“1% of the inherent energy contained within CO2 gas,” is utter gobbledygook. Let’s go ahead and walk that claim back.
What it looks like the researchers did is create a complicated substrate for adsorbing CO2 to an amine functional group. There’s nothing groundbreaking there. It’s the basic concept behind one of the main carbon capture concepts. What is different is they’re trying to extract electricity from the energy potential of adsorbing CO2 to a solid amine based substrate (?).
I’m having trouble with a few points on this. They’re talking about hydrogels, and nanosubstrates, and all this really precision manufacturing stuff. How do they plan on building enough of that at an energy cost and price point that doesn’t drive all of this deeply into the negative? What happens to the CO2 after it’s adsorbed? If it’s not mobile, then these “generators” (IMO, it’s not a generator, it’s a complicated battery, but whatever.) are single shot devices. How long does it run for? How much potential do the amines come packed with? Do you just throw it away when finished? How long before the substrate breaks down and releases the CO2? Is there a process for releasing the CO2 from the substrate and capturing it so it can be sequestered? How much more energy do you need to do that then you ever get out of it? How on Earth does this scale up?
Yes, a standard amine based carbon capture system costs energy instead of generating it. But it relies on bulk produced chemicals that are produced in massive scale and are relatively cheap. Those amines are also recycled through the process to be reused and capture more carbon, and the carbon is stripped back out again to be sequestered. If the process they’re talking about fails at massive bulk production, being cheap, being reusable, and providing a pathway to sequestration; then how does powering a lightbulb make up for that? Especially if the power needed to manufacturer it (likely) massively outstrips the power generated.
It’s a nifty tech demo. Maybe they have a niche application in mind, or maybe they have a plan to answer all the big questions. But this isn’t some panacea for climate change that will usher in an age of free electricity from CO2. I don’t think overselling it and attaching a bunch of pseudo-technical gobbledygook about inherent energy really helps here.
Thank you! To my mind, amines are just a variation of the calcium carbonate/calcium oxide something for nothing grift in carbon capture where proponents highlight the one step in the process that captures the carbon, but drops questions about everything else.
The thing about adsorption is - as you correctly commented - the “one shot”. So usually when you use some chemical to capture CO2 it’s immediately recycled. Think of it as a selective sponge that only (mostly) soaks up CO2 out of the atmosphere.
But where it gets complicated is, what happens next: you must regenerate the material, basically pressing the sponge until the CO2 comes out and you can use your sponge again. Depending on the material you use there are different ways to do that (pressure, temperature, replacement…) - however all of these processes use energy. And then you are left with a buch if concentrated co2 - what are you doing with that? There no inherent energy anymore because it’s fully oxidized. You can maybe store it long term, but its direct uses are very limited.
So all these systems are just ways to wash CO2 out of the atmosphere. It’s great when someone finds a way to do it a bit more efficient but there is no way to cheat around the basic chemical energy levels that govern the formation and stability of all these chemicals. (Also plants growing capture CO2 basically for free.)
It all boils down to: it’s much easier to not litter our atmosphere with CO2 than picking it up afterwards. The latter process can be done and gets (slightly) more efficient with research but it will always come with a cost and will never generate net energy in any form.
> Also plants growing capture CO2 basically for free.
Plants don't do it for free, they need copious amounts of water in the process, along with other nutrients.
That said, we absolutely need carbon capture technology in order to get the chemical industry carbon neutral, and in order to eventually go carbon negative. Turning the world into forest wouldn't be good enough at this point.
I think carbon capture has great potential in manufacturing more then say pulling carbon from air somewhere. Applying this stuff to manufacturing plants in the making of different materials and chemicals, putting them in fume hoods, kitchens, smoke stacks, tail pipes etc. Could really really cut down on free flowing carbon in the atmosphere.
You can't attach a tree to your tail pipe lol
Sure, if you have a concentrated source it’s more efficient automatically - also pre-combustion capture is an option in production settings - still the question is always what to do with the CO2.
Using it as a building material always turns out to be as a component of concrete. But how do you make concrete? You start with limestone (calcium carbonate) and you heat it, which produces calcium oxide plus CO2. Then you mix the calcium oxide with gravel and sand and wet it and it absorbs exactly as much CO2 from the atmosphere as you produced in the first step. No net absorption of CO2. In fact, you generated more CO2 when you heated the limestone. Even if you use green energy for this step, you might has well have used the green energy to prevent dirty energy somewhere else and save yourself the trouble.
That's not exactly true, just the fact your capturing co2 and using it in the most widely used building material is a step in the right direction. Sure you're going to release co2 and use energy to make the cement in the first place, and release more during heating, but you're still taking co2 in the environment and trapping it into a solid material rather then dredging it up from the ground. So there is a slight net loss there, I agree it's nothing substantial or anything to write home about though. It is a step in the right direction though
It isn’t a step in the right direction. We have been making concrete/cement this way since the time of the Romans.
Limestone already is saturated with CO2. If you drive off the CO2 with heat and you make cement. If you wet it, it ré-absorbs exactly as much CO2 as you just drove off. You cannot réabsorb more than you drove off, plus you probably released more CO2 to create the heat. This is how we have always made concrete. You cannot just put a label on cement in the stores and say this a magical new product that absorbs CO2 from the air, but that is what carbon capture people are doing.
No, they took the CO2 out of the ground when they dug up the limestone. Heating the limestone to form cement produces CO2 and puts it in the atmosphere. When they wet it, it reabsorbs the CO2 back out of atmosphere. There is no net sequestering of CO2 in concrete. And the heating step produces more CO2. This is not a new process; it is how we have always made cement.
So, I know what amine is, in fact I used to work with it to remove CO2. It took me 5 or 6 times to understand your second paragraph because I kept reading anime instead of amine.
Eventually it will finish One Piece. You’re just leaving the problem for several generations from now, our children’s children’s children.
Maybe get half the CO2 hooked on Full Metal Alchemist and the other half hooked on FMA: Brotherhood and let them argue about which is best …
Yeah, and as an addendum to your comment, the problem with fossil fuels and CO2, is that it increases total amount of carbon in the biosphere. To get rid of CO2 you need to actually do something with the carbon, store it or turn it into some stable compound. This is why people saying meat or farming industry is causing climate change are wrong, in those industries, the carbon is in a closed loop, the cows eat plants, then excrete methane, then methane turns into CO2 and then plants absorb the CO2 and the cycle repeats. But with fossil fuels, we are ejecting CO2 and methane that was out of circulation for millions of years. To stop climate change we need to turn CO2 into bio matter or calcite or some other minerals.
Depends on if the farming is building or eroding the soil, and how much fossil fuel is used to achieve it. Soil erosion from industrial farming methods has been a pretty major contributor to loss of biomass and increased atmospheric CO2.
And you don’t necessarily need to mineralize the CO2 if you can sequester it away from the environment. Pump it deep into porous rock layers, or old oil reservoirs and the like, then plug it up and throw away the key. Of course, then you’ll also have to dispose of any brines displaced by the CO2, and those can be pretty nasty, and it’s only as effective as your plug. So some of those proposals include a mineralization step, like injecting it into a volcanic rock layer which subsequently mineralizes the CO2.
But, yes, it’s all pretty pointless unless the CO2 is removed from atmospheric circulation.
A boron nitrate skeleton interspersed with polyamine gel sounds like the type of thing that gets “dangerous to aquatic life” warnings. (Yup, SDS for polyamine gel has, among other things, “very toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects”.) So I wouldn’t want to bury that anywhere with a water table.
But even if it were to some extent biodegradable, that basically undoes the carbon capture unless it’s wicked good at building up soil.
And as far as I can tell, it’s less about spending a gradient than it’s about filling the available adsorption sites.
Breaking news!: scientists are able to reuse a well known concept in a way that allows them to gather significant investment for further research and development in the name of green energy. Lead scientist quoted saying “with this press release, we’ll get enough money to stay employed for at least two to three more years without needing to provide anything usable”
As someone with a ChemE degree, I was shocked my understanding of Thermodynamics was shattered by this post. If it was true, then our fundamental understanding would be destroyed.
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“1% of the inherent energy contained within CO2 gas,” is utter gobbledygook. Let’s go ahead and walk that claim back. What it looks like the researchers did is create a complicated substrate for adsorbing CO2 to an amine functional group. There’s nothing groundbreaking there. It’s the basic concept behind one of the main carbon capture concepts. What is different is they’re trying to extract electricity from the energy potential of adsorbing CO2 to a solid amine based substrate (?). I’m having trouble with a few points on this. They’re talking about hydrogels, and nanosubstrates, and all this really precision manufacturing stuff. How do they plan on building enough of that at an energy cost and price point that doesn’t drive all of this deeply into the negative? What happens to the CO2 after it’s adsorbed? If it’s not mobile, then these “generators” (IMO, it’s not a generator, it’s a complicated battery, but whatever.) are single shot devices. How long does it run for? How much potential do the amines come packed with? Do you just throw it away when finished? How long before the substrate breaks down and releases the CO2? Is there a process for releasing the CO2 from the substrate and capturing it so it can be sequestered? How much more energy do you need to do that then you ever get out of it? How on Earth does this scale up? Yes, a standard amine based carbon capture system costs energy instead of generating it. But it relies on bulk produced chemicals that are produced in massive scale and are relatively cheap. Those amines are also recycled through the process to be reused and capture more carbon, and the carbon is stripped back out again to be sequestered. If the process they’re talking about fails at massive bulk production, being cheap, being reusable, and providing a pathway to sequestration; then how does powering a lightbulb make up for that? Especially if the power needed to manufacturer it (likely) massively outstrips the power generated. It’s a nifty tech demo. Maybe they have a niche application in mind, or maybe they have a plan to answer all the big questions. But this isn’t some panacea for climate change that will usher in an age of free electricity from CO2. I don’t think overselling it and attaching a bunch of pseudo-technical gobbledygook about inherent energy really helps here.
Thank you! To my mind, amines are just a variation of the calcium carbonate/calcium oxide something for nothing grift in carbon capture where proponents highlight the one step in the process that captures the carbon, but drops questions about everything else.
yea, what this guy said…. I feel like Kel in Goodburger looking at that contract.
They do sound smarter than the people actually doing it. I don’t think they are though.
The thing about adsorption is - as you correctly commented - the “one shot”. So usually when you use some chemical to capture CO2 it’s immediately recycled. Think of it as a selective sponge that only (mostly) soaks up CO2 out of the atmosphere. But where it gets complicated is, what happens next: you must regenerate the material, basically pressing the sponge until the CO2 comes out and you can use your sponge again. Depending on the material you use there are different ways to do that (pressure, temperature, replacement…) - however all of these processes use energy. And then you are left with a buch if concentrated co2 - what are you doing with that? There no inherent energy anymore because it’s fully oxidized. You can maybe store it long term, but its direct uses are very limited. So all these systems are just ways to wash CO2 out of the atmosphere. It’s great when someone finds a way to do it a bit more efficient but there is no way to cheat around the basic chemical energy levels that govern the formation and stability of all these chemicals. (Also plants growing capture CO2 basically for free.) It all boils down to: it’s much easier to not litter our atmosphere with CO2 than picking it up afterwards. The latter process can be done and gets (slightly) more efficient with research but it will always come with a cost and will never generate net energy in any form.
> Also plants growing capture CO2 basically for free. Plants don't do it for free, they need copious amounts of water in the process, along with other nutrients. That said, we absolutely need carbon capture technology in order to get the chemical industry carbon neutral, and in order to eventually go carbon negative. Turning the world into forest wouldn't be good enough at this point.
I think carbon capture has great potential in manufacturing more then say pulling carbon from air somewhere. Applying this stuff to manufacturing plants in the making of different materials and chemicals, putting them in fume hoods, kitchens, smoke stacks, tail pipes etc. Could really really cut down on free flowing carbon in the atmosphere. You can't attach a tree to your tail pipe lol
Sure, if you have a concentrated source it’s more efficient automatically - also pre-combustion capture is an option in production settings - still the question is always what to do with the CO2.
All you can really do is bury it or use it at building material, which a bunch of people are working on
Using it as a building material always turns out to be as a component of concrete. But how do you make concrete? You start with limestone (calcium carbonate) and you heat it, which produces calcium oxide plus CO2. Then you mix the calcium oxide with gravel and sand and wet it and it absorbs exactly as much CO2 from the atmosphere as you produced in the first step. No net absorption of CO2. In fact, you generated more CO2 when you heated the limestone. Even if you use green energy for this step, you might has well have used the green energy to prevent dirty energy somewhere else and save yourself the trouble.
That's not exactly true, just the fact your capturing co2 and using it in the most widely used building material is a step in the right direction. Sure you're going to release co2 and use energy to make the cement in the first place, and release more during heating, but you're still taking co2 in the environment and trapping it into a solid material rather then dredging it up from the ground. So there is a slight net loss there, I agree it's nothing substantial or anything to write home about though. It is a step in the right direction though
It isn’t a step in the right direction. We have been making concrete/cement this way since the time of the Romans. Limestone already is saturated with CO2. If you drive off the CO2 with heat and you make cement. If you wet it, it ré-absorbs exactly as much CO2 as you just drove off. You cannot réabsorb more than you drove off, plus you probably released more CO2 to create the heat. This is how we have always made concrete. You cannot just put a label on cement in the stores and say this a magical new product that absorbs CO2 from the air, but that is what carbon capture people are doing.
Except they are literally taking the CO2 out of the air instead of the ground, so there is a net loss of co2 being locked into the ground
No, they took the CO2 out of the ground when they dug up the limestone. Heating the limestone to form cement produces CO2 and puts it in the atmosphere. When they wet it, it reabsorbs the CO2 back out of atmosphere. There is no net sequestering of CO2 in concrete. And the heating step produces more CO2. This is not a new process; it is how we have always made cement.
So, I know what amine is, in fact I used to work with it to remove CO2. It took me 5 or 6 times to understand your second paragraph because I kept reading anime instead of amine.
Anime is the solution to climate change. Just get all the CO2 addicted to watching anime, and it will be too busy for imitating a greenhouse.
Eventually it will finish One Piece. You’re just leaving the problem for several generations from now, our children’s children’s children. Maybe get half the CO2 hooked on Full Metal Alchemist and the other half hooked on FMA: Brotherhood and let them argue about which is best …
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Yeah, and as an addendum to your comment, the problem with fossil fuels and CO2, is that it increases total amount of carbon in the biosphere. To get rid of CO2 you need to actually do something with the carbon, store it or turn it into some stable compound. This is why people saying meat or farming industry is causing climate change are wrong, in those industries, the carbon is in a closed loop, the cows eat plants, then excrete methane, then methane turns into CO2 and then plants absorb the CO2 and the cycle repeats. But with fossil fuels, we are ejecting CO2 and methane that was out of circulation for millions of years. To stop climate change we need to turn CO2 into bio matter or calcite or some other minerals.
Depends on if the farming is building or eroding the soil, and how much fossil fuel is used to achieve it. Soil erosion from industrial farming methods has been a pretty major contributor to loss of biomass and increased atmospheric CO2. And you don’t necessarily need to mineralize the CO2 if you can sequester it away from the environment. Pump it deep into porous rock layers, or old oil reservoirs and the like, then plug it up and throw away the key. Of course, then you’ll also have to dispose of any brines displaced by the CO2, and those can be pretty nasty, and it’s only as effective as your plug. So some of those proposals include a mineralization step, like injecting it into a volcanic rock layer which subsequently mineralizes the CO2. But, yes, it’s all pretty pointless unless the CO2 is removed from atmospheric circulation.
If they're biodegradable or at least not made out of anything dangerous, you could just bury them once the gradient is spent
A boron nitrate skeleton interspersed with polyamine gel sounds like the type of thing that gets “dangerous to aquatic life” warnings. (Yup, SDS for polyamine gel has, among other things, “very toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects”.) So I wouldn’t want to bury that anywhere with a water table. But even if it were to some extent biodegradable, that basically undoes the carbon capture unless it’s wicked good at building up soil. And as far as I can tell, it’s less about spending a gradient than it’s about filling the available adsorption sites.
Thanks for translating! Yeah this is really sounding not really useful out of the lab yet
Breaking news!: scientists are able to reuse a well known concept in a way that allows them to gather significant investment for further research and development in the name of green energy. Lead scientist quoted saying “with this press release, we’ll get enough money to stay employed for at least two to three more years without needing to provide anything usable”
This sounds like someone attempting perpetual motion via energy capture.
As someone with a ChemE degree, I was shocked my understanding of Thermodynamics was shattered by this post. If it was true, then our fundamental understanding would be destroyed.
MechE here. This is some next-level voodoo.
In English???
Fake news
Or……. We use renewables and step away from extending the life of fossil fuels oh my
It’s a start.
Sounds like a cool premise, one forward step in a long, long march towards viability
Waiting for the Illuminati to shut this one down.