now that is doin, not yawping. CO2 recycling
you can kill people for America at age 18 but need to be 21 to buy a beer |
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Looks interesting.
http://carbonengineering.com/our-technology/ I'd be surprised if they actually can make money with it unless they're getting their electricity for free. But I hope they keep at it. Cheers, Scott. |
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I don't get it.
What good is capturing CO2 from the atmosphere? We've go companies right here in Los Angeles that have been doing that for many decades. They sell it as Dry Ice. It's mostly a byproduct of producing liquid Oxygen and liquid Nitrogen. Now, if they have a cheap way to break the bond to produce carbon and oxygen, then I would be impressed. Just cramming CO2 under ground is going to be a big problem down the line when something goes wrong. There is no industrial process whatever that can't go wrong - and if it can, it will. |
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I was thinking that too, initially.
It's relatively cheap to make liquid nitrogen (it cost roughly $1/gal delivered in large quantities a few years ago), and that's much colder than dry ice. I don't know the process, but it would seem that dry ice should be cheaper than LN2. Trouble is, when you're talking about extracting millions or billions of tons, the cost gets very high very quickly. Maybe that chemical process is cheaper on that huge scale. Of course, just extracting it isn't good enough. You need to find a cheap way to get it out of the atmospheric cycle and (ideally) return it to a rock-like state so it stops trapping infrared radiation. It'll be interesting to see how things turn out. Cheers, Scott. |
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they are turning it into fuel
you can kill people for America at age 18 but need to be 21 to buy a beer |
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Yeah? Just how do they expect to do that?
Details please. CO2 is what remains when you burn fuel. You can't use CO2 for fuel. Breaking it into Carbon and Oxygen (fuel and oxidizer) takes inputing the same amount of energy as their combining (burning) released. The only way to propel anything with CO2 is to compress it, which takes more energy than the decompressing will release. |
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uh, read the article?
"It's now possible to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use it as a feed stock, with hydrogen, to produce net zero emission fuels." you can kill people for America at age 18 but need to be 21 to buy a beer |
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The article is wonderfully uninformative.
It's now possible to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use it as a feed stock, with hydrogen, to produce net zero emission fuels. I've seen much more credible explanations for New Age energy frauds from back in the early '70s. Details please. |
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They depend on nearly free electricity if they want to make fuel.
http://carbonengineering.com/our-technology/ INTEGRATION WITH CARBON-FREE ENERGY It could still be useful even if it costs money or net power to grab a significant amount of CO2 out of the air. But the question remains whether it will be better than traditional techniques if they also have similar "free" inputs. Cheers, Scott. |
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Yes, with unlimited "almost free" electricity . . .
. . they can break the bond to produce carbon and oxygen. They also need to break the hydrogen away from something. Then they can re-combine into some sort of "designer fuel". I'd like to see an energy flow and balance diagram here. There are a lot of other things you can do with unlimited "almost free" electricity - if you can get it. I well remember all the "electricity will be too cheap to meter" claims for nuclear power. I've talked to people who suckered for "Medallion Homes" based on those claims. To me, this article reads like a foundation pitch to start sucking in investors who don't know how to do math. |
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maybe something similar
you can kill people for America at age 18 but need to be 21 to buy a beer |
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Credible science, but major problems.
Calculate the square footage of solar collection needed to equal the output of an oil well. All these folks had better pray that the Fusion Reactor being developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works actually works. "Electricity too cheap to meter" is what all this stuff needs. |
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Plants, via photosynthesis, do this all the time.
But, with all the deforestation for land use by agriculture we're going the wrong way. We're replacing carbon sequestered in biomass with CO2 and plants that are small and don't use that much of it. Photosynthesis needs to be used or replicated. Make room for those cords of wood! :) Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov |
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Photosynthesis can't keep up.
We're burning the photosynthesis of millions of years in a few decades. It is believed that the last global warming was ended by a huge bloom of aquatic ferns all over North American waters. Today, these same ferns are considered pests and are constantly cleared from recreational waterways in the U.S. and Canada. |
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Yep, fossil fuel is the worst culprit.
Even peat takes thousands of years to build up. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov |
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Sadly, just a few rather simple factoids like these are pretty discouraging
to anyone with a a soupçon of clear comprehension of just some basic math, not very complex physics and ... a close look at the historical-fact that Waste has been the rich-countries' Largest and most consistent Product, ever since Conspicuous Consumption became the general indicator of Mine's Bigger, for the billions living high on that perennial hog. Changing such habits of so many/so quickly is likely a task well beyond the most manipulative-minds who fancy their mob-psych. skillz. Probably our best Hope would be for a demi-Tragedy {I can't conjure up an outline for one of those} just adequate to Get the ATTENTION of *ALL* of us complicit co-conspirators/facilitators of what may prove to *have been: the Final gross-error of all previous human 'fantasies of the futchah''. That which aimed us *Here*. *How's That! for fun-with the subjunctive tense, word-jockeys? |
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I bet they generate more CO2 in burning natural gas then they extract from air.
Granted they will recapture that CO2 as well. Net net, they are using energy to make and otherwise concentrate CO2. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov |