• Scientists say we are on the cusp of a carbon dioxide recycling revolution
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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/03/scientists-say-we-re-cusp-carbon-dioxide-recycling-revolution Every year, the billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) we release into the atmosphere add to the growing threat of climate change. But what if we could simply recycle all that wasted CO2 and turn it into something useful? By adding electricity, water, and a variety of catalysts, scientists can reduce CO2 into short molecules such as carbon monoxide and methane, which they can then combine to form more complex hydrocarbon fuels like butane. Now, researchers think we could be on the cusp of a CO2-recycling revolution, which would capture CO2 from power plants?and maybe even directly from the atmosphere?and convert it into these fuels at scale, they report today in Joule.
I wonder this would help avoiding real-life dystopic (maybe cyberpunk one) reality?
It would be nice to see the current apocalyptic tides proven wrong!
The only problem with this technology is this bit: Q: Is this technology ready to use now? A: The scale-up and the advancements that have been happening in the last couple of years are really quite incredible. In terms of how close we are to industrial impact—it’s really a matter of maybe 5 to 10 years. Opponents of tackling climate change will just use this as an excuse to keep the status quo, and say "well we will have the technology to deal with it in a few years".
Prepare for even more regulations gutting now powered by this excuse which even won't work because the technology won't be able to help us from the hole we dug ourselves into.
Technically there are already working applications of this kind of technology, blue crude is a good example and is a project being funded by Audi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98f34iGDeRQ
God I hope this is the case.
Ideally we can just ise this tech to create near carbon neutral liquid fuels instead of continually drilling/fracking for oil.
There's lots of examples of carbon capture working on small scales. The problem is scaling it up to an industrial scale, and then where do you store it?
Why would storage be a problem?
Say we got this I wonder how long these "power plants" (for lack of better word) would need to be used before we saw an effect to the climate on a noticeable scale Would we be taking about tens of years or hundreds?
I feel like that would largely depend on the scale and number of the recycling plants. Although I think it could make a decent dent when paired with other efforts to reduce CO2 such as reforestation.
Uhh humans emit 26+ gigatonnes of CO2 per year. That's a lot of carbon to capture, and you have to store it somewhere if you want to keep it out of the atmosphere.
Who says we have to capture it all? If we burn carbon neutral fuels then we are not putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since it'll only be later captured and reused. Reducing carbon dixodie in the atmosphere would be the problem of other efforts like reforestation projects.
we'll pump it deep underground to fill in the cracks of the fracking
I mean, this sounds great and all, but wouldn't this just require more energy than we could get out of it, turning C02 info fuel?
This takes energy to do. Carbon capture on a large scale wont be helpful if we dont move from polluting forms of energy generation.
There are already self sustaining carbon dioxide filters all over the planet. Unfortunately we keep cutting them all down.
Well, good news is bamboo is pretty great at being a good carbon sink and growing very fast, and being damn useful bad news is we're still not going to be able to plant enough anything to outpace our carbon growth
Eh, this concept isn't that new. A few years back the US Navy developed a prototype of a device that removed CO2 from seawater and and using electricity produced JP-7 from it. The idea was that they'd use it to make jet fuel on board carriers. The cost was about US$8/gallon which was about the same cost as shipping it to the carriers.
More Bamboo = More Pandas. Reduce carbon growth immediately.
No, it's already working in the real world. Blue crude is a example of this. Energy from renewable sources such as wind/solar would be used in the creation of carbon neutral fuels effectivly turning it into an energy storage medium.
Introduce the era where we can just recycle C02 forever from our atmosphere, we ditch EV's and ICE's and go straight for butane powered jet cars Dystopian future here we come
Dude it's fine. We'll just use it to make carbon fibre. That's how chemistry works, right?
Just as that 26 gigatons isn't emitted all at once and in one place, it won't be captured and converted into fuel at a single facility.
No idea why I never even considered this option lol. I mean all plants naturally repurpose CO2 themselves, so it just makes sense for us to design an artificial means to do so at our leisure as well.
The cost can never compete with other solutions since you still need a lot of energy to create it. How energy efficient is blue crude? I imagine you would still need a lot of electric from carbon free sources to make it work, otherwise it wouldn't be carbon neutral. You are essentially taking electric and storing the energy in an inefficient manner, so it can be burned in an inefficient engine. Plus if you can only use it to make diesel then how do you deal with increased NOx emissions, even if it doesn't have any sulfur or hydrocarbons in it you still have NOx. You may as well just use that electric to power the grid and cars directly rather than trying to store it as crude. *On a small scale. In a much more inefficient method than a battery. We are going to need vastly more carbon free power generation if you want to go the blue crude way.
Sure, if you want to convert it back into electricity, but we're going to need that fuel to power aircraft.
Can blue crude be used to make jet fuel? In 10 years we are probably going to start seeing commercial battery electric aircraft.
You're never going to see practical intercontinental battery powered aircraft. Even accounting for the 42% or so efficiency of modern jet engines, batteries would need to hit ~20MJ/kg to match jet fuel (44MJ/kg*0.42 is about 20 MJ/kg). Batteries are at about ~2MJ/kg at the moment, so you're looking at 10 times as much "fuel" to match a jet engine aircraft. A 777ER Dreamliner for example has a maximum takeoff weight of 351,000kg with 145,000 kg of fuel. To get the same range your aircraft couldn't even get off the ground (not even accounting for the extra fuel consumption for the added weight!).
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