How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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Ciro Pabón
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How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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A curious way of thinking:

http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/p ... erview.pdf 1.8 Mb

The idea is to blow CO2 over potassium carbonate to trap it, mix it with hydrogen produced from electrolysis, create methanol and synthesize gas from it.

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They estimate a price of gas around 4.60 devaluated dollars. It does not take in account the credit for CO2 reduction. It's not theory, they have a working prototype. It's not a wacko inventor, these are Los Alamos scientists.
Ciro

dumrick
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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The people over at Los Alamos really do their best to sell nuclear technology!
:lol:

In fact, the "carbon-neutral" slogan could be used for a variety of alternative fuel systems, if they relied solely on carbon neutral power on processing. For instance, bio-fuels could be carbon neutral if the power to process the vegetal mass into usable fuel would be, let's say, solar power, wind power or nuclear power (in this case, with the slight inconvenience of a by-product called nuclear waste that needed to be dumped, but nothing a currupt dictatorship in some african country wouldn't accept in the vicinity of some village, in exchange with some land-land missiles, for sure). Or am I looking at this the wrong way?

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joseff
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Nuclear waste can be reprocessed. This is something done in (eg) France but not common in the USA.

mcdenife
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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If by waste you mean contaminated material, then no, that cant be reprocessed (well actually depends on the material I guess).
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regards to matters requiring thought. The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement upon anything new. - Galileo..

The noblest of dogs is the hot dog. It feeds the hand that bites it.

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joseff
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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I mean "spent fuel" :)

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Ciro Pabón
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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This you already know: nuclear energy is cleaner than fossil fuels.

Anyway, to stay on thread, what calls my attention is the idea of storing energy (whichever you choose) by synthesizing fuels.

Didn't the germans use synthetic fuel during World War II? What process was that? What efficiency did they reach?

Notice that a price for syntethic fuel of (roughly) double the current price means that you can reach an efficiency greater than other forms of storage, like batteries or hydraulic power, which cost more than double (per watt) than fossil fuels.

There is also the evident base of the idea: you sequester CO2 and use it positively, instead of, for example, embedding it into rocks or injecting into salt mines or any other "useless" storage system. So, if there is any viable scheme for sequestering CO2 from atmosphere, I would say this should be the preferred reservoir. It sounds to me like waste management systems that actually do something with the waste, normally, at the cost of some energy input for treatment of said waste.

In the end, african dictators and all (who will be "evil" no matter what... ;)) I think that is the economics of the proposal what could make it work: if you get money from cleaning the atmosphere from CO2, then the cleaning will be made. If you don't, well, you have to stick to "land-land missiles deals" for your benefits. :)
Ciro

Carlos
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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Ciro -- During WW11 Germany used the Bergius method to convert coal to liquid fuel for vehicles.
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ ... RTA0001707
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process
http://www.mmdnewswire.com/commercilizt ... -1159.html

Here is an article that came out just yesterday. Another new way to use aluminum to catalyze water to hydrogen and oxygen efficiently enough to scale up to a power plant that could produce electricity for 10 cents a kilowatt hour or scale down to use on board as a fuel source for cars.
http://www.physorg.com/news122655117.html

A few threads ago on a biofuel thread we shared I mentioned harvesting methane hydrates from the ocean floors, you may have read that one of the methods involved using CO2 to displace the methane leaving the co2 behind, reaping fuel and sequestering carbon.

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Ciro Pabón
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Thank you very much, Carlos. I found a couple of things that could be interesting:

- The Bergius process, used by Germans and invented in 1913, spends 50% of the energy value of the carbon used as input.
- The Karrick process, used by Americans and invented in 1930, spends 25% of the energy of carbon and also produces CO2.
- Sasol, the largest South African company, produces synfuel and uses the Fischer-Tropsch method, earning money. It was heavily subsidized by South African apartheid government, there you have the african dictators... :) I haven't found the energy content of the product.

All these processes essentially heat carbon (or natural gas) in absence of oxygen to produce fuel, fuel-oil, smokeless coal and some other byproducts. All of them, or variations, have been proposed to recover oil from shales, tar sands or natural gas "flared" in oil wells.

The Karrick process can produce a barrel for 35U$, the tar sand "retort" system goes at U$ 15 per barrel.

On the other hand, this "Green Freedom" (patriotic name... :|) process doesn't produce CO2, but its cost is astronomic, compared with the older systems. Of course, the concept of producing gasoline from air and water only, while you clean them, seems pretty cool. 8)
Ciro

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checkered
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dumrick wrote:The people over at Los Alamos really do their best to sell nuclear technology!
:lol:

In fact, the "carbon-neutral" slogan could be used for a variety of alternative fuel systems, if they relied solely on carbon neutral power on processing. For instance, bio-fuels could be carbon neutral if the power to process the vegetal mass into usable fuel would be, let's say, solar power, wind power or nuclear power (in this case, with the slight inconvenience of a by-product called nuclear waste that needed to be dumped, but nothing a currupt dictatorship in some african country wouldn't accept in the vicinity of some village, in exchange with some land-land missiles, for sure). Or am I looking at this the wrong way?
Well, as my current

understanding of the issues goes, you pretty much hit the nail in the head there. Much of the carbon needs to be taken out of the energy cycle, period. Either that happens by lowering our energy needs, or then we've got to find ways to manage with electricity and hydrogen that is bonded to something else than carbon - preferrably we'll manage both. (Meanwhile we've also got to be conscious of atmospheric vapor concentrations and greenhouse gases other than CO2 ... Methane has a relatively short atmospheric life, but is 21 times more potent. That's why I'm uneasy about the quantities - and releases - on the kind of industrial scale that meeting gasoline/diesel replacing levels requires.)

I'm not ruling out nuclear as an option, but as the above post implies, the fact is that only a meager handful of all nuclear nations have factored radioactive waste management in the operating costs. Until the rest follow suit, convincingly, I'm not going to be their greatest advocate. Besides, nuclear by definition is highly centralised/high investment, something that doesn't bode too well with economic democracy, personal responsibility and, in a word, empowerment.

Now, I read the "Green Freedom™" PDF through - once - made some notions, and crunched some numbers to "get my head in the ballpark" about the realistic prospects of nuclear powered potassium carbonate CO2 sequestration and gas liquefication process or whatchamacallit. I guess a disclaimer is in order, namely that none of what follows has been done to any semblance of academic standard and that I only ran any and all numbers once. I trusted my recollection and sources beyond reason. Thus, the propability of mistakes is fairly significant. Nonetheless, I'll try and leave such a trail of "thought breadcrumbs" here that a sort of a "peer review" is possible. I'm more than happy to see any mistakes challenged, my only hope is that any such exercise serves to clarify - and not muddy - the "big picture".

The document states that a sequestration rate of 55kJ/mol CO2 is projected. I'll accept this even though that figure was based on speculative technology and the actual lifecycle analysis of the technology was stated to be incomplete. The other flowchart relating to the energy efficiency (technical, not linked to this thread) just wasn't immediately decipherable. Anyhow, I thought it'd be worthwile to contrast the above figure with current global nuclear capacity and the total "excess" of CO2 in the atmosphere, just for argument's sake.

The mean mass of atmosphere is around 5,148*10^18 kg, in which the latest measurements indicate a CO2 concentration of 383 ppm (parts per million), or 0,0383%. This amounts to roughly 3,0*10^15 kg in total; the pre-industrial baseline of CO2 concentration lies at about 280 ppm or so, which means we have "maxed our CO2 credit" by some 27% to date. That is some 8,1*10^14 kg, or at 44g/mol the equivalent of 1,84*10^16 mol of CO2, a veritable sh*tload of the stuff. Which brings us to balancing our account with the nuclear-potassium-liquefication ... Let's assume that every nuclear powerplant in the World would be retrofitted with this equipment and/or all decommissioned units would be replaced by sequestration plants. We've currently about 440 reactors with a combined output (power) of 366 GW.

By Green Freedom™'s specifications we can then calculate the amount of energy needed to capture the fossil CO2 atmospheric excess, a figure which conveniently comes pretty close to 1,0*10^21 J. And since we have a figure of the overall nulcear power in our disposal we can project the amount of time it'd take to put the kind of energy through the system as to reduce CO2 from 383 ppm to 280 ppm (or so). If (and it's a big if) I've gotten it even half way right until now, it'd take

~ 31.900 days

or 87 years, and then some. Since these plants come at $5Bn a pop (projected), the hardware cost alone for this imaginary feat could reach $2,2 trillion (that's twelve zeroes in one of them), give or take. Of course there are quite a few humongous omissions in this kind of logic, so I'll try to explore a few in the most superficial of terms. For starters, the 87 year figure holds up only if we hoarde the resulting carbohydrate fuel and not use it at all, while remaining carbon neutral in all other endeavors meanwhile. Otherwise we could extend the process manyfold. And given that we'd be using all nuclear energy in this, from where we'd find power for the grids anyway?

But this is assuming that the natural carbon sinks (oceans, forests, etc.) function "as is" meanwhile; we don't know that. Some projections I remember seeing have solubility, photosynthesis and soil capture reaching a preindustrial atmospheric CO2 equilibrium in 100 to 200 years from the moment we reach closed carbon energy cycles anyway. So I guess, armed with only this superficial information, I'd rather vote for investing that $2.2 trillion in getting rid of carbon in the energy cycles than find elaborate ways to keep churning the stuff around just because we've gotten used to doing so.

Of course I have a few random secondary concerns as well, like the points about infrastructure efficiency holding up, comparing nuclear with high yield solar or geothermal processes for energy sources and so on. I also noted an outward bound arrow marked "methane purge" in the flow chart, which I found worrying; much better to burn the stuff into water and CO2 than release it to the atmosphere. But perhaps that's what it means, I don't know. Also, the carborate scrubbing was said to be very efficient (95%!?) so finding locations suitable for nuclear plant cooling and atmospheric conditions might not be the easiest of tasks ... without very steady air movement the plant risks developing occasional "low CO2" bubbles, perhaps reducing efficiency radically.

I don't know what I'd call this proposal, but "low risk" and "transformational" wouldn't spring to my mind as first (or second) options. The scale (resources, time) of the potential project is immense (just a couple of such plants would hardly make a dent, I was using the entirety of our nuclear energy production as an example for a reason) and I can't help thinking that it'd drain investment from simpler and cheaper ideas - and for all the fanfare, the complete carbon cycle in all this appears murky to me. I'm happy that these technologies are constantly developed, since if we do encounter clear runaway phenomena (exponential, after tipping points) we might require costly desperate measures like engineering weather directly.

But meanwhile, photosynthesis, intellectual diversity and restraint work much better for me.

A couple of links to relevant websites:
Synthetic Fuel Concept to Steal CO2 From Air, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Concurrent Technologies Corporation
Alternative Energy NOW conference, organised by CTC, sponsored by the U.S Air Force etc., I guess that's why they have the Stars and Stripes flying alongside a B-52 bomber on the front page ...

Ps. If you're up to it, read this blog entry (tamino.wordpress.com). It's about carbon isotopes and how those can be used to tell the source of the carbon in CO2. You guessed it, the fossil sourced carbon isotope shows clearly in the atmospheric balance. Much more raw data on greenhouse gases to be found on the World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (WDCGG).

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Image linked from tamino.wordpress.com

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Ciro Pabón
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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Checkered, what a great post.
Ciro

mcdenife
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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Yes Ciro, however I am not convinced by his "smoking gun" conclusion.
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regards to matters requiring thought. The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement upon anything new. - Galileo..

The noblest of dogs is the hot dog. It feeds the hand that bites it.

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checkered
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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Ciro Pabón wrote:Checkered, what a great post.
mcdenife wrote:Yes Ciro, however I am not convinced by his "smoking gun" conclusion.
Well, thank you, you're

very kind. Whereas the content of my contribution can and should be subject to criticism and corrections, I mainly hope that my effort managed to excite some further thought on these issues.

My intention truly was to get to grips with this proposed technology and its ramifications, the original motivation wasn't (and still isn't) to "debunk" it - but only to consider its applicability in the overall scheme of things. My emphasis is on sustainable development, which goes directly into the resources - and maintaining or increasing those - with which we and this biosphere has to work with. In that sense I'm a bit curious about arriving at a "conclusion", because I wasn't attempting one. In other words my intent was an exercise in enablement.

Science holds its truths only as long as they're applicable, after all. Still, we have to live by our experience and understanding. Perhaps it's just most important to try and function in a way that leaves room for one of the most common instances of the human experience - mistakes. Mistakes are instrumental in the learning process. I guess a crisis - such as runaway global warming - can be defined as a state with a dramatically reduced capacity to make mistakes in relation to the requirements of finding solutions. Perhaps the human condition prevents us from avoiding risk, but that's not to say we can't consciously engineer how we choose to face it.

If the core technology (K2CO3 carbon sequestration) is conclusively proven (and this should be possible in a scale smaller than actually building a GW scale nuclear powerplant around the experiment) I can see it as a potentially worthwhile infrastructure investment, but certainly not as a unique and indefinite standalone "solution". Not with its currently proposed interface with the environment - but that isn't saying the process itself would be a R&D dead end, nor does that imply that the basic process is somehow faulty. It's just a question of what, exactly, we should do with it. And what we should do about things we can't do with it. Hopefully my previous post got people to draw many diverse and complementary conclusions and led to novel ideas as well.

It is the entirety of the environmental issue that I'm interested in and as such individual projects can provide welcome perspective on many essential facets of the whole. I thought about expanding on this and did write about the stuff in length as well, but ended up deleting it. I felt it would've ultimately been a distraction, in substance and in scale. I guess sustainability applies to conversations as well.

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Ciro Pabón
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Re: How to obtain gas from... CO2!

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I think Mcdenife refers to the conclusion that CO2 is man-made, not to your "back of the envelope" figures.

On the other hand, I have a solution to global warming that I find economically feasible.

We should use fuel with a high nitrogen content (it's cheaper and causes smog), we should eliminate cathalyzers on car exhausts (also it would be cheaper) and we should finish the burning of the Amazon (you can earn a few dollars in the process). We could also drop a few nuclear bombs in a few well chosen volcanoes, provoking immense eruptions.

The particles would fog the atmosphere, triggering another ice age. So, if we contaminate enough, but not with mere CO2, but with all the means at our disposition, we could save ourselves!

Another possibility would be to interrupt the Atlantic Oceanic Current, again, using a few strategically located nuclear bombs so we could have another Ice Age in the style of "The Day After".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

Smoke and haze over China. If we could contaminate the planet with true energy and no hesitations, we could cool the Earth...
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Burn, baby, burn! :)
Ciro

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checkered
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Ciro Pabón wrote:I think Mcdenife refers to the conclusion that CO2 is man-made, not to your "back of the envelope" figures.
Well, I don't know if

I quite have the fortitude or resources to debate that. I'd appreciate though, if everyone participating in the debate took better care of cutting through the chase (especially in the scientific community); I've grown weary of comments that only serve to blur the issue and I'm equally weary people who seem to think that their personality itself is invested in them being right about whatever their claim is. Let's not forget that in getting on top and to the bottom of things, a hypothesis proven wrong is just as valuable as one proven right.

High nitrogen crude preferred? How'bout sulphur as well? Messieurs Chávez and Putin should only be too happy as their oilfields sport high quantities of the latter putting some pressure on those pesky refinement costs which, granted, do not matter all too much at $100/barrel (the current profitability limit of some thick sludges I've read to be around $60). I have a soft spot for the Amazon (".rainforest" rather than ".com", I must hasten to add) though, I'd wait with any additional torching to the one happening presently. But high atmospheric particle counts do make for absolutely fabulous sunsets, I have to admit ... perhaps Ridley Scott got it right with the "Blade Runner". I can picture my bionic avatar standing over a sooty urban landscape littered with flickering flatscreen billboards and the occasional methane "purge" in some 150 years from now. (Though Scott is in serious competition with James Cameron's "Terminator" by the look of things; the Brit global satellite command and control system is called ... "Skynet". Oh dear.)

On the theme of science faction, your dimming ideas reminded me about something I read a little over a year ago in a PNAS document ... it was rather widely reported at the time. Actually pretty inspiring stuff, written by J. Roger P. Angel, Regents Prof. of CAAO, University of Arizona after his wife asked him to solve global warming (the "better halves" can be somewhat demanding at times, or so I've been told). "Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1) - PDF" details establishing a self-guiding microsatellite swarm of 16 trillion units, delivered by 20 million coil gun/ ion propulsion launches at a cost of (appr.) $500 Bn/year over half a century.

In the "discussion" section Prof. Angel does make the point, too, that radical direct involvement in climate is warranted only in case of ongoing or imminent danger of abrupt climate change. The same investment in sustainability and renewables, situation permitting, will have a healthier balance between treating the cause and treating the symptoms. In considering these things one tends to get something of a "Bruce Almighty" syndrome ... managing whole Worlds might seem like a fun proposition, but the nitty gritty of it proves quite daunting on close inspection. In any case, I'll quote the abstract here.
Roger Angel, in a PNAS document wrote:If it were to become apparent that dangerous changes in global climate were inevitable, despite greenhouse gas controls, active methods to cool the Earth on an emergency basis might be desirable. The concept considered here is to block 1.8% of the solar flux with a space sunshade orbited near the inner Lagrange point (L1), in-line between the Earth and sun. Following the work of J. Early [Early, JT (1989) J Br Interplanet Soc 42:567–569], transparent material would be used to deflect the sunlight, rather than to absorb it, to minimize the shift in balance out from L1 caused by radiation pressure. Three advances aimed at practical implementation are presented. First is an optical design for a very thin refractive screen with low reflectivity, leading to a total sunshade mass of ~20 million tons. Second is a concept aimed at reducing transportation cost to $50/kg by using electromagnetic acceleration to escape Earth’s gravity, followed by ion propulsion. Third is an implementation of the sunshade as a cloud of many spacecraft, autonomously stabilized by modulating solar radiation pressure. These meter-sized ‘‘flyers’’ would be assembled completely before launch, avoiding any need for construction or unfolding in space. They would weigh a gram each, be launched in stacks of 800,000, and remain for a projected lifetime of 50 years within a 100,000-km-long cloud. The concept builds on existing technologies. It seems feasible that it could be developed and deployed in ~25 years at a cost of a few trillion dollars, <0.5% of world gross domestic product (GDP) over that time.
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Image linked from Wikipedia