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

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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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @12:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2019, @12:21PM (#840111)

    it's all a bit funny. buildings that need excessive airconditioning, you know because it's a total heat trap but it LOOKS cool.
    the airconditioners are crap: they too have to look "cool". why a indoor unit of a split type has to hang on the wall instead of protruding / jutting naught-ly and perpendicular to the wall INTO the room is beyond me.
    i suppose it will get interesting once the aircon is directly powered by combustion and carbon gas production.
    it would never touch the athmosphere outside but would straight up be captured, funneled into a "reactor", which via solar generated electricity, would turn it into a "energized" gas that can be combusted anew to run the compressor.
    my mind is salivating at all the coils and pipeing and sensors and reactor design that this will require.
    also ... hmmm... co2 IS used as a working fluid in high pressure cooling applications ... OMG OMG
    ^_^