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Its not fraudulent, its a good idea, and likely useful in niche large chemical plants. It is also useless against climate change. The the paper uses a simple i
by midjji 5y ago
Its not fraudulent, its a good idea, and likely useful in niche large chemical plants. It is also useless against climate change.
The the paper uses a simple input of CO2 and nitrogen. Though O2 could be added as well, as the gallium will simply react with it too. After all, More energy is released by gallium reacting with O2, than by carbon reacting by O2, or it would not happen in the first place. In the atmosphere, CO2:O2 is say 400:1 meaning you need 400 times more gallium.
The next step would be to separate the gallium from the gallium oxide, which is energy intensive, though this can be climate neural using nuclear. To do so would require hundreds of times the global energy production from coal, oil, and gas. And if you have built these, why not just use them instead, global warming would already be effectively stopped.
It also cannot be used in car catalyzes, providing an anoxic reaction chamber which can collect and separate the outputs simply isn't feasible at small scale. The carbon would be in a fine powder, likely to spontaneously react with O2 if exposed to air, either slowly, or if given a spark, very rapidly indeed. The gallium also should not be released into the environment. Not only would large scale use of this tech make it very expensive, gallium is also mildly toxic. However, because it is rare in our environment, there are few if any studies on the impact of long term low dose gallium poisoning. As a result, its a comparable to lead, a few decades ago. Not saying its as deadly, just saying its a metal we are rarely if ever exposed to, known to be mildly poisonous in the short term. And this is before you add the problems of contaminants in fuel, and partial combustion. For similar reasons it also cannot be used in aviation.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoJust think of how much money your could make selling the carbon as 100% eco-friendly charcoal...
- midjji 5y agoMost farmers do just that^^
- 300bps 5y agoAt first I ignored the entire HN submission because I've been taught that carbon sequestration will never be a solution to atmospheric carbon. On a whim I clicked on the comments though expecting the first comment to be, "This will never work, because..." So I was happy to see that the top comment was actually positive! Then I saw your response.
- tedivm 5y agoThis still is pretty positive- it seems like it can be used as carbon capture inside of existing plants that produce CO2 as a byproduct. It isn't going to solve climate change but it could give us another tool to use.
- midjji 5y agoI get that pain -_-' One of the things which I've seen but feel is rarely talked about is that the planet is sequestering a large amount of CO2 and this increases positively proportionally to CO2 concentration. Over longer periods of time, the CO2 levels drop, and sudden shocks such as volcanos and cataclysmic massive forest fires, are parried by the increase, quickly returning to previous levels. This proves that sequestration does work which is nice. There are many problems with this. At historic CO2 levels on human timelines the natural sequestration is effectively in balance with CO2 production. So its not enough to sequester the additional modern human production, and the prop increase is less than 1, so it wont be. Two, at least some of the systems which are sequestering are doing so as a side effect of severe to catastrophic ecological damage. For rare events this isn't a problem, but our current production is not one year in a century. It does mean that if we stop using fossile, CO2 levels will revert on their own. Though it will take a long time.
- ummonk 5y agoExactly. If we go carbon neutral and stop the CO2 production shock to the system, nature will take care of what we've already put out (though it may take a few centuries, depending on which of the IPCC atmospheric CO2 level half-life estimates you go by).