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Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful material
- crimsonalucard1 6y agoDoesn't the net CO2 in the air increase? So you harvest CO2 to into fuel. That fuel is burned and the CO2 is released back into the air. So net difference is zero. But to harvest the CO2 you needed to generate a high amount of heat. That's extra CO2. So net CO2 is more. It depends on the cost of harvesting that CO2.
- pronoiac 6y agoI couldn't fetch the article, so I'm looking at the ScienceDaily page. It's a process to turn: * otherwise-waste carbon dioxide into (taking electricity) * syngas, which can be turned into * synthetic diesel, methanol, alcohol or plastics Plastics could be a carbon sink I guess.
- lykr0n 6y agoYou can use Solar and other renewable energy to power the conversion process. Progress is still progress. I would much rather to pay more for net zero carbon fuel, then not do anything.
- travisporter 6y agoIt’s actually strange that no gas company is advertising something like this. I’ve seen so many industries advertise even the tiniest carbon offsets but why can’t BP or Exxon sell a net zero or at least low emissions fuel
- effie 6y agoIt is really strange to you that oil company is not advertising a product that they don't have, a product which would compete with their regular product, a product which is hard to sell (more expensive and dubious value)? From the standpoint of these companies, there is plenty of oil down there, making synthetic one has no upside.
- travisporter 6y agoWell, maybe not synthetic, but what if they said "use this gas for 10% more, we planted a tree for every gallon" or whatever. Even if it was complete bs, I'd think about it
- perl4ever 6y agoI do not understand the concept that a property of a sum of a bunch of numbers somehow applies to those components. Whether something is net zero depends on what you are adding it to; it's not inherent in that thing. It's like, if you have a pile of blue things, then the pile is also blue. But other characteristics do not work that way. If you have a pile of things that each weigh 1 lb, then the pile does not weigh 1 lb.
- readams 6y agoIf you make a hydrocarbon by taking CO2 from the air, and you use a carbon free energy source to do it, then burning that hydrocarbon is net zero carbon. That is, if all your hydrocarbons that you burn were made this way, then the atmospheric carbon doesn't increase because of your activity. It acts just like a battery.
- lykr0n 6y agoExactly. It's not a solution, but it's a way to stop the problem from getting worse. It's like moving from a variable rate credit card to a 0% loan. You still have this pile of debt you need to deal with, but you more or less stop the problem from getting any worse.
- perl4ever 6y agoYou're not telling me anything I don't know. Look at it this way, do you believe CO2 is basically fungible in the context of global climate change?
- nordsieck 6y ago> But to harvest the CO2 you needed to generate a high amount of heat. That's extra CO2. So net CO2 is more. That depends on where they get their energy from.
- WJW 6y agoYou can get the required high amount of heat either through concentrating solar collectors or through any renewable form of electricity that you run through electric heaters. If you want to be fancy, you can use microwaves to very selectively heat only the parts you want to heat.
- Animats 6y ago“We used an open flame, which burns at 2000 degrees, to create nanoparticles of zinc oxide that can then be used to convert CO2, using electricity, into syngas.” Is this a real catalyst? (That is, it doesn't get used up in the process.) Or do they have to keep making more zinc oxide clouds to keep the process going? The paper summary is unclear about the energy inputs to this process. Costs $10 to read the paper.
- philipkglass 6y agoIt's a real catalyst. Full paper here: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/aenm.202001381 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/aenm.202001381 I don't think it will have industrial significance any time soon, though. Catalysts and processes for the reverse water-gas shift reaction are better developed. The hope is that electrochemical catalysts like this can combine the electrolysis process for making H2 and the syngas production step into one, with lower equipment costs. It's hard for me to believe that it will overtake better established industrial processes. It's very hard to take a maybe-better process from lab scale to industry when there's already an established pair of processes that get to the same outcome. My prediction: electrolyzers and catalytic processes will continue to be optimized separately, and combining those modules will continue to be more predictable and affordable than all-in-one electrocatalytic approaches like this.
- elcritch 6y agoDo you have more resources regarding the current state of art for the separate processes?
- pronoiac 6y agoThis looks like the same story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200610152016.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200610152016.h...
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- bit_logic 6y agoEvery time there’s a discussion about synthetic carbon fuels, there’s the same frustrating replies. I want to reply to those with one statement: the whole point is to use excess power from solar/wind. There’s always the same replies pointing out how it’s more efficient to use the power directly in EV batteries, laws of thermodynamics, and other similar things. Those completely miss the point. Solar/wind is going exponential and we have a big problem of storing excess power. Massive really massive amounts of batteries is one option. But converting that into carbon fuels that work directly in existing infrastructure and is effectively carbon neutral is a good option too. That’s where the discussion should be, not pointless arguments about efficiency of EVs.
- regularfry 6y agoI was going to ask if anyone knew what the efficiency of this process was. Obviously we can't get a perpetual motion machine out of it, so it must be taking more energy to form the syngas than gets released from the fuel in the first place, right?
- lstodd 6y agoRight.
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoYou don't need carbon to store energy, you can just stop at hydrogen (or use nitrogen to make ammonia). Processes can be refitted to use pure hydrogen or it can just be added in small increments to existing gas burning plants. Replacing anything that burns fuel with carbon in it with alternatives that dont is a better solution.
- p1mrx 6y agoLots of homes and buildings use natural gas for heat. It would be nice to replace that with something carbon neutral, but the infrastructure can't handle hydrogen levels above 10-20%.
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- credit_guy 6y agoThe application doesn't really make sense the way they explain it: use CO2 from a power plant to produce syngas. If the power plant burns methane, you might as well produce syngas straight out of methane, and short-circuit the step where you produce CO2. From the net energy usage point of view, you are better off (otherwise, you just found a recipe for perpetual motion). Where this could make sense is energy storage. Say you are next to a large solar power plant, and you want to store the excess energy produced during the day and release it at night. Batteries are too expensive, pumped water requires some mountains, etc. With this, you store a quantity of CO2 in some tanks. At day you generate syngas and consume electricity, and store it in some other tanks. At night, you burn the syngas, get some of the initial electricity back, and store the CO2 back in its tanks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pm90 6y agoYou’re correct but It still makes sense as a way to get existing power plant operators on board the green energy train. It’s probably cheaper to retrofit an existing plant to harvest the generated co2.
- nine_k 6y agoThis makes complete sense if you replace a power plant that produces electricity with an industrial process that produces heat, e.g. a blast furnace. Then you can grab the waste CO₂ and turn it into something useful (ultimately liquid fuel, plastics, etc) by using the cheap solar energy, of which we often have a surplus at daytime. This has the downside of only operating efficiently during sunshine, or needing a power transmission line from somewhere under sunshine currently (e.g. during local night).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ajuc 6y agoHow are they converting CO2 into H2+CO? Where is the hydrogen coming from?
- thereisnospork 6y agoWater. In a conventional CO2 electrolyzer (electricity + CO2 -> CO + O2) where CO2 is dissolved in water (plus salt) H2 is the standard byproduct per H2O + electricity -> H2 + O2. The concept of CO2+H2O directly into H2 + CO is neither novel nor useful, as dedicated green-H2 production is more efficient. This is an example of 'meh' level work being puffed up.
- gpm 6y agoSlightly offtopic, what's the easiest way to scrub CO2 from air (e.g. in a house) without using up consumable materials? Some form of pressure swing absorption?
- atrus 6y agoProbably a bunch of plants.
- outworlder 6y agoUnder a lot of light, otherwise they would consume O2 as well.
- gpm 6y agoJust in terms of numbers, you breathe out a kg of CO2 per day, you need to be growing more than a kg of plants per day to keep up with that. That's a lot of plants.
- marcosdumay 6y agoIf you are concerned about indoor CO2 concentration, the answer is to ventilate the place. No reasonable amount of plants will keep a house stable. If it's just really curiosity, well, people have been scrubbing CO2 since space travel is a thing. Wikipedia was completely unhelpful to me, but I remember there is a mineral with high CO2 selectivity that you can simply push the air though it.
- gpm 6y ago98% curiosity, 2% lack of faith in our long term ability to keep CO2 levels down to healthy levels (1000ppm is enough that we can detect minor negative effects... I have to wonder if really minor ones exist even at 400 ppm). Wikipedia was similarly not useful for me. Scuba divers and the like apparently use a one-time-use non-regenerative mineral that absorbs CO2. The space station has something that regenerates but I haven't been able to figure out what.
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- woodandsteel 6y agoSynfuels are very important for saving the climate. Yes, we need to eventually move all transportation to batteries, and we now have the technology to do that with cars and increasingly with trucking. But for ocean ships and long-range airplanes we are nowhere near ready for that. And hydrogen fuel cells are not nearly good enough. So at least for many years the only way to make some important forms of transportation carbon-neutral will be synfuels