UCLA: New Super-Porous Materials Can Trap CO2
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 02.15.08
The atmosphere doesn't care how we do it, we just need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So while you'll have a hard time finding people more opposed to coal plants than we are, we have to be realistic: Many of these power plants won't be closed for years and in the meantime anything that can mitigate the damage is good.
That's why these new materials created by Omar Yaghi and his team at UCLA are interesting. They are super-porous - 1 gram can contain up to 2,000 square meters of surface area - and absorb 80 times their volume in carbon dioxide while letting other gases pass through. The novelty compared to other similar materials is that it doesn't take much energy to release the CO2 afterwards, making it more energy and cost effective.
Other techniques to capture CO2 from smokestacks currently use up to 15-20% of the total electricity produced by the plant. "Capturing and compressing carbon dioxide through these existing methods can add 80 to 90 percent to the cost of producing electricity from coal." So it's not surprising that these methods aren't used much. While we're still very strongly against coal plants, a cheaper method that would actually be used is a positive step. As long as it's used only on existing coal plants and not used as an excuse to build new ones.
Technology Review writes:
The next step for the materials is commercialization. This means scaling up production and incorporating the materials into a system at a power plant, such as by packing the materials into canisters that can be filled with pressurized exhaust gases--something that the UCLA group says could be possible in two to three years. Yaghi estimates that the materials could easily be made in large quantities, since they are similar to other materials he has developed that can now be made by the ton by BASF, the giant chemical company.
But capturing the CO2 is just one step. Storing it is a whole other huge problem.
::A Better Way to Capture Carbon, ::New Materials Can Selectively Capture Carbon Dioxide, Chemists Report, ::New CO2 Capturing Material Could Make Plants Cleaner
See also: ::Why Carbon Sequestration Won't Save Us, ::There Is No Such Thing As Clean Coal, ::Oops...There's Fly-Ash In The Clean Coal Ointment, ::Palladium, Not Carbon, May Be Used To Scrub Mercury From "Clean Coal" Plants, ::Comparing The Cost Of New Nuclear v.s. "Clean Coal" Plant Generated Electricity
I remember a Canadian (inventor?) that developed a huge canon that could shoot a VW Bug sized object. I think it generated speed like a particle accelerator, round and round via electromagnets, and then let 'er rip. It was a cheap way to launch satellites.
Not being an engineer, this sounded amazing. Since I haven't heard anything since, I suppose it was not realistic. (after all, satellite orbits are rather precise). But maybe a "carbon canon" could shoot huge containers of CO2 at the sun. That would be some extreme recycling.
Carbon is a commodity; used to make steel, carbon fiber, etc. Why do we keep considering it a waste product? Dissociate the carbon from the hydrogen before burning the fuel for energy. The majority of the energy in fuel is from the hydrogen. You get clean energy from the hydrogen and a usable commodity in carbon.
anonymous, his name was Gerald Bull and it was not so complicated, the bigger the cannon, the lower the muzzle velocity, so he did the math and built guns big enough to shoot satellites into space.
Unfortunately the Canadian government cut off his funding, he started illegally selling arms to South Africa and then ended up that the only person who would fund him was Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
At the time of his assassination he was building a 500 foot long gun with a 15 foot bore that could put a 5000 pound object into orbit.
This is actually a fairly promising strategy. There are hundreds of zeolites, some naturally mined and used in organic agriclture, some as filtration agents for fish tanks, adn so on.
For a general background check wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeolite
Paul Ely,
The world is simply waiting for you or someone else to figure out how to do it in a way that is economically viable.
Richard Branson has a $25M prize for anyone that can develop an "economically viable" way of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere. Certainly if a process were to turn the CO2 into useful commodities and make a profit, that would be "economically viable."
Good luck in your endeavors.