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Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 07 2019, @04:46AM   
from the chilly-reception dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

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/

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Original Submission

• Re:Energy requirement for capture? Re:Energy requirement for capture? (Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:55AM (1 child)

  by zocalo (302) on Tuesday May 07 2019, @07:55AM (#840045)

  I read this as making the assumptions that we will continue to run HVACs regardless and develop a viable air-scrubbing carbon capture tech that works based on driven air volumes typical of a HVAC and requires that the air be pumped through the system, rather than something like a free flow using natural convection. e.g. the entire system doesn't need to be carbon neutral, just that the energy saving from the HVAC that would be running anyway feeding air into the scrubber is enough to make the scrubber carbon neutral, and ideally carbon negative. I think it doubtful you could offset the carbon footprint of the entire setup, but if you can make a significant net dent into the footprint of the HVAC then it's definitely worth pursuing. That probably still means you're going to need an incredibly efficient, e.g. mostly passive, carbon scrubber and it might only be viable at scale (e.g. for HVACs at large commercial and industrial spaces rather than for typical home units), but it all hinges on the monetary and power costs of the hypothetical CO2 scrubber.

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• Re:Energy requirement for capture? (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 07 2019, @05:41PM

  by The Mighty Buzzard (18) <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday May 07 2019, @05:41PM (#840285) Homepage Journal

  Yeah, I don't mind if they want to slap some extra widgets on the air handler. The assumption that air conditioning is going to keep happening is a very valid one though. If it's a choice between me having to sleep in 80+F conditions or the planet, Earth's just fucked.

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