3 ms·

From chapter 211 of my book: None have proposed then taking the CO through a final step and ending up with simple C and O. This is not without good reason: ou

From chapter 211 of my book: None have proposed then taking the CO through a final step and ending up with simple C and O. This is not without good reason: out of all substances known to thermally decompose, none does it at a higher temperature than carbon monoxide. If you thought 2,000° was hard, try 3,870° C. That’s hot enough to melt any known metal. That’s hot enough to melt any rock! The few substances known to man that can be counted on to stay solid at that temperature can be counted on one hand.

philipkglass 8y ago
I tried searching for that excerpt from your book and couldn't find any matches. Is the book published? I'd be interested in reading it. If I wanted to turn carbon dioxide back into elemental carbon I'd probably try to get there via the Bosch reaction with electrolytic hydrogen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction NASA has funded a fair bit of lab scale work on it for recycling breathable atmosphere on space stations. It doesn't require heroic super-materials. You can theoretically store the input CO2 and H2 in large buffers so as to smooth out intermittently available input energy, without needing to firm up the primary energy supply itself.
- mchannon 8y ago
  The full book is not yet available anywhere. It's self-published (and I mean that literally; I'm doing the printing and binding myself, to discourage making it another $.99 Kindle throwaway or having a crappy low-res PDF version of it floating on torrents or sci-hub). List price on it will be in the hundreds of dollars. I'm not trying to sell as many copies as cheaply as possible, which might be hard for some people to understand. Message me your info and I'll give you a discount on price. Elemental carbon is probably the wrong goal: keeping a limited pool of CO2 and thermally converting it to CO, then water-shifting the CO into CO2 + H2 is far more practical. If you want to bury the carbon, it's more practical to bury it as a hydrocarbon, which is easily accomplished with the CO + H2 used through Fischer-Tropsch. If you want to convert the carbon back into food, there's probably some clever process to convert F-T product oil into sugars and carbohydrates.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Yes, I am interested, though I'm not sure what your book is about in general. I just emailed you from an .edu address. What is the goal you're aiming at? Carbon-neutral synthetic fuels? From the excerpt, I thought you might be considering converting atmospheric CO2 back into relatively low-reactivity, compact, reduced forms of carbon for burial in e.g. old coal mines. (Which would be astonishingly energy intensive, but I wouldn't put it past the capabilities of early-22nd-century civilization if automation continues to advance and we avoid nuclear war, super-pandemics, and other such disasters.)
ars 8y ago
> out of all substances known to thermally decompose, none does it at a higher temperature than carbon monoxide. Please compare to thermolysis of water.

philipkglass 8y ago

I tried searching for that excerpt from your book and couldn't find any matches. Is the book published? I'd be interested in reading it. If I wanted to turn carbon dioxide back into elemental carbon I'd probably try to get there via the Bosch reaction with electrolytic hydrogen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction NASA has funded a fair bit of lab scale work on it for recycling breathable atmosphere on space stations. It doesn't require heroic super-materials. You can theoretically store the input CO2 and H2 in large buffers so as to smooth out intermittently available input energy, without needing to firm up the primary energy supply itself.

mchannon 8y ago
The full book is not yet available anywhere. It's self-published (and I mean that literally; I'm doing the printing and binding myself, to discourage making it another $.99 Kindle throwaway or having a crappy low-res PDF version of it floating on torrents or sci-hub). List price on it will be in the hundreds of dollars. I'm not trying to sell as many copies as cheaply as possible, which might be hard for some people to understand. Message me your info and I'll give you a discount on price. Elemental carbon is probably the wrong goal: keeping a limited pool of CO2 and thermally converting it to CO, then water-shifting the CO into CO2 + H2 is far more practical. If you want to bury the carbon, it's more practical to bury it as a hydrocarbon, which is easily accomplished with the CO + H2 used through Fischer-Tropsch. If you want to convert the carbon back into food, there's probably some clever process to convert F-T product oil into sugars and carbohydrates.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Yes, I am interested, though I'm not sure what your book is about in general. I just emailed you from an .edu address. What is the goal you're aiming at? Carbon-neutral synthetic fuels? From the excerpt, I thought you might be considering converting atmospheric CO2 back into relatively low-reactivity, compact, reduced forms of carbon for burial in e.g. old coal mines. (Which would be astonishingly energy intensive, but I wouldn't put it past the capabilities of early-22nd-century civilization if automation continues to advance and we avoid nuclear war, super-pandemics, and other such disasters.)

ars 8y ago

> out of all substances known to thermally decompose, none does it at a higher temperature than carbon monoxide. Please compare to thermolysis of water.