For over a decade, scientists have attempted to synthesize a new form of carbon called graphyne with limited success. That endeavor is now at an end, though, thanks to new research from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Graphyne has long been of interest to scientists because of its similarities to the "wonder material" graphene—another form of carbon that is highly valued by industry whose research was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. However, despite decades of work and theorizing, only a few fragments have ever been created before now.
Graphyne is thought to have "unique electron conducting, mechanical and optical properties." They can better explore those possibilities if they can find a way to reliably and affordably synthesize the material.
How long before humans start mining the atmosphere for carbon?
More information: Yiming Hu et al, Synthesis of γ-graphyne using dynamic covalent chemistry, Nature Synthesis (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-022-00068-7
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @02:04PM
that would be funny, except that we already know that humans are willing do do a lot of things for various forms of carbon (in the form of coal and oil).
if you think about it, it's kind of ridiculous that we bred roses, tulips, and dogs that can fit in your fucking pocket, but nobody thought to selectively breed trees that absorb carbon at higher rates.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday May 25 2022, @02:33PM (8 children)
You can't effectively mine the atmosphere for carbon. Sure, you can remove carbon from the atmosphere and maybe even turn that into some sort of useful product. It won't be anywhere near competitive to other ways of gathering carbon for a very, very, long time. If ever.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 25 2022, @02:40PM (1 child)
I guess that depends on what exactly you consider “mining”. If you call every way of extracting carbon from the air as mining the air, then actually mining the air for carbon is the oldest form of carbon mining there is: you use the growth of plants to extract the carbon from the air, and then make coal out of the plants.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday May 25 2022, @05:22PM
Ah, that's not quite what I was thinking about, but one could argue that.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @04:06PM (5 children)
Navy researchers are working on reclaiming CO2 from seawater as feedstock for jet fuel:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/fuel-seawater-whats-catch-180953623/ [smithsonianmag.com]
Caveats:
*currently equal-to-double the cost of oil from rocks
*requires a carbon-neutral source of electricity (ie. on-ship nuclear) to make sense ecologically
*estimate 10 years to develop into an effective product (insert obligatory XKCD here)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @04:43PM
https://xkcd.com/678/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Wednesday May 25 2022, @07:37PM (3 children)
While the idea of a nuclear powered carbon capturing gets my nerd boner going, this is not a feasible method, the amount of ships you'd need dwarfs the entire global shipping industry.
The problem with CO2 is that you need at least as much energy to get it back as you got out of burning it in the first place (conservation of energy and all). According to ourworldindata.com, the global energy generation from fossils is in excess of 120000TWh. That would mean that you need at least that much energy to neutralize the effect of current fossil fuel consumption, and realistically it would be much higher than that because the energy efficiency is likely to be much higher. Just for scale comparison, the largest nuclear power plant in the world right now is the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power which generated up to 60TWh at peak capacity when it was operational.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Wednesday May 25 2022, @07:41PM
I don't proofread, bite me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @09:20PM (1 child)
CO₂ is a trace gas so concentrating it for capture takes significant energy over and above converting it to a useful or storable form. Carbon capture proponents usually forget that part.
I don't always proofread enough either. Kinky, but I'm afraid of what I might catch.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday May 29 2022, @11:26AM
Right.
The time to do carbon capture is *before* you release it into the atmosphere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @03:12PM (2 children)
Summary about mining the atmosphere for carbon has to be bait for us, right? If you simply want to make materials there are sources of carbon that are orders of magnitude more easy to mine. Carbon sequestration is a thing of course, but the return on energy for technology-based sequestration doesn't currently scale and may never. Good ol' plants and trees are the most practical sequestration technique, and carbon is so common that it can be easily "mined" from any trash heap with considerably lower energy input than processing atmospheric CO2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @03:52PM (1 child)
minions called "trees" do all the mining, then die, then we dig them up and undo all their work.
you could just be lazy and convert sunlight to electricity straight-up . however forming a autorian regime around this solution is much more difficult...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday May 29 2022, @11:28AM
Autorian?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @03:42PM (1 child)
graphene: (2D) hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms
graphyne: (2D) triangular lattice of carbon hexagons (i.e. "benzene hexagons" as the nodes of a triangular lattice)
there's a description on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphyne [wikipedia.org]
It's annoying that I had to google what this graphyne thing is. summary could have at least mentioned that it's another 2D material, especially since I'm excited about the indestructible spaceelevator tube/buckyball 3D carbon atom structure thing. whatever it's called.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @05:58PM
You are a credit to the human race!
Thank you for the sauce!
(Score: 3, Touché) by progo on Wednesday May 25 2022, @04:04PM
> How long before humans start mining the atmosphere for carbon?
About 20 years after we deploy industrial scale fusion reactor electricity generators (the not-yet-existing kind that produce more energy than they consume). When you have fusion power, a lot of whacky things seem like a good idea. This era has been 5 to 10 years away for over 50 years now, I think.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 25 2022, @04:31PM (7 children)
As if English doesn't have enough annoying homonyms already, we need to add more? Graphyne vs graphene
Or is this one pronounced gra-FINE so it's just a cutesy spelling thing?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @06:10PM (2 children)
It's standard chemical nomenclature for carbon bonds: ~ane is single bond, ~ene is a double bond, ~yne is a triple.
Ethane CH3-CH3,
Ethene CH2=CH2, (commonly called ethylene)
Ethyne CH:-:CH (commonly called acetylene)*
---
* :-: was the best I could do to represent a triple bond
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 25 2022, @06:28PM
Oh so it's a systemic dumb decision, not just an isolated case.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday May 25 2022, @07:47PM
The second syllable has the long i sound as in "fine".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @06:40PM
It's pronounced graf-yen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @07:14PM (1 child)
I think you meant homophone.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by tangomargarine on Wednesday May 25 2022, @08:29PM
Sounds like homophones are a subset of homonyms. But yes.
If -yne is really pronounced like -ein, then it wouldn't technically be any of {homonym, homograph, homophone}...but I'm trying to think of other examples in English of words that have this vowel pronunciation in the first place.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 25 2022, @10:11PM
You'll learn how to pronounce it if it's in your interest to do so.
I, for one, welcome our new graphyne transistors.