https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientist-discover-how-to-convert-co2-into-powder-that-can-be-stored-for-decades/
A team of scientists has figured out how to convert planet-warming carbon dioxide into a harmless powdery fuel that could be converted into clean electricity
The question to always ask with these articles is: Is this process prohibitively expensive, or does the process output more CO2 overall than you input? It's always one of the two.
A third question is, can it scale up to what's needed to begin to make a dent in the problem. The answer will unfortunately always be no, not even close. That's how much we've put in the air and oceans, the numbers are huge.
Okay, then let's just give up then.
We can't plant enough plants to fix the problem because the plants will eventually decompose, re-releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere and environment. We need some form of carbon capture if we ever want a chance of restoring the environment to how it was. Even if we quit deforestation and fossil fuels overnight, we'll still have all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warming our planet.
Quitting fossil fuels isn't enough to fix the problem, and quite honestly, the amount of cynicism around carbon capture on lemmy reeks of fossil fuel propaganda. If carbon capture doesn't work then why bother pushing oil and gas companies to invest in carbon capture? Why spend the money when it could be spent on another oil well or transitioning to solar and wind? I know the latter sounds like a good idea, but again even if we switch overnight, the world will still be warming. Why don't we make them pay for the damage they've done and transition to solar and wind instead of letting them off the hook?
"Oh no, it's probably too expensive!!! Where do we put it!?!? It probably won't scale enough!!!! Well, might as well not spend the money, we can use it to enrich ourselves instead."
I don't believe it's a waste of resources to research these things, but it gets old seeing the same headline every month for decades on end. At this point, if it isn't an actionable process, don't bother wasting my time with an article.
Storing carbon as sodium formate has the same problem as storing it as trees - bacteria will eat it and release CO2. Its also not useful as portable fuel - its energy density is an order of magnitude less than kerosene.
Its potential use as a battery is interesting though. I can imagine a system where a long lasting catalyst is used to fill a tank of sodium formate using waste CO2 from industrial processes and excess electrical generation capacity from renewable sources like wind and solar, and the machines that use sodium formate to generate electricity at times of low wind and solar generation could potentially be less polluting overall compared to mining lithium for new batteries and recycling worn out lithium batteries.
See, here's an actual reason why this doesn't work for sequestering carbon. Like, it frustrates me to no end that lemmy, as supposedly environmentally conscious as it is, immediately throws out any man-made attempts at carbon capture and insists that plants are the only solution.
If there's a real reason why it wouldn't work, then okay! I get that! Just... We're already burning up here and we need all the help we can get. We're already suffering the consequences of climate change and it's only going to get worse, why is everyone so excited to discount any attempts to improve the capture process? Do you really wanna live with 2023's weather (or the weather for whatever year we finally start decreasing CO2 output) for however long it takes for the environment to fix itself, or would you rather researchers were trying to find newer, faster ways of capturing it so we don't have to keep having extreme weather well into the 2060s or later? Even if we switch to all renewables overnight, If you just sit back and let trees do the job, we'll probably still be experiencing the effects of climate change for the rest of our lives.
Don’t decomposing plants spawn new, live plants? Acorns or something, I dunno. I’m not a biologist.
These articles always avoid answering questions like that and are never detailed enough to inform you. I read this as, without the facts to support it, their process is similarly efficient to others, but yields a more stable end product. If the process scales, it will be more suitable for long term storage than previous attempts
Actually they miss the bigger truth. Unless we direct the bulk of the world's resources by dismantling the current world order, this shit ain't ever happening, and the climate is going to cripple the world order inevitably.
Making sodium formate (HCOONa), using electrochemistry :
CO2 + H2 =>> formic acid
H2O =>> H2 + 1/2O2
NaCl + H2O =>> NaOH + 1/2H2 + 1/2Cl2
formic acid + NaOH =>> sodium formate
I guess they must use something similar to this, probably shortening some steps and using efficient solvent at the right temperature and pressure and with the right electrocatalist.
Well, I still prefer photosynthesis which produces sugar (and +). Plants are self replicating, use free solar energy, captues CO2 straight from the air and all this probably at a tiny fraction of the cost.
My understanding is that pumping algae into the ocean is actually a really bad idea. In a barren pond or abandoned quarry? Sure, great place for it. However, iirc, if the algae blooms it'll suck a lot of oxygen out of the water and I think puts CO2 back into the water (can't remember if it just sucks up oxygen, or if it does both). That can cause marine life to suffocate and result in mass die-offs.
I never understood that- isn't algae a plant therfore o2 producer?
It dies off and sucks oxygen, but its a balance
The problem is that if algae dies, it's most likely die at the same time making a sudden and great O2 shortage making animals die, which creates the same process.
Plants have a cycle, where sometimes they absorb more CO2 and sometimes they give off more. It’s not permanent storage.
With fossil fuels, we are taking CO2 that gas been sequestered for hundreds of millions of years, and injecting it either directly into the atmosphere, or into plant lifecycle where it is temporarily stored until it goes into the atmosphere. Plants help but are too temporary a solution
You are mostly right, but what I meant (sorry I was not explicit) was this :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
A bog or bogland is a wetland that accumulates peat as a deposit of dead plant materials – often mosses, typically sphagnum moss. It is one of the four main types of wetlands. Other names for bogs include mire, mosses, quagmire, and muskeg; alkaline mires are called fens. A baygall is another type of bog found in the forest of the Gulf Coast states in the United States. They are often covered in heath or heather shrubs rooted in the sphagnum moss and peat. The gradual accumulation of decayed plant material in a bog functions as a carbon sink.Bogs occur where the water at the ground surface is acidic and low in nutrients. A bog usually is found at a freshwater soft spongy ground that is made up of decayed plant matter which is known as peat. They are generally found in cooler northern climates and are formed in poorly draining lake basins. In contrast to fens, they derive most of their water from precipitation rather than mineral-rich ground or surface water. Water flowing out of bogs has a characteristic brown colour, which comes from dissolved peat tannins. In general, the low fertility and cool climate result in relatively slow plant growth, but decay is even slower due to low oxygen levels in saturated bog soils. Hence, peat accumulates. Large areas of the landscape can be covered many meters deep in peat.Bogs have distinctive assemblages of animal, fungal, and plant species, and are of high importance for biodiversity, particularly in landscapes that are otherwise settled and farmed.
Yeah, woody perrenials lock up CO2 for centuries and we have a lot of abandoned mines and whatever holes are leftover from oil drilling that we could theoretically bury plant material in.
Still whatever we do would need to be on unprecedented scales and the World is just not going to do that. At least not until the effects are so acute that it is too late.
Yes, and this ("World is just not going to do that") is very bad since things will get worse and many people may die (sooner than they would have) in the next 50, 100 years.
if you look at very long time scale, thousand years and more, things will balance up. (...?)
But we don't really know : there might be big volcanoes or completely new technologies like Geo engineering. Of course the future is (mostly) unknown.
So just carry on like normal people! We can keep kicking this can down the road indefinitely, allowing the O&G tycoons continue to rape the planet.
Fuck me.
Yeah, my first thought is we found a way to stave off catastrophe so the deniers can say they were right all along. 🤬
I get the temptation to feel that way, but this development should be seen as a really good thing.
1st we have started to electrify everything which is fantastic but it's a Pandora's box, no one can just put that technology back in the box and we'll see continued development and improvement which reduces CO2 output.
2nd we needed a way to remove the extra CO2 from the atmosphere without overtaxing the environment, this should help us do that and get the planet back to a healthier position.
That's ok with solar arrays on otherwise unusable land. We're figuring out the clean electricity thing, now we gotta figure out the carbon capture thing.
Here is the paper the article is based on
It is very chemistry dense that is way overy head. It says that "typical" electrolysis techniques have around a 10% "carbon efficiency", whatever that means, while this one has around 96%.
I also see that in their test they used CO2 gas, so this may efficiently get us a usable fuel from CO2 but may not help us sequester CO2 gas from the atmosphere.
I'd love someone who knows what they are talking about to analyze it for us though.
The sell of the paper is a new fuel storage medium. The positive part is that creating a fuel from existing carbon sources means (hopefully) less petroleum pumped out of the ground to contribute more carbon. The negative is that it leans more to that than the permanent sequestering, and I can't seem to pick out a net energy use anywhere, but basic physics tells us it will take more energy to do the process in entirety, even if most of it results in large scale storage. I doubt that happens because removal of carbon vs. putting into a new form to be used is like burying money. Which leads to something I've noticed pop up only in the past month or so...a new term added. "Carbon capture, utililization, and storage". CCS has already been very heavily into the production of carbon products to support their efforts, after all they have to make a profit, right? The only real storage done is a product to inject into the ground to help retrieve more oil. Again, they aren't going to just bury the money, that's foolhardy for a business.
Sorry for more negativity in the thread. Just calling a spade a spade. Those who don't like the feeling that gives can just ignore it and focus on the new science that will save us.
No, I agree. Capitalism is a flawed creation that is ingrongruent with continuing to survive on this planet.
Only carbon sequestration I can imagine is if the government taxes corporations and pays others to bury carbon.
Net zero emissions are a step I guess, I would prefer carbon negative but the oil and gas cartels are gonna want to sell us something
What do you mean? Iirc from the last time I saw this pop up, they wanted to use it as a fuel to heat homes, but it seems like they could just put it back in the ground where it belongs.
The big problem with physical carbon storage is that we emit way too much to ever have enough land to store it all as powder. All of these technologies work great at the demonstration scale, but when you do the math for any sort of scale that would make a dent in our emissions, it's just way too many carbon atoms.
Granulated as roadbase for roads and footpaths? Lightweight agregate additive in concrete? Bricks?
Yeah, this article seems enamored with the idea that the researchers came up with the idea, but doesn't actually explain how they are doing it at all.
The published study describing their math and method is linked in the article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642300485X
The opportunity, of course, is that it might become feasible to mine the air for carbon (and fold it with added electricity from transient sources like wind/wave/tide/solar) and compete with the folks pumping sequestered carbon fuels from the ground.
Of course, this wouldn't compete with the use cases for petroleum that arise in refining the polymers in oil (think of all the plastics and other compounds that come out of the oil industry that aren't refined fuels). Selling those products is so profitable that for years oil companies have been flaring off excess natural gas at the wellhead to be rid of it instead of spending the money to capture, contain, and ship it to market. On the one hand, if this tech to mine CO2 from the air becomes a competitor, 1 of 2 things happens:
It's probably #2, really refined fuels can be considered a waste product of extracting the petrochemicals
Clean, thorium fueled nuclear reactors would be a much better solution for the next hundred or so years until fusion is practical.
