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Climate Change: 'Magic Bullet' Carbon Solution Takes Big Step:
A technology that removes carbon dioxide from the air has received significant backing from major fossil fuel companies.
British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way.
It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.
[...]CO2 is a powerful warming gas but there's not a lot of it in the atmosphere - for every million molecules of air, there are 410 of CO2.
While the CO2 is helping to drive temperatures up around the world, the comparatively low concentrations make it difficult to design efficient machines to remove the gas.
Carbon Engineering's process is all about sucking in air and exposing it to a chemical solution that concentrates the CO2. Further refinements mean the gas can be purified into a form that can be stored or utilised as a liquid fuel.
[...]Carbon Engineering's barn-sized installation has a large fan in the middle of the roof which draws in air from the atmosphere.
It then comes into contact with a hydroxide-based chemical solution. Certain hydroxides react with carbon dioxide, reversibly binding to the CO2 molecule. When the CO2 in the air reacts with the liquid, it forms a carbonate mixture. That is then treated with a slurry of calcium hydroxide to change it into solid form; the slurry helps form tiny pellets of calcium carbonate.
The chalky calcium carbonate pellets are then treated at a high temperature of about 900C, with the pellets decomposing into a CO2 stream and calcium oxide.
After any water lingering in the concentrated CO2 is removed, the result can be converted into a fuel:
The captured CO2 is mixed with hydrogen that's made from water and green electricity. It's then passed over a catalyst at 900C to form carbon monoxide. Adding in more hydrogen to the carbon monoxide turns it into what's called synthesis gas.
Finally a Fischer-Tropsch process turns this gas into a synthetic crude oil. Carbon Engineering says the liquid can be used in a variety of engines without modification.
The question then becomes are people going to look at this development and think there is no need to reduce their use of fossil fuels and/or delay the transition to renewable power sources?
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Sunday April 07 2019, @06:32PM (2 children)
If we could use this method to sequester a high percentage of the CO2 from coal, nat gas, and diesel plants it would make the transition to an electric transportation system much less burdensome.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 08 2019, @02:33AM (1 child)
That's a big if.
Tell you what, though. Why not capture the CO2 at the source of emission, when it's concentrated - should be more energy efficient, isn't it? Assuming you are burning all oxygen in the air that you use for combustion, you'll have to take CO2 out from about 21% concentration by volume. Definitely should be less energy intensive than separating it out from 0.04% by volume.
I wonder why the "dyno juice and farts energy industry" seems to favor "well, we'll sponsor others in the chase for wild Rube Goldbergs" instead of looking into they own yard?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday April 08 2019, @06:15PM
It's more concentrated, but it's also more limited. Sure, you can set this up at the output of a nat gas plant...and probably get cheaper results when it spins up...but they don't generally keep those things running 24/7. And if the plant closes, so does the carbon capture. And more importantly, is it cheaper to attach one of these to a coal plant vs just building a wind/nuclear/solar plant instead? Otherwise it doesn't actually solve anything.
The big problem is with transportation, because the energy density of oil can't be matched by batteries. And you can't put one of these on every tailpipe. If you can pull the CO2 out of the air and convert it to oil, then power that with renewable energy, that can solve the problem by making the oil carbon-neutral in the first place. I think the other potential use would be for grid-scale batteries -- as it might be easier to produce and store oil rather than having a much larger volume of batteries -- but you still can't pull the carbon out of the power plant because you'd want to be producing carbon specifically when the power plant isn't running (ie, when you have an excess of solar/wind/etc.)