insane

There you go. Let's get rich and get a DOE grant. Only 18 months left to pull it off.

I propose a design consisting of one beansprout in a moist medium or on a wetted surface in a container. Throw in a mlaim for more than one sprout too. There, the ultimate green biker product.

NT

Mkay, they claim to be able to grab CO2 out of the air by running it thro ugh what looks to me like an enormous swamp cooler that uses potassium hydr oxide (!) solution instead of pure water. The KOH turns into K2CO3 which tr ades the carbonate for hydroxyl with CaOH2, which becomes CaCO3 from which CO2 is later extracted. No individual step looks outright impossible, and t hey should be amenable to being coupled as described so at first glance the re's no reason it isn't feasible.

However, as you know, John, in theory, theory and practice are the same b ut in practice they're not.

So first, it needs a constant water supply. Yes, I'm sure it's carefully designed to be a *lousy* swamp cooler, but water loss to, and heat extracti on from the air is simply unavoidable. It will lose less water and therefor e transfer less heat in high humidity, but it will still lose water and ste al heat. That is an ongoing environmental insult that could lead to climate change if the technology becomes as widespread as say internal combustion engines.

I won't even go into the expense of the tech required to handle (what wil l be necessarily, for efficiency's sake) strongly alkaline solutions.

I can't just handwave away the environmental impact of a KOH spill on the scale of the experimental setup, much less on the proposed industrial scal es when something inevitably breaks.

What will make or break it isn't whether or not it will work, but who end s up paying for it. If companies producing the CO2 have to do it, there wil l be a long, dragged out legal wrangle first, and then the consumers of the ir products will end up paying for it.

If governments end up doing it, taxpayers will just have to bend over a l ittle farther.

Ideally, from the viewpoints of the companies AND consumers and taxpayers , the process should be made PROFITABLE. Then, you would have a hard time g etting companies to NOT do it.

But that's something Greenies just can't, or rather refuse to, grasp.

Mark L. Fergerson

You do understand this CO2 is *all* captured, right? The CO2 from the energy source is not emitted into the air. So there is nothing "marginal" about it. The "marginal" aspect is thinking that we can continue to emit CO2 indefinitely without concern?

To the dismay of many, we (the greater we here) will simply not be able to continue to emit CO2 without consequence. The cost of dealing with the problem will not be transparent to our lives. The only good thing is that for most of us discussing the problem, we will not feel the impacts of AGW. Our children will.

Sure (well not the CO2 emitted by the construction and indirect operation costs, but the direct emissions from the fuel, sure).

But it is far less efficient than capturing the carbon at the source of it's emission, or avoiding the emissions in the first place.

I don't really disagree with this bit.

So you're suggesting using water, energy from the sun and atmospheric CO2 to construct some sort of organic polymer? I can't see that ever working.

Cheers

Who said they won't capture emissions at the source? That is one of the several options for using it.

As to avoiding the emissions, how would you propose to do that? So far no one has been willing to do what is required to not create the emissions in the first place.

A friend showed me a book (forget the name) with an illustration showing the ever growing production of CO2. Even if we were to stop the growth of emissions, we would still be in trouble in some years... pick a number, 60, 100, 200? But with the continuing rise in CO2 production it would happen *much* faster.

He then divided the wedge into seven equal pie slices which I seem to recall produced some round numbered amount of CO2 by some point in the future. He then showed how we really don't have a clear path to dealing with *any* of these pie slices without waving our hands and assuming some cool stuff happens. But even if some of the more likely "cool" stuff happens it only deals with a couple of pie slices.

In the end, we simply don't have any idea how to deal with AGW without drastically altering our lifestyles. We seem to be unwilling to do that. So we will suffer the consequences... or more accurately, our descendents will.

Many do.

Even in the unlikely event this green agenda turns out to be correct, one can simply go nuclear.

NT

On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 09:11:58 +0100, John Devereux Gave us:

Reclaim the deserts. Stop deforestation. Grow more weed.

It grows two feet per month, and a pine tree only grows two feet per year.

So... weed is the answer.

To just about everything... including the shitstorm in Baltimore and elsewhere.

On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 09:36:41 +0100, Syd Rumpo Gave us:

It does not have to work. We will all be extincted anyway..

Our only purpose here was because God wanted plastic.

It may be your answer, AlwaysWrong, but then you are a dope crazed oxygen thief that serves no useful purpose.

A nuclear powered car would be a wonder to behold. A nuclear powered aircraft would be *extremely* difficult to engineer almost impossible. We are stuck with liquid fuels for some applications for the foreseeable future unless compact fusion reactors become possible.

Present battery technology sort of works for commuting provided you never want to travel more than a couple of hundred miles in a day.

The battery lifetime needs work too. The latest motors are impressive.

Cracking low temperature photolysis of water a la photosynthesis and electron transfer reactions stolen from plants might eventually lead to viable industrial processes that can capture CO2 but this thing is essentially an example of "doing something" with no benefits.

The estimates for the "savings" are almost certainly wildly optimistic and in reality it will fail to meet budget, schedule and performance.

That is because it represents an impossible thing: a failure of the free market.

I was sorta secretly hoping that when Steven Chu was made Energy Secretary here that there would be a push to restart nuclear research (fission). Come up with some standard plant design, that could be copied without all the bureaucracy each time... (I don't know much about fission so I'm half talking out of my a$$.)

George H.

What's the problem with using nuclear energy to produce liquid fuels? Today of course we wouldn't, but if fossil fuel ever became a no-go, that's likely the next best thing. Since it would cost much more, travel habits & transport would change.

NT

Smoking weed just puts the CO2 back into the air, smelling a lot worse.

On Wed, 10 Jun 2015 08:31:01 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

Nope. Were that true, smokers would die from it.

Fact is smoldering, which is what smoking is, is not the same as complete combustion.

And the smell is better, idiot.

Low brained retard is more like it.

yeh, that's why batteries and electric cars matter, they can be charged from almost every source of energy we have, airplanes are pretty much limited to oil

-Lasse

Travel habits change? That's not allowed. John wants to go to Truckee!