Chemists develop new material for the separation of carbon dioxide from industrial waste gases:
Chemists at the University of Bayreuth have developed a material that could well make an important contribution to climate protection and sustainable industrial production. With this material, the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) can be specifically separated from industrial waste gases, natural gas, or biogas, and thereby made available for recycling. The separation process is both energy efficient and cost-effective. In the journal Cell Reports Physical Science the researchers present the structure and function of the material.
[...] "Our research team has succeeded in designing a material that fulfils two tasks at the same time. On the one hand, the physical interactions with CO₂ are strong enough to free and retain this greenhouse gas from a gas mixture. On the other hand, however, they are weak enough to allow the release of CO₂ from the material with only a small amount of energy," says Martin Rieß M.Sc., first author of the new publication and doctoral researcher at the Inorganic Chemistry I research group at the University of Bayreuth.
Journal Reference::
Martin Rieß, Renée Siegel, Jürgen Senker, Josef Breu. Diammonium-Pillared MOPS with Dynamic CO2 Selectivity, (CC BY 4.0) Cell Reports Physical Science (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2020.100210
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday October 25 2020, @06:31PM (9 children)
I bothered to click thru and read the paper
1) The product is obscure and fancy and complicated to the point where if you're going to install a large heavy physical plant to handle the CO2 you're better off installing solar and batteries or nukes. Its like inventing a perpetual motion machine that works but required infinite energy to deploy, interesting, but not terribly useful at greenwashing
2) We have no use for the CO2 volume we get from 1% of the coal we burn. We just... dont. Given how easy it is to transport solid C vs trapped CO2 we don't even have the infrastructure or enough copper in the earth's crust to build the pipelines. There's an interesting hard sci fi story the details of which I completely forget, but the premise was imagine a magical "maxwell's demon" catalytic converter-alike was invented that pumped out all the CO2 in an exhaust stream... now what do we do with it? The answer it seems was "nothing" we can't even handle it much less use it all.
3) EROEI ratios don't matter for life support in military attack subs. Given the people involved its an open bet if this will show up in USA or Chinese submarines first.
4) Then I scroll to the end of the actual paper (does everyone have public access to it?) and "Funding: The research was supported by ExxonMobil" Seriously, the whole thing is science fiction to begin with, its just marketing greenwashing. So disappointed. So the tech is probably not even real. Sad.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday October 25 2020, @07:11PM (5 children)
I grow CO2 scrubbers in my garden. Doesn't need a lot of infrastructure, just a little water during the dry season. And the CO2 grows into big beautiful green stalks
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2020, @07:43PM (2 children)
Do you eat the stalks to turn them into compost, or do you burn them and release the CO2 again?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday October 25 2020, @08:06PM
It's all one big circle... Nothing is going anywhere. It is merely disassembled and reassembled...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2020, @08:48PM
Vaporize, and compost the waste.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 26 2020, @12:34PM (1 child)
A simple engineering estimate is an acre of wheat should average a ton per year production. I'm sure its wetter than pure starch but pure dry starch averages 50% carbon atoms by mass. So you can harvest a half ton of carbon per year per acre from wheat.
I don't feel too bad about rounding as there is no standard acre of land or intensiveness of farming or plant fertility, so its not unusual in rando years to get a bad year of like 10 bushels or 200 bushels in a great year but the USA long term wide range avg is like 60 which would be the specified ton per acre per year. I could swear I read over 210 bpa one year for one farmer in ideal conditions.
Anyway Two problems:
There's a power plant near my house (well.... 35 miles east) that burns 6000 tons of coal ... per day. So you'd have to dedicate about three million acres of wheat to be buried to make up for coal burning for one plant. Of course it would be more efficient to skip digging up the coal and just burn the wheat in a dedicated wheatburner.
It takes more than a ton of hydrocarbons per year per acre to grow and harvest wheat. So essentially you'd be burning more oil and stuff to greenwash the process.
Maybe low yield stuff would work like instead of intensive factory farming of three million acres, simply abandoning three hundred million acres of forest would work. One problem is there's only 3/4 of a billion acres of forest in the USA so dedicating about half to one coal plant isn't going to work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @04:28PM
Except farming 3 million acres of wheat (even if you do it with zero emissions) won't do anything to offset the emissions from burning coal, because assuming that wheat is part of the food chain all the CO2 captured is going straight back into the atmosphere.
You would have to do something like convert the wheat into coal (some form of oil probably more practical) and then not burn it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2020, @11:03PM (1 child)
> [CO2] ...now what do we do with it?
It is a straightforward engineering exercise to freeze it and ship it by rocket to Venus.
I'm not saying that's cost-effective, but it is an option.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 26 2020, @12:44PM
Mars would be better. In fact, send rockets from Venus to Mars in addition to Earth to Mars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @03:50PM
> Given the people involved its an open bet if this will show up in USA or Chinese submarines first
Which people, the German scientists?
Germany still builds pretty good submarines, you know? They may not look as imposing as the huge strategic subs deployed by the US and Russia as part of the nuclear trident and they're not able to stay submerged basically forever because in principle, they're an evolution of the proven diesel-electric design, But they're much more silent and because of their shallow draft can get very close to shore.
They're good enough for Israel. Anyone's guess what they need subs with these kinds of specs for...
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2020, @07:20PM (1 child)
I know the climate solution, we must give our money to the government and multinational corporations.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @12:16AM
It is all THEIR money. Didn't you see the updated EULA?