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It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century—and assuming fossil-fuel–fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius.
A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The result: "Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells" in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. "The envisioned model of 'crowd oil' from solar refineries, akin to 'crowd electricity' from solar panels," would enable people "to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths."
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-air-conditioning-fix-climate-change/
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @05:40AM (7 children)
Thermodynamics is not friendly to this. We'll burn more coal to power the system. Wait, let's just burn the free fuel it makes, and we'll get free air conditioning! LOL.
Ordinary maintenance issues are not friendly to this. All that fancy gear will get clogged with gunk.
OSHA will have a fit over putting refineries on the rooftops of ordinary businesses.
To say it won't be cheap to buy is quite the understatement I'm sure.
So I won't trust them. The upcoming Soylentnews story about the banana disease being somehow caused by global warming is also suspect. These people are insane.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:13AM (4 children)
So if installing HVAC will require additional hardware to capture the CO2 and convert it into other 'useful products', who will pay the additional costs - installation, maintenance, running costs etc? Government, the building owner, the company occupying the building or will it be left to the poor tax payer again? Who owns the products that are produced, and how is any waste disposed of - or are they suggesting that everything will be recycled with nothing but goodness oozing from the installation?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:43AM
The problem is capitalism:
1) Employees get their money from wages, so the employer pays through wages.
2) Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
Under capitalism the first term in the brackets is negligible and can be rounded to zero. This can only be solved by increasing taxes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @09:46AM
Just build a big, beautiful wall. After it pays for itself, everything else is profit.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 07 2019, @11:43AM
More precisely the problem seems to be the net proposed system overall is turning 25 year depreciation HVAC into elaborate and complicated distributed "solar into liq hydrocarbon fuel" plants to run legacy machinery like cars operating on a 5 year depreciation schedule. And we have no experience running distributed solar into liq hydrocarbon fuel plants, but we already know how to convert gas whatevers to electric, so the risk differences are ridiculous.
It seems a lot more economically sensible to slap some solar panels on the roof and when the gas lawnmower wears out in a couple years, buy an electric lawnmower, ditto car, etc.
I will say that the overall system sounds very much like a modded minecraft contraption that would be amusing to view on youtube or in this situation, IRL. I mean, sure a noob would use a power conduit to connect the solar panel to the energy cell that powers his applied energistics network in minecraft call it good, and move on to digging up diamonds or whacking zombies or whatever; but it takes a genius madman to use the solar panel to run a garden cloche to grow potatoes to turn them into biomass to distill into ethanol to store in crafted iron buckets to eventually fluid transpose into portable tanks feeding ethanol burning generators to make power to run the applied energistics network. I mean, its not cool to plug in an extension cord when you can build an entire chemical plant for the sheer hell of it.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Tuesday May 07 2019, @01:58PM
Silly, the same people who feed the pony will pay for the magic air-conditioner CO2 capture unit.
Of course, the pony will produce methane, but...
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:11PM
It seems that the hvac already is generating heat, and that heat could be used to do more work, which if directed could be used to help carbon capture into fuel. THis should increase efficiency, though of course, not free.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday May 07 2019, @08:00PM
I mean, they do call it out, It's even in the summary. So, realistic or not, they did see the flaw you mention. So by the laws of the internet you are now required to trust them completely.