon. e.g. An average
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Whoops, my bad - I was thinking insolation where I live in the Southwest: clear skies and lowish latitude translate to roughly 5 hours of peak solar equivalency per day, and the solar thermal systems which interest me as a tinkerer can easily approach 100% efficiency (1kW/m^2 at peak). At 16% efficiency that's still about 0.8kWh/day, but not nearly as impressive as 5kWh. On the other hand as you get into more overcast areas further from the equator the appeal of solar thermal increases, and high capacity
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Sure we can - our current usage is rife with waste. We could easily cut US energy consumption by 50+% simply by wasting less energy, we'd only need to drop per-capita energy usage to levels comparable to such backwards wastelands as the UK and France
That's not going to happen unless we get rid of electricity
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One huge problem with your calculations is that they work on averages. The world does not work like that. What do you do in winter time when the real output is 10% of the average output and the demand is double the average? To deal with that you would need twenty times your calculated area of PVs.
Also you numbers are way off. You state "5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day". According to this [wikipedia.org] " most efficient mass-produced solar modules have power density values of up to 175 W/m2". So 5000/175 = 28.
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Yeah, fixed the number error in a rely to Solandri - I was thinking insolation in the Southwest, which is indeed ~5kWh, but that's only directly relevant to solar-thermal uses.
I think you badly overestimate the summer-versus-winter variation, though I'll grant you that areas prone to long winter storms might indeed be that bad. But regardless - yes: the biggest problem with solar and wind is variability - the answer is some combination of storage and/or a high-efficiency long range distribution grid. Both
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Take a look at this [fraunhofer.de] real world data from Germany. Take a look at page 10. In July they produced 5.1TWh. In January they produced .35TWh. So in January they produced 7% of what they produced in July. Also notice they overall they produced 29.7TWh with and installed capacity of 35.65Gw. Here is the math 35.65*365*24=312TWh of capacity. 29.7/312= 9.5%. So the actual production was 9.5% of capacity. So using real world data your figures are at least off by an order of magnitude.
A the answer is some combination of storage and/or a high-efficiency long range distribution grid. Both of which are technologies under active development.
You are absolutely correct. The p
1% at 1% (Score:2)
Re:The point (Score:4, Interesting)
We've already got CO2 scrubbing technology that is remarkably effective: photosynthesis in plants. In terms of cost/benefit, this method is by far more efficient than the one talked about in TFA. Plus there are numerous advantageous byproducts, like grains, tomatoes, zucchini, etc.
What we could use is a more effective means of sequestering the carbon in vegetation materials. Charcoal is great for sequestration: chemically inert for thousands of years, and with microscopic structures that promote good soil ecologies, much like coral promotes sea life. Currently most methods of producing charcoal return about 2 parts of carbon to the atmosphere for every part that is potentially sequestered ("potentially" since it needs to be put in soil or water and not in the barbeque).
"Biochar" [wikipedia.org] is the word to google on for more about this form of carbon sequestation.
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It makes a lot of sense. For one, you don't need to store and then release the electricitt. For two, you don't need all the infrastructure upgrades for three, and probably the most important, this is somethingt the government can do without a major backlash from everyone who thinks global warming is nothing but a redistribution scheme designed to take right and wealth from the people while making government unneccesarily more powerful.
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Lol . Someone explain how that is a troll.
Oxygen Toxicity (Score:2, Informative)
Oh yes!!
"Pulmonary and ocular toxicity result from longer exposure to elevated oxygen levels at normal pressure. Symptoms may include disorientation, breathing problems, and vision changes such as myopia. Prolonged exposure to above-normal oxygen partial pressures, or shorter exposures to very high partial pressures, can cause oxidative damage to cell membranes, the collapse of the alveoli in the lungs, retinal detachment, and seizures."
You are also wrong. CO2 levels were approximately equal to today. So
battery charged by tailpipe (Score:3)
so theoretically, we can develop a process to turn harmful emissions (or any emissions) into the same stuff that goes into batteries, which we can use for power?
honestly mind blowing! if I'm reading this right this is cool
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Great... Instead of CO2 we get CO (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you want to convert Carbon Dioxide into Carbon Monoxide?
If not used immediately, Formic acid decomposes into carbon monoxide and water when exposed to air and heat. I wouldn't exactly call this a "game changer" unless the target of it all is to give everyone A) a lot of toilet bowl cleaner for cheap or B) a silent death.
Great... Instead of CO2 we get CO (Score:5, Interesting)
Formic acid can be stored and used in a fuel cell to have a very good solar storage fuel. No need to worry about CO if kept within this fuel cycle.
Related Abstract: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content... [rsc.org]
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Formic acid can be stored and used in a fuel cell to have a very good solar storage fuel. No need to worry about CO if kept within this fuel cycle.
Related Abstract: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content... [rsc.org]
And what is the byproduct of that fuel cell? No, let me guess... a potent greenhouse gas?
I agree that this could be a useful fuel cell if the energy density is high enough, but the net CO2 change in atmosphere is 0. All the CO2 that came out, goes back in.
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Agreed, if your goal is to remove CO2, then using a fuel cell by itself is not a helpful fuel cycle. However, the Fuel Cell based cycle is very promising and can help to improve the viability of remove solar farms where transmission loss is a significant detractor.
I wonder since the output of a fuel cell is pure heated CO2, this output can be fed back directly into the solar input side to further improve efficiency?
Maybe there are other absorption cycle that can be added to the chain after the fuel cell tha
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Because carbon monoxide can be used as fuel and substrate for further synthesis processes.
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Photosynthesis offers the same advantages, without the technology overheads. In addition it offers some nice byproducts, like grains, tomatoes, zucchini, etc.
Using vegetation as feedstock for charcoal production will effectively sequester carbon for tens of thousands of years, if not longer. Additionally, carbon sequestered in this way is a good soil ammendment, that can make poor soils more productive.
Google on href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar">"biochar" for more about this approach.
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Problem with that is, vegetation rots eventually, releasing methane - a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Sure, you can flame it off, but then you're still releasing that captured CO2 back to the atmosphere. Only by increasing the forest footprint of the world, or causing massive algae blooms in the oceans [wikipedia.org] can you really sequester CO2 in vegetation.
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Only by increasing the forest footprint of the world, or causing massive algae blooms in the oceans can you really sequester CO2 in vegetation.
I imagine some sort of GMO supertree that grows as fast as bamboo, for carbon sequestration and a cheap building material.
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There is a notable lack of reading comprehension showing in parent post.
To make the obvious more clear, the vegetation is converted to charcoal. Roughly 30 - 35% of the carbon in the vegetation is sequestered, as charcoal, for tens of thousands of years, so long as it is kept too moist to burn. And to repeat, charcoal granules are an excellent soil amendment promoting better soil ecology and retention of irrigation water.
Google on "biochar" [wikipedia.org] for more about this approach.
Photosynthesis has its disadvantages. (Score:2)
Photosynthesis has a comparatively low efficiency, which will come back to bite you if the space for your application is limited.
Also, only works in a fairly narrow temperature range (if it's 10 degrees below zero, fairly little photosynthetic activity will happen even you have plenty of sunlight). In addition it offers some nice byproducts, like grains, tomatoes, zucchini, etc.
The electricity-to-hydrocarbon route can use space that's unsuited for growing
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I agree with all the points made in parent post, except the one about "comparatively low efficiency".
Conversion of biomass left after harvest of crops to biochar involves pyrolysis which is exothermic and can produce electricity through steam or turbine driven generators. By properly marrying together mature technologies that we have been using for over a century we could be turning agricultural waste directly into electricity WHILE AT THE SAME TIME removing 30% - 50% of the carbon in that biomass from the
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I didn't see where Carbon Monoxide (CO) is mentioned in the articles or the summary of the paper. (The paper itself is more than I can read right now.)
Where is CO involved in this process?
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If you look up the properties of Formic Acid on any Chemistry site and review its compounds and decomposition state you'll see that it dissipates, breaks down, decomposes into Carbon Dioxide and Water.
Actually, here is a link to wikipedia that is actually correct in statement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Otherwise, here is my source:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10... [acs.org]
See the main paragraph below the introduction in the scanned image.
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Correction, Carbon Monoxide and water... Typo.
Given that methane synthesis ... (Score:2)
However, I believe that (electricity and/or heat)+H2O+CO2->some hydrocarbon is going to be the next big thing in the chemical industry. The company or individual that comes up with a practical, inexpensive solution will basically have a license to print money.
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If the goal is to reduce global warming however, methane is a much more powerful warming gas. What I think would be a better use is transformation to calcium carbonate. This would produce cement.
http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
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Re:Given that methane synthesis ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The two dreams are:
- A 3D printer that takes its ink from the atmospheric carbon.
- A solar panel that produces lipids, sugars and proteins.
So... a tree.
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So... a tree.
No, no, no no no no no.... We are too technologically advanced to use common sense and cheap readily available natural processes. We must pour billions of dollars into a self-created industry to develop technologies that are expensive to build and maintain to solve a problem that only exists in computer models mostly based on assumptions and "best guesses". This is because of our scientific superiority over nature. We are smart. This is what smart people do.
Amazing technology (Score:2)
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Indeed! Because before patents nothing useful was ever invented.
The order is as follows:
1 - Fire making. (useless)
2 - Patents.
3 - The wheel.
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Yes, but who owns the patents?
Probably Monsanto...
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bollocks
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Bollocks indeed. Coal mostly consists of the tiny little black spores on the undersides of fern leaves. Over a hundred million years or so, these tough little tarry thingies could collect into a coal seam. After several hundred million years, there could be a usable coal deposit. Sometimes, some of the ancient tree roots are preserved inside the coal. The rest of the forest and ferns rotted - bacteria ate it.
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Trees (and agricultural "waste") can be converted to charcoal through pyrolysis. About 1/3rd of the carbon that was captured by the plants becomes biochar, which is a useful soil ammendment, and which sequesters the carbon for tens of thousands of years. So in effect as good as changing it back into coal (but with nicer side effects, like apples, zucchini, etc).
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While the solar illumination -> biomass conversion is only about 6%, one needs to consider the whole life cycle of the technology.
Trees have a number of difficult to beat efficiencies.
Firstly, they do not require manufacturing (which uses a significant amount of energy and materials). Secondly, they do not require transport to site. They also self replicate which is a huge bonus that other technologies cannot currently compete with. Also, trees produce a variety of highly useful materials. Yes there
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Quite so. Tangentially related, have you seen this talk on reversing desertification? The fellow seems to be on to something, and even if you're mostly growing grasses and meat, if you can drastically increase the biomass in areas where vegetation is currently extremely sparse that's an enormous amount of carbon sequestration potential, in addition to the numerous other environmental and climatological benefits of nurturing a thriving biosphere.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan... [ted.com]
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Once you have your formic acid, bury the Plants,Aphids and Ants and you have sequestered tons of carbon under ground, clearing up the air.
plant some trees (Score:1)
Trees breathe CO2. Problem solved.
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Killface... (Score:3)
Energy is a problem everyone wants solved (Score:3)
But I read this and went HUNH ?
Formic acid isn't used for much of anything except preservatives and antibacterials, and some niche tanning and cleaning uses. It allready has biological means of production (Hint this traps CO2 as well), and this diverts electricity (read energy) from uses where it's already well employed ?
The only renewable environmental thing here is the solar panel and some future research on maybe fuel cells.
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Well pretty sure nobody wants to make the stuff for energy storage. I didn't catch what the efficiency of the solar panel was but 2% final efficiency ? You might as well just hook the panel up to the grid, eat the transmission losses and store the energy in batteries.
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Oh Goody... (Score:1)
Just me or is carbon capture dumb? (Score:2)
It just sounds like nuclear waste programs, capture and store .... sure, but sooner or later you still have to come to grips with the amount of waste whether in raw form or captured form. It just seems like doing something simply for a short term gain, to be seen as doing something. Yet the real problem seems to be the inefficiencies of the processes producing the CO2 in the first place.
It's like flooding in a ship, you don't try to stop the flooding, you seek to slow the flooding to a manageable rate. T
We've created synthetic ants? (Score:2)
Maybe we should just breed more ants.
This myth brought to you by PSE&G (Score:2)
Why the hell would you even mention that? The source of the electricity for an electrochemical proof-of-concept reaction matters not at all - Much less, the company that happened to sell you the solar panel. If the core reaction works, you can prove it just as thoroughly using grid power as you can using Product Placement-powered Greenwashing.
That said, running this reaction fro
law of Problems (Score:2)
Ouch! (Score:2)
Nothing hurts worse than these synthetic bee stings.
Crazy ants! (Score:1)
Crazy ants use formic acid and are impervious to fire ants. Do they get it from CO2? How much CO2 does a crazy ant sequester? If you've never seen a crazy ant they don't bit or sting but they are FAST and they are MANY.
http://www.ibtimes.com/crazy-a... [ibtimes.com]
Just A Thought (Score:2)
Then get some ribs for the 4th, and heat the ribs up with the 'C'? PARTY!!!
I wonder if it is cheaper (Score:2)
Oh please, no carbon storage (Score:2)
Keshe Foundation (Score:2)
Am I the only one that thought of the Keshe Foundation [wikipedia.org] and their claim of solar panels that capture CO2 and CH4? [keshefoundation.org]
Did this startup simply "borrow" the knowledge from the widely-distributed USB stick and claim it as their own?