4 ms·

In the paper the team reports roughly 50-80% estimated mechanical efficiency, 92% conversion of CO2 by mass in a 27cm / 330ml column, and ~230kw*hr/ton of CO2 e

by gp 5y ago

In the paper the team reports roughly 50-80% estimated mechanical efficiency, 92% conversion of CO2 by mass in a 27cm / 330ml column, and ~230kw*hr/ton of CO2 energy input. They used 6%-20% CO2 mixtures with balance nitrogen and some water to try and approximate different exhausts including flue gas. This seems like a groundbreaking achievement. The only thing that wasn’t clear to me was the size of reactor they expect to be required to achieve meaningful throughput, and the amount of HCl replenishment required, if any, to maintain catalytic performance. This paper gives me a lot of hope.

robbedpeter 5y ago
It's talked about as a catalytic reaction, and the solvent isn't consumed - you get o2, nitrogen, and carbon flakes (which can be further sonicated in a detergent mixture to produce graphene flakes. ) They estimated $100 cost for ~500 lbs of carbon. To put things in context, there's about a trillion tons of "excess" co2 in the atmosphere. That means you're going to need to produce 280 million tons of carbon to reset to 1970 levels. $400 per ton means $1,120,000,000 , or $1.12 trillion. Assume economies of scale, improved efficiency, secondary markets, and you could reduce the effective cost by 80%, so maybe $250 billion could solve co2 climate impact. Spread that out over all vehicles, power plants, businesses, and so on, and that seems achievable over a decade. Spread over global scales on a sound 50 year plan, and people wouldn't even notice any economic impact. Now what if you can tweak the chemistry and produce methane or ethanol or propane? Pure carbon feedstock has to have more uses, so it might be a net producer of value, as opposed to a fundamental cost. Pretty exciting to think about.
- zamalek 5y ago
  > $400 per ton means $1,120,000,000 , or $1.12 trillion. That's practically nothing. This is very hope inspiring: when politics eventually catches up to science we may actually have the tools to do something in time.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Even maintaining our current co2 levels would be pretty amazing. And that could be much cheaper.
robbedpeter 5y ago
https://phys.org/pdf553333905.pdf https://phys.org/pdf553333905.pdf From the paper: "We have already scaled this system up to two-and-a-half liters dimensions, which can deal with around 0.1 liter of CO2 per minute. And we've tested that running continuously for a whole month and the efficiency of the system did not degrade." 2.5l column runs 6 liters per hour. 494,109.34 Liters per ton of co2, so... lots of columns are needed. 82,352 columns per ton per hour, lol. If you made a giant pool reactor it would be 206 cubic meters of space, so 15x15x1 meters, or about 50x50 feet.
- gp 5y ago
  Ahh I missed this. Thank you!

by gp 5y ago

robbedpeter 5y ago

It's talked about as a catalytic reaction, and the solvent isn't consumed - you get o2, nitrogen, and carbon flakes (which can be further sonicated in a detergent mixture to produce graphene flakes. ) They estimated $100 cost for ~500 lbs of carbon. To put things in context, there's about a trillion tons of "excess" co2 in the atmosphere. That means you're going to need to produce 280 million tons of carbon to reset to 1970 levels. $400 per ton means $1,120,000,000 , or $1.12 trillion. Assume economies of scale, improved efficiency, secondary markets, and you could reduce the effective cost by 80%, so maybe $250 billion could solve co2 climate impact. Spread that out over all vehicles, power plants, businesses, and so on, and that seems achievable over a decade. Spread over global scales on a sound 50 year plan, and people wouldn't even notice any economic impact. Now what if you can tweak the chemistry and produce methane or ethanol or propane? Pure carbon feedstock has to have more uses, so it might be a net producer of value, as opposed to a fundamental cost. Pretty exciting to think about.

zamalek 5y ago
> $400 per ton means $1,120,000,000 , or $1.12 trillion. That's practically nothing. This is very hope inspiring: when politics eventually catches up to science we may actually have the tools to do something in time.
mrfusion 5y ago
Even maintaining our current co2 levels would be pretty amazing. And that could be much cheaper.

robbedpeter 5y ago

https://phys.org/pdf553333905.pdf https://phys.org/pdf553333905.pdf From the paper: "We have already scaled this system up to two-and-a-half liters dimensions, which can deal with around 0.1 liter of CO2 per minute. And we've tested that running continuously for a whole month and the efficiency of the system did not degrade." 2.5l column runs 6 liters per hour. 494,109.34 Liters per ton of co2, so... lots of columns are needed. 82,352 columns per ton per hour, lol. If you made a giant pool reactor it would be 206 cubic meters of space, so 15x15x1 meters, or about 50x50 feet.

gp 5y ago
Ahh I missed this. Thank you!