New 'Game-Changing' Technology Removes 99% of CO2 From the Air (interestingengineering.com) 165
Engineers from the University of Delaware developed a method for effectively capturing 99 percent of carbon dioxide from the air using an electrochemical system powered by hydrogen, a press statement reveals. Interesting Engineering reports: The new system, outlined in a new paper in the journal Nature Energy, was actually born out of a setback in another research project. The team behind the new technology was originally working on hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, a more affordable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells. While working on that technology, the team was faced with a serious obstacle. HEM fuel cells, they found, are very sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air, making it hard for the batteries to function properly.
Fast forward a few years later, and the researchers that once tried to combat the effects of carbon dioxide on HEM fuel cells are now using it to our advantage. "Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, a co-author on the paper. The team leveraged the built-in "self-purging" process seen in HEM fuel cells to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. "It turns out our approach is very effective. We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and right configuration," said study lead and UD Professor Yushan Yan.
Today, the team has a more compact system that is capable of filtering greater quantities of air. According to the researchers, their soda can-sized early prototype device is capable of filtering roughly 10 liters of air per minute and of removing about 98 percent of CO2. What's more, they found that a smaller electrochemical cell measuring 2 inches by 2 inches could be used to continuously remove roughly 99 percent of CO2 found in the air flowing at a rate of approximately two liters per minute. The team's prototype is designed to scrub CO2 out of a vehicle's exhaust, though it could also be used for a number of other applications, including aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines.
Fast forward a few years later, and the researchers that once tried to combat the effects of carbon dioxide on HEM fuel cells are now using it to our advantage. "Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, a co-author on the paper. The team leveraged the built-in "self-purging" process seen in HEM fuel cells to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. "It turns out our approach is very effective. We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and right configuration," said study lead and UD Professor Yushan Yan.
Today, the team has a more compact system that is capable of filtering greater quantities of air. According to the researchers, their soda can-sized early prototype device is capable of filtering roughly 10 liters of air per minute and of removing about 98 percent of CO2. What's more, they found that a smaller electrochemical cell measuring 2 inches by 2 inches could be used to continuously remove roughly 99 percent of CO2 found in the air flowing at a rate of approximately two liters per minute. The team's prototype is designed to scrub CO2 out of a vehicle's exhaust, though it could also be used for a number of other applications, including aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines.
delaware! (Score:2)
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https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-... [redbubble.com]
Blue Hens!
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Re: delaware! (Score:2, Troll)
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Biden came out of Delaware.
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Biden came out of Delaware.
Pedantic nitpick: Biden was a senator from Delaware. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
New 'Game-Changing' Technology Removes 99% of CO2 (Score:2, Insightful)
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Plants could cope just fine.
I hope this scales (Score:5, Informative)
I really hope they're on to something here, but it's way too early to get your hopes up. The soda can sized one filtering 2L of air per minute would require 1,200 of the devices to clean up one 2L engine running at 2,400 RPM. (4 stroke engines only have 1 power stroke on each cylinder every 2 revolutions) And that's a relatively low RPM.
It would need to scale down so a device small enough to put in a car can handle 10,000L of air or so to be practical. I wish them the best of luck and hope they succeed, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Especially since you'd need 3 of these devices to handle normal human breathing (12 breaths per minute @ 0.5L per breath).
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How much coal do you need to burn (Score:2)
to produce the electricity to power one of these things?
I suspect that plants are actually better for CO2 removal as they power themselves. But then you need to bury them somewhere very, very deep.
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I suspect that plants are actually better for CO2 removal as they power themselves. But then you need to bury them somewhere very, very deep.
Plants can be converted to biochar which locks away the carbon safely and stably whilst improving soil to encourage other plant growth. The process also produces energy.
Re: I hope this scales (Score:2)
Re:I hope this scales (Score:5, Insightful)
They call this a breakthrough because of a percentage. The percentage is not important at all. A breakthrough would be in amounts. We need amounts in the order of a gigaton per year.
I wonder how much hydrogen they need btw. Maybe when they scale it up for a car they find out it is easier just to make the car run on hydrogen instead.
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Mod this up (Score:2)
Yes until we find a hydrogen mine the net effect of this tech is MORE CO2, even if some of it is handily concentrated.
Re: I hope this scales (Score:2)
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> The soda can sized one filtering 2L of air per minute
It means I never need to buy a tank refill for my Sodastream again. Since the tank and hoses were $90, I wonder how cheap these could be. No fuss, no muss, they could do $150 easily.
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Complicated calculations? I literally set up the example so that the only calculation was dividing a single number by 2.
The article gives the volume of air that can be processed in a minute. I used the example of an engine the same size as that volume, then picked a reasonably low cruising RPM to figure out how many of the devices would be needed to process that amount of air. The RPM is needed to compare the volume of air processed to volume air produced. It's the most basic, minimally complicated comparis
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You don't inflate and deflate your lungs all the way with every breath.
Perhaps YOU don't. I do.
Bullshit. If you're a human, your lungs behave like a human. Or you're a troll bot, in which case, still bullshit, you don't have lungs.
then picked a reasonably low cruising RPM to figure out how many of the devices would be needed to process that amount of air. ...
And that is much more complicated than simply calculating how much gasoline/diesel the engine burns and how much CO2 that is
Dividing RPM by 2 is not a complicated calculation to anyone who has passed 3rd grade. It covers every 2L engine regardless of fuel consumption or efficiency. If you want to know a different 2L engine at a different RPM, it's still just RPM/2. Not complicated in any, way, shape or form for even barely competent people.
Your calculation also requires knowing the RPM to calcul
Dr. Who (Score:3)
is rolling in his grave. Clearly, this is part of a Sontaran plot to use all of our cars, outfitted with this ATMOS (Atmospheric Omission System) thing, to transform our planet into lush, fertile, breeding grounds. Not for our future alien overlords, because we'll all be dead. Sontar, ha! Sontar, ha!
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But Dr Who never dies, he/she just regenerates for another go, so no grave to roll in, perhaps he/she is rolling in the Tardis?
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I would say the transformation of the show from primetime sci-fi to afterschool romcom could be considered the death of a timelord. I found a wonderful, short video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I recall that the doctor at the end fixed things by burning up all the gas and converting it to carbon dioxide. Some way to save the planet!
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Fortunately, ATMOS runs on Windows 95.
But: thermodynamics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: But: thermodynamics (Score:2)
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You can't gain energy, true. And entropy is complicated, yes. This is limited the same way as Maxwell's Demon is. But if it can slow the rate of CO2 increase, it can buy time to eliminate fossil fuels.
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The potential difference across the cable would cause it to explode and the drag would cause the satellite to crash fairly quickly. You'd not sequester more CO2 than the launch emitted, even if we could build a Space Gun.
I'm leaning more and more to satellites being useful, though. If you launched enough with large solar panels folded up a-la JWT but on a larger scale, you could direct beam the energy to the ground. I've been wary of this, as you'd vaporise anything that touched the beams, but as I age, I b
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The facility will extract the equivalent carbon of 40 million trees annually.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to maintain the 40 million trees? It really seems like there's a more reliable technology available that builds itself, and requires no electricity whatsoever.
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It can indeed "save us from global warming", if the energy used to produce hydrogen is carbon-free. Time to build a bunch of nuclear plants to oversupply energy and use the surplus for carbon removal?
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Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics are really harsh, so it may be a “breakthrough” but it is not going to save us from global warming.
Thermodynamics tell us that extracting CO2 from the air can never be better than not putting it there in the first place. You can not gain more usable energy by producing CO2 in a process and then capturing it, than by doing it in one process.
Furthermore, the step of diluting CO2 in the atmosphere “spoils” energy: undoing that dilution necessarily makes any concentration step use even more energy. Or produce even more waste. Or both.
Fortunately thermodynamics doesn't really apply to this problem.
The energy gain from burning fossil fuels doesn't come from putting CO2 into the atmosphere, it comes from the process of breaking down complex hydrocarbons into simpler chemicals such as CO2 (and H2O). Those chemicals just end up in the air as a byproduct of the reaction.
Capturing the CO2 from the air doesn't present a "thermodynamics problem" any more than a thin cloth absorbing steam from the air would.
Now if you tried to use that CO2 and H2
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Yes and no?
Sure it takes energy to remove CO2 from the air.
And it takes energy to generate H2 required to remove CO2.
However, the energy required to generate H2 does not have to come from a CO2-generating source of energy. Even if unfortunately, as of today: industrial H2 production is mainly from steam reforming of natural gas, oil reforming, or coal gasification. Who knows, maybe there is a way to generate H2 differently?
Has potential, if larger. (Score:2)
Re: Has potential, if larger. (Score:2)
Here is the paper's abstract (Score:5, Informative)
This is just another fact-thin piece on Slashdot based on a Press Release...
The Abstract contains much more info:
The alkaline environment of hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells (HEMFCs) potentially allows use of cost-effective catalysts and bipolar plates in devices. However, HEMFC performance is adversely affected by CO2 present in the ambient air feed. Here, we demonstrate an electrochemically driven CO2 separator (EDCS) to remove CO2 from the air feed using a shorted membrane that conducts both anions and electrons. This EDCS is powered by hydrogen like a fuel cell but needs no electrical wires, bipolar plates or current collectors, and thus can be modularized like a typical separation membrane. We show that a 25cm2 shorted membrane EDCS can achieve >99% CO2 removal from 2,000standard cubic centimetres per minute (sccm) of air for 450hours and operate effectively under load-following dynamic conditions. A spiral-wound EDCS module can remove >98% CO2 from 10,000sccm of air. Our technoeconomic analysis indicates a compact and efficient module at >99% CO2 removal costs US$112 for an 80kWnet HEMFC stack.
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Re:Here is the paper's abstract (Score:4, Informative)
Oh you poor fool, trees are carbon neutral. You see, when a tree dies microorganisms consume it in a process called decay. The decay process results in the sequestered CO2 being released into the atmosphere. At most, you are locking up carbon for the lifetime of the tree, assuming it grows in the first place.
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Yes, some tree species can live for thousands of years... but most trees die in decades. Furthermore, the more crowded they are, the shorter their lifespans. Furthermore, the environment is the deciding factor of which kind of tree should be planted.
So yeah, you're just kicking can down the road... but I'm sure a man as intelligent as you already knew that, right?
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That's because it's been dried and treated. Trees don't get that when they die.
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This is all false, so it's not clear why you're so smug about it. The tree has mass both above and below the ground, some of the carbon from both roots and leaves winds up in the soil. Aerobic decomposition returns quite a bit of carbon to the soil while anaerobic decomposition doesn't, which is why rainforests don't sequester as much carbon as other kinds of forest.
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I've never heard of anyone finding cutting down trees and then burying them, so unless it happens in a landslide/mudflow then it's not happening.
Re: Here is the paper's abstract (Score:2)
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Even if it gets buries. There are microorganisms underground as well. One has to put the trees into an oxygen depleted environment in order to prevent decay and sequester the carbon.
Realistically speaking - trees are carbon neutral because only a very small fraction of the carbon sequestered by the trees will not eventually go back into the atmosphere as either CO2 or methane. For sequestering carbon, look to our oceans. The plankton, if not consumed, drops to the bottom of the ocean where it can be
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Sounds like they are not trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at all, but improve fuel cell performance.
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Anyone able to translate that into kWh/metric tonne of CO2? At whatever pressure is standard for these comparisons,
Cost and longevity of device?
Where’s the break-even? (Score:2)
Three questions
What does a 2”X2” lab benchmark mean orthogonally for scaling to anti-pollution purposes?
Does battery pre-filter CO2 cost of $112 per 85 kW fuel cell beat in a TCO to LiON?
What is the cost to apply CO2 scrubbing tailpipe exhaust .vs. BEV?
So? (Score:2)
Re: So? (Score:2)
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It's not fixed yet, but then, devices to clean exhaust aren't going to be retrofit onto cars either. People shifting to EVs is actually more likely.
Re: So? (Score:2)
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It will be interesting to see if it makes rebreathers more practical, I'm kind of crap at math — I can get from A to B in most cases but it can take me a long time — so I'm not going to try to figure out whether it will actually make them any smaller, and/or last longer, when someone else could do it a lot faster. I can see how the tech would be useful on a nuke sub, though, for sure.
How much energy does it cost to run this machine? (Score:2)
That is the big question. CO2 capturing techniques already exist, but so far they have not shown a net benefit.
And put it where? (Score:2)
Not much utility in that. Also capturing 99% is nothing to brag about if you feed it engine exhaust to begin with, do that with normal atmospheric concentration and then you have something interesting.
Trees (Score:2)
Just plant trees... not burn them.
"Game-Changing" (Score:2)
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Meh, people will just replace it with some other sports-related buzz word. My new hobby is to make up new ones and work them into conversation. My current favourite is "ball carrier."
Article with much more detail (Score:2)
Here's an article that is not behind a paywall and giving quite a bit more detail;
https://iopscience.iop.org/art... [iop.org]
I guess to make this viable as an atmospheric scrubber at industrial scale you would use renewables to power electrolysis to get the hydrogen (which requires water, and probably fresh water). But maybe it isn't very much, and they appear to be able to recycle at least some of it;
"minimal hydrogen will be required to power the CO2 separation, thereby allowing the use of purged hydrogen from the
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How about we create a really, really tall chimney, and send all that captured CO2 into space? :-D
It's the quantity, stupid! (not the percentage) (Score:2)
The method is capable to process 10L per minute.
A 2.0-liter engine can flow 9,000L per minute.
Cost ? (Score:2)
per ton CO2?
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It doesn't matter in terms of environmental repair on a global scale. CO2 is the product of energy-releasing chemistry - reactions we use to generate heat to power things with. It would take at least as much energy as previously released to re-capture CO2, and that's before allowing for any process having inefficiencies in it.
The short of the long of it is that so long as we have things burning stuff for power, it makes more sense to put clean energy towards replacing those things rather than CO2 sequest
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You first?
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I was calling out AndyKron for being another brain-dead Malthusian. But hey you do you pal.
Re:Wont work in a practical situation. (Score:4, Informative)
On this actual article - what matters is the power requirements for setup and operation.
Indeed. The only number that matters is the dollar cost per kilogram of CO2 removed.
The percent of CO2 removed from the airstream is not important at all.
Not to mention where they think they will store all this CO2 - compress it? ;)
Yes. There are HUGE markets for CO2. Once it is captured and compressed, it can be sold for profit.
By far the biggest potential market is for enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org] using super-critical CO2.
What to do with it Re:Wont work in a practical...] (Score:3)
...Yes. There are HUGE markets for CO2. Once it is captured and compressed, it can be sold for profit.
Not that huge. Global carbon dioxide emissions are about 33 billion tons per year. There isn't a market for even millions of tons of carbon dioxide. Much less tens of billions.
By far the biggest potential market is for enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org] using super-critical CO2.
"We need to capture CO2 from the atmosphere so we can mine the fuel to put more CO2 into the atmosphere!"
Re:What to do with it Re:Wont work in a practical. (Score:5, Informative)
There isn't a market for even millions of tons of carbon dioxide.
Yes, there is. The problem is supply, not demand. If millions or even billions of tonnes of CO2 were available, frackers would be happy to buy it.
Frackers in America use more than 5 billion tonnes of water annually. Supercritical CO2 is a superior fluid for extracting oil from shale.
"We need to capture CO2 from the atmosphere so we can mine the fuel to put more CO2 into the atmosphere!"
Oil consumption isn't going to magically stop overnight.
Here are the options:
1. Produce oil while sequestering CO2.
2. Produce oil without sequestering CO2.
Only an idiot would believe that #2 is the better option.
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Oil consumption isn't going to magically stop overnight.
Carbon capture on economically relevant scales isn't going to magically start overnight either. By the time this technology or one like it is widely deployed, we'd better already be far along in our transition away from fossil fuels. If not, we're screwed.
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Carbon capture is a 21st century perpetual motion machine scam. A trivial understanding of thermodynamics will demonstrate why this isn't scalable or economical
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Hmm nope. Not even with nuclear.
Try again.
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The only number that matters is the dollar cost per kilogram of CO2 removed.
Well it's the cost difference compared to either leaving it in the atmosphere (much more expensive) or other CO2 extraction methods (variable but reasonably similar on average)
We *have* to do this, so it's cost in isolation is irrelevant. The cost of not doing it is going to be far far worse.
Re:Wont work in a practical situation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except we haven't. most of the world is very sparsely populated, however I imagine you live in some shithole city, right?
Sorry for the reality check, but hey.
Actually we have. The question of our overrunning the planet is not as to whether or not we physically take up space, but rather as to whether we make use of the planet. That sparsely populated part of the world is being farmed and fished to feed the cities, mined to power the cities, and razed to provide materials to build the cities.
The only part of the planet we have left an ecological footprint on is the parts of no value to us. You don't need to be in some shithole city, you can drive well outside the city and still see nothing but the damage humans have done due to our lust for resources to feed a world clearly not designed to sustain such populations.
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Re: Wont work in a practical situation. (Score:3)
Carbon dioxide [Re: Wont work in a practical...] (Score:2)
Perhaps, assuming math efficiency pans out, we will see these atop cell towers one day, scrubbing co2 and producing water. Pure carbon has a lot of industrial applications like graphite, graphene, and synthetic diamond for cutting tools.
Note that the process described produces carbon dioxide, not carbon. If you want carbon, you have to reduce the CO2, which takes a lot of energy. Easier to produce carbon directly from coal (or better, from methane), instead of burning the coal (or methane) first.
Re: Carbon dioxide [Re: Wont work in a practical.. (Score:3)
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what matters is the power requirements
We have more than enough energy available, but not yet collected, to power these. When your source is renewable/fuel is free, you just build more capacity if you need more.
Hell you could strap these devices to the posts holding up solar panels at the solar farms.
Other reasons to remove CO2 (Score:5, Informative)
I'm thinking of more practical uses like removing CO2 when using underwater rebreathers without needing caustic chemicals. Seawater reacting with the current CO2 scrubbing chemicals is a major concern for divers. Rebreathers: The Caustic Cocktail [underwaterjournal.com]
Same with removing CO2 on the space station, crew transport, moon station, or Mars mission. Some firefighters also use rebreathers and they might also be smaller. Firefighting rebreathers [fireappara...gazine.com]
I can also think of a few large meetings in small rooms that might have been less painful if they scrubbed the CO2 out of the room, but perhaps that wasn't the reason why the meeting gave me a headache.
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Re:Other reasons to remove CO2 (Score:5, Interesting)
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I didn't even think about reaching out directly to them with alternative use cases. Nice job!
That's dumb. (Score:2)
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They are trolls or just mentally inept but more likely the former. It's like the post above that says "removes 99% of CO2" and suggests all plants would die... as if this technology instantly would remove so much CO2 when the article itself outlines the process is rather slow currently.
They wish to fan the flames that any solution to global warming would be worse than just letting it take it's course...
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First, yes, does this tech scale? No strong indication of that in TFA, and the analysis of a small ICE engine's requirements upthread are a useful start. Possibly most useful for spacecraft.
Human actions are simply not at the scale to affect nature
Meh, I'll bite.
The idea that we aren't at a scale to affect nature is passing strange. Anti-colonialists can ask after the passenger pigeon which once darkened the skies of North America. Anti-communists can ask after the Aral Sea, one of the worst environmental disasters of modern history thanks to Soviet arrogance, mis
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Just... no. (Score:2)
You couldn't scrub the entire atmosphere with this. You MIGHT be able to build systems large enough to reduce the CO2 of a major city provided it is vulnerable to temperature inversions or other form of containment of pollutants. But you're not talking 99% of the CO2 over that city, you're talking 99% over the device. But of course you need air currents (since efficiency will fall as CO2 is scrubbed) and that takes power (generating CO2) since the air will be very still in such cases. No matter how you set
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Re: Does it scale? (Score:2)
But the way in which it is removed currently uses chemicals. They can be toxic and dangerous, also needs replenishing. Difficult to do in space. Much better to have an electrical device that runs on solar power, with a chemical emergency backup.
Re: Does it scale? (Score:2)
Re: What can POSSIBLY go wrong? (Score:2)
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CO2 levels were pegged at a around 280ppm for the last 10,000 years. Remember how the planet was a bare rock with no plants for that time?
Nobody is proposing reducing our principle greenhouse gas to below historical levels. There is an overwhelming amount of educated individuals who believe that being 50% higher than that (and more specifically- on that upward trajectory) is dangerous territory though.
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Chemical scrubbers (lithium hydroxide) are a bit difficult to replenish far away from a lithium mine.
Spacecraft initially used chemical systems, but as longer-term spaceflight became a thing, the Shuttle and ISS has non-chemical scrubbers installed (The shuttles had to be heated up to a few hundred degrees C to replenish IIRC, and the IIS' system needs to be exposed to vacuum)
This one wouldn't be ideal
Re: CO2 scrubbers are not new (Score:2)
Re: CO2 scrubbers are not new (Score:2)
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BZ (Score:2)
I love the cluelessness of one respondent. My paddock is full of solar powered CO2 absorbers. I have to cut some of it quite regularly in spring.