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Every time I hear a "THERMODYNAMICS" argument on carbon capture/retrieval, I die a little inside. Especially since the fundamental assumption is that the earth
by esyir 5y ago
Every time I hear a "THERMODYNAMICS" argument on carbon capture/retrieval, I die a little inside. Especially since the fundamental assumption is that the earth is a closed system. Considering that the sun provides us an effectively (current and moderate-future) unlimited source of energy, it's perfectly reasonable to spend more energy than was generated, especially if it allows us to mitigate unreliable sources (solar) with on-demand sources.
The question is then, can we spin up sufficient capacity, and can we find a scalable, sufficiently efficient way of capturing said carbon, thus the research into this area.
Nobody is talking perpetual motion here.
- jiggawatts 5y agoBut then why bother burning the coal in the first place? If you can get energy from the sun/fusion/fission/wind/whatever then you don’t need to burn coal! If you just want to remove CO2 from the air, there are much better ways than “un-burning” it.
- esyir 5y ago1: CO2's already in the air. You gotta get it out somehow. If this (or some other approach) is sufficiently efficient, then I'm happy. 2: Solar is unreliable, requiring tiding over on nights/cloudy days/etc. In theory, this would allow for excess energy -> fuel, or other things, since coke is also useful for a number of other industrial processes. 3: Does this scale? I have no idea. It's not quite burning gallium though, since from what I'm seeing, gallium can then be regenerated to elemental gallium (at the cost of more energy). This is more an engineering, rather than a research question though. 4: This is just one of many projects (with some nice characteristics), if something else better turns up, then so be it.
- jiggawatts 5y ago"Somehow" doesn't mean we should entertain options that are guaranteed to be futile. There are already better methods that have been devised an even tested at small industrial scales. This isn't a problem of scale, and the problem is that optimistic people just don't get this. There is no way to make this work, ever. It's like the old joke: "Sure, we're selling every unit at a loss, but we'll make up for it with volume!" You can't take a "business plan" that inherently loses money and try to scale it up to... what? Even greater losses? (In this case, this is both a thermodynamic and a financial loss. You're burning both energy and cash!)
- hackeraccount 5y agoThat's like saying I lose money on lunch everyday. It's true - lunch never pays me, I don't make it up in volume and I won't even break even. My life is bigger then lunch though. Lunch enables me to do other things that do make money - so I take a loss on lunch with a view towards the other stuff.
- jiggawatts 5y agoA human being can never use their energy gained from their food to reduce all of their exhaled CO2 back to carbon, no matter what technique they use. It’s impossible, of the perpetual machine variety. This is precisely analogous to this gallium example! You can’t unburn something without losing more energy in the process than the burning produced. It’s always over 100% overhead. ALWAYS!! The details and the path taken through the world of chemistry or electrochemistry are totally irrelevant and can never alter this.
- scotty79 5y agoWe could build 1000 times more renewables than we have right now. But since we don't have a way of storing vast excess of energy available in peak production times we would still have to burn coal for some part of the day. Thanks to this technology with proper economic incentives we might use surplus electricity in peak renewables production hours to make carbon to burn later, or to bury underground.