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
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.
Plantagenet wrote: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.
Putting dust or microspheres or sulphuric aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet is already being tested by scientists who claim they can "geoengineer" the planet to counteract global warming.
Coming soon to a sky near you.....
dissident wrote:BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected.
EnergyUnlimited wrote:dissident wrote:BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected.
From what I know, Mt Pinatubo have lowered global temperatures by 0.5 *C for 2 years at the expenditure of something like 30 million tons of SO2.
Lets say that we are fighting 5*C degree warming to reduce it to 3*C.
So we need to go down 2*C.
Assuming that in order to get 0.5 *C cooling 10 millions tons of SO2 per year is needed I suspect that for 1*C 20 millions tons would be needed, for 1.5*C it would be 40 millions tons per year and for 2*C it would be 80 millions tons per year as relation is not linear in this case.
So theoretically we could cool down the Earth up to 3-3.5 *C if we delivered to stratosphere *entire global production of sulfuric acid* round o'clock for decades and centuries.
I wonder what resulting acid rains would do to vegetation... and where the carbon from decomposing dead vegetations would go.
IMO entire concept of SO2 mediated cooling is plain stupid and unworkable.
But in postscience era any stupidity might be attempted.
Scientists have new plan to fight global warming: Dimming the sun
dissident wrote:Plantagenet wrote: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.
Putting dust or microspheres or sulphuric aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet is already being tested by scientists who claim they can "geoengineer" the planet to counteract global warming.
Coming soon to a sky near you.....
BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected. If the SO2 is introduced at lower altitudes it will be flushed too fast into the troposphere and removed by wet scavenging. No jet can fly at 30 km. Only specialized planes such as the U-2 can fly at 22 km but not higher. The rapidly attenuating air density messes up air-foil boundary layer behaviour.
All the talk about planes, towers and cannons to deliver the SO2 is nothing but vapid bunk. The use of giant dirigibles is more plausible. Supposedly some designs would be able to carry 500 tons of payload. Assuming one trip per day we need 10,000,000/(365*500) = 55 of them. But none of the proposed designs would be able to reach 30 km since they are rigid or semi-rigid. Only true balloons can expand with altitude to reach about 35 km:
http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/M ... _2002.html
This geo-engineering crap made a flash in the publications several years ago and is now in the hands of governments and assorted other shysters.
Plantagenet wrote:Given the manifest failure of the UNFCC, the Kyoto Accords and the Paris Accords to stop the ever increasing amounts of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, governments are now looking at ways to geoengineer the climate with new interest. Geoengineering now seems to be the only way to stop global warming and save the planet.
2019-seven-ways-geoengineering-planet.Seven main varieties of geoengineering have been proposed. Unfortunately they are mostly too impractical or too expensive to actually do.
Cheers!
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