KaiserJeep wrote:I think that you are all being naive. There may or may not be serious side effects to burning FF's. Without any doubts whatsoever, six billion humans will starve if we abandon petroleum-powered mechanized agriculture, and the transport of foodstuffs from distant places.
Nobody has yet convinced me that any AGW/CC consequence is worse than that.
ROCKMAN wrote:Newfie - Exactly. Engineers can come up with lots of workable ideas. Such as the most obvious: drastically reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned by consumers. What can be done isn't relevant: what govts/societies are willing to do is.
Newfie wrote:Unfortunately we collectively act as 9 year olds. So it is extreamely unlikely we will do anything helpful.
Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?
One Day, Your Car May Run on Fumes—From Power Plants
A Canadian startup is testing a system that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuel for cars and other vehicles.
Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s technique combines several common manufacturing processes and will eventually be able to produce fuel for about $4 a gallon, according to David Keith, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of the company.
With oil prices climbing and U.S. gasoline following suit, that’s a level that could make this alternative fuel competitive. Many companies have developed ways to make fuel from plants, trees, sugarcane waste and other substances instead of petroleum, but the challenge has always been the cost. Carbon Engineering’s technique was developed specifically to address this.
“This isn’t some new clever piece of science or weird chemical we synthesized in some fancy lab,” Keith said in an interview. “The key thing that the company’s done from the beginning is focus on doing this in a way that is industrially scalable.”
The “direct air capture” process starts with common industrial cooling systems and a solution that draws carbon from the air, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Joule. The carbon is combined with hydrogen to make motor fuel, through a technique used at pulp mills. The most expensive part is the electricity used to extract hydrogen from water.
Pilot Plant................
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... atechanged
Sys1 wrote:Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?
Actually, the technology is available for decades : it's thermonuclear weapons.
After a full scale thermonuclear world war, Earth will be colder than Artic down to Africa.
Nevertheless, food production will be close to 0 and mankind will be replaced by beetles which are quite resistant to radiations and scarce food.
Cog wrote:Climate change is irrelevant compared to running out of oil. At least as far as humanity's future goes.
GHung wrote:One Day, Your Car May Run on Fumes—From Power Plants
A Canadian startup is testing a system that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuel for cars and other vehicles.
Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s technique combines several common manufacturing processes and will eventually be able to produce fuel for about $4 a gallon, according to David Keith, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of the company.
With oil prices climbing and U.S. gasoline following suit, that’s a level that could make this alternative fuel competitive. Many companies have developed ways to make fuel from plants, trees, sugarcane waste and other substances instead of petroleum, but the challenge has always been the cost. Carbon Engineering’s technique was developed specifically to address this.
“This isn’t some new clever piece of science or weird chemical we synthesized in some fancy lab,” Keith said in an interview. “The key thing that the company’s done from the beginning is focus on doing this in a way that is industrially scalable.”
The “direct air capture” process starts with common industrial cooling systems and a solution that draws carbon from the air, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Joule. The carbon is combined with hydrogen to make motor fuel, through a technique used at pulp mills. The most expensive part is the electricity used to extract hydrogen from water.
Pilot Plant................
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... atechanged
KaiserJeep wrote:Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?
By The Editors of IEEE Spectrum
Do you believe that climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy that does little more than create jobs for scientists while crippling businesses with pointless regulation? Or, quite the contrary, are you convinced that climate change is the biggest crisis confronting the planet, uniquely capable of wreaking havoc on a scale not seen in recorded history?
Many of you are probably in one camp or the other. No doubt some of you will tell us how disappointed/angry/outraged you are that we (a) gave credence to this nonsense or (b) failed to convey the true urgency of the situation. We welcome your thoughts.
In crafting this issue, we steered clear of attempting to change hearts and minds. Your views on climate change aren’t likely to be altered by a magazine article, or even two dozen magazine articles. Rather, this issue grew out of a few simple observations. One is that massive R&D programs are now under way all over the world to develop and deploy the technologies and infrastructures that will help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Governments, corporations, philanthropies, and universities are spending billions of dollars on these efforts. Is this money being spent wisely?
That question brings us to the next observation: The magnitude of the challenge is eye-poppingly huge. In 2009, representatives of industrialized nations met in Copenhagen and agreed on the advisability of preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2 °C above their preindustrial levels. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) declared that doing so would require cutting greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 70 percent from 2010 levels by midcentury. These targets then guided the Paris Agreement (2), in 2015.
Even before Paris, Bill Gates had declared his belief that only a series of “energy miracles” could make meaningful progress in reducing greenhouse gases (3).
That got us thinking: What might those “miracles” be? If they were going to enable substantial cuts within a couple of decades, they would have to be in laboratories now.
So we started looking around for these miracles. We focused on three of the largest greenhouse-gas-emitting categories: electricity, transportation, and food and agriculture. We considered dozens of promising projects and programs. Eventually we settled on the 10 projects described in this issue (and two others covered on our website).
We picked most of these projects because they seemed to hold unusual promise relative to the attention they were getting. And we threw in a couple for, well, the opposite reason. Our reporters went to see these activities firsthand, fanning out to sites in Japan; Iceland; Hungary; Germany; the Netherlands; Columbus, N.M.; Schenectady, N.Y.; LaPorte, Texas; Cambridge, Mass.; and Bellevue, Wash. They trooped up and down vertical farms. They flew in electric airplanes. They viewed entirely new microorganisms—genetically engineered with the help of robots—growing in shiny steel fermentation chambers. An algae-growing tank burbled quietly in our mid-Manhattan offices, sprouting the makings for a green-breakfast taste test.
After six months, we had soaked up some of the best thinking on the use of tech to cut carbon emissions. But what did it all suggest collectively? Could these projects, and others like them, make a real difference? We put these questions to our columnist Vaclav Smil, a renowned energy economist, who responded with an essay (4). Without stealing Smil’s thunder, let’s just say that they don’t call them “miracles” for nothing.
The entire June 2018 issue: https://spectrum.ieee.org/
References:
(1) http://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-reductions-needed-to-curtail-climate-change-ipcc-17300
(2) https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/what-is-the-paris-agreement-on-climate-change/
(3) https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Energy-Miracles
(4) https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-critical-look-at-claims-for-green-technologies
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Sys1 wrote:What will be quite funny is when big coal or Donald Trump will say we must throw fossil fuels dust in the atmosphere faster "to save the planet" (tm) from GW.
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