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Here's the thing: there's this thing called conservation of mass and energy. The carbon reaction goes like this: Carbon + Oxygen = CO2 + energy. You can rever
by fallingfrog 8y ago
Here's the thing: there's this thing called conservation of mass and energy.
The carbon reaction goes like this: Carbon + Oxygen = CO2 + energy.
You can reverse it, like you can with any chemical reaction, like this: CO2 + energy = Carbon + Oxygen
This is all high school chemistry stuff. But the long and short is: To sequester carbon from the atmosphere requires at least as much energy as you got by burning the carbon in the first place.
That's why no scheme to unburn the carbon can ever work.
- jeff_friesen 8y agoThat kind of dismissive, smug response is never helpful and often disempowering. While so far we've never gotten around conservation of energy laws, we've often engineered solutions that met our goals. There are renewable sources of energy that can power this effort. Many wind-farms and even solar farms are starting to overproduce in some areas. Nuke plants overproduce because they can't adapt quickly enough to changing demands. There are solutions to the problem of powering these sequestration units.
- fallingfrog 8y agoRight, but they are always worse than just not burning the CO2 in the first place. Also, "So far"? If you believe that we're ever going to break the conservation of mass and energy, you literally believe in magic.
- alkonaut 8y agoYup either everyone who talks about carbon capture literally believe in magic and failed high school chemistry/physics, or there is more nuance to the issue than you think.
- avmich 8y ago> That's why no scheme to unburn the carbon can ever work. Why? How does it follow from the previous sentence?
- fallingfrog 8y agoBecause it always takes more energy than just not burning the carbon in the first place. "Always" in the exact, scientific, ironclad sense of the word "always".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- avmich 8y ago> Because it always takes more energy than just not burning the carbon in the first place. "Always" in the exact, scientific, ironclad sense of the word "always". So what? You're implicitly checking if energy is "lost", for some definition of energy loss. But that's not what's discussed here. Nobody's proposing a perpetuum mobile, we're just talking about environment. The question is, is it better to not burn in the first place or burn and then clean up? And the answer, perhaps surprisingly, is not obvious.
- m_mueller 8y agoYes, the article actually does a decent job at discussing this. For city driving it almost certainly doesn’t make sense compared to going electric. Neither does it make sense as an alternative to going to a carbon-free electric grid. Where it does make sense is in industrial processes where energy is not the largest cost factor, or the parts of transport industry where energy density and charging speed the most important characteristic (e.g. air travel, long-haul trucking).
- avmich 8y agoI'm impressed by achievements of Sustainable Energy Solutions, a company in Utah, which specializes in energy-efficient cleanup of CO2-rich exhausts from power plants. Particularly the efficiency of the approach is worthy of attention, in my opinion. https://sesinnovation.com/ https://sesinnovation.com/
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoUmm, renewables to build more renewables.
- jartelt 8y agoThey plan to sequester the CO2, not "unburn" it back to carbon and oxygen. The CO2 reaction you posted has nothing to do with the cost of capturing CO2 and sequestering it.
- vondur 8y agoWhat if the carbon capture process was driven by a renewable energy source? Thermodynamic still applies but the useage of carbon to do so could be close to zero.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoGases mix. You can burn carbon at one location, and unburn it elsewhere. For instance, you could burn it on planes, which benefit directly from fossil fuels' high energy density, and then unburn it in areas with surplus of solar or wind power, taking energy from renewable sources. Here, no thermodynamics violated, and yet the system allows us to eat our cake (high-density energy storage) and eat it too (net zero carbon emissions).