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I would love that, but how? There is no available residential CO2 scrubbers.
by J_Shelby_J 2y ago
I would love that, but how? There is no available residential CO2 scrubbers.
- jefftk 2y agoBringing in external air (and filtering it, if it's polluted) will be way cheaper than scrubbing CO2 at current levels.
- unholythree 2y agoDefinitely. Filtering particulates and tempering the outside air is the way to go in anything but most extreme situations. I suspect even designing a fallout shelter you would want to go that route.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoAn ERV costs about ~$1000 plus labour (you can install yourself).
- somenameforme 2y agoThis is true, but mostly because the cost of bring in external air is near $0 in most cases - just open a few windows! But there's a lot of absurdly cool ways to scrub CO2 that are not especially expensive, like the video-game level of serendipity+convenience that's the Sabatier Reaction [1]. Combine hydrogen + CO2 at 300C => methane + water. It's already being used on the ISS to keep the air fresh. It'll also be a key component on Mars. There you have basically unlimited CO2 and unlimited hydrogen which yields unlimited methane and unlimited water. Carry out electrolysis on some of the water and you get hydrogen + oxygen. The hydrogen can be fed back into the original cycle, and so you end up left with methane + oxygen which is also known as rocket fuel, uncoincidentally the exact sort SpaceX's Starship is using. Back on Earth you could use this reaction to create practically endless carbon neutral fuel so long as the CO2 was sourced from either the air or a regrown natural capture source like trees or what not. Rockets using this fuel would even have a negative carbon footprint since some of that fuel will get burnt outside the atmosphere. It all seriously feels like a video game where there's just this perfect, but just utterly contrived, rule allowing you to thrive on the next level of difficulty. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
- OutOfHere 2y agoThe reaction is most interesting, but there are three concerns: (1) It presumably requires concentrated CO2. It's not trivial to concentrate CO2 from the air without the appropriate technology. (2) Pure hydrogen can risk an explosion. (3) What does one do with the methane? Also, it too can risk a fire. For these reasons, this is not a reaction that one would seek to do at home.
- somenameforme 2y agoThe Sabatier reaction is completely safe. Here [1] is a video of a few kids doing it completely manually with a couple of syringes, a pipe, and a torch. Producing methane is one of the huge benefits. Methane is just a normal fuel - use it to generate electricity, for your oven/stove, heating, whatever. But at home if all you want is CO2 removal then just use some lye, soda lime, or a million other simple capture technologies. Not quite as sexy, but it'll get the job done. <rant> There's no grand technologies required for any of these things. The only reason it's not done at scale is the same reason we can't have nice things in general. Governments are far more interested in war and cock measuring contests than actually solving problems. We spent literally trillions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the latest wars will probably dwarf that. Just imagine all the crazy sci-fi scale of things we could have done with all that money. Alas, humanity seems to be running on loop, except now we have nukes, paired alongside what are likely some of the most idiotic 'leaders' in centuries. Want to know the answer to the Fermi Paradox? </rant> [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdNPkW9I0fQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdNPkW9I0fQ
- OutOfHere 2y agoWell said. The root cause as I see it is the nature of money used by the people. If money were gold or bitcoin or a similar limited commodity, with a sufficient layer of anonymization, also with global validity and use, then many of these problems would not happen because the governments just would not have so much money to waste. The governments use their guns to enforce that we use their money instead which is prone to heavy inflation and excessive taxation. Reasonable taxation can still exist even with gold/bitcoin via property taxes. We do not have financial freedom.
- autoexec 2y agoDon't the activated carbon prefilters used in many residential air filters work to scrub CO2 at least a little?
- alexey-salmin 2y agoTry calculating how much heavier the filter must become every day to make a difference
- TylerE 2y agoNot in the slightest. Those are for filtering volatile organics.
- Filligree 2y agoThere will be. Mind you, I’m not too happy about a future in which nobody can go outside.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoInstead of scrubbing CO2, just adding the other important components like N2 & O2 to reduce the percent of CO2 in the air would probably be easier
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoNo, because CO2 is only 0.04% of the air, O2 is 21% and N2 is 78%.
- hollerith 2y agoNavies have been removing CO2 from submarines for decades. I think they use sodium hydroxide. Manned space programs must remove CO2 air breathed by astronauts. They used lithium hydroxide for decades (including famously in Apollo 13) but ISTR the international space station has a more sophisticated process.
- gpm 2y agoThe ISS has a clever trick of using zeolite beds to absorb CO2 (a rock with pores that selectively hold onto CO2, and H2O but they dry the air first), and then venting it to space to get rid of the CO2 and recharge them.