insane

Are they a penny stock ? If so I'll take five bucks worth just for fun.

Hey, that is how it is done. You never take from the big boys, you can only take from the other little boys.

I have to agree. The energetics cannot possibly work out.

A device to waste energy whilst refining a tiny amount of pure CO2.

I wonder whose foolish money is invested in that?

Doing it to cooled furnace flue gasses at least gives you a head start but even then so far no one has come up with a workable scheme.

Why are you so convinced that this is not practical? The issue is not can it be done, the issue is simply how much it will cost.

When I worked in a lab we captured CO2 in a similar manner. It is simple, basic chemistry. They are investing time, effort and money into ways to make it practical on a large scale. Why is it so impossible?

The energy needed to make CO2 by the process they describe is so huge that the thing cannot possibly break even or come remotely close.

Even fractional distillation of liquid air would probably work out cheaper and energetically more efficient plus you would obtain more valuable LN2, LOX and LAr as byproducts for good measure.

You can scrub small amounts of CO2 and SO2 this way if cost and energy is no constraint but you cannot do it economically on a large scale.

Making lime for cement from CaCO3 is one of the most energy expensive bulk processes in industrial production. This is a non starter green pipe dream for people with no clue about thermodynamics or economics.

It's not an energy machine. Who said it would produce energy? The idea is to not continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates.

I'm not sure how you would think it could possibly produce more energy than is put into it.

So what do you actually know about the process and the energy required?

Uh, CaCO3 *is* lime. I think you are referring to the production of "quick lime" or calcium oxide.

All the chemical reactions are cyclical. So the only required energy expenditure is in releasing CO2. The rest of the chemical reactions will proceed with little energy input and in fact, the production of Ca(OH)2 is highly exothermic. Don't you think they recover that heat?

I'm sure this will be a challenging project to make practical. But the numbers associated with "practical" will change as we move forward and removing CO2 from our industrial processes becomes more and more important.

Depending where you get your energy from. I agree that it seems unnecessari ly energy intensive, but the level of energy expenditure is matched in soda recovery plants across the world, so it's not impossibly huge.

It delivers the CO2 as a solid, which might make for practical problems.

You can't. Other people may have schemes that may work better than you imag ine to be possible.

Making lime for cement is not as energy expensive as - say - making alumini um from alumina.

That a process requires expending a lot of energy at some points doesn't st op the operators getting a lot of that energy back elsewhere. Until you kno w the intimate details of the process you'd be wise to be less dogmatic abo ut its economics.

I agree that it sounds like it ought to be total bullshit, but it's surpris ingly specific about what they actually do, so it may work better - in thei r specific plant - than one would guess from what one might know about more primitive set-ups doing some of the same operations.

Solid? Where did you read that? The CO2 comes off at high temps as a gas.

I like this.

Their basic technology seems idiotic to me (TBH), I'm not certain it's competitive to fractional air distillation, but I think they have a shot.

They should do a better job plastering the sales pitch all over the front page.

Because that would be stupid. Perhaps he is not stupid?

For example, if the CO2 from the fossil fuel needed to power it is more than the CO2 recovered, it is fundamentally pointless.

Did you read anything about the process? That point is addressed.

It's in Calgary, maybe they can use the oil sands to power it... there will be a lot of excess CO2 around then... :^)

George H.

Here's their FAQ's... Point 5 spells out the energy cost.

With natural gas it's 1/2 ton created to capture 1 ton. With oil that would be 1 ton for 1 ton...

George H.

But they recycle that CO2, too! It's a Perpetual Carbon Machine. Or a Perpetual Money Machine.

I was listening to some guy on NPR last night about corn ethanol. something like 25 - 35% of our corn crop now goes to make it! (That seems crazy too, at least to me.)

And then of course NY state is giving Elon Musk ~ $1 billion to build solar panels here in my fair city.

Politicians are not always the sharpest sticks in the pile.

George H.

It is. It's driving up the cost of food worldwide, and killing people. Now the gov wants to increase the amount of ethanol, and ruin engines.

Everything that Elon does loses money. He's a silly fad. I suspect he'll crash and burn one of these days.

But they are. They win at the game they play, getting elected and flinging power around.

As long as government has piles of money to give him, he'll be just fine.

They only win against other politicians who would do the same. IOW, someone has to win. It doesn't matter who.

Thanks George

So it is marginal and (hence) very expensive. Also that does not include indirect CO2 from the contruction of the plant, workers cars etc...

John

We could have patriotic, responsible, competant managers, like Bush I and Romney. But we elect charismatic sociopaths, like Clinton and Obama.

People get the government they deserve.

Not if you are doing fractional distillation of liquid air, which was what Martin Brown seemed to be proposing as a "more practical" approach.

When you have liquified air, any CO2 present is a solid.

CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase at low pressures - anything below 5.1 atmospheres. At pressures above this there is a liquid phase from -56.6C up to about 31.1C.

Exploiting this phase to let you condense out liquid CO2 and pump it away as a liquid could be fun - you'd have to remove any water first.