Air carbon capture continues to get written about as if it is an interesting technology that will play a significant role in reducing global warming. But most articles fail miserably to put the technology in context. A new study or press release comes out, and a bunch of sites publish articles which make it sound as if global warming is practically solved.
For the most part, carbon capture is a fig leaf funded by fossil fuel money to allow them to continue to mine fossil fuels and sell them. In some cases, it’s funded by them to provide a source of CO2 to pump into existing tapped out oil wells so that the sludge liquefies and can be pumped out and sold. And many researchers keep plugging away because it’s an interesting scientific challenge to them.
There are three problems with carbon capture and sequestration — capture, shipping and long-term disposal.
The smallest unit of measure of CO2 for useful discussions of carbon capture and sequestration is the metric ton. That’s a 1,000 kilograms or about 2,200 lbs. A kilogram is a 1,000 grams. That means to get a ton of CO2, we’d need to filter it out of about 13 million cubic meters of air, if we were 100% efficient at capturing CO2 molecules from the air (and a bunch of other nuances).
Let’s try some analogies. An Olympic-sized swimming pool contains about 2,500 cubic meters of water. So you’d need to strain about 5,250 Olympic pools worth of air to get a ton of CO2. The Houston Astrodome is about 1.2 million cubic meters, so you’d need to filter the air from about 11 Astrodomes to get a ton of CO2. You’d need about 5.4 Great Pyramids of Giza. If you filtered all of the air in the Grand Canyon, you’d get about 127 tons of CO2.
That’s why all air carbon capture devices end up looking like a massive wall of fans.
The solution is to stop putting CO2 into the air. Stop burning fossil fuels. As rapidly as possible. And let the huge machine that is Mother Nature do the rest. We’ve created an enormous problem over 250 years. We aren’t going to address it in 20.
See cleantechnica.com/2019/03/11/a…
#climatechange #carboncapture #CO2
from Beiträge von Danie van der Merwe https://ift.tt/2W3XhHi
via IFTTT
For the most part, carbon capture is a fig leaf funded by fossil fuel money to allow them to continue to mine fossil fuels and sell them. In some cases, it’s funded by them to provide a source of CO2 to pump into existing tapped out oil wells so that the sludge liquefies and can be pumped out and sold. And many researchers keep plugging away because it’s an interesting scientific challenge to them.
There are three problems with carbon capture and sequestration — capture, shipping and long-term disposal.
The smallest unit of measure of CO2 for useful discussions of carbon capture and sequestration is the metric ton. That’s a 1,000 kilograms or about 2,200 lbs. A kilogram is a 1,000 grams. That means to get a ton of CO2, we’d need to filter it out of about 13 million cubic meters of air, if we were 100% efficient at capturing CO2 molecules from the air (and a bunch of other nuances).
Let’s try some analogies. An Olympic-sized swimming pool contains about 2,500 cubic meters of water. So you’d need to strain about 5,250 Olympic pools worth of air to get a ton of CO2. The Houston Astrodome is about 1.2 million cubic meters, so you’d need to filter the air from about 11 Astrodomes to get a ton of CO2. You’d need about 5.4 Great Pyramids of Giza. If you filtered all of the air in the Grand Canyon, you’d get about 127 tons of CO2.
That’s why all air carbon capture devices end up looking like a massive wall of fans.
The solution is to stop putting CO2 into the air. Stop burning fossil fuels. As rapidly as possible. And let the huge machine that is Mother Nature do the rest. We’ve created an enormous problem over 250 years. We aren’t going to address it in 20.
See cleantechnica.com/2019/03/11/a…
#climatechange #carboncapture #CO2
from Beiträge von Danie van der Merwe https://ift.tt/2W3XhHi
via IFTTT
Comments