13 replies to this topic

[stevo]

http://www.science20..._out_of_the_air
http://www.myessenti...oxide-scrubber/

Edited by stevo, 18 June 2012 - 06:10 PM.

[Raklian]

Doesn't say what can be done with the captured carbon dioxide.

[Craven]

That's not really important. What is important is if there's any catch. Like - if you need 1kg of platinum to caputre 10 tons of carbon it's prolematic. If there is no catch, then we may remember David Keith as man who saved the world.

[kjaggard]

From the first one: "This means that if you used electricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you'd be capturing 10 times as much CO2 as the power plant emitted making that much electricity,"
and
"Their custom-built tower was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on a single square metre of scrubbing material – the average amount of emissions that one person produces each year in the North American-wide economy."

So one square meter for every person in the US. figure for growth a bit and round up to 140 square miles. That's about the size of the Gaza strip. Or slightly less than a third of New York City. But that's just the plates themselves, not including the power plant and building they are on. And you'll want them devided up across the country not just one location (otherwise you get co2 depletion, and thus plant die off and higher fire risk with the balance of o2 and Nitrogen being the majority of the atmosphere.) So triple the space per plate and you get one new york city sized area, devide that over 50 facilities (say one in each state). We could drop oursleves into just barely negative co2 production for about thirty years.

But we'd be using carbon fuels up faster to power the process. So we may want to try alterantive power sources for the process. But that still leaves the question of what to do with the co2 once you have it.

If one used it for algae farms to produce protein and oils it might offer food options, and there is research into using it as an alternative fuel source to natural fossil fuels. But the farms needed for that level of production for the amount of co2 pulled out of the air in a day by these things would be huge. Compressing them into tanks might allow us to store them until usage requires it. But compression requires storage vessels which need manufacturing and energy to compress it. Still it might be the best option at this point.

But the real question is how does it work and is it reversable? I mean if they are making a giant chemical sponge that absorbs the co2 an then slowly off gasses it over a decade, it means we have to store the whole arrangment once it's full and replace it with a new one. Can we afford to keep buying these things and storing them? Could it be done as seven for each plant and the used ones are put in a refinement room where it's recycled for use by the next week? How much additional processing energy does that entail? What's the working lifetime of each unit?

[Zeitgeist123]

id say that we create a technology that could convert this co2 into a beneficial compound/element like oxygen, and maybe diamond/gold.

[kjaggard]

id say that we create a technology that could convert this co2 into a beneficial compound/element like oxygen, and maybe diamond/gold.

Humanity doesn't have the ability to turn carbon into gold at least not without spending more than many times the golds value on energy from CO2 sources to make it. Diamond is also fairly expensive to make but much easier to do. You are still likely to make more co2 in creating a diamond then you remove. We may be on the verge of a break even point in the near future with carbon nanotubes, graphene, and fullerenes.

But we have to put energy into co2 to get O2 and C seperate. Then we have to use energy to create something with the raw carbon. That's why plants are so valuble, they take in co2 use sunlight for energy and create chemical processes that break co2 and release much of the oxegen and use the carbon to create foods or other plant parts that can be processed into other useful materials like wood, or maple sap, pine pitch, bamboo ect.

The problem with plants is we are removing them in huge swaths from the face of the earth and burning their carbon stores for fuels and making plastics ect. we are reversing their hard work and it's destroying our environment.

[stevo]

- http://planetgreen.d...rial-scale.html- another video here that tells how it works, no plutonium. just costic soda
-

Edited by stevo, 20 June 2012 - 07:31 AM.

[kjaggard]

sounds like a chemical reaction which means biproducts and the question of where you get the bicarbonate to start with. But the video doesn't actually explain anything at least not the one you posted. It does look farmiliar to me from over a year ago. Which makes me wonder why we've not heard anything since then.

[CallMeKari]

That's pretty neat as long as there's no catch and it doesn't need a huge amount of power. As for what to do with the CO2, I say pump it into greenhouses for the plants! Then extract the oxygen they create from photosynthesis. Very simple solution I know, it would need some fine tuning lol.

[stevo]

That's pretty neat as long as there's no catch and it doesn't need a huge amount of power. As for what to do with the CO2, I say pump it into greenhouses for the plants! Then extract the oxygen they create from photosynthesis. Very simple solution I know, it would need some fine tuning lol.

That sounds like a great idea

it was on Discovery project Earth on the Discovery Channel

[stevo]

http://thefutureofth...of-the-air.html

http://www.scribd.co...Hydroxide-Spray

i wish i could find a video of him explaining how it works
this might just be a big help to help cut our carbon foot print

[stevo]

http://avaxhome.ws/v...ojectEarth.html

this is a list of all the shows in the series

[kjaggard]

That's pretty neat as long as there's no catch and it doesn't need a huge amount of power. As for what to do with the CO2, I say pump it into greenhouses for the plants! Then extract the oxygen they create from photosynthesis. Very simple solution I know, it would need some fine tuning lol.

That's sorta the idea behind algae farms, algae actually pull more co2 out of the air and convert it to oxegen while producing protein, oil and ethanol. the more you give it the more you can grow and the more it consumes. Plants are less efficent and have a Higher level of non usable material produced that would have to be thrown out or burned which produces green house gasses as they rot or burn. Algae could be produced that would grow the colony and the end result is biofuels and food.

http://thefutureofth...of-the-air.html

http://www.scribd.co...Hydroxide-Spray

i wish i could find a video of him explaining how it works
this might just be a big help to help cut our carbon foot print

But where does he get his ingredients is the question. It's all well and good to say I can use sponges to soak up oil spills out of sea water but it's another thing to try and get as many sponges as would have been needed to stop the BP oil spill and then get them to the spill and deployed. It may well cost in co2 production more to mine the bicarbonate, or manufacture it than his machine could pull out in a year. and if it is a chemical reaction then the co2 is not usable in algae farming or greenhouses anymore but instead is some type of chemical waste we have tor remove and process in some way or store.

[stevo]

well i'll tell you that it definitely worked. i saw the show