4 ms·

But this is attractive from the point of offsetting global warming. I should do the calculations for how effective it really is i.e. how big a plant do I need t

But this is attractive from the point of offsetting global warming. I should do the calculations for how effective it really is i.e. how big a plant do I need to offset all the carbon dioxide I produce. If it is, there would be a public incentive to fund development and plants of such a nature vs funding carbon neutral or carbon positive energy ventures.

Dn_Ab 13y ago
Wikipedia lists some active (in Germany and Iceland) and proposed demonstrations of the general concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel#Demonstration_projects_and_commercial_development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel#Demonstrati...
whythehellnot 13y ago
Given that their full scale solar concentrator could produce 20,000L per day. I think it would take around 10,000 of those concentrators just for aeroplanes to be carbon neutral. To be honest, that isn't too bad considering how much money we waste collecting other fuels much more dangerously. This would be worthwhile if we could construct them quick enough before our transition to our battery powered future. To be honest this sort of technology would be better used for recycling agriculture fertilisers.
sitkack 13y ago
Really we should have funded this and a myriad of other technologies esp fusion instead of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When fusion finally comes online, we need to dump a serious amount of energy into pulling the carbon back out of the seas and the atmosphere. But without the seas, billions will end up starving.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  The sad truth is that fusion power remains a highly elusive and intractable technology after 50 years and billions of dollars of "research" (though much of that arguably was really rebranded weapons development). The broad outlines of a potentially sustainable high-energy-yield future are well known. Solar is the clear standout winner, hydro, wind, geothermal, and possibly some biomass may contribute. Liquid hydrocarbon fuels synthesis via Fischer-Tropsch, Sabatier process, or similar processes looks potentially viable, and water as a feedstock for both hydrogen and carbon seems tractable. It's not easy or cheap, but it's possible. As for the billions -- I suspect that a future stable wealthy population level will indeed be some billions fewer than live on Earth today.
  - sitkack 13y ago
    Solar has an absolutely $/watt right now. And edge deployed solar solves tons of problems with grid capacity. We really need to get on electric car grid intertie. Billions is not an incredible amount of money. Fusion research has been horribly underfunded and has and is making great strides. http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful So 27B USD (inflation adjusted) in funding over the history of fusion. Pennies. http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ Estimates for the total cost of the wars is around 4T USD with the current dollar cost of 1.5T USD. In Seattle we are building a 2 mile long tunnel for 4.25B. Our tunnel is 7% of the lifetime fusion budget. We don't need solar and fusion to solve our fuel problem. We need solar and fusion to pull carbon back out of the atmosphere and the oceans. Population has absolutely nothing to do with carbon output levels. North America and Europe account for the majority of carbon output and 20% of the worlds population. edit: fixed number
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Billions is not an incredible amount of money. Billions with nothing to show for is. Fusion energy is the first seriously pursued energy source which has never been proof-of-concepted for more than a few million dollars, and its only competition there is nuclear fission. Even there I suspect that the first criticality would have been achieved at even lower cost. I'm digging for references, though AFAIK first human-triggered criticality was at the University of Chicago in 1942 under Enrico Fermi (I'm not sure if earlier radiation workers achieved criticality). I can't find budgetary amounts for that project, but the entire Manhattan project was $26 billion in 2014 dollars, and it delivered sustained chain reaction, working reactors (at the very beginning of the project), and an actual stockpile of working weapons, two of which were used in combat. By contrast, fusion research, while providing weapons, has not succeeded in delivering sustained net-energy-positive reactions. And every single prior external energy source humans have utilized has been proven on a budget of at most a few dollars, if not freely in nature: agriculture, wood fire, coal, oil, gas, water, wind, solar, geothermal, wave, tide. Another distinction which occurred to me some time back is that fusion is the first (on Earth) non-chain-reaction type material-based energy source. That is: all other energy sources involving transformation of matter (whether by conventional molecular or nuclear chemistry) will proceed by themselves under proper conditions in which energy is sufficiently reflected or retained at the point of reaction. In the case of solid fuels, a fire is achieved by piling fuel such that airflow is permitted (providing necessary oxygen), while the heat of burning embers is contained to allow more fuel to participate in the fire. Many sufficiently volatile fuels will burn without much or any concentration (e.g., candles, matches, twigs), though a coal or log fire generally requires _some_ assembly. Those conditions are readily and directly observable in nature. Similarly, sustained nuclear fission is accomplished by ensuring that emitted neutrons have a sufficient likelihood of striking more atoms that the reaction is sustained. This is easy enough to achieve that nuclear industry workers have to take pains to not accidentally create critical masses of fissible materials (a task at which there have been multiple failures). Wind, water, and solar energy demonstrations and practical application all pre-dated the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, fusion technologies are all based on the principle of feeding more energy into the reaction chamber to continue the reaction, and absent that very active feedback (through very complex means). It's only when you, very literally, achieve stellar magnitude concentrations of mass that fusion occurs naturally at rates sufficient to provide substantial amounts of energy. And even the Sun, a third of a million times as massive as Earth, only undergoes hydrogen fusion at a rate per unit mass roughly equivalent to reptile metabolism. You, as a mammal (I presume), are releasing four times more energy per unit mass than the Sun is. The Sun just happens to be slightly more massive than you (or, of course, your mother -- or mine). While exothermic fusion has been achieved on Earth, it's not been controlled, sustained, or utilizable for productive energy use. And I really don't see that changing. When you contrast the billions to trillions in research that would have to be spent simply researching useful fusion technologies with the amount of actual energy infrastructure which could be constructed with an equivalent expenditure based on solar, wind, geothermal, and liquid fuels synthesis (among other known and proven technologies), there's really no argument in my mind. Keep ticking the research along at low levels, sure, but in the near term (the next decades to century or so) we really have an exigent need that should be fulfilled first. Finally: "Population has absolutely nothing to do with carbon output levels" is flat-out false, and misses the point. The accepted formula is in fact dependent on population, but also affluence and technology: I = P × A × T That is: impact (including CO2 emissions) is a function of population, affluence (net resource consumption), and technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT The other problem is that it's not just CO2 emissions but total carrying capacity which are limited, as exemplified by "peak everything": oil, water, topsoil, phosphorus, uranium, copper, and many other inputs to both industrial and nonindistrial human existence. Estimates of what specifically a long-term sustainable carrying capacity might be vary, but a number that has been suggested (by the Ehrlichs among others) is around 2 billion. Last I checked we'd exceeded that slightly, and there might be a recruitment of volunteers in the near future.

Dn_Ab 13y ago

Wikipedia lists some active (in Germany and Iceland) and proposed demonstrations of the general concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel#Demonstration_projects_and_commercial_development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel#Demonstrati...

whythehellnot 13y ago

Given that their full scale solar concentrator could produce 20,000L per day. I think it would take around 10,000 of those concentrators just for aeroplanes to be carbon neutral. To be honest, that isn't too bad considering how much money we waste collecting other fuels much more dangerously. This would be worthwhile if we could construct them quick enough before our transition to our battery powered future. To be honest this sort of technology would be better used for recycling agriculture fertilisers.

sitkack 13y ago

Really we should have funded this and a myriad of other technologies esp fusion instead of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When fusion finally comes online, we need to dump a serious amount of energy into pulling the carbon back out of the seas and the atmosphere. But without the seas, billions will end up starving.

dredmorbius 13y ago
The sad truth is that fusion power remains a highly elusive and intractable technology after 50 years and billions of dollars of "research" (though much of that arguably was really rebranded weapons development). The broad outlines of a potentially sustainable high-energy-yield future are well known. Solar is the clear standout winner, hydro, wind, geothermal, and possibly some biomass may contribute. Liquid hydrocarbon fuels synthesis via Fischer-Tropsch, Sabatier process, or similar processes looks potentially viable, and water as a feedstock for both hydrogen and carbon seems tractable. It's not easy or cheap, but it's possible. As for the billions -- I suspect that a future stable wealthy population level will indeed be some billions fewer than live on Earth today.
- sitkack 13y ago
  Solar has an absolutely $/watt right now. And edge deployed solar solves tons of problems with grid capacity. We really need to get on electric car grid intertie. Billions is not an incredible amount of money. Fusion research has been horribly underfunded and has and is making great strides. http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful So 27B USD (inflation adjusted) in funding over the history of fusion. Pennies. http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ Estimates for the total cost of the wars is around 4T USD with the current dollar cost of 1.5T USD. In Seattle we are building a 2 mile long tunnel for 4.25B. Our tunnel is 7% of the lifetime fusion budget. We don't need solar and fusion to solve our fuel problem. We need solar and fusion to pull carbon back out of the atmosphere and the oceans. Population has absolutely nothing to do with carbon output levels. North America and Europe account for the majority of carbon output and 20% of the worlds population. edit: fixed number
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Billions is not an incredible amount of money. Billions with nothing to show for is. Fusion energy is the first seriously pursued energy source which has never been proof-of-concepted for more than a few million dollars, and its only competition there is nuclear fission. Even there I suspect that the first criticality would have been achieved at even lower cost. I'm digging for references, though AFAIK first human-triggered criticality was at the University of Chicago in 1942 under Enrico Fermi (I'm not sure if earlier radiation workers achieved criticality). I can't find budgetary amounts for that project, but the entire Manhattan project was $26 billion in 2014 dollars, and it delivered sustained chain reaction, working reactors (at the very beginning of the project), and an actual stockpile of working weapons, two of which were used in combat. By contrast, fusion research, while providing weapons, has not succeeded in delivering sustained net-energy-positive reactions. And every single prior external energy source humans have utilized has been proven on a budget of at most a few dollars, if not freely in nature: agriculture, wood fire, coal, oil, gas, water, wind, solar, geothermal, wave, tide. Another distinction which occurred to me some time back is that fusion is the first (on Earth) non-chain-reaction type material-based energy source. That is: all other energy sources involving transformation of matter (whether by conventional molecular or nuclear chemistry) will proceed by themselves under proper conditions in which energy is sufficiently reflected or retained at the point of reaction. In the case of solid fuels, a fire is achieved by piling fuel such that airflow is permitted (providing necessary oxygen), while the heat of burning embers is contained to allow more fuel to participate in the fire. Many sufficiently volatile fuels will burn without much or any concentration (e.g., candles, matches, twigs), though a coal or log fire generally requires _some_ assembly. Those conditions are readily and directly observable in nature. Similarly, sustained nuclear fission is accomplished by ensuring that emitted neutrons have a sufficient likelihood of striking more atoms that the reaction is sustained. This is easy enough to achieve that nuclear industry workers have to take pains to not accidentally create critical masses of fissible materials (a task at which there have been multiple failures). Wind, water, and solar energy demonstrations and practical application all pre-dated the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, fusion technologies are all based on the principle of feeding more energy into the reaction chamber to continue the reaction, and absent that very active feedback (through very complex means). It's only when you, very literally, achieve stellar magnitude concentrations of mass that fusion occurs naturally at rates sufficient to provide substantial amounts of energy. And even the Sun, a third of a million times as massive as Earth, only undergoes hydrogen fusion at a rate per unit mass roughly equivalent to reptile metabolism. You, as a mammal (I presume), are releasing four times more energy per unit mass than the Sun is. The Sun just happens to be slightly more massive than you (or, of course, your mother -- or mine). While exothermic fusion has been achieved on Earth, it's not been controlled, sustained, or utilizable for productive energy use. And I really don't see that changing. When you contrast the billions to trillions in research that would have to be spent simply researching useful fusion technologies with the amount of actual energy infrastructure which could be constructed with an equivalent expenditure based on solar, wind, geothermal, and liquid fuels synthesis (among other known and proven technologies), there's really no argument in my mind. Keep ticking the research along at low levels, sure, but in the near term (the next decades to century or so) we really have an exigent need that should be fulfilled first. Finally: "Population has absolutely nothing to do with carbon output levels" is flat-out false, and misses the point. The accepted formula is in fact dependent on population, but also affluence and technology: I = P × A × T That is: impact (including CO2 emissions) is a function of population, affluence (net resource consumption), and technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT The other problem is that it's not just CO2 emissions but total carrying capacity which are limited, as exemplified by "peak everything": oil, water, topsoil, phosphorus, uranium, copper, and many other inputs to both industrial and nonindistrial human existence. Estimates of what specifically a long-term sustainable carrying capacity might be vary, but a number that has been suggested (by the Ehrlichs among others) is around 2 billion. Last I checked we'd exceeded that slightly, and there might be a recruitment of volunteers in the near future.