16 ms·
Turning CO2 to Stone
- VeejayRampay 10y agoIt's nice that we're looking to alternative ways to capture and store atmospheric CO2, but at time it also does look like we're working too hard to replicate a system that does that already (and has for a long time): plants. Or does it mean that the time of planting trees and preserving forests is over now and we have to do it another (most often less efficient) way?
- jjawssd 10y agoI thought algae was far more efficient than plants?
- TheAdamAndChe 10y agoIt is, but where would you get the nutrients needed to grow the algae at a scale needed to offset global climate change?
- jjawssd 10y agoHow about (farm) waste water runoff?
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis has been suggested before. Scale is still hard. I read an article in the UC Davis algae magazine (http://www.algaeindustrymagazine.com/department/education/west/uc-davis/ http://www.algaeindustrymagazine.com/department/education/we...) a while ago that talked about flooding a fairly large acre (hectare) parcel with water, growing a layer of algae on it, then burying the algae. (process flood, algae mat grows, drain/evaporate, and plow it all under, then repeat.) The algae decomposition process releases methane (worse than CO2).
- jjawssd 10y ago> The algae decomposition process releases methane (worse than CO2). Under what conditions does this happen?
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- bluGill 10y agoonly if we cannot capture methane. If we can capture it, we can run it through an engine and get the energy back. Most landfills are already doing this: it adds some extra profit to the bottom line. I have no idea if this stores any carbon anymore though.
- ramblenode 10y agoThere is research being done on iron seeding/fertilization of barren ocean waters [0]. In such places, iron is the limiting factor for algae growth. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
- Daishiman 10y agoThe problem with plants is that they do not sequester CO2 permanently; plants grow, die, and decompose, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. Trees certainly work as a buffer in the sense that carbon in plants is carbon not in the atmosphere, but the amount you could hold is tiny in comparison to the amount that must be sequestered back in order to make a meaningful change in atmospheric and oceanic CO2 composition. Nonetheless, plants have important benefits, since they alter the local climate by changing the albedo and perspirating. Perspiration of plants in jungles helps to create clouds and regulate humidity, and would help to counteract some of the negative effects of climate change.
- TheAdamAndChe 10y agoBiochar is a possible method to permanently store the CO2 captured from plant matter. Playing devil's advocate here, water vapor is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas, even more so than CO2.
- m_coder 10y agoI was hoping that someone would mention biochar. Heating your house using the leftover heat from the process of creating biochar could be carbon negative.
- TheAdamAndChe 10y agoI agree there's potential in its use, but what I'm afraid of is 1) the high nutrient requirements needed to grow the biochar at a scale useful to offset global warming, and 2) Biochar is basically coal, which could be burned and converted into CO2 again.
- nine_k 10y agoBury it back. We seem to have huge cavities from used-up coal mines. We could refill them.
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- mikeash 10y agoPlants don't usually store CO2 long term. You have to do something with them after they grow, or else they decompose and put the CO2 right back into the air.
- nerdponx 10y agoYou mean like eat them?
- masklinn 10y agoCutting them will indirectly release the carbon. Making plants into building materials or cabinetry keeps the carbon locked.
- nothrabannosir 10y agoNo, eating a plant turns it into CO2. Our / animals' bodies burn the sugars (which were the store of C) into co2 and energy, using the original o2 produced by the plant to convert that co2 into those sugars. It's more meaningful to reason about co2 storage in terms of area dedicated to plants, than the plants themselves.
- masklinn 10y ago> Plants don't usually store CO2 long term. That's not true, a stable mature forest is a long-term carbon store, the release from decomposition being offset by capture by new growth. And depending on the underlying soils it may be a net sink until it's clear cut and burned away (e.g. peat swamps as in south-east asian islands).
- TheAdamAndChe 10y agoWe pull almost all of the CO2 we burn from coal and oil, which were basically underground carbon reserves. To replace all of that CO2 with plant matter would take an immense amount of nutrients, which have to come from somewhere. Then there's the chance that the plant matter will turn to coal or oil again, meaning it may be used again. By turning the CO2 directly into carbonate, you both remove the need for nutrients and turn the CO2 into a form that is both incredibly stable and not useful for any energy purposes, lessening the chance that it will make its way back into the atmosphere.
- lend000 10y agoExactly. We have pulled an unnatural amount of "usable carbon" to the surface, which, even if it becomes a part of a natural, stable, cycle, will leave us with a higher net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We can only go back to "natural" CO2 levels through unnatural means, unless we are willing to measure time on a geological time scale (the millions of years it will take to replace oil reserves from the swamps of today). So until then, we would still be dealing with an acidic ocean and a greenhouse atmosphere.
- schiffern 10y ago>We can only go back to "natural" CO2 levels through unnatural means Ok, but let's be careful not to exclude the middle here. "We got here by mining (an industrial activity), therefore we can't use plants in any part of a carbon sequestration chain (even one that also involves industrial activity)." Trying to use this argument as a blanket ban on plants becomes little more than an appeal to sympathetic magic. The only thing that matters is how much CO2 a technique can buffer (annual production x time constant), not whether or not it uses plants at any stage. Plants already have enormous annual production, but for economic/thermodynamic reasons it's hard for purely factory-based techniques to achieve sufficient scale. It becomes a money sink both up-front and operationally, respectively because A) factories are expensive, and B) hard thermodynamic constraints mean that it's at a fundamental competitive disadvantage compared to any typical [reminder: energy consuming] factory.
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- the8472 10y agoReforestation is good in regions that used to have forests. But using rocks might also work in ardi regions where freshwater is a limited resource (I assume they can just use salt water to pump CO2 into the rocks). And you can't just plant forests everywhere, for example china experiences issues with its Green Wall, where the trees soak up so much water that it causes the ground water level to fall.
- ph0rque 10y agoFor $15/US resident/year (on average), you could sequester all the carbon you produce that year by having 150 trees planted in return for your donation: http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-change-solution-simplified http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang...
- saycheese 10y agoREVISION: If true, seems like it would feasible for the US, but unclear how regions like Africa & Asian would do the same. Any ideas? Below is the original comment with correction for accounting error. _________ $15 per person per US person[2] per year does not sound like a lot, but in sum per year it's a massive amount of money; amount would be $4,847,228,805. For example, per person using the 2014 net collections[1] of the US's net tax collections divided by the population estimate for July 2016[2], the US revenue per person is $8,000. [1] ($2,690,755,432) https://www.irs.gov/uac/soi-tax-stats-collections-and-refunds-by-type-of-tax-irs-data-book-table-1 https://www.irs.gov/uac/soi-tax-stats-collections-and-refund... [2] (323,148,587) http://www.census.gov/popclock/ http://www.census.gov/popclock/ On the spreadsheet, money amounts are in thousands of dollars.
- smarterclayton 10y agoThe US tax charts are reported in thousands, so 2.6 trillion / 323 million = 8k per person, not 8
- saycheese 10y agoThanks, missed the "Money amounts are in thousands of dollars" - corrected the comment above.
- woofyman 10y agoYour first link, the numbers are in thousands of dollars so the correct amount is $2,690,755,432,000 nearly 3 trillion dollars.
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- padiyar83 10y agoIts not either or at this point, you need both (as many as possible) solutions. In some regard CO2 storage solutions are better because you can make use of lower priced real estate like ocean floor vs growing plants and forests which take away real estate that can be used for human habitation and agriculture. Also CO2 storage is more stable in time. Like 100 years from now, people might just choose to cut down the forests and just release all that stored carbon back.
- bnegreve 10y agoWe burn oil to produce cheap energy and we get CO2 as a byproduct. If you want to reverse the process you need some energy, so what would be the point of burning the oil in the first place?
- ams6110 10y agoThe energy could be from wind, solar -- in fact it might be an ideal use case for those sources if the process can be done intermittently, i.e. whenever the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Or you could envision large carbon sequestration plants powered by on-site nuclear.
- bnegreve 10y ago> Or you could envision large carbon sequestration plants powered by on-site nuclear. I'm not sure I understand, you're suuggesting that we 1. Burn oil to produce energy (and CO2 as a byproduct) 2. Use the energy to do X 3. Use non-fossil energy to get rid of the CO2 we created during step 1. When we could just do: 1. Use non-fossil energy to do X Am I missing something?
- bhickey 10y ago0. There's a lot of carbon in the air and we might want to get rid of it.
- ams6110 10y agoYes, I was unclear. We've presumably got 100+ years of industrial carbon emissions to clean up if we want to get back to "pre industrial" atmospheric carbon. Plus ongoing emissions from transportation even if all electrical power is converted to renewable or nuclear.
- david-given 10y agoTransport. Fossil fuels are incredibly energy-dense and convenient to transport and work with, while renewables aren't. There's plenty of transport systems that are utterly reliant on fossil fuels and couldn't be converted to renewable energy. Carbon sequestering would allow continued use of these while staying carbon-neutral.
- craigyk 10y agoI've been doing preliminary research on what kind of high-density trees grow reasonably fast in different climates. If the wood has a high enough density it will sink in water without treatment. Wood that has been submerged can take 100s of years to decay. Hence it might be possible to lock away a lot of carbon and give us some breathing room, by repeatedly clear-cutting and reseeding forests and sinking the logs. Even without high-density wood, it might be worth the effort to treat the timber so that it will stay sunken. I did some estimates previously that suggest the amount of land area that would have to be dedicated to this to reduce atmospheric CO2 is not unreasonable.
- aaronblohowiak 10y agoWhy sink when you could dehydrate it in the desert? Rot needs water.
- hvidgaard 10y agoWonder what that would do to the desert over time. If it could reclaim some desert land it would be wonderful.
- craigyk 10y agoPart of the equation is do what makes the most sense locally. So sure, if you are closer to desert, that's the way to go.
- bluGill 10y agoIf you are close to the desert you probably don't have forests though. Tree need a lot of water, as things get dryer the land transitions to grassland before desert. Of course mountains are often a factor. There are deserts at the base of forested mountains. The mountain takes all the rain.
- drallison 10y agoScaling up this technique to make it practical is going to be challenging. And it is not enough to simply compute the quantity of carbon not emitted; the full energy-life-cycle of the sequestration needs to be computed as well.
- jjawssd 10y agoWould be very interesting to see nuclear energy sources harnessed to split carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon or generated into liquid fuels. I can't wait to see nuclear power plants selling oil and gasoline.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoFor a number of reasons that won't happen with existing plants, but the two bigs ones are that the plant economics are based on selling electricity to the grid and the operating cost of a nuclear plant today, makes for very expensive oil and gasoline (an equivalent of $125 - $150 barrel of crude oil prices). However if you built a nuclear plant that was specifically designed for F-T (so for example you used it to bring the F-T reactor up to 1300 degrees) you might be able to get the cost down to something a bit more competitive at the moment. The big advantage of course is that you could build such a plant with a 50 mile (80 km) radius (thus ensuring that even a Chernobyl style disaster would have not have long term effects on anyone outside of the safe zone) build a rail spur or a pipeline to exfiltrate the production.
- pjc50 10y agoI believe the US Navy already have pilot plants for doing this on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. It's too expensive for land use but much better than shipping across potentially hostile waters. (Gasoline on US bases in Afghanistan ended up costing something more than $100/USgal, due to being taken overland several thousand miles through Pakistan under armed escort due to occasional Taliban attack.)
- batguano 10y agoThis made me appreciate how much a few degrees C of climate change matter: http://xkcd.com/1732/ http://xkcd.com/1732/ When the world climate was 4.3 degrees Celsius colder, Boston was covered under a mile-high sheet of ice.
- EGreg 10y agoWhat about methane, anyone got stuff for that?? It's much more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2.
- mazlix 10y agoJust burn it and sell the electricity and freshwater? Then it becomes 1 CO2. http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/511natgascombust.html http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/511natgascombust.htm...
- fnj 10y agoPlus traces of CO, NOx, carbon particulates, and unburned hydrocarbon.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoMethane is CH4, if you burn in oxygen then you get CO2 (and some CO potentially as you say) and H2O. Where's the NOx come from? Can you get particulates burning methane? Long chain hydrocarbons, I can see how that works; but methane seems like it would disperse too easily, unless it's liquid/solid methane you're burning or you're doing it in a very low pressure atmosphere. That's my intuition though, any citations showing significant particulate yield with methane combustion?
- fnj 10y agoAny hydrocarbon fuel burning in atmospheric air produces some NOx,and some particulate matter. I should also have mentioned SOx, at least considering that your methane fuel is not going to be chemically pure CH4. Natural gas, in addition to CH4 as the primary component, contains some ethane and propane, plus traces of butane, pentane, hexanes, N2, CO2, and sulfur. I'm not sure what amounts of pollutants one would consider "significant". Certainly, gas turbines burning methane are comparatively low in pollutants, but even properly functioning automobile engines are extraordinarily low in pollutant emission (just for orientation, I don't consider CO2 "pollution"). http://www.gasturbine.org/images/thegasturbinesolution.pdf http://www.gasturbine.org/images/thegasturbinesolution.pdf https://www.enbridgegas.com/assets/docs/Gas%20Analysis%20Victoria%20Square%20Stn%20No%2050139%20-%20September%202016.pdf https://www.enbridgegas.com/assets/docs/Gas%20Analysis%20Vic...
- sandworm101 10y agoStoring co2 under the sea? Imagine what a leaking well will look like: a giant soda straw injecting c02 directly where it can do the most damage. Carbon storage may be a stop-gap but, as with "clean coal", is also used as a pr flag to justify continued fossil fuel expansion. With the price of solar dropping, that is where we should focus (and fusion).
- philipkglass 10y agoThe point of this article is that the injected CO2 reacts with the rocks to create stable solids, so that it can't leak even if the physical containment fails after a few years. That is a significant improvement over e.g. schemes to inject CO2 in depleted oil fields, where physical containment failure would indeed undo all the benefits of sequestration.
- sandworm101 10y agoExcept for when the pipe breaks, much like every oil-related accident. Pipes +ocean +pressure always creates risks.
- _coldfire 10y agoExcept that we control the flow into the pipe and can turn it off in a minute, unlike every oil-related accident.
- chris_va 10y agoJust a reminder that the Iceland study result was unexpected, and while it is great that the media is publicizing the results, it would be nice to get additional confirmations before getting really excited. Having said that, I'm still kind of excited. The basalt flood in Eastern Washington alone is in theory large enough to sequester hundreds of years of US emissions.
- grizzles 10y agoThere is an entrepreneur I follow on Twitter working on this. Press Release: http://www.orica.com/News---Media/australian-research-pilot-plant-turns-co2-into-potential-green-construction-materials#.WIUS6vGGNhE http://www.orica.com/News---Media/australian-research-pilot-...
- scentoni 10y agoThe optimal way of storing carbon is as coal.
- SixSigma 10y agoMore optimal than diamond?
- truncheon 10y agoSomewhat, yes. It seems that graphite is a somewhat more relaxed state than carbon's diamond crystal allotrope. Both burn, and can be vaporized with LOX/acetyline torches: http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/medium_1x_/public/import/2013/images/2009/08/diamond3.jpg http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/medium_1... But apparently, over long periods of time, and unless coerced, carbon prefers to be graphite and so, diamonds can decay as such. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond#Thermal_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond... Hence why graphite is generally more plentiful than diamonds.
- SixSigma 10y agoCoal isn't graphite though. And you're talking about burning, not storage. Coal produces lots of dust and debris. I'm sure diamond would produce some dust at volumes. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-coal-and-graphite https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-coal-an... Anyway, it's fantasy because I'm fairly confident we're not going to turn CO2 into mountains of diamonds in my lifetime!
- owenversteeg 10y agoI was curious, so I did the math. Total worldwide carbon production is 38.2 billion tons per year. Cost to sequester a ton of carbon is between $30 and $150, depending on who you ask and how you do it. Let's assume a middle of the road price of $90/ton. That's $3.438 trillion a year, or about $478 per person. This is roughly equal to the US yearly federal spending, or 3% of the world GDP. If you somehow pooled together all the world's billionaires and got them to contribute their annual income (roughly $600 billion a year, averaging the past 7 years) to the effort, you could eliminate roughly 20% of carbon produced in the world every year. ------------------------- Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear why finding new sequestration methods is incredibly important: if you can get the cost from $160 to $10 per ton, then suddenly all you'd need would be a coalition of half the world's billionaires to stop the main cause of global warming. Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc. ------------------------- Mostly off-topic: when I was looking at estimates of land size, apparently the amount the US has shrunk from 2007 to 2015 (14,000 km2; went from 9,161,120 km2 to 9,147,420 km2) [0] is roughly equivalent to half the area of the Netherlands. Wow. [0] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.K2 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.K2
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoYou also have to remember the costs of capturing CO2, which is best done at the points of emission, and transporting the CO2 to the (usually far away) storage site. OTOH, the total cost (not just for sequestration) is about $100, maybe a bit more, in most estimates. For reference, a gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2, so $100/ton equals $1/gallon of gasoline. That's roughly what you'd have to increase gasoline price by to fund CO2 capture, transport and storage. (This neglects that the capture part is neigh-on impossible.) For electricity, to compensate for the average US CO2 emissions per kWh (~1.2 lbs/kWh), you'd have to increase the price by about 6 cents per kWh. To do CCS for both gasoline and electricity consumption, the average US family would have to pay (order of magnitude) 1000 x $1 + 12000 x $0.06 = $1720. That would compensate for about half the family's CO2 emissions. The remaining half is dominated by emissions from the food we eat, the stuff we buy and from having fun.
- philipkglass 10y agoThe net reaction goes like this: CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + SiO2. Note that the products, silicon dioxide and calcium carbonate, are thermodynamically stable solids. Crucially, the activation energy for the weathering of silicates to carbonates is low in the presence of water and carbon dioxide. Low enough that it happens spontaneously in nature on exposed rock surfaces. That means that the energy inputs required to reduce atmospheric CO2 via silicate weathering are much lower than a "combustion in reverse" process to turn gaseous CO2 into synthetic coal and bury it. The other crucial issue is that the kinetics of silicate weathering are tremendously hindered in nature. A freshly fractured basalt surface weathers rapidly for a year or two and then develops a cation-depleted micron scale "rind" that drastically slows the weathering reactions with the rest of the bulk rock. One way to accelerate the kinetics of silicate weathering is to use more concentrated materials, like the Iceland injection process: nearly pure CO2 plus water will react much faster than natural surface waters exposed to hundreds-of-ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. That works ok if you have a rich stream of CO2 like directly from a power plant's stacks. It won't work for dealing with CO2 already emitted to the atmosphere unless you add a complicated and energetically expensive pre-concentration stage to turn 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 into a 950,000 ppm CO2 stream you can inject. The other way to improve the kinetics of silicate weathering is to generate a lot more surface area: crush bulk stone into particles 100 microns or finer. Then there's a lot of fast-reacting extra surface area that can react with CO2 at ambient concentrations. And even the slow weathering to the center of the particle will take maybe a century rather than multiple millennia. (If a century sounds unacceptably slow, I would venture that you have not fully internalized the vast timescales that unaided nature would take to restore the pre-industrial CO2 equilibrium.) Putting crushed stone particles in near-shore ocean environments may further accelerate weathering by ensuring that natural wave action keeps abrading the rind from particles. Crushed stone rich in magnesium and calcium silicates can also be applied to acid sulfate soils in tropical agriculture. Raising the pH of acid soils increases agricultural productivity by preventing low-pH aluminum toxicity to plants and, unlike sweetening soil with limestone, it sequesters some carbon at the same time. The crushed stone accelerated weathering approach can offset all sorts of CO2 emissions: point or distributed sources, local or distant sources, present or past sources. Finally, it restores the historical pH balance of the oceans as well as getting rid of excess radiative forcing from CO2. The amounts of stone required to offset historical emissions are vast, but any solution will be vast because the scale of the problem itself is vast. In terms of scalability, simplicity, energetics, and flexibility, I think that accelerated silicate weathering is the best shot at long term restoration of oceanic and atmospheric CO2 concentrations to the pre-industrial baseline.
- Gravityloss 10y agoWe have a great method of storing carbon. It is also technologically simple, very stable, and, would you believe it, completely free! It is called coal. It was already stored in the ground millions of years ago. We just have to not dig it up and burn it. Also related: oil, peat.
- yeukhon 10y agoNo you don't. Those were the results of millions of years. Don't dig it up? Okay, find alternate engery source which can support the way we live today. I am all for reduction (I believe in climate change), but what you said came out very aggressive and counter productive. So noz
- Gravityloss 10y agoIt's literally very ineffective to keep burning coal, dilute the CO2 to the atmosphere and then fantasize about collecting the 400 ppm ambient later. It would be easier to replace as much coal as possible with other forms of energy as soon as possible.
- yeukhon 10y agoWhat makes you think people aren't trying hard enough? It's the fact we haven't come up with an alternative clean source of energy able to sustain the rate of our current consumption. None of the green energy we know of can do that right now (be it too costly, or just not enough power generated).
- Gravityloss 10y agoIt doesn't have to be a 100% solution at first. The CO2 problem is cumulative. Every ton of coal left unburned is helpful. The earlier those nukes, windmills or solar panels go up, the more coal they displace. We just had an article on HN where Wyoming banned renewables.
- stcredzero 10y agoThe best way to reduce emissions of CO2, is to develop sources of energy that are more economical than fossil fuels. If we had the huge surpluses of carbon emissions free energy implied by fusion, we'd be able to slash energy-related carbon emissions to a small fraction of the current level, while also drastically reducing the need to extract hydrocarbons as a chemical feedstocks. Fusion is probably even capable of providing enough energy to sequester excess carbon, beyond emissions.
- hvidgaard 10y agoFusion energy is not free. The cost of building a reactor alone puts the price in the same range as fission. But it's safer, and we have an abundance of fuel for it. So build it to handle base loads, use wind/solar where it makes sense, and use excess production to some meaningful task.
- stcredzero 10y agoThe cost of building a reactor alone puts the price in the same range as fission. But it's safer, and we have an abundance of fuel for it. The 2nd sentence will eventually put it in a lower price range than fission.
- hvidgaard 10y agoThe fuel cost of a fission planet is less than 15% of TCO, so it's not going to be much cheaper, if at all.
- pasbesoin 10y agoI haven't read this, but do people forget basic chemistry? We burn fossil fuels because the process is exothermic -- we extract usable energy from it. Lithification of CO2 (to make up a word?) is, as far as I know, endothermic. It takes energy to accomplish. On the surface, tending towards counter-productive. Burn fossil fuels to lithify CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Or ramp up nuclear, with all its problems, for the same. Fusion, sure -- but we are not there, yet. Unless we look at the sun -- solar and wind. (The largest fusion reactor we are going to have -- up in the sky.) "Alternative", next-generation, "renewable" energy might allow us to divert part of its potential excess supply to lithification of CO2. At the "tailpipe/smokestack" of conventional production, or even, if we can figure out effective capture, out of the sky. You want CO2 dealt with, you're going to need to find a way to package it into a stable solid state. By the way, we already have one worldwide, extant system for lithification of CO2. Based upon solar energy. Photosynthesizing flora. Trouble is, we are outracing its natural counterbalance while simultaneously reducing and eliminating the flora required for it.
- ComputerGuru 10y agoThis process of trapping CO2 in stone is very, very different from converting CO2 to artificial coal and does not require the same magnitudes of energy (or anywhere near them).
- pasbesoin 10y agoSorry if I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to trapping CO2. I don't regard it as long term capture, whereas "stonification" -- actually making the stuff part of a mineral we know has long-term persistence -- is.
- sytelus 10y agoOn a very off-topic note, I wanted to know how human beings can colonize gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn assuming they somehow have access to huge amount of energy. One key problem that would be needed to solve is exactly this: converting gases like CO2 and methane to solids.
- Eric_WVGG 10y agocolonize != terraform Even if you somehow converted the gasses of Saturn into solids, the mass would result in a level of gravity that would not be survivable. I don't think there's any possibility for colonizing gas giants that doesn't involve something like Bespin or Jetsons floating platforms.
- Pocketsnakes 10y agoCarbon is necessary to all plant life on earth. It is good for nature. The carbon cycle was running down to the point of depletion. We do not need less carbon.
- Pocketsnakes 10y agoCarbon is necessary to all plant life on earth. It is good for nature. The carbon cycle was running down to the point of depletion. We do not need less carbon.
- okonomiyaki3000 10y agoQuestion: once this CO2 has been changed into a solid form, will we be able to burn the solids to produce energy?
- kmm 10y agoThe resulting carbonate minerals can't be burned because they are already completely oxidized, the same way you can't burn water (with oxygen). Carbonate minerals are a lower energy compound than their reactants, which is good, because it means the reaction will happen spontaneously without an energy input from us (which would probably be too large to make it economical)
- teddyg1 10y agoNot mentioned in these comments is the actual method they cite in capturing the solid CO2. The method involves bubbling CO2 through water and hydrogen sulfide, which is incredibly toxic. Not sure if there's a better way to do it, but their current process is both economically infeasible and dangerous.
- Dylan16807 10y agoI don't think 'incredibly toxic' is the best word for a smell most people are familiar with. Industry uses toxic chemicals all the time. It's not a big deal. This is a chemical that's relatively easy to notice and where prolonged non-acute exposure doesn't have known harms. It's better than most.
- sixsevenwheels1 10y agoI like the idea of growing bricks http://biomason.com/ http://biomason.com/
- sixsevenwheels1 10y agoI like the idea of growing bricks http://biomason.com/ http://biomason.com/
- Jean-Philipe 10y agoI heard there's also a way to turn CO2 into wood.