Out of Thin Air: The Quest to Capture Carbon Dioxide

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/08/110811-quest-to-capture-carbon-dioxide/

Out of Thin Air: The Quest to Capture Carbon Dioxide

Drawing carbon dioxide directly out of air: Some scientists say such technology is essential, others view it as wishful.
Diagram by Joe Zeff, National Geographic

Marianne Lavelle
For National Geographic News
Published August 11, 2011

Trees and other green plants pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Shouldn't we be able to do it, too? Only better?

A small but determined number of researchers have been working on just this idea: Drawing carbon dioxide directly out of the air with chemicals. They argue it is necessary to help address the huge overburden of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, a problem that would otherwise continue to compromise the health of the planet even if the world stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow.

The advocates of "direct air capture," however, seemingly were dealt a blow when http://www.aps.org/policy/reports/popa-reports/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=244407">a two-year study released in June by a committee of the American Physical Society (APS) cast doubt on whether the technology could ever be cost-effective. Relying on data in the public domain, the APS panel expressed pessimism about the technology's prospects, at least in the short term.

Undaunted, air capture researchers are continuing their work toward demonstration of the technology and commercialization. They say that their own findings, some of which are not yet published, give them reason to be optimistic. And they say their technologies could be combined with others or used in applications that could offset costs. For example, direct air capture might prove especially well-suited to recycle carbon dioxide back into the ordinary, familiar liquid hydrocarbon fuels that power today's trucks, planes, and even cars. (See related story: "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/08/110811-turning-carbon-emissions-into-fuel/">Carbon Recycling: Mining the Air for Fuel")

[Salviati]

1. I've always thought that if we could make liquid hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2

then it would be great to go another step and make solid hydrocarbons, i.e. plastic. Make a lot of building materials from it, and that would be a good way to lock up some of that carbon. There's too much in the atmosphere right now, so just pulling it out to recycle it as fuel to be burned again is not enough. We need to pull it out and keep it out.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. There was a paper published a few years ago, on making plastics like this

Can’t find it just now…

In essence, it was using plastic manufacturing as a method of carbon sequestration.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Ah… here we go…

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=WPCP_008856&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=a34cc537-f51c-42c1-9f21-1875bf9d8d97

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Apr. 8, 2008

DVDs and CD-ROMs That Thwart Global Warming

NEW ORLEANS, April 8, 2008 — Carbon dioxide removed from smokestack emissions in order to slow global warming in the future could become a valuable raw material for the production of DVDs, beverage bottles and other products made from polycarbonate plastics, chemists are reporting.

In separate reports scheduled for presentation today at the 235th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, Thomas E. Müller, Ph.D., and Toshiyasu Sakakura, Ph.D., described innovative ways of making polycarbonate plastics from CO₂. Those processes offer consumers the potential for less expensive, safer and greener products compared to current production methods, the researchers agreed.

“Carbon dioxide is so readily available, especially from the smokestack of industries that burn coal and other fossil fuels,” Müller said. He is at the new research center for catalysis CAT, a joint 5-year project of RWTH Aachen and industrial giant Bayer Material Science AG and Bayer Technology Services GmbH. “And it’s a very cheap starting material. If we can replace more expensive starting materials with CO₂, then you’ll have an economic driving force.”

In another ACS presentation, scientists from Japan also reported using CO₂ as an alternative feedstock to change carbonates and urethanes into plastics and also battery components. Sakakura, the team’s lead researcher, noted that the new process is simpler and faster than another process developed by a Japanese firm. Sakakura is with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan.

…

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/July/28071001.asp

Recycling CO2 to make plastic

28 July 2010

A US company developing a novel way to convert carbon dioxide into plastics is one of six firms receiving a total of $106 million (£68 million) in government funding as the US pushes research converting captured waste carbon dioxide into useful products.

Massachusetts-based Novomer has received $18.4 million from the US Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a process for converting carbon dioxide into polycarbonate polymers that could be used to make plastic bottles.

Since its formation 4 years ago, Novomer has been developing a way of reacting traditional epoxide feedstocks with carbon dioxide from industrial waste streams to form plastics that contain between 40 and 50 per cent carbon dioxide by weight. The company uses a catalyst technology developed by Geoff Coates at Cornell University in New York, US, and employs a cobalt catalyst which chief executive Jim Mahoney says is fairly straightforward to synthesise despite being a relatively complex organometallic compound.

Using the catalyst technology, Novomer can form both high molecular weight (MW) polymers to make thermoplastic polymers that can be used to make plastics, and low MW polymers that can be used to make resins for use as coatings and adhesives. The technology can also be used to convert carbon monoxide into a range of chemicals such as acrylic acid and 1,3 propanediol.

…

http://www.novomer.com/

[Salviati]

6. Cool, thanks for the articles I'll have to take a look.

If we can somehow turn all that CO2 from a problem into a resource, that will go a long way towards helping get ourself out of this hole we're in...

[caraher]

3. Read the APS study linked in the OP

The basic problem is that CO2 is still a trace gas in the atmosphere, which means that harvesting it from the air requires passing a lot of air across some collector surface. A cubic meter of air has a mass of about a kilogram, and since CO2 concentration is less than 500 parts per million that cubic meter of air has a mass of roughly half a gram. So the trick to making this have a ghost of a chance is to devise a capture method that snags that half-gram of CO2 without (a) emitting more greenhouse gas (whether in manufacture of the capture device or its operation) or (b) costing too much money.

The APS study argues that it's so much more cost-effective simply to reduce carbon emissions at their sources (by turning to low/no carbon emission energy sources) that a big investment in these capture technologies is probably not wise. Carbon should be sequestered - by leaving it underground!

[Nihil]

4. ... which is precisely why ...

> The APS study argues that it's so much more cost-effective simply to reduce carbon
> emissions at their sources (by turning to low/no carbon emission energy sources)
> that a big investment in these capture technologies is probably not wise.
> Carbon should be sequestered - by leaving it underground!

... all of the fossil fuel producers (+ many FF consumers) are solidly behind
any & all hare-brained schemes to "capture" & "sequester" CO2 as the alternative
would impact *their* profits permanently. (They can write off such "research projects"
against the little tax that they pay AND get a PR boost for "acting responsibly")

:argh:

It is not a coincidence that the primary supporters of all of the so-called "CCS"
scams are sponsored by the fossil fuel industry.

:grr: