Company That Sucks CO2 From Air Announces a New Methane-Producing Plant (arstechnica.com) 142
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Swiss company Climeworks has announced the opening of a new plant in Italy that will collect carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air and pair it with renewably-made hydrogen (H2) to make methane fuel that would add little or no CO2 to the atmosphere. The plant in Troia, Italy, was completed in July and went into operation this week as part of a research program funded by the European Union. The new Italian plant will be run for more than 4,000 hours over the next 17 months (that's just under eight hours a day) in order to demonstrate the viability of fuel production as a potential revenue source for carbon capture. Gebald said that pure, captured CO2 could even be processed into jet fuel. When that fuel is burned, he said, it would again create CO2 that could be captured at an arbitrary Direct Air Capture plant and turned back into jet fuel.
The plant consists of three air collectors that are more energy efficient than Climeworks' first ambient air collector. "The plant will filter up to 150 tons of CO2 from ambient air per year," Climeworks said in a press statement. "Simultaneously, an alkaline electrolyser (1.2 MW) locally generates 240 cubic meters of renewable hydrogen per hour by making use of excess on-site photovoltaic energy." A catalyst then combines the CO2 and the hydrogen into methane gas in a reactor built by a French company called Atmostat. The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel natural gas lorries," Climeworks says. As Ars notes, Climeworks' previous carbon-capture plant "captured carbon out of ambient air using a filter of base amines that would bind with more acidic CO2." The carbon that was captured was then sent to a greenhouse to speed plant growth.
"The second was based in Iceland at a geothermal plant that released some volcanic CO2," reports Ars. "Climeworks' small plant captures that carbon and injects it back into the ground, where mineral reactions help the CO2 bind with basalt, essentially storing the gas as a rock."
The plant consists of three air collectors that are more energy efficient than Climeworks' first ambient air collector. "The plant will filter up to 150 tons of CO2 from ambient air per year," Climeworks said in a press statement. "Simultaneously, an alkaline electrolyser (1.2 MW) locally generates 240 cubic meters of renewable hydrogen per hour by making use of excess on-site photovoltaic energy." A catalyst then combines the CO2 and the hydrogen into methane gas in a reactor built by a French company called Atmostat. The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel natural gas lorries," Climeworks says. As Ars notes, Climeworks' previous carbon-capture plant "captured carbon out of ambient air using a filter of base amines that would bind with more acidic CO2." The carbon that was captured was then sent to a greenhouse to speed plant growth.
"The second was based in Iceland at a geothermal plant that released some volcanic CO2," reports Ars. "Climeworks' small plant captures that carbon and injects it back into the ground, where mineral reactions help the CO2 bind with basalt, essentially storing the gas as a rock."
The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel .. (Score:3)
Would it not be more efficient to put the excess electricity into the grid, or even use the hydrogen in a fuel cell to power EVs? Burning fuel in an ICE is very inefficient.
Re:The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a research project. You shouldn't nitpick irrelevant details.
The point is to make CH4 from captured CO2. What they do with the CH4 after that is immaterial.
Re:The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel (Score:5, Informative)
Unless they put it back into the atmosphere.
In which case it's worse than literally doing nothing.
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Taking carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into fuel and burning it is better in terms of climate change than taking carbon trapped in the ground, turning it into fuel and burning it. Especially if the energy used to produce the fuel from the atmospheric carbon came from a renewable source.
Re:The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
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Methane is roughly 70 times worse than CO2 in terms of the greenhouse effect. Not only is the gas itself about 30 times better than absorbing heat, but it decomposes into CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is worse for trapping heat than CO2 released at ground level.
So if they pull CO2 out of the air, make it into methane, then just vent it.. that's significantly worse than doing nothing.
Luckily that's not what they're doing.
=Smidge=
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That is 100% correct.
Without a great deal of additional infrastructure, you can't pull the 100T out of the air without expending energy in ways that will increase the amount of carbon in the air. People gotta drive to work to build and operate the plant, and so forth.
Now, if you do build out the clean infrastructure required, you can do a one-time pollution event (think, for example, of creating solar panels - it
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Unless they put it back into the atmosphere.
In which case it's worse than literally doing nothing.
No. It is a frigging RESEARCH PROJECT! It is not about "doing anything" it is about exploring possibilities.
Re:The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel (Score:5, Funny)
So it's a CO2 capture and release program ;D.
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You should nitpick the details. 240 cubic meters = 240,000 L. You're producing more energy than you're putting in.
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240m^3 of hydrogen gas, presumably at standard conditions is roughly 24l of gasoline equivalent, or roughly 210kWh equivalen. 1.2MW in -> 0.2MW out. Pretty miserable use of energy.
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You can't pour solar into your gas tank
You can pour it into your battery, and run your EV. That's good enough.
You use less and less and less energy to travel the same distance.. This does not happen with batteries..
Batteries, on the other hand, can use regenerative braking. Also, an EV is much more energy efficient.
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Actually, batteries weigh less discharged than charged; and the difference in mileage between a full and empty tank is minimal, such that a 25mpg car can travel 300 meters further on an empty tank than a full tank (if it can magically burn the same amount of fuel as a full tank along the way, without carrying the tank of fuel itself).
Our grid isn't 100% clean energy, so there's always load to offset at the moment. You can put the solar energy right on the grid.
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300 meters is 300 meters
It's 1/135 of the car's normal mileage; and the total change is between 0 and 1/135. It also matters less on continuous driving, since it mainly only impacts stop-and-go traffic.
I can, with my current gasoline vehicle, drive all the way across this continent without ever pulling into a gas station, if I so desire. I can take enough gasoline with me. Be it in jerry cans or a secondary fuel tank. You can't do that with batteries.. They'd weight too much.
You can stop and pour some of your (heavy) gasoline into the fuel tank, or you can pull into the gas station next to which you've stopped and use their gasoline.
There are 160kW charge stations; nobody has put more than 60kW charge circuitry in a car yet. 160kW can fill an 85kWh battery pack in half an hour. That's 4.75 hours
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You're producing more energy than you're putting in.
No they are not [wikipedia.org].
It takes energy to capture the CO2 from the atmosphere.
It takes more energy to generate the hydrogen. The hydrogen generator consumes 1.2Mw of power and produces 240 cubic meters of H2. A cubic meter of H2 has a mass of 90 grams, and has about 12.5 Mj of energy.
(240 m^3 * 12.5 Mj/m^3 / 3600) / 1.2 Mw = 70% efficiency for electricity to H2
There is no way this process is net energy positive.
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The only net-energy-positive process I've yet found is a differential thermal generator--a heat pump connected to a heat engine, using adiabatic recuperation and taking advantage of the fact that atmosphere isn't one uniform temperature (you belch cold air out the exhaust, and you're sucking warmer air into the intake).
The engineers don't like it. They tell me it'll work, but you'll never get much energy density: it's going to look fancy running itself while producing maybe enough excess energy to also
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Re: The methane "is then liquified and used to fue (Score:5, Informative)
I think they mean for airplanes. Jet fuel can't be substituted for electricity yet, energy density and conversion rates are too low. You'd spend most of the energy lugging around the spent batteries anyway. Airplanes get more efficient as they run out of fuel, since it makes them lighter.
Fun fact: very large airplanes can not land once they take off, because the take off weight plus fuel exceeds max landing weight. If there is an emergency, airplanes have essentially carte Blanche authority to dump fuel to get to landing weight. This is also one reason why many flights don't fill tanks to the brim. If you made it to your destination having not burned enough fuel, not only have you spent extra lugging that fuel you didn't need, you'd also have to dump it before landing, since that is too much stress for landing gear.
Re: The methane "is then liquified and used to fue (Score:5, Interesting)
Kerosene is the current oil supply chain bottleneck. Doesn't matter if we cut down use of other oil distillates. Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
That means that even if we were to say cut our use of gasolene, we can't afford to refine less oil, because growing civil aviation needs more kerosene. If we can actually generate kerosene from this process with any kind of meaningful cost effectiveness, we stand to benefit tremendously from less need to refine oil.
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Interesting point. I suspect there is a fair bit of flexibility in the system - stuff that we could turn into kerosene with a bit more processing, but currently don't because there is a market for it in it current form; also possibilities that we could fuel jets with alternative hydrocarbons - I think the turbines could easily take anything which is liquid, low viscosity, and burns easily.
There is serious money from serious airplane companies going into researching electric (battery) aircraft, but in the fo
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The "serious money going into researching electric battery" is pointless on aircraft. The only thing we theoretically know of that could potentially, maybe, perhaps, in ideal scenario meet the energy density needs of commercial aircraft is lithium air.
Lithium air batteries are like fusion power, except that where fusion power is perpetually "50 years away", lithium air batteries are perpetually "20 years away". This hasn't changed in last 30 years or so, and it's unlikely to change for foreseeable future, a
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You won't be flying across the Atlantic on an electric airplane any time soon. But much like EVs vs ICEs there's a lot of ~1 hour short hop routes that could possibly - if jet fuel prices and emission regulations demand it - be done electrically.
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You won't be flying anywhere with a meaningful payload. Atlantic is not even close to the ranges being the problem. You can't even fly a couple of hundred kilometres with a meaningful payload, and no one is even thinking of thousands kilometres outside the hyper slow semi-gliders like Solar Impulse.
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I wonder if fuel cells or flow batteries could be suitable for long distance air travel. I have difficulty imaging a 75 million watt nominal fuel cell or flow battery light enough for an aircraft but apparently some do exist at least as prototypes.
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Why do you think airlines (e.g. Virgin), aircraft manufacturers (e.g. Boeing) and others (US military for example) are spending big bucks to look for more sustainable replacements for jet fuels?
A number of jet flights have taken place using either 100% biofuels or biofuel blends and a lot more work is being done.
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Problem being, ethanol in engines doesn't really work all that well. Engine wear and tear goes to hell, and energy density of ethanol is significantly lower than that of kerosene so flights become much shorter and fuel expenditure patterns go through the roof. The efforts you mention are basically initial preparatory movements for the "oil is several hundred USD a barrel" scenario, where ethanol blends basically will be "emergency replacement" for kerosene when it's so exorbitantly expensive, something has
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The terms "biofuel" and "sustainable" are contradictory. There are no biofuels that are sustainable now and the laws of physics prevent biofuels from ever being sustainable.
The reason that airlines are interested in biofuels is "greenwashing", they can advertise being "green" even if they know as a fact that such efforts are futile. Aircraft manufacturers and the military are interested in biofuels because in a fight for our lives against a suitably determined and capable adversary we might have to resort
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Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
Not true. You can convert heaver fractions to lighter ones using cracking. And you can convert lighter to heavier using catalysts.
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You can even make it out of sea water if you wanted to. Not just kerosene, you can make gold out of sea water.
Still doesn't make it viable.
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Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
That is wrong on so many levels and ignores the fact that refineries have been doing more than simply distilling fuel for the best part of 20 years. The vast majority of jet fuel these days is created from heavier fractions through hydrocracking. The pre-treating requirements to protect the catalysts in this process results in a cleaner nicer kero than you would get from straight run distilliation anyway.
You can create jet fuel from pretty much every cracking process though some processes result in a fuel t
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Essentially "make jet fuel, or make golden jet fuel. That you burn".
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Kerosene is the current oil supply chain bottleneck. Doesn't matter if we cut down use of other oil distillates. Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
That means that even if we were to say cut our use of gasolene, we can't afford to refine less oil, because growing civil aviation needs more kerosene. If we can actually generate kerosene from this process with any kind of meaningful cost effectiveness, we stand to benefit tremendously from less need to refine oil.
The amount of kerosene produced does not rely only on the kerosene fraction from the crude petroleum. For instance if we needed less gasoline, then the processing would be changed from fluid catalytic cracking to hydrocracking to produce more kerosene at the expense of gasoline. Other process changes would also be made to favor kerosene.
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The "golden kerosene" does indeed exist as an option. USN has a process that extracts it from salt water for example.
As for "but we can just extract different amounts of kerosene from same oil", I keep hearing this myth, and asked about it from old friends I used to study with in university who went into hydrocarbon field several times. The answer has been universally the same across last two decades: "hypothetically possible, not realistically workable".
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No, because electric demand peaks in the evening (Score:2)
> Would it not be more efficient to put the excess electricity into the grid
The demand on the electric grid peaks in the evening, after work (and when everyone turns on lights). Solar-electric produces virtually no electricity in the evening. So no, direct to the grid solar electric doesn't work at scale. It can work of 1% of your electricity comes from solar, and you're using other sources for when you need a lot of electricity. It can "work" for one company if the taxpayers are paying them to produce a
Re:No, because electric demand peaks in the evenin (Score:4, Interesting)
FC Cars are nothing like you describe. Range is 300+ miles. Fueling is under 5 minutes from empty and generally un-eventful. The H2 supply chain breaks down far more often than the cars or the fueling stations (and the supply chain is getting better).
H2 tanks are extensively tested including such items as shooting them with 50 cal bullets. It takes two bullets to the same location to pierce the tank, and then it is a leak and the H2 gas that goes straight up. If it ignites, all the flame goes straight up as well. It is very hard to create an explosive mixture, and even then the explosive over-pressure is not really an explosion (a refinery in Wilmington, CA had a very large H2 tank explode a number of years ago. I felt the pressure wave 15 miles away. Even though many people were on site, no one was even injured.) I always wondered if H2 was a greenhouse gas. The answer is no as it actually escapes into space and literally leaves the planet (Helium does this as well). There are design differences, but generally H2 is far safer than gasoline car. Even a BEV car has real safety issues. Did you know the fire department needs to "saw" two spots on a Tesla Model 3 to break the high voltage "loop".
Reliability is also very good with 100K miles warranty and almost no required maintenance. Even the breaks last forever. I drive my FC car every day and it is an excellent car that gets me where I want to go in safety and comfort. My closest H2 station is about 4 miles away with 2 others within 15 miles. I see other FC cars on the road most days. 5100+ in California. http://www.cafcp.org./ [www.cafcp.org]
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Your comparison with nuclear waste is as off-point as the rest of your post. If anything, a hydrogen leak is the least destructive event of any fuel leak. Gas and diesel are famous for pollution. Your example of nuclear waste is obvious. BEV battery fires produce all sorts of toxic gasses and hazardous left overs. A hydrogen fire/explosion produces water. If it does not burn, it heads into space. There is zero environmental impact.
Your analysis of hydrogen safety ignores a lot of research. The most
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Burning fuel in an ICE is very inefficient.
Agreed. They should just pipe the methane into peoples homes, and make more of that H2 for fuel cell cars. As long as they can do all of that with renewable power we're good to go.
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150 tons of CO2 per year? (Score:3, Funny)
Okay, that's a start.
All we need are about 15 million more of these plants and we'd be fine, right?
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It's not a start. It's a prototype.
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Toward what end? Not like it _sequesters_ CO2 from the atmosphere. They are making fuel using H2 (via electrolysis I assume) so it's just a chemical battery. CO2 returns to the atmosphere within days or weeks.
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You'll need WAY more than 15M of these plants to make a dent. The average first worlder is responsible for 10 - 20 tons of emissions per year. So, we'd need something like 1 plant per 15 people to reach carbon neutrality through this method.
This system would have to scale up *MASSIVELY*, maybe 4 - 6 orders of magnitude, to make it even a possibly worthwhile endeavor.
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Would #sarcasm have made my intent clearer?
I thought it was implicit in the phrasing I used for the second statement ending in a question mark, but I guess not, since you're not the only one who seems to have mistaken my point.
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...I can imagine a *single* large plant doing 15 million times the work of this one.
A scale-up of something like that would be necessary to make this a useful approach.
Given that they are using a 1.2MW catalyzer to generate hydrogen, if that needed to scale up linearly too, then you are talking about need something like 18TW for one such plant.
That's not going to cut it.
How much does it cost ? (Score:2)
Usual bad reporting from a zealot.
No answers about what the process costs. Who is the target market for the methane. Why aren't they going forward with their prior project to convert steel plant waste gas to fuel.
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Cost is massive, as this is a proof of concept prototype. Cost efficiency is not a concern at this stage.
Target for methane is irrelevant (but electricity generating CCGTs would obviously love to have it, especially since this one is going to be of extremely high purity) because this is a proof of concept.
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Cost is massive, as this is a proof of concept prototype. Cost efficiency is not a concern at this stage.
Oh you are involved in the project ? How massive is massive in numbers and what does that translate into as a cost per cubic meter of natural gas ?
Target for methane is irrelevant (but electricity generating CCGTs would obviously love to have it, especially since this one is going to be of extremely high purity) because this is a proof of concept.
Well maybe for you but end users have their own ideas about what's relevant and what isn't
Re:How much does it cost ? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I'm not involved in the project. This is the first time I hear about it.
As for the rest, I have no idea why you think that pure methane is not a wanted raw material in Europe. Availability of affordable natgas is one of the greatest geopolitical threats to European powers in next few decades, as many of European majors either have switched or are in process of switching their electricity generation to CCGTs. Guess what they overwhelmingly burn?
So yeah, if these things actually become cost effective, "who will buy the natgas" is going to be literally the last of the relevant questions on the list, because there will be a long queue of buyers, salivating at the potential of reliable source of methane sourced in Europe.
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As for the rest, I have no idea why you think that pure methane is not a wanted raw material in Europe
Is it pure ? The article doesn't say. Maybe that's why they talk about liquefying it instead of using a pipeline ??
So yeah, if these things actually become cost effective
Well that's the big if. If it happens a good portion is going to depend on where the process is now and just how far it can go. If it's a proof of concept just what is the concept and just how well did it prove out.
The article is a vacuum of information. The only take away I can have from it, is some people in Europe managed to convert CO2 and Water into Methane. Something which has been done l
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Purity is a function of input and process. It's hard to imagine where you could get impurities in the aforementioned process. Do suggest anything that comes to mind, my chemistry is quite a bit rusty, but I can't think of any major sources of impurities.
And yes, cost effectiveness is not just a big "if". It's a fucking elephant in the room kind of huge "if". But that's what prototyping process is for. To figure out if there is a way to make the process cost effective or not.
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Purity is a function of input and process. It's hard to imagine where you could get impurities in the aforementioned process. Do suggest anything that comes to mind, my chemistry is quite a bit rusty, but I can't think of any major sources of impurities.
The article mentions it works with waste gas from steel mills. Doesn't mention if the higher concentration is preferred or not. Once again information that is needed but not reported.
And yes, cost effectiveness is not just a big "if". It's a fucking elephant in the room kind of huge "if". But that's what prototyping process is for. To figure out if there is a way to make the process cost effective or not.
Yeah but like I said earlier, about all the article tells me is that some Europeans converted CO2 and Hydrogen to Methane. Just off the top of my head Audi has a CO2 and water to diesel process, and the Office of Naval Research has a Seawater + CO2 to Jet Fuel Process. CO2+Hydrogen to methane I think goes back to WW1. Gas and S
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You merely need to explain where the chemistry messes up, and the reaction becomes something other than carbon dioxide plus hydrogen equals methane and water (? can't remember where oxygen molecules went). Remember that modern physics modelling combined with modern automation allows for remarkably precise reaction control, one of the main reasons why we no longer get acid rain from modern coal burners for example.
The news here appears to be that the process is workable on large scale in sustainable fashion.
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You merely need to explain where the chemistry messes up, and the reaction becomes something other than carbon dioxide plus hydrogen equals methane and water
Thought I just did, if the input gas isn't pure CO2 which the discharge from a steel plant or anything collected from the atmosphere and the impurites are not processed out, than the reaction will be CO2+other+H2->CH4+H20+ other
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Interesting assumption. Why do you think it will not be filtered to some extent to match the reaction needs?
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Which is why they're prototyping it right now to find all of those things out, instead of just doing what you did. "It's uncertain, so the answer is now".
Essentially "fire? uncertain. Let's just keep to not having fire". People who did that went extinct, and for a reason.
This isn't CO2 "Capture" its carbon recycling (Score:4, Insightful)
If they then make methane out of the carbon, which is burned...
CO2 capture is taking carbon permanently out of the air - unburning the carbon that was burned in the first place. This scheme should be called RECYCLING carbon - which isn't nearly as bad as digging up coal, but it isn't "cleaning" the air if it is sold as methane. It should be buried as rock or coal to be environmentally friendly instead of environmentally neutral.
Re: This isn't CO2 "Capture" its carbon recycling (Score:2)
You could also add a few more steps to the process to use as rocket fuel. The rocket fuel that doesn't get spent on accents or fall back to earth would no doubt remove that carbon from the atmosphere.
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That doesn't seem like a half bad idea to start. make launch and test rockets 15%(number from my ass) emission engines, and get some money into the technology.
Re:This isn't CO2 "Capture" its carbon recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
It should be buried as rock or coal to be environmentally friendly instead of environmentally neutral.
That would be idiotic. As long as there is net demand for methane, using energy to pump it into the ground, while using energy elsewhere to pump it out of the ground, purify, and transport it, is just stupid.
Here's a new vocabulary word for you: fungible (hint: it is something that methane is).
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You don't seem so bad sometimes. I guess only when you let your toxic show... hmmm. Well played troll.. Or lucky idiot... Either way, you're spot on with this.
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OK, I agree that the energy spent in "burying rock or coal" shouldn't be spent. Just call it carbon neutral.
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OK, I agree that the energy spent in "burying rock or coal" shouldn't be spent. Just call it carbon neutral.
Or skip the conversion to methane, and just pump the CO2 down-hole.
Even better, put the CO2 to economic use, for enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org], improving crop yields with CO2 enrichment [sciencedirect.com], mitigating soil alkalinity, and many other industrial and agricultural uses.
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While some of it definitely can be used productively, ultimately we are going to have to remove significant amounts from the atmosphere to limit climate change.
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Well, sure. But if you were to undertake sequestration, you'd be doing it on a massive scale to have any effect. You could pump most of the methane you produce into the ground and skim of the methane you actually needed and divert that into the market.
The real problem is that this would be massively energy-intensive. It takes as much energy to unburn a CO2 molecule as you get from making it in the first place. You might consider this after you've had a technological breakthrough in fusion or somethin
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True, it is a great first step towards carbon neutral fuels.
Given time we could use surplus energy for carbon capture, even so far as to pump it back into wells, first as firestly as temporary storage facilities and long term for carbon capture.
There are times of the year where solar and wind produce surplus electricity, which could be used.
Company that Sucks (Score:4, Funny)
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Probably, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth performing scientific/engineering experiments like this to learn from. There are plenty of similar experiments to turn seawater into fresh, sun/wind/rain/tides/geothermal into electricity, to split atoms, to fuse atoms, etc. Some are (still) failures and some (eventually) turn into successes, but overall there are enough successes to keep humanity moving forward.
The most expensive failure so far is probably sustainable nuclear fusion, but the lure of the enormo
Methane sucks (Score:2)
You have to store methane at cryogenic temperatures to keep it liquid, we need electricity to liquids at room temperature, not electricity to gas.
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At room temperature it doesn't go liquid regardless of pressure, you have to store it at cryogenic temperatures to keep it liquid. So you continuously lose energy.
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CNG has very low energy density and the natural storage is of limited availability.
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Methane? (Score:2)
I thought Methane was a 1000x more of a greenhouse gas than CO2? Nothing is leakproof. Over time little gaps in seals are going to go unnoticed. Is the small leaks in methane > than the bulk of the total CO2 removed in terms of greenhouse impact?
hurry up nano-assemblers..... pure carbon would make great diamond structures or graphite/graphine stuctures.
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Perpetuum mobile? (Score:2)
Hydrogen = 1.75 kWh/liter
240 cubic meter/h = 240,000 liter/h or ~20T of hydrogen/h
Electrolyser = 1.2 MWh
That means they produce 420 MW of energy for 1.2 MW of input.
They are generating 'free' energy from 150T of CO2 in the air? Something sounds really wrong.
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> Hydrogen = 1.75 kWh/liter
You're off by a factor of about 600 there, buddy. You don't get that kind of energy density until you've compressed it to several hundred atmospheres.
Plus, 240 cubic meters of hydrogen at STP only weighs about 21kg, so I don't know why you said "20T" which implies tons?
=Smidge=
Ambient air? (Score:2)
Why not extract CO2 from the exhaust pipe of a regular coal/gas power plant. Surely the CO2 concentration there is hundreds of times higher than in ambient air?
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Why not shut down the coal plant, and pump the energy to run this recovery plant straight into the grid instead ?
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Sabatier process for Mars (Score:2)
Nooooo! (Score:2)
150 tons per year is a sick joke ... (Score:2)
Considering that the average 1st world person is responsible for 10 - 20 tons of emissions per year.
They would need to *MASSIVELY* scale that system up, by many orders of magnitude, to make it a useful endeavor.
The US Navy has been working on this for years (Score:3)
This is not new. The US Navy has been working on this technology for what I'm guessing is at least a decade. What I'm guessing are the most notable differences are that they intend to get power from nuclear reactors, and perform this process at sea.
But we can't celebrate the US Navy working on this because to many in the "save the planet" group they see nuclear power as worse than global warming. Such people also tend to overlap with those that believe that no nation should have a military.
This gets a big yawn from me as it shows nothing that hasn't already been done. It does nothing to solve the real problems on where this energy comes from. Wind and solar power are inherently expensive and unreliable, nuclear power is not. Powering this process with any kind of carbon based fuel is simply nonsensical. Powering this with hydroelectric means we simply run out of hydro capacity more quickly, assuming that we haven't crossed that line decades ago. Thinking we can power this process with fusion reactors or some other not yet developed energy is just wishful thinking.
This process must get it's power from nuclear fission or it will not be successful any time soon.
Re: On a certain level, we must validate solutions (Score:2)
Simultaneously, an alkaline electrolyser (1.2 MW) locally generates 240 cubic meters of renewable hydrogen per hour by making use of excess on-site photovoltaic energy.
Looks like it uses 1.2MW of locally generated solar power that is in excess of the rest of the plant.
Re:On a certain level, we must validate solutions (Score:4, Insightful)
Did we get this energy from solar panel or wind turbine excess energy, where we turn on the devices only when the price of energy craters due to oversupply, or is this intended to run 24/7/365? Or do they (as many processes do) use electricity generated from fossil fuels to run the machines?
They currently use renewable energy.
But the point you're making here is irrelevant; If this moves from the current experimental/proof-of-concept to commercial production, you'd still use renewable energy to run it 24/7 because the product itself has value as a fuel and chemical feedstock that displaces fossil fuel.
Pulling CO2 from the air is not a solution, but producing hydrocarbons that are carbon neutral and renewable is a very, very important piece of the puzzle.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, heading back and even rolling back the industrialization of China and India is essential as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Efficiency.
Re: (Score:2)