Filtering our air

April 26, 2007 2:25 AM

The University of Columbias Earth Institute has successfully demonstrated carbon dioxide air capturing. As to what could be done with the carbon dioxide after, the IPCC has some ideas (pdf). Unfortunately they don't state how much energy these machines consume or how expensive (toxic, etc.) their prodction is going to be.
posted by Glow Bucket (38 comments total)

via
posted by Glow Bucket at 2:26 AM on April 26, 2007

"This is an exciting step toward making carbon capture and sequestration a viable technology," said Lackner. "I have long believed science and industry have the technological capability to design systems that will capture greenhouse gases and allow us to transition to energies of the future over the long term."

I'm sorry, but if this solution actually works and gets implemented, humans will never mend their destructive ways. We'll breathe a sigh of relief [thinking, 'thank fuck that's over!'] and keep driving our pimped out Escalades around and flying to LA to get gemstones glued to our Blackberries.
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:01 AM on April 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

This I fear as well, but there are lots of other problems like toxic wastes etc. that we will have to be dealt with. And as much as the current news panic about global warming could be a wake up call to people ignorant or oblivious of environmental problems it could also be regarded as a fad in no time with people returning to their usual agenda of wastefulness.

A lingering catastrophe might make people overthink their habits but it also does mobilize them to come up with technologies and ways to combat the symptoms - I don't think this is thoroughly bad. If this could prevent more serious weather glitches and unstability I'm all for it.

Of course there's still the question of the cost of these things, money and resource-wise.
posted by Glow Bucket at 3:33 AM on April 26, 2007

Here's a non-toxic carbon sequestration technology that doesn't need much grant funding, and you and I can do this today, right now, without the government or private sector getting involved.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:41 AM on April 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

I'm with BP. Plant some trees on your patch, get some solar panels (I'm getting planning permission) and go for biodiesel. Don't wait for the boffins to 'fix it'.
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:55 AM on April 26, 2007

Blazecock Pileon

From my understanding, the effectiveness of carbon offsetting by planting trees is still rather dodgy. I'm no scientist but I'm sure someone could better elaborate.
posted by champthom at 3:56 AM on April 26, 2007

Blazecock:

1 Tree: ~50 lb CO₂/year
1 1-m² device as described in TFA: 20,000 lb CO₂/year


and what Glow Bucket said.
posted by rxrfrx at 3:57 AM on April 26, 2007

Also, this isn't really a "fix it yourself or wait" situation. Even if we all started driving biodiesel today, biomass EtOH became 10 times cheaper, and everyone installed a couple trees on the front lawn, warming would still continue. If you believe the projections based on current CO₂ levels, there needs to be a long-term solution to decrease them, not just decrease our output. So this type of device will be necessary regardless.
posted by rxrfrx at 3:59 AM on April 26, 2007

rxrfrx: Those numbers are meaningless when we don't have data for how much CO2 the operation of those machines produce.
posted by biffa at 4:05 AM on April 26, 2007

I did not post this to announce the new miracle cure for global warming.

I was merely very interested in the fact that such a machine has been build and apparently works and I wanted to share that with you.

Yes, planting trees and using solar panels for power and heat is good - as are a zillion other things like being mindful of where your food comes from. However, I find it nifty that some engineers are doing something which actually qualifies as being helpful in reducing co2 emissions (one of the many problems that - in my opinion - have to be fixed to allow our children a healthy future)

Well and biodiesel: While the idea is neat I find it unbearable to use as long as there are people hungering - those fields of rape could be better utilized, I am sure.
posted by Glow Bucket at 4:09 AM on April 26, 2007

I did not post this to announce the new miracle cure for global warming.

I know and I wasn't attacking you or the science on display... just being a stormcloud, as usual. People suck.
posted by chuckdarwin at 4:21 AM on April 26, 2007

Trees are transient storage of carbon. When they die and decompose, the stored carbon mostly gets released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Mature forests are more-or-less carbon dioxide neutral, not sinks. To increase sequestration with forestry, you have to continuously plant more forests. This was a dodge Canada was originally going to play to meet it's Kyoto targets and the rest of the world (rightly) called us on it.

While planting new forests will help a bit, the real problem is that we've been enthusiastically dumping geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere for a century or more: coal and petroleum. This is more than the biosphere alone can hande. The idea of carbon sequestration is to restore the balance by locking it away again. Biomass solutions don't do that, unless you bury the biomass.
posted by bonehead at 4:50 AM on April 26, 2007

I hate materialism for a variety of reasons, but wastefulness only equals destruction when you do not have the technology to deal with the side effects. I recognize we do not have that technology even with this machine, but I think it's a bit weird to confuse the morality of cause and effect to the extent that when we break the link the former cause is still considered "evil'.

Trees apparently only reduce global warming if you plant them in the tropics.

I thought the key to carbon sequestration involved ocean life?
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:52 AM on April 26, 2007

biodiesel: While the idea is neat I find it unbearable to use as long as there are people hungering

The world does produce enough food to feed everyone, Glow Bucket, the big problem is distribution. One of the aspects of the distribution problem is fuel costs. One of the major problems in Africa right now is energy scarcity, not food scarcity. It may be that cheap, sustainable sources of fuel help feed people better.
posted by bonehead at 4:56 AM on April 26, 2007

From what I've read about this technology, and I know this from a number of different reliable sources, is that the real selling point of carbon dioxide capturing to the public is going to be the uniforms.
posted by The Straightener at 5:06 AM on April 26, 2007

The problem with distribution is arguably related more to corruption in the third world than anything else.
posted by BrotherCaine at 5:07 AM on April 26, 2007

rxrfrx: Those numbers are meaningless when we don't have data for how much CO2 the operation of those machines produce.

Presumably it wouldn't create any if attached to a non-greenhouse emitting powersource, such as wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric or yes, nuclear.

In fact, if you attached this to a nuclear power plant, you would basically have no-cost energy to run it as long as you'd like.

---

What I wonder is: does this CO2 sequestration actually work? How do you know the stuff won't just leak back into the atmosphere? I mean how could you verify that it dosn't? (I suppose sample it every few years to make sure the CO2 levels don't drop?)
posted by delmoi at 5:07 AM on April 26, 2007

Those numbers are meaningless when we don't have data for how much CO2 the operation of those machines produce.

The whole reason I said "as described in TFA" is that those numbers are all we have to work with here. Obviously, if there is some completely different net CO2-capturing figure, then the comparison with trees will be different.
posted by rxrfrx at 5:44 AM on April 26, 2007

Also, there's the issue of methane output from trees, which is still rather unclear, but has the potential to make "50 pounds per year of CO2" really equivalent to less than that.
posted by rxrfrx at 5:46 AM on April 26, 2007

chuckdarwin: I think I'm missing your point. If there isn't any net environmental harm from gluing diamonds to blackberries, or flying, or whatever, why would you object?

As for carbon use in general, we're going to have to stop burning fossil fuels, or at least seriously cut down, once peak oil hits regardless of global warming. As China, especially, becomes more modernized it will hurry us to the point where the price of oil exceeds its utility.
posted by sotonohito at 6:43 AM on April 26, 2007

Presumably it wouldn't create any if attached to a non-greenhouse emitting powersource, such as wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric or yes, nuclear.

Why not just use the electricity from the wind, solar etc to power whatever it was the coal power station is spweing out, thus saving more carbon?

In fact, if you attached this to a nuclear power plant, you would basically have no-cost energy to run it as long as you'd like.

I don't know where you get the no-cost aspect of this, are you being ironic concerning past predictions about overly optimistic future technological development?
Otherwise, if you did hook up a nulcear power plant with the aim of reducing carbon emissions, then you'd be better off shutting down a coal power plant and just using the electricity from the nuke rather than running the coal plant and using the nuke to remove carbon.
posted by biffa at 7:36 AM on April 26, 2007

this is rank bullshit.

the machines use "sorbents" to capture carbon dioxide molecules from the air, then they output "a pure stream of carbon dioxide molecules" to....where exactly? a scuba tank?

to purify carbon dioxide or anything else requires energy input, because you're going against the natural flow of things "entropy". how much energy will this take, where's it gonna come from and how much carbon dioxide will be generated producing _it_?

i knew what blazecock's link would be before i clicked on it. i'm very happy with the 15 advanced carbon sequestrators i put in last year northwest of my house. this autumn, they will produce pears! can your machine do that?
posted by bruce at 7:38 AM on April 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Here are some reliable numbers to provide a sense of the scale of the problem:

7 billion tons of CO2 are released each year from fossil fuels. 2 billion tons more from deforestation. About half of this (4.5) is absorbed into the oceans and soils, and half is added to the atmospheric total. In 1750 the atmospheric total was 560 billion tons. Today it is 800 billion tons.

Each year we need to remove 4 to 5 billions tons to keep things even - and to get things back to pre-industrial levels, we need to remove another 240 billion tons (800-560). This doesn't take into account growth going forward.

The air capture devices, according to the article, can remove 1 billion tons a year -- assuming one million devices of 10 meters square each (and assuming they can be solar powered). So we would need 4 to 5 million devices, but more comfortably 8-10 million.

More details are needed, and this is a mammoth technical solution, but it is not outside the realm of possibility.
posted by stbalbach at 7:41 AM on April 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Why not just use the electricity from the wind, solar etc to power whatever it was the coal power station is spweing out, thus saving more carbon?

Because that wouldn't do anything about the CO₂ already in the air. It also won't do anything about all the power plants spread out all over the world.

These things, you could just set them out in the desert, sucking CO₂ out of the air on solar power without the need to build expensive power lines. Of course, I'm not sure how you could sequester CO₂ out in the desert, but theoretically with carbon credits in place they could be very profitable, and practical.
posted by delmoi at 8:15 AM on April 26, 2007

Because that wouldn't do anything about the CO2 already in the air. It also won't do anything about all the power plants spread out all over the world.

You're missing the point. While fossil fuel generators are still spewing out CO2 in one place, then it will be better for the overall levels of CO2 if you stop part of those emissions by displacing them with renewably generated electricity than if you have the fossil fuel emissions then use the electricity from the renewable source to power taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
posted by biffa at 8:27 AM on April 26, 2007

Glow Bucket: fine point, but that's Columbia University (USA), not University of Columbia.

And what Bruce said; from what I remember of my university chemistry and thermodynamics classes, this seems too good to be true.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:55 AM on April 26, 2007

bonehead: Trees are transient storage of carbon. When they die and decompose, the stored carbon mostly gets released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Mature forests are more-or-less carbon dioxide neutral, not sinks.

While it's true that mature (ie. "climax") forests are steady-state ecosystems, hence they release the same amount of carbon as they absorb every year, these forests are sinks of existing carbon. Cutting them down releases this carbon (2 billion tons per year, according to stalbach's information above.) So that's 2 billion tons per year (about 25% of our total CO2 output) that we can save *right now* by simply banning the further destruction of old-growth ecosystems. And to say that carbon sequestration by "immature" forests is "temporary" is disingenuous, considering that a newly planted tree may absorb carbon and hang on to it for a thousand years or more if we simply leave it alone. Presumably that might buy us some time while we come up with more "permanent" solutions.

BrotherCaine: Trees apparently only reduce global warming if you plant them in the tropics.

Please note (from your link): "Bala and his co-workers are modest on their work and are quick to point out that it is based on a single simulation."

rxrfrx:
1 Tree: ~50 lb CO2/year
1 1-m2 device as described in TFA: 20,000 lb CO2/year

initial cost of 1 tree: ~$0.25
ongoing (yearly) cost for operation and maintenance of 1 tree: ~0

initial and ongoing cost of CO2-capture device: ~???

These are the numbers we need to see. It's not that I think this technology is a bad idea, but that it is still highly experimental, and "we have the technology" already - ie. self-powered self-reproducing self-maintaining carbon sequestration devices - they're called plants.
posted by dinsdale at 9:17 AM on April 26, 2007

Awesome! Thanks for posting this.

delmoi: What I wonder is: does this CO2 sequestration actually work? How do you know the stuff won't just leak back into the atmosphere? I mean how could you verify that it dosn't? (I suppose sample it every few years to make sure the CO2 levels don't drop?)

My understanding is that sequestration is still experimental at this point, but CO2 injection has been used in oil fields for quite a while now (to raise pressure). From the Oil Drum weblog:

The CO2 eventually finds its way from the injection wells to the production wells and comes back to the surface. This is perfectly natural and not a problem; it's allowed for in the design of any EOR scheme. The CO2 is just another part of the well effluent stream, so it's fully contained. You strip it out in the separators, recompress it and reinject it to dissolve out the next lot of oil... and so on. This is called "gas cycling".

Eventually you would have a reservoir full of CO2 (or, more realistically, CO2-rich solvent plus injected water) and some residual trapped oil (probably quite heavy as all the light ends would have vaporized), with smaller and smaller quantities of liquids coming out. When oil production falls below some economic limit, you shut everything down and abandon the wells (you DID provide for abandonment costs in your project plan, didn't you?). The CO2 would remain trapped underground.

Another way to filter CO2 out of the air would be to grow trees or other biomass and then burn it, capturing the CO2. But this new development looks really promising.
posted by russilwvong at 9:24 AM on April 26, 2007

I've contacted Klaus Lackner's office about the energy consumption and co2 production estimates for these machines and will post any answers I get here.
posted by Glow Bucket at 10:18 AM on April 26, 2007

dinsdale, "old-growth" steady-state forest takes about two generations of trees to get to. Call it 200 to 500 years for eastern hardwood (nearer 200) or western coniferous/boreal (nearer 500). the western and boreal forests are currently being devistated by the pine boarer beetle anyway. We're losing forest to invasive pests because of climate change.

It's true that you can lock up some carbon in a forest for a generation or two, but so much carbon has been kicked into the atmosphere from fossil fuel combustion that there is not enough potential (land) biomass to bring us back to our previous steady state. The marine sedimentation cycle (diatom formation, etc...) is too slow for any reasonable amount of forest to act as a temporary buffer to help at this stage.

Humanity has not just exhausted the natural climate homeostasis, but is near or past the potential maximum for biological buffering of climate change. We're near or past the point where an intervention like this is necessary.
posted by bonehead at 11:19 AM on April 26, 2007

Honestly, as much as I like trees, I don't see them as a very good carbon storage system. They grow slowly, which means they pull carbon from the atmosphere slowly. Faster growing plants would be better.

This guy has an interesting take on things. He suggests using farm subsidies to encourage farmers to turn ag waste into charcoal, which can then be conveniently burried, taking that mass of the carbon out of the atmosphere and providing electrictiy from the charcoal production process.

biffa wrote "Why not just use the electricity from the wind, solar etc to power whatever it was the coal power station is spweing out, thus saving more carbon?"

Because we can only use variable sources, such as solar and wind, to meet around 20% of our needs. You use variable sources for much more than 20% and you'll wind up with rolling brownouts, or worse. Solar and wind are great, but they aren't a complete solution by themselves.

Personally, I'm an advocate of a) spending billions researching fusion and other new sources of energy, and b) in the meantime using more fission.

Fission needs to be kept out of the hands of for profit corporations, its too dangerous and they cut safety corners (see the recent scandals in Japan for a perfect example). But in non-profit hands there's no reason why fission wouldn't be safe.

Don't believe me? Look at the US navy. 55 years of fission powered ships and not a single accident. Why? Because there's no profit motive getting in the way of maximum safety. The same principle can apply to civilian power production: eleminate the profit motive and fission is perfectly safe.

I'm in favor of profit, and for profit corporations, and all that jazz, in its proper place. Atomic power isn't its proper place.
posted by sotonohito at 12:41 PM on April 26, 2007

bonehead: dude, I'm not suggesting that an intervention is not necessary, I just don't want anyone to be under the illusion that there is some sort of "magic bullet" technology that's going to fix everything so we can just keep on deforesting the planet. We've got to do everything within our power to reverse this process of climate change, one of which is to reverse the process of deforestation. Do you disagree?
posted by dinsdale at 1:16 PM on April 26, 2007

55 years of fission powered ships and not a single accident

..that we know of. The US Govt is as bad as the Soviets when is comes to nuclear cover-up.
posted by stbalbach at 1:45 PM on April 26, 2007

stbalbach Accidents involving radiation are pretty much impossible to cover up, radiation doesn't just hide conveniently, its easy and cheap to detect and there are dozens of private groups opposed to atomic power who would *love* to prove an attempted coverup.

I think that its more likely that there haven't been any US navy failures than that the navy is covering up failures.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not really a big fan of fission, there is an inherent danger and disposing of the waste is a non-trivial problem. But when compared to continuing to burn fossil fuels, I think its the better of the bad options. Obviously we should, as I mentioned earlier, be pumping huge wads of money into power generation research. If even 10% of the money wasted in Iraq had been spent on fusion research we might have a working fusion plant by now.

But we need power, and lots of it, and we need power in a way that won't keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere. Wind, solar, and other similar sources can only be used to supply around 20% of our needs, right now there are only two technologies available to supply the other 80%: fossil fuels and fission. Which do you prefer?
posted by sotonohito at 4:57 PM on April 26, 2007

I think that its more likely that there haven't been any US navy failures than that the navy is covering up failures.

I'm sorry, but how do you find evidence of a nuclear disaster at sea?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:19 PM on April 26, 2007

Blazecock Pileon By detecting the radiation it would release. Water is an excellent radiation shield, true, but if the accident happened on the surface there'd be atmospheric contamination, and while I'm not an expert, I'd imagine that even an underwater accident would be an energetic enough event that it could be relatively easily detected.

More to the point consider this: the government of the USA can't even cover up a presidential blowjob, there's no way they could cover up a real disaster.

In an ideal world there'd be huge whistleblower prizes and laws granting total legal immunity to whistleblowers, but even without those incentives coverups fail. Its one of those ultimate truths of the modern world: Secrets cannot be kept.
posted by sotonohito at 6:49 PM on April 26, 2007

sotonohito wrote

chuckdarwin: I think I'm missing your point. If there isn't any net environmental harm from gluing diamonds to blackberries, or flying, or whatever, why would you object?

Are you trying to suggest that air travel isn't environmentally harmful?
posted by chuckdarwin at 1:31 AM on April 27, 2007

chuckdarwin No, but I'm suggesting that if we remove the environmental harm (either by using planes that don't produce pollutants, or by removing the pollutants) than why would you object?

You said: "I'm sorry, but if this solution actually works and gets implemented, humans will never mend their destructive ways. We'll breathe a sigh of relief [thinking, 'thank fuck that's over!'] and keep driving our pimped out Escalades around and flying to LA to get gemstones glued to our Blackberries."

I'm saying, why shouldn't we? If the environmental harm of such activities is eleminated, why would you be grumpy about them?
posted by sotonohito at 3:55 AM on April 27, 2007