[HN Gopher] Aluminum formate Al(HCOO)3: Earth-abundant, scalable...
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Aluminum formate Al(HCOO)3: Earth-abundant, scalable, & material
for CO2 capture
Author : westurner
Score : 117 points
Date : 2022-11-07 04:33 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| westurner wrote:
| "Aluminum formate, Al(HCOO)3: An earth-abundant, scalable, and
| highly selective material for CO2 capture" (2022)
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade1473
|
| > Abstract: _A combination of gas adsorption and gas breakthrough
| measurements show that the metal-organic framework, Al(HCOO)3
| (ALF), which can be made inexpensively from commodity chemicals,
| exhibits excellent CO2 adsorption capacities and outstanding CO2
| /N2 selectivity that enable it to remove CO2 from dried
| CO2-containing gas streams at elevated temperatures (323 kelvin).
| Notably, ALF is scalable, readily pelletized, stable to SO2 and
| NO, and simple to regenerate. Density functional theory
| calculations and in situ neutron diffraction studies reveal that
| the preferential adsorption of CO2 is a size-selective separation
| that depends on the subtle difference between the kinetic
| diameters of CO2 and N2. The findings are supported by additional
| measurements, including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy,
| thermogravimetric analysis, and variable temperature powder and
| single-crystal x-ray diffraction._
| [deleted]
| westurner wrote:
| "NIST Breakthrough: Simple Material Could Scrub Carbon Dioxide
| From Power Plant Smokestacks" (2022)
| https://scitechdaily.com/nist-breakthrough-simple-material-c...
| :
|
| > _[What to do with all of the captured CO2?]_
|
| >> - Generate more formic acid to capture more CO2
|
| - Make protein powder (#Solein,). And nutrients and flavors?
|
| - Feed algae
|
| - Feed plants, greenhouses
|
| - CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage
|
| - Firefighting:
| https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572664456210948104
|
| - Make aerogels. Aerogels are useful for firefighter protective
| clothing, extremely lightweight insulation, extremely
| lightweight packing materials, aerospace; and no longer require
| supercritical drying to produce:
| https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572662622423584770?t=A...
|
| - Make hydrogels. Hydrogels are useful for: firefighting:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogel+firefighting
| https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1572664456210948104
|
| - Make diamonds, buckyballs, fullerenes, graphene
|
| - Water filtration: activated carbon, nanoporous graphene
|
| Is there a similar process ("MOF,) for capturing Methane from
| flue gas? Is that before or after the CO2 capture?
|
| - Methane is worse for Earth than CO2 FWIU. And there are many
| uncapped wells leaking methane, as now visible from space:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33431427
|
| - It's possible to make CBG Cleaner Burning Gasoline from
| methane (natural gas)
|
| How does the #CophenHill recycling and flue capture facility
| currently handle CO2 and Methane capture?
|
| - "Transforming carbon dioxide into jet fuel using an organic
| combustion-synthesized Fe-Mn-K catalyst." (2020)
| https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20214-z
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25559414
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I suspect that there are applications and industries that cannot
| fully be decarbonized. For example, steel production. So anything
| that can capture carbon from that (8% of global CO2 emissions, I
| believe) would be fantastic.
| rocqua wrote:
| If I read this correctly, this is mostly aimed at the smoke-
| stacks of fossil fuel plants. Great for reducing their harm
| before we phase them out, and valuable especially if it is cheap
| enough to actually be plausible. Cheap here matter more than
| perfect, since the problem of emitting CO2 from fossil fuel
| plants is better (but more slowly) solved by phasing out fossil
| fuel.
|
| But how does this work for scrubbing CO2 from general atmosphere,
| is it anywhere close to an option? Once we have 'solved' the
| problem of no longer emitting CO2, we will almost certainly still
| have way more CO2 in the atmosphere than we want. Does this new
| scrubber material make it feasible to reduce the CO2 from the
| atmosphere, or will it be more economical to deal with the
| symptoms of high CO2 levels?
| microjim wrote:
| Trees
| twawaaay wrote:
| Trees do not reduce CO2 in long run.
|
| For starters, humanity emits more CO2 than the combined mass
| of entire biosphere (every living organism, not just trees),
| every 10 years. Even if we were somehow able to cover all
| landmasses of Earth with trees (which we can't) and thus
| double/triple the biomass we would only set back the problem
| by a decade or two.
|
| Second, trees are part of a cycle. They store the CO2
| temporarily, then release it mostly back to the atmosphere --
| very small part becomes soil.
|
| Trees are not a magical solution that is somehow constantly
| sequestering CO2 from atmosphere. Trees store a bit of CO2
| once and then it stops and can even easily be reversed (if
| you burn it down). New growth is necessary to keep the store
| at the same level, otherwise the trees will burn or die and
| CO2 is returned to the atmosphere.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| >For starters, humanity emits more CO2 than the combined
| mass of entire biosphere (every living organism, not just
| trees), every 10 years
|
| """ Plants and soils together currently absorb an estimated
| 30 percent of the CO2 emitted by human activities each
| year. """
|
| https://news.stanford.edu/press/view/38728
|
| Do you have source for your 10 years?
| twawaaay wrote:
| It is actually very simple. Everybody can check easily.
| You do not have to believe me.
|
| You need two numbers:
|
| 1. Amount of carbon emitted by humanity. The easiest way
| to get this is to find all production of coal, nat gas
| and oil and convert it to carbon.
|
| 2. Amount of carbon in biomass. You can find the estimate
| of weight of Earth's biomass online. Then you need to
| multiply by a factor of how much carbon there is in
| biomatter on average.
|
| All necessary numbers are readily available and not
| controversial.
|
| As to how much plants use CO2 it is _IRRELEVANT_. The
| only way it would be relevant is if you also had a number
| on how much plants emit CO2 back to atmosphere when they
| burn or rot. But this is extremely difficult to measure
| directly.
|
| Just as you can't figure out how much you are saving up
| just based on your income without knowing your expenses.
|
| But you do not have to estimate any of the two numbers.
| It is enough to imagine that, given constant weight of
| the biomass, all carbon converted from CO2 to biomass has
| also roughly equivalent release back to atmosphere one
| way or another.
| ars wrote:
| > aimed at the smoke-stacks of fossil fuel plants
|
| "CO2 from dried CO2-containing gas streams"
|
| The word "dried" is going to cause trouble. Smoke stocks have a
| lot of water - more water than CO2 actually.
| dools wrote:
| Scrubbing C02 is important for industrial processes other than
| energy production so it's very important to get it right
| otherwise we can't fabricate stuff without increasing emissions
| and building renewable infrastructure while adding another 3.5b
| people to the population is going to involve a lot of
| fabrication.
| [deleted]
| twawaaay wrote:
| > Cheap here matter more than perfect, since the problem of
| emitting CO2 from fossil fuel plants is better (but more
| slowly) solved by phasing out fossil fuel.
|
| The goal is to stop emitting CO2, not phasing out fossil fuels.
| If you can use fossil fuel without emitting CO2 (and other
| greenhouse gasses), then the goal is achieved.
|
| But we also know that fossil fuels are finite and it might be
| worthwhile to stop using them and learn to use alternatives
| before we get forced to do it when the sources run dry.
|
| For me the most tragic part of the current situation is that if
| we somehow destroyed our current civilisation, there would be
| no raw resources to support a new industrial age.
| rocqua wrote:
| I don't think there are (economical) ways to stop emitting
| CO2 without phasing out fossil fuels. And like you said,
| regardless of CO2, fossil fuels will run out anyway.
|
| I wonder if any new civilization could bootstrap off existing
| knowledge and artifacts about electricity. Wind and water
| based electricity don't require stupidly complicated tech to
| get going. You can probably mine copper from ruins rather
| than mines. Similarly, perhaps current stores of coal and oil
| could also support some systems for long enough? Heck, I
| could even imagine old oil wells to be 'easy' to re-open.
|
| In any case, neither I nor my children will be around after
| we destroy civilization. So I care much more about avoiding
| the destruction than the ability to rebuild afterwards.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If we somehow destroy our current civilization, then world
| population will plummet from starvation, especially in the
| third world that isn't fertilizer-self-sufficient.
|
| And we'll still have plenty of raw coal + recyclable metals.
| twawaaay wrote:
| We won't have any raw coal. All raw coal is hundreds of
| meters below ground because everything that was easily
| accessible was already dug.
|
| In my country hundreds of years ago people were _gathering_
| coal lying on the ground or picking it with a shovel in
| small holes. When oil was first found it was basically
| pooling on the surface or required a very shallow hole,
| nothing more than a deep water well, to reach.
|
| Not only those, but a lot of other easily available sources
| have already been completely used up. There might be some
| that are overlooked in very sparsely populated, hard to
| reach places like Russia, Brazil or Antarctica. But the
| same reason why they have not been found and exploited
| would be why a new attempt at civilisation will also have
| hard time trying to find it.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _All raw coal is hundreds of meters below ground
| because everything that was easily accessible was already
| dug._
|
| You should probably visit Wyoming.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mines_in_the
| _Un...
| brilee wrote:
| Good question. I was also suspicious of the angle/framing of
| the paper as a smokestack capture solution. My thoughts are
|
| 1. smokestacks are a great place to start, it's
| thermodynamically easier, has low-hanging fruit, and can be a
| stepping stone to a atmospheric DAC solution.
|
| 2. I bet that the smokestack angle of the paper is due to ALF
| being a decent oxygen absorber. The paper made the argument
| that the CO2 (diameter 330pm) vs. N2 (diameter 364pm)
| selectivity was due to size exclusion principles. But oxygen
| has diameter 346pm, much closer to CO2, so it would stand to
| reason that oxygen would compete for CO2 binding efficiency. If
| you read the supplementary materials/experimental conditions,
| literally every experiment is done under a protective flow of
| 99.95% N2 gas, indicating that this compound is not to be
| exposed to air.
| rocqua wrote:
| Interesting angle.
|
| Even if this only works in smokestacks, it is hugely
| valuable. We will be stuck with some fossil fuel in the
| coming few years at least. Making those years less polluting
| is worthwhile.
|
| I suppose there is a risk that people say "we can do fossil
| fuel a bit longer, we scrub it now", but I think that will
| pretty soon be a clearly untenable position.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| >Does this new scrubber material make it feasible to reduce the
| CO2 from the atmosphere, or will it be more economical to deal
| with the symptoms of high CO2 levels?
|
| The low tech solution for scrubbing C02 from the atmosphere is
| to get more plants absorbing it and prevent the plant
| decomposition back to CO2 or even worse to methane. Some of the
| agricultural waste may be just buried in the fields helping to
| build the organic matter in the soil, but it would be hard to
| avoid any CH4 emissions doing it. Just check any landfill with
| buried organic matter and some sipping in water. One can try to
| use pyrolysis and get charcoal. This would not be 100%
| emissions free (CO, CO2, CH4 etc.).
|
| The main problem with the above is that collecting
| wood/straw/etc. transporting and then processing it also
| requires energy, at least on land. Converting the millions of
| agro machines to run on batteries or hydrogen would not be
| carbon neutral either.
|
| Supposedly if we fertilize patches of the oceans the dead algae
| will nicely sink to the bottom not to be release CO2 for
| centuries.
| mayama wrote:
| There isn't enough arable land and fresh water to
| meaningfully address climate change in the time necessary.
| Algae farming with sea water might be a good alternative if
| we could address disposing the the algae without emissions.
| thamer wrote:
| This is _the_ critical flaw in betting mostly on trees to
| remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
|
| To get to the now-unlikely target of +1.5degC by 2100, the
| need is on the order of 6 billion tons of CO2 to remove
| _each year_ by 2050[1]. A mature tree can capture only
| around 22 kg a year[2], so removing 6 billion tons would
| require planting 270 billion trees _each year_. To get a
| sense of the magnitude of the effort, there are an
| estimated 3 trillion trees on Earth today; we 'd need to
| plant just as many in only 11 years.
|
| [1]
| https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-
| ins...
|
| [2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/forests-health-and-
| climat...
| elmolino89 wrote:
| 270B trees @22kg/year, right?
|
| You cut them down each year and replant, or assume that
| there are no trees locking up 22kg CO2/year for more than
| 1 year?
| usrusr wrote:
| Better yet: you burn the plants for energy, then sequester
| the conveniently high concentration CO2 from the smokestack
| and do with it whatever you'd think would be smart to do when
| burning fossiles.
|
| About the Science article: my quick skim stumbled over the
| word "regenerate", which tells me it's not about some
| material suggested for permanently binding the carbon, but
| about a tool to get from smokestack-level CO2 concentrations
| to even higher levels?
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| >Supposedly if we fertilize patches of the oceans the dead
| algae will nicely sink to the bottom not to be release CO2
| for centuries.
|
| This is not true. Russ George is and perhaps always will be a
| grifter.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Uh, the experiment log on that page is actually moderately
| encouraging. The lesson, particularly from the EIFEX
| experiment, appears to be that it works great provided
| there's adequate silica for diatoms. No reference to Russ
| George required.
| leoedin wrote:
| My favourite solution to this is to use some of the pyrolysis
| products as fuel - if you burn and release 20% of the carbon
| captured by the plants to power the process of burying the
| remaining 80% the process is still carbon negative overall,
| and you have a nice to use hydrocarbon fuel that can more-or-
| less slot into existing machinery.
|
| The biggest problem is the scale of it - to make a
| significant dent in global co2 you need to be pyrolysing _a
| lot_ of wood - getting towards entire-earth scale managed
| forests.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| I also think that compared to some pie or at times mirror
| in the sky terra engineering projects "plants for the
| rescue" look more realistic at this point.
|
| >The biggest problem is the scale of it - to make a
| significant dent in global co2 you need to be pyrolysing a
| lot of wood
|
| The giant scale and use of land is one thing. But
| increasingly in many places the limiting factor be it for
| agriculture or forest or biomass plantations is water.
| While forests and vegetation have more than just a sponge
| effect, we should keep in mind that a scorched dry forest
| or a field burns easily. One may look at it as +/- net zero
| (what burns was absorbed by the plants we planted), it may
| be safer to go for high biomass yielding plants we can cut
| preferably more than 1x a year. In the case of fire only
| the carbon absorbed in the last say half a year would be
| released. And nasty plants such as Arundo can re-sprout
| after the fire. Or in a case of a prolonged drought given
| the right equipment one can just cut it down and get rid of
| the danger.
|
| *Edit*: cut one "While" too many
| imhoguy wrote:
| > if we fertilize patches of the oceans
|
| Don't we do it already with wastewater streaming down from
| fields, pipes, rivers...?
| belorn wrote:
| Yes, it is called eutrophication and is a huge pollution
| problem. The dead algae that drops to the ocean floor get
| eaten by bacteria and through that depletes the oxygen,
| resulting in hypoxic dead ocean. No fish and no plants,
| which in turn kills biodiversity both in and outside the
| water.
|
| Even if the goal was to store CO2 and we didn't care about
| anything else, the method has additional problems. With
| nothing living in dead zones except for algae, the methane
| gas produced by decomposing dead algaes has a high risk of
| rising to the surface.
| japanuspus wrote:
| The "ocean fertilization" referred to here is not with
| nutrients, but with iron [0]. Apparently there are glacial
| runoffs at Greenland which would just need to be
| transported to other areas of the ocean in order to capture
| massive amounts of CO2.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Yes and no. Meaning: depositing fertilizer close to the
| shore in shallow waters causes toxic algal blooms and
| suffocates everything. One needs deep, cold waters so the
| sinking organic matter is not decomposing rapidly.
|
| And yes, if the winds blow the Saharan dust over large
| oceanic surfaces algae do grow in otherwise "desert" waters
| and some of the generated biomass does sink deep.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| One aspect these iron fertilization experiments have
| ignored is albedo. Leaving any sequestration on the
| table, and just focussing on keeping the albedo of
| equatorial oceans low for as long as possible has the
| real potential to avoid absorbing massive amounts of
| solar heat into the system. That doesn't solve the co2
| problem, but because you can negate the feedback loop
| aspect of the problem, and perhaps even make natural
| sequestration occur faster if you lower temperature
| enough. One thing I haven't been able to figure out from
| the data from the experiments, is how long these blooms
| last. The tonnage of fertilizer and the size of the
| bloom, yes. Also, the experiments were done in eddies
| mostly to isolate the effects. So an open equatorial
| ocean experiment would be needed. Along with better local
| temperature monitoring. Some satellite imagery to verify
| albedo would be a plus. As far as ballpark numbers, if
| the bloom stays equatorial, you would need about 1.5e9
| USD per however long a bloom lasts in order to maintain
| an albedo that would initiate snowball. That is scaling
| linearly up from the area affected by previous
| experiments vs their costs.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| From German Wikipedia the albedo of water changes a lot
| with the angle. Oceans already are "dark" when hit by
| sunlight at +45degs angles. So it may not be that
| important.
| rocqua wrote:
| Stupid idea of mine: can we start burying our paper rather
| than recyling it? It means every sheet of paper requires
| cutting down more trees, and hence putting more trees
| (indirectly) into the ground. If you then re-plant those
| trees you capture more carbon.
|
| I presume the paper doesn't add enough to create soil and
| just rots.
| smileysteve wrote:
| But paper is pretty effectively recycled and trees aren't
| the only input - transport, water, and heat at the plant.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| >But paper is pretty effectively recycled and trees
| aren't the only input - transport, water, and heat at the
| plant. Exactly. Moreover 1ha of Arundo produces 20-50t or
| more dry mass per year packed in 100mx100m area. Granted,
| not harvested at 0% humidity, less dense than paper.
| Collecting 50t of recycled paper from the containers in
| the city probably needs more energy for transport.
| Hextinium wrote:
| This is actually the logic for just burying plastic: it
| doesn't degrade on any important timescale. Acts as a
| carbon sink, and keeps it out of everything. Winning all
| around.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Not if you got the plastic using fossil fuels and extra
| energy. Which is the case for most of the non-degradable
| plastic. Add to it that we are nowhere close to replace
| various types of plastics with materials obtained from
| non-fossil fuels.
|
| Obtained from cellulose
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate does
| decompose fairly quickly in the soil.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The low tech solution for scrubbing C02 from the atmosphere
| is to get more plants absorbing it and prevent the plant
| decomposition back to CO2 or even worse to methane.
|
| Bring back moors. Moors can sink a shitload of CO2 - and
| there have been a lot of moors de-watered over the last
| centuries to gather peat and agricultural land.
|
| The downside is you have to convince or pay off a lot of
| farmers who have farmed the former moors for just about the
| same timeframe.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Yes, moors would help. I remember that during some floods
| in Europe one of the ideas floating around was to construct
| large polders which will be flooded as needed. No clue if
| catching up flood waters that would be enough to turn such
| polders into carbon sink.
|
| There was some documentary about a German farmer keeping
| his grasslands in a moor-like state by rising the water
| table lowered by drainage. This did work well for him in
| the times of the draught but in general if I remember
| correctly it did lower his income.
| Mizza wrote:
| Always flue gas, never atmospheric concentrations.
|
| We have loads of good ideas for scrubbing flue. We have no good
| ideas for atmospheric CO2.
|
| 420/1000000 isn't a lot of particles per million. Moving and
| concentrating those particles and grabbing them is going to
| require an _incredible amount of energy_ no matter how you swing
| it. People have not comprehended the scale of this challenge yet.
| ealexhudson wrote:
| If the source of the flue gas is ~renewable (e.g. wood) and the
| energy generated is used usefully, this isn't a bad idea for
| carbon capture. It's much easier to capture the carbon
| technologically like this, and rely on broader capture (e.g.
| trees) to pull it out of the atmosphere. What really counts is
| what happens to the concentrated carbon being extracted - it
| needs to not go back into the atmosphere.
| amelius wrote:
| How do trees do it, then?
| pjc50 wrote:
| At about 3% efficiency, but compensating by being spread over
| a large fraction of the land surface.
| Mizza wrote:
| One adult tree captures 25kg per year. One transatlantic
| flight releases 500kg per passenger. Twenty trees, per
| person, per flight. Get serious.
|
| IPCC projections for a "good" scenario still depend on
| magical BECCS processes that don't yet exist., not flue
| scrubbing, which I think if anything will be away to keep
| coal plants online for _longer_.
|
| It's still valuable science, but don't get excited until
| there are major, major advancements in non-flue DAC/CCS.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| You're failing to put things in perspective. There are 500
| trees on earth for each human being. That would mean they
| can absorb 12500 kg per year.
|
| Also, tree are NOT the largest natural CO2 sink, oceans
| absorb more.
|
| Overall, the biosphere absorbs about 50% of total human
| emissions (25% by land plants and 25% by oceans). I think
| that once we drop the CO2 emissions enough, the nature will
| quickly scrub it out of the air, we don't need to get
| negative ourselves, just drop close to zero and nature
| should balance itself pretty quick.
| Mizza wrote:
| It's a carbon _cycle_. We've spent a hundreds of years
| adding new carbon to that cycle as fast as our technology
| will allow, which is now very fast. It will remain in the
| cycle unless we sequester it back into the ground. Plants
| (for the most part) aren't CO2 limited, they're nitrogen
| limited.
|
| The climate also isn't something that will just snap
| happily back into place. We're in a local minima. If we
| climb up this hill, we won't like what we find in the
| next valley.
| klyrs wrote:
| Oceans absorbing CO2 results in acidification which is
| already harming the oceanic life cycle. We _really_ want
| to tilt the balance away from the oceans, because the
| consequences of a dead ocean are dire.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is nothing magical about BECCS.
|
| At the power plant it is a matter of putting together
| technology that already exists. All of the elements such as
| amine strippers, pyrolysis, oxy-fuel combustion, etc. have
| been around since the 1970s. The literature has a "stopped
| clock" appearance in that people have talked about these
| things in the context of "clean coal" and biofuels for a
| long time without anything being built.
|
| There are two problems with it.
|
| One of them is that any kind of carbon capture is expensive
| and competes directly with a power plant (maybe the same
| power plant) without the CCS equipment. To win that
| competition, the operator of the power plant either needs
| to be fined for emitting CO2 or has to be paid for
| capturing it, to the tune of $50-$100 per tonne.
|
| Another is that the ecological accounting for biofuels is
| frequently not favorable. When you consider water
| consumption, effects of land use, and the effects of
| inputs, many biofuel schemes (such as Ethanol from corn in
| the US) seem to be a net negative.
|
| The cheapest BECCS scheme is to capture CO2 from the
| alcohol fermentation process, this has been implemented
| with great success
|
| https://bioenergyinternational.com/adm-starts-commercial-
| sca...
|
| Ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil is much better from an
| ecological and economic perspective and it would cost
| something like $30 a tonne to capture CO2 and inject it
| into a saline aquifer but politically it seems impossible
| given that most international bodies think that the real
| problem in Brazil is deforestation and that somehow
| promoting agriculture in Brazil is going to cause
| deforestation despite the fact that the Ethanol industry is
| mostly around Sao Paulo and nowhere near the rainforest.
|
| In principle there might be some agreement that Brazil gets
| credits for BECCS and also gets credits for protecting the
| rainforest but the latter is somewhat nonsensical in that
| there is a mismatch in time between processes that emit CO2
| (say you spend 5 hours on a plane) and the need to protect
| a forest forever to sequester a finite amount of CO2.
| Mizza wrote:
| Why is sugarcane in Brazil any better than corn in the
| US? If they use petrochemical fertilizer, the problem is
| the same.
|
| You cannot sequester a ton of CO2 for $30/tn anywhere in
| the world right now. You can't even do it for five times
| that. If what you say were true, I'd be able to clean up
| after my own existence right now, which I can't do. I can
| only buy scammy "credits" and "offsets".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://biowesleyan.wordpress.com/first-generation-
| biofuels/...
|
| The advantage of corn over other crops is that it
| flourishes in the presence of nitrogen fertilizer.
| Sugarcane is not so hungry.
|
| The cost of capturing fermentation CO2 is low because
| fermentation CO2 is almost pure with very little nitrogen
| in it. Thus almost all of the cost is the cost of
| compressing the CO2, pumping it, and injecting it
| underground which is about $30 a tonne. Even a few
| percent of nitrogen will cause the CO2 to misbehave while
| pumping, so capturing CO2 from a combustion stream
| requires some kind of separation which historically has
| been an aniline stripper or something like the rectisol
| process, but maybe it will be aluminum formate or
| something else in the future. The aniline stripper costs
| about $50 a tonne.
|
| The trouble with capturing fermentation CO2 is that it is
| not scalable. There is a certain amount of it produced
| and it isn't enough to "save the Earth" but it is a low
| hanging fruit and it would help in the process in
| validating sequestration, as there are all kinds of
| questions about the permanence and safety of saline
| aquifer injection. (Don't get me started about the
| CarbFix water sequestration project...)
|
| As for why you can't buy any good carbon credits it is
| the proliferation of junk carbon credits at low prices
| that keeps good ones off the market. Another problem is
| that many schemes are using the CO2 to produce more oil
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-energy-carbon-
| capture...
|
| which on one hand is a real market for the CO2 (in Texas
| you can drill and get CO2 in some places and since the
| 1980s they will pump it sideways and use it for enhanced
| oil recovery) but doing so seems to be more problem than
| solution and it ties the project economically to the up-
| and-down cycles of the oil industry.
| Mizza wrote:
| This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing. I had
| written off ethanol because of how gunked up it got with
| the American corn industry and the stupid fact that Iowa
| votes first in the US primary elections. Maybe there's
| something to this.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > but politically it seems impossible given that most
| international bodies think that the real problem in
| Brazil is deforestation and that somehow promoting
| agriculture in Brazil is going to cause deforestation
| despite the fact that the Ethanol industry is mostly
| around Sao Paulo and nowhere near the rainforest.
|
| It's not like Bolsonaro's term hasn't proven that
| deforestation is a massive problem. No one is trusting
| Brazil on a geopolitical stage at all, particularly as it
| looks like Lula is heading off in a lame-duck term
| against parliament and regional governors being dominated
| by Bolsonaro allies, who are bought off by Big Ag.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It was that way before Bolsonaro and will be that way
| after Bolsonaro.
|
| Ever since
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
|
| agriculture has been the most contentious issue in world
| trade and it is the reason why the World Trade
| Organization has been deadlocked since 1999. A while back
| Brazil asked the question: "What industries can we lead
| the world in?" and one of the answers was meatpacking so
| they got behind
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_S.A.
|
| That is, JBS is to Brazil what Boeing or Apple Computer
| are to the US and it is by no means anomalous that it has
| a great deal of political influence.
|
| When we tell them what to do with their land they react
| the same way we'd react if they said "It's unfair that we
| have to pay royalties for software like Microsoft Windows
| and Hollywood Movies, not to mention GMO seeds".
|
| Most of the people in the US I talk to who rightly want
| to see a stop to deforestation in the Amazon are ignorant
| about agriculture in Brazil (e.g. they think that JBS is
| backwards, not the fiercely competitive corporation it
| is) and ignorant about agriculture in general and not
| particularly understanding of the process by which
| deforestation happens in Brazil.
|
| It doesn't help that many questions are not well
| understood such as the relationship between land use in
| the area south of the Amazon and local climate changes
| that could cause the rainforest to recess northward.
|
| There could be some compromise but so long as developed
| country NGOs are speaking to Brazilians in a patronizing
| way it isn't going to happen.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Sunshine. Lots of it.
| lemming wrote:
| _We have no good ideas for atmospheric CO2_
|
| https://www.projectvesta.org is the best-looking option I have
| seen for this.
| Mizza wrote:
| The one I am most interested in is https://verdox.com/
| kragen wrote:
| direct air capture has been demonstrated by a variety of
| methods, including the literally oldest human industrial
| chemical process, lime burning. i've done the calculations,
| it's not such a bfd, even with lime
|
| yes, it requires an incredible amount of energy
|
| guess what solar panels give you
| Mizza wrote:
| I would be very curious to see that math that you solved the
| problem with, given that all of the scientists in the world
| working on this missed your solution.
| kragen wrote:
| no they didn't, you did, because that's what happens when
| you don't read any of the existing research
|
| quoting my comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32198793 about the
| theoretical thermodynamic minimum for direct air capture,
|
| as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environ
| ment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO2, or 900
| kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the [?]60 Gt/year of
| anthropogenic CO2 currently being emitted and get us to
| carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently
| require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is
| only about 10% of current world marketed energy
| consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed
| energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate
| change into reverse would require a bit more than that,
| maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy
| can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.
|
| Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do
| not closely approach the theoretical minimum. ...
|
| Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it
| cannot get us to net negative CO2 emissions.
|
| (note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33504318 points
| out a way that point source capture could conceivably get
| us to net negative emissions)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 describes the
| lime approach. it uses a huge amount of energy, 1600
| kWh/tonne CO2 (5700 kJ/kg CO2), much larger than the
| theoretical minimum above and much more than Climeworks, so
| the purpose of explaining it is only to demonstrate that
| there's no practical scalability limit to direct air
| capture. you don't have to ramp up your production of
| triethanolamine or aluminum formate or whatever the fuck.
| those are just a matter of optimizing the energy efficiency
| Mizza wrote:
| None of this explains how using 10% of total human energy
| production (at a bare minimum, using technology that
| doesn't exist) isn't a "BFD", or how in the world lime
| burning - a process that emits CO2 - is in any way a
| solution.
|
| I have absolutely "read the research", spent months in
| training and worked in the industry, which is why I found
| your claim that you've solved it and that it's not a big
| deal to be so ridiculous.
| kragen wrote:
| direct air capture normally requires cycling a sorbent,
| as you would know if you had worked in the industry as
| anything other than a janitor. you heat it up, it emits
| CO2 (hopefully into your underground caverns or wherever
| the fuck you're sequestering the stuff), you cool it back
| down, and it starts absorbing CO2 (for example, from the
| atmosphere). that's the same way scrubber systems like
| diethanolamine, triethanolamine, and zeolites work.
| calcium carbonate/calcium oxide/calcium hydroxide is one
| such cycle, just a particularly energy-hungry and slow
| one. conceivably there might be other approaches that
| don't rely on thermal cycling (pressure cycling, some
| kind of electrochemical thing) but afaik nobody has
| demonstrated one. they won't repeal the fundamental
| entropic limit anyway so they'll only be marginally
| better than existing thermal-cycling systems, we can't
| expect an order of magnitude improvement
|
| using 70 percent as much, or even several times more,
| energy than the humans currently produce is not a bfd
| because the amount of solar energy reaching earth is five
| orders of magnitude greater than current world marketed
| energy consumption. historically that was irrelevant
| because burning coal was cheaper than solar panels. now
| solar panels are cheaper and it's just a matter of
| scaling up production, which will happen unless people
| somehow run out of economically profitable ways to use
| energy. see my notes from 2008 at
| https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html for
| details
|
| i note a total absence of any quantitative arguments in
| your comments thus far; instead they rely on handwaving
| and gee-whiz pop science claims of incredibleness and
| authority
| Mizza wrote:
| You edited your comment after I posted, but it doesn't
| matter, you haven't talked about the topic at hand:
| atmospheric CO2, a pollutant that makes up 0.04% of the
| air.
|
| All of your calculations assume an infinite stream of
| pure CO2 - which is why sorbent based DAC work great for
| flue gas. Making that work with atmospheric CO2 requires
| tremendous pretreatment, which is hard and expensive and
| not something that can be handwaved away. It is the
| fundamental problem.
| kragen wrote:
| no, that is not correct; all of the calculations i have
| made and cited assume 400 ppm atmospheric air, not pure
| co2. it wouldn't even be coherent to talk about a
| theoretical thermodynamic minimum energy requirement to
| capture co2 from pure co2, which is the '10% of total
| human energy production' you're talking about upthread
|
| rather than handwaving it away i linked to the
| calculation of what that theoretical minimum is, provided
| my own calculation of a trivially feasible and scalable
| approach that takes less than seven times as much energy
| as that, and mentioned climeworks, which is one of
| several companies doing direct air capture today for less
| energy than that (but obviously more than the theoretical
| minimum)
| Mizza wrote:
| I don't see where you're solving this problem. How do you
| move the air? How do you remove the water? How do you
| concentrate the CO2?
| kragen wrote:
| if you don't know anything about how atmospheric CO2
| scrubbers work i suggest reading
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture and some
| of its 45 references
|
| the top of the article has a flow diagram of a lye-
| catalyzed version of the lime process i was describing, a
| chemistry that has been used in submarines, anesthesia,
| and scuba diving for about a century
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber has
| a nice overview of the different process chemistries
| commonly used
| Mizza wrote:
| Bro, you have not answered the question. How do you move
| and prepare the air? Think about the volume and weight of
| the gas that needs to be moved. See what adding fans and
| pretreatment does to your napkin science project and tell
| me how many times the total GDP of the world it costs.
|
| There is a reason why all of science is searching for new
| methods for DAC right now - because what you're
| suggesting doesn't work at the cost and scale we need.
| kragen wrote:
| fans use an obviously insignificant amount of energy
| compared to burning lime (as you'd know if you'd ever
| done a process engineering calculation involving fans),
| air pretreatment is unnecessary for the methods i'm
| talking about (as i already explained), and 'all of
| science is searching for new methods for DAC' is the sort
| of nonsense that suggests you've never met a scientist in
| your life
|
| the issue has only ever been that clean energy has
| historically been too expensive for terraforming. new
| methods for DAC may be economically important in a
| hypothetical competitive DAC market, and knocking off 50
| percent or even 5 percent of the energy cost would mean a
| significant reduction in the absolute resources required,
| but they aren't going to improve on the minimum energy
| thermodynamically required, which is inherent to the
| 400ppm concentration
|
| what's changed is that now we have a cheap source of
| carbon-free energy that scales to five orders of
| magnitude more energy than we need for this
|
| ten years ago we didn't; without that the problem was
| basically unsolvable
|
| now it's not
| Mizza wrote:
| Alright, man, good luck. I didn't see a single answer
| about how you're going to physically move and prepare 5
| quadrillion tons of air or why that's not necessary, but
| I'll sleep tight knowing that you've cracked it.
|
| Everybody else who's reading this, maybe look up what all
| of the proposed DAC plants in the world look like, notice
| they're pretty much just a gigantic wall of fans, and
| think about why that might be. It's because DAC requires
| moving a shit-ton of air, because 400ppm isn't a lot of
| parts per million, and that matters.
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1.7terawatt+years
| tells me " [?] 4.7 x yearly electric energy production of
| all nuclear power plants ( [?] 3.2x10^15 h W )"
|
| Or 14.9 trillion kilowatt hours, which at plausible
| retail prices of PS0.10/kWh is approximately one and a
| half trillion pounds. Now, who's going to pay for that?
| kragen wrote:
| sounds about right, though presumably you wouldn't be
| paying retail if you're setting up shop to terraform the
| earth. numerous recent ppas provide much lower
| (wholesale) prices than that; see https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-
| ppa-prices and
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/merchant-
| income..., which have numerous prices below PS0.02/kWh.
|
| and, as i said, you can probably use solar thermal for
| sorbent regeneration
|
| note, though, that the number you're using is the
| theoretical minimum energy used. existing practical
| technologies, as i said, consume several times more
| energy than that. it is unlikely that we will ever
| closely approach this theoretical efficiency
|
| there is indeed a real difficulty in the current human
| incentive structure where everybody hopes someone else
| will fix the problem so they don't have to bear the cost
| themselves. but that's not a question of engineering
| infeasibility due to resource limits; that's a question
| of politics
| conductr wrote:
| It's not much on a global scale, given the nature of the
| problem it would be solving. And if it works we have a
| nice little renewable power infrastructure as a byproduct
|
| The real problem is people and our near inability to
| coordinate at that scale
| kragen wrote:
| agreed, or even, as demonstrated in parts of this thread,
| people's inability to come to an agreement on widely-
| known facts that conflict with their ego defense
| phtrivier wrote:
| Is this something to be used for CC at power plants ? Or does it
| have any application to DAC ?
| midislack wrote:
| CO2 is a great red herring, the real cancer toxins and forever
| chemicals are spewed more every year while people scramble to
| sequester a harmless substance. In the distance, Bayer-Monsanto
| is laughing at all the useful idiots.
| BoGoToTo wrote:
| I challenge you to find a single peer-reviewed paper that
| states excess CO2 is not a contributing factor for
| anthropomorphic climate change.
| midislack wrote:
| Didn't you read the Climategate mails? Academics in charge of
| climate journals admitted to "changing the meaning of peer
| review." I'm under no obligation to listen to these communist
| prognosticators after an admission like that.
| BoGoToTo wrote:
| My dude, I used to work for Environment Canada. Climate
| change is real and people are causing it. I have quite
| literally worked with the raw data coming in from multiple
| sources. It paints a comprehensive picture of excess CO2
| and Methane release into the atmosphere and overall less
| heat from the sun being radiated back into space as a
| result.
|
| Also, "communist prognosticators" really? Grow up.
| midislack wrote:
| You used to work for a climate agitprop outlet? And you
| believe anthropogenic climate change is real? No shit.
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| I challenge you to discover Russel's teapot.
| sebstefan wrote:
| Climate change has nothing to do with cancer
| midislack wrote:
| Not so fast, persona!
|
| https://cancerletter.com/guest-editorial/20220729_5/
| [deleted]
| mqus wrote:
| why not tackle both?
| orangepurple wrote:
| Big CO2 counter propaganda has pushed the other stuff out of
| the limelight
| muaytimbo wrote:
| One thing that is suspiciously absent from the abstract is the
| stability of this material to O2.
| [deleted]
| lzazz wrote:
| When we have CO2 capture running, will all the money from "CO2
| credits" that was stolen from businesses be returned? :')
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm not familiar with that but I assume it would actually be
| spend on things such as this
| cbracketdash wrote:
| Chemist here. Looks promising for CO2 scrubbing !
|
| However, my instincts would keep me cautious around this
| chemical. The formate ion forms formic acid and eventually
| formaldehyde which is extremely toxic to humans. In addition,
| many organoaluminum compounds (i.e DIBAL) can cause serious
| damage (like blowing up labs... seriously). If a bunch of this
| stuff was in the atmosphere, it could be quite dangerous to human
| life.
|
| Otherwise, I am quite interested to seeing how this could be
| implemented.
| brilee wrote:
| Chemist here.
|
| Formate does indeed act as a reducing agent under appropriate
| conditions, but its byproduct is typically CO2 gas, not
| formaldehyde (HCOO- -> CO2 + H+ + 2e-). Aldehydes are generally
| unstable with respect to disproproportionation and are
| therefore unlikely reaction products.
|
| Organoaluminum compounds are molecules with direct Al-C bonds,
| whereas these are effectively normal ionic salts with some
| unusual unit cell structure. Conflating DiBAl with aluminum
| formate is akin to conflating chlorine gas with clhoride
| anion...
| refurb wrote:
| Formate ions can disproportionate:
|
| HCO2H -> CO2 + H2
|
| HCO2H + H2 -> HCHO + H2O
|
| However, aluminum salts of formate are likely more stable?
| You usually need formic acid and heat to generate hydrogen.
| kragen wrote:
| also if you get trace amounts of formaldehyde out the
| smokestack it isn't going to last more than a few hours in
| the environment. every living thing produces formaldehyde
| MgB2 wrote:
| The compound presented here is, however, not an organoaluminum
| compound. Those have Al-C bonds and are indeed very reactive.
| Aluminum formate has the Al3+-ion coordinated only by oxygen,
| and will certainly not exhibit the reactivity you described.
| jokoon wrote:
| Any physicist seems to say co2 is a neutral molecule which makes
| any carbon capture tech very energy intensive, whatever
| technology it uses.
|
| Tired of money trying to greenwash lies.
| usrusr wrote:
| That's why the smart people focus on capture from flue gases,
| which might be generated not only from fossil fuels but also
| from renewable biomass (basically the same just so much
| younger) and leave aside the direct air capture follies. Guess
| which side the process described in this article is on.
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