New Materials Remove Carbon Dioxide from Smokestacks, Tailpipes and Even the Air

[Wiseacre]

Want a bit of good news? Consider this, plus the fact that we're getting cloer to biomass alternative fuels that will one day eliminate the need for gasoline engines.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2012) — Scientists are reporting discovery of an improved way to remove carbon dioxide -- the major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming -- from smokestacks and other sources, including the atmosphere. Their report on the process, which achieves some of the highest carbon dioxide removal capacity ever reported for real-world conditions where the air contains moisture, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Alain Goeppert, G. K. Surya Prakash, chemistry Nobel Laureate George A. Olah and colleagues explain that controlling emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. They point out that existing methods for removing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and other sources, including the atmosphere, are energy intensive, don't work well and have other drawbacks. In an effort to overcome such obstacles, the group turned to solid materials based on polyethylenimine, a readily available and inexpensive polymeric material.

Their tests showed that these inexpensive materials achieved some of the highest carbon dioxide removal rates ever reported for humid air, under conditions that stymie other related materials. After capturing carbon dioxide, the materials give it up easily so that the CO2 can be used in making other substances, or permanently isolated from the environment. The capture material then can be recycled and reused many times over without losing efficiency. The researchers suggest the materials may be useful on submarines, in smokestacks or out in the open atmosphere, where they could clean up carbon dioxide pollution that comes from small point sources like cars or home heaters, representing about half of the total CO2 emissions related to human activity.

 

[waltky]

Recycling CO2 and rainforest challenges...

New Discovery Promises Efficient Way to Recycle Carbon Dioxide Pollution
January 06, 2012 - Scientists in the United States say they have discovered a new, inexpensive way to remove excess carbon dioxide, or CO2, from the atmosphere, as well as from large industrial exhaust sources, such as factory smokestacks.

Researchers at the University of Southern California's Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute say their new CO2 extraction method achieved some of the highest rates ever reported for removing the potentially climate-changing greenhouse gas from the air under humid conditions. Most scientists believe that industrial carbon dioxide emissions are major contributors to global warming. The accelerating increase in the Earth’s average surface temperatures also is believed to be triggering significant changes in climate, including more intense storms, more severe floods and droughts, and major shifts in rainfall patterns.

Study co-author and Loker Institute director Professor Surya Prakash said the CO2 extraction technique involves a plastic-like substance dispersed in a sandy material called fumed silica. Prakash says the goal of the research was to create an efficient way to capture excess CO2 from the air and recycle it for use in the production of all the fuels and carbon-based products now made from refined petroleum. He adds that the extracted carbon dioxide also can be permanently isolated from the environment. Prakash says he expects to see his team’s CO2 recycling technology in commercial use within three to five years.

The USC researchers say the fumed silica materials they developed for the CO2 extractor are much cheaper, more energy efficient and more chemically stable than existing extraction devices. They also report that the new materials can be used multiple times without losing their efficiency. Prakash said he and his colleagues tested the new materials in humid air because capturing CO2 in humid conditions is especially difficult, and provided realistic conditions for the experiment since most air contains moisture. A report on the new USC study is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Source

See also:

African Rainforests Continue to Face Challenges
January 06, 2012 - The African continent contains about 30 percent of the world’s global rainforests, second only to the Amazon. Scientists and conservationists met at Oxford University to discuss changes the forests are expected to undergo in the 21st Century.

Africa’s tropical forests face challenges from deforestation, hunting, logging and mining, as well as climate change. “Climate change is a major issue for much of the world, but for Africa, in particular. And there’s much interest and concern around Africa’s forests, which is the second largest area of tropical forest in the world after the Amazon forest. And yet there’s been very little synthesis of the research that’s there. There’s much less known about both climate and forest and people and there interaction in Africa compared to many other regions of the world,” said Yadvinder Malhi is a professor of ecosystems science at Oxford University and director of Oxford’s Center for Tropical Forests.

He said the conference brought together experts in climate change, ecology, social sciences, economics, anthropology and archeology to discuss Africa’s rainforests. “They’re important at an international level for many reasons. They hold a large amount of carbon. They seem to be absorbing carbon from the atmosphere, which is slightly slowing down the rate of climate change. In the case of Africa, the recycling of water. So water that falls in the Congo region gets taken up in the roots of trees and evaporated back into the atmosphere where it forms clouds and new rain,” he said. The clouds that form over the Congo Basin actually have long range effects on water supplies and weather patterns in parts of Asia and even North America.

West and Central Africa

There’s a big difference between the forests of the Congo Basin and West Africa. Malhi says there’s been extensive deforestation in West Africa. Much of the land has been cleared for agriculture over the last 20 to 30 years. “When we look at the Congo Basin we see a very different situation. That’s an area that is at the moment almost all intact forest and has had relatively low rates of deforestation. And the reasons why those rates have been low are varied from country to country. But in the largest area, the Democratic Republic, it’s been political instability and poor infrastructure linked to that instability that has meant that this large forest reserve has not currently really faced very heavy pressure, at least compared to forests of Asia or the Amazon,” Malhi said. However, he said that could change with new investment and infrastructure and expansion of industrial scale plantations. About 3,000 years ago, the Congo forests were affected by natural climate drying. Forests retreated and were replaced by grasslands.

“At the same time, around two and a half thousand years ago, Iron Age humans settled in much of the forest, cleared it with axes, with iron axes. And then they had a population collapse around a thousand years ago and the forest regrew. And this is quite a different history from the history we see in the Amazon rainforest, where there’s been pretty continuous forest over human history and earlier. And also where there was human impact it was not with iron instruments. There was no Iron Age in the Amazon,” he said. The combination of natural climate drying and the wide scale felling of trees resulted in fewer species of trees compared to other tropical forests. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “The species that are left seem to be relatively resilient to a large extent. They can recolonize disturbed areas quite quickly. They can spread quite quickly, regrow quite quickly. So if one area gets deforested, you can still find the species elsewhere,” he said.

Food Security

 

[waltky]

Granny wonderin' if dat's what been makin' it so warm lately?...

CO2 'drove end to last ice age'
4 April 2012 - Ice core records from Antarctica had suggested the CO2 increase lagged behind temperature rise

A new, detailed record of past climate change provides compelling evidence that the last ice age was ended by a rise in temperature driven by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The finding is based on a very broad range of data, including even the shells of ancient tiny ocean animals. A paper describing the research appears in this week's edition of Nature.

The team behind the study says its work further strengthens ideas about global warming. "At the end of the last ice age, CO2 rose from about 180 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to about 260; and today we're at 392," explained lead author Dr Jeremy Shakun. "So, in the last 100 years we've gone up about 100 ppm - about the same as at the end of the last ice age, which I think puts it into perspective because it's not a small amount. Rising CO2 at the end of the ice age had a huge effect on global climate."

The study covers the period in Earth history from roughly 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was the time when the planet was emerging from its last deep chill, when the great ice sheets known to cover parts of the Northern Hemisphere were in retreat. The key result from the new study is that it shows the carbon dioxide rise during this major transition ran slightly ahead of increases in global temperature.

This runs contrary to the record obtained solely from the analysis of Antarctic ice cores which had indicated the opposite - that temperature elevation in the southern polar region actually preceded (or at least ran concurrent to) the climb in CO2. This observation has frequently been used by some people who are sceptical of global warming to challenge its scientific underpinnings; to claim that the warming link between the atmospheric gas and global temperature is grossly overstated.

More BBC News - CO2 'drove end to last ice age'

 

[waltky]

Determining CO2 from natural sources vs. man-made sources...

CO2 from fossil fuels discerned from natural sources
20 April 2012 - Coal and oil contain far less carbon-14 than is contained in the CO2 produced by life today

Researchers have demonstrated a way of distinguishing between carbon dioxide in the air coming from fossil fuel burning and that from natural sources. It measures one type, or isotope, of carbon that decays over time - long since gone from fossil fuels. As explained in the Journal of Geophysical Research, the method may prove useful in CO2 monitoring efforts. However, experts say that the approach must be calibrated against existing carbon-measuring techniques.

The research was led by scientists from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in the US, who studied six years' worth of atmospheric sampling data gathered by aircraft over two sites in the northeastern US. The team focused on the rare isotope carbon-14, which is constantly produced in tiny amounts in the atmosphere when cosmic rays hit nitrogen atoms, and which decays away over thousands of years. Buried away for millions of years underground, fossil fuels contain virtually no carbon-14; and neither does the CO2 emitted when the fuels burn.

But CO2 coming from plants does contain carbon-14. That difference that showed up in the team's atmospheric samples as a ratio of natural, "biogenic" CO2 to fossil fuel CO2. The trick could complement existing carbon accounting methods used to monitor how much CO2 countries and regions are producing, principal among them the self-reporting of fossil fuel usage. "While the accounting-based approach is probably accurate at global scales, the uncertainties rise for smaller-scale regions," said the Earth System Research Laboratory's John Miller, lead author of the study. "And as CO2 emissions targets become more widespread, there may be a greater temptation to under-report. But we'll be able to see through that."

However, the method may not stretch down to a level of geographic detail that is increasingly important for single CO2 sources such as power plants. "Other types of physical measurement (of CO2 levels) are being driven by emissions trading, and I'm not sure how far this would be able to extend to application at the individual site and installation level," said Jane Burston, head of the Centre for Carbon Measurement at the UK's National Physical Laboratory. The centre's head of emissions Rod Robinson explained that much work needs to be done to validate the assumptions of the method and ensure it gives similar quality results as existing physical and accounting measurements.

Nevertheless, Ms Burston said the method would be a valuable tool in the quest to understand fully how carbon is released and distributed. "For things like CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the best way of going about it is just getting as many measurements as you can from the ground, from the atmosphere, and from satellites," she told BBC News. "The more measurements we have from different sources, the more accurate we can make them all."

BBC News - CO2 from fossil fuels discerned from natural sources

 

[skookerasbil]

Cool.............now we'll have 37 catalytic converters on our cars!!! And Im sure the car companies will eat the cost of the technology!!! Restriction blows...........I'd just remove them anyway!!

 

[waltky]

Ain't been so much CO2 inna air since the dinosaurs was a-fartin'...

Experts: CO2 record illustrates 'scary' trend
May 11,`13 WASHINGTON (AP) -- The old saying that "what goes up must come down" doesn't apply to carbon dioxide pollution in the air, which just hit an unnerving milestone.

The chief greenhouse gas was measured Thursday at 400 parts per million in Hawaii, a monitoring site that sets the world's benchmark. It's a symbolic mark that scientists and environmentalists have been anticipating for years. While this week's number has garnered all sorts of attention, it is just a daily reading in the month when the chief greenhouse gas peaks in the Northern Hemisphere. It will be lower the rest of the year. This year will probably average around 396 ppm. But not for long - the trend is going up and at faster and faster rates.

Within a decade the world will never see days - even in the cleanest of places on days in the fall when greenhouse gases are at their lowest - when the carbon measurement falls below 400 ppm, said James Butler, director of global monitoring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. "The 400 is a reminder that our emissions are not only continuing, but they're accelerating; that's a scary thing," Butler said Saturday. "We're stuck. We're going to keep going up." Carbon dioxide stays in the air for a century, some of it into the thousands of years. And the world carbon dioxide pollution levels are accelerating yearly. Every second, the world's smokestacks and cars pump 2.4 million pounds of the heat-trapping gas into the air.

Carbon pollution levels that used to be normal for the 20th century are fast becoming history in the 21st century. "It means we are essentially passing one in a whole series of points of no return," said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said the momentum in carbon dioxide emissions has the world heading toward and passing 450 ppm. That is the level which would essentially mean the world warms another 2 degrees, what scientists think of as dangerous, he said. That 2-degree mark is what much of the world's nations have set as a goal to prevent. "The direction we've seen is for blowing through the best benchmark for what's dangerous change," Oppenheimer said.

And to see what the future is, scientists look to the past. The last time the worldwide carbon level probably hit 400 ppm was about 2 million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That was during the Pleistocene Era. "It was much warmer than it is today," Tans said. "There were forests in Greenland. Sea level was higher, between 10 and 20 meters (33 to 66 feet)." Other scientists say it may have been 10 million years ago that Earth last encountered this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The first modern humans only appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

MORE

 

[Mr. H.]

U.S. CO2 emissions fall to lowest first-quarter level in 20 years: EIA | Reuters

 

[Saigon]

Yeah, that is good news.

The best thing about these ideas is the export markets. Any strong innovation will bring in jobs and dollars.

Ironically, it is the right wing who seem most opposed to innovation, and most committed to coal and petrol.

 

[Mr. H.]

Yeah, that is good news.

The best thing about these ideas is the export markets. Any strong innovation will bring in jobs and dollars.

Ironically, it is the right wing who seem most opposed to innovation, and most committed to coal and petrol.

"Innovation" is what has driven hydrocarbon supplies for the last 100 years. The kind of innovation "the right wing" supports- not opposes.

The left wing on the other hand opposes all things hydrocarbon. And at any cost.
And to the extent of taxing and regulating hydrocarbon production while subsidizing renewables/alternatives. Market manipulation is hardly innovation.

 

[Saigon]

The left wing on the other hand opposes all things hydrocarbon. And at any cost.

Do they? Links? Evidence?

 

[Mr. H.]

The left wing on the other hand opposes all things hydrocarbon. And at any cost.

Do they? Links? Evidence?

After 12 hours, you got nuttin' re: my post?