Finnish Startup Unveils Machine That Takes Office-Air CO2 and Converts It Into Fuel (arstechnica.com) 114
Over a video call, Finnish start-up Soletair Power showed Ars Technica their machine that converts office-air carbon dioxide into fuel. Scott K. Johnson reports: The value proposition for the first part of the device is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide accumulates in buildings full of people, and higher CO2 concentrations may impact your ability to think clearly. The usual way to manage that is to introduce more outside air (which may need to be heated/cooled). Another could be to selectively filter out CO2. This device could do the latter for you. That CO2 could simply be vented outside or used to produce an unwieldy amount of seltzer. Instead, what makes Soletair's idea more interesting is that the rest of its device turns the CO2 into fuel. The configuration the company demonstrated makes methane but could be swapped for a liquid fuel process. Depending on the source of the energy running the machines, these fuels could be carbon-neutral since the carbon comes from the air. Whether it's economically viable is another question.
The CO2 capture technique they're using is a scaled-down version of those designed for combustion power plants. Air goes through a chamber full of small granules that contain amines -- compounds that bind with CO2 molecules. Periodically, the granules are cycled through a heating step. The temperature only needs to rise to shy of 120C, Soletair's Petri Laakso and Cyril Bajamundi told Ars, so steam from the local heat system and/or an electric heating element is sufficient. This makes the amine granules release the CO2 they're holding, which accumulates in a storage tank. The granules are then ready to absorb more CO2. The other two-thirds of the machine, which measures about 2 meters tall, 5 meters long, and 1 meter wide, deal with turning that CO2 into a usable fuel. First, there's an electrolyzer that splits water to make hydrogen gas. Then hydrogen is combined with CO2 in a methanation reactor to produce pure methane gas.
The CO2 capture technique they're using is a scaled-down version of those designed for combustion power plants. Air goes through a chamber full of small granules that contain amines -- compounds that bind with CO2 molecules. Periodically, the granules are cycled through a heating step. The temperature only needs to rise to shy of 120C, Soletair's Petri Laakso and Cyril Bajamundi told Ars, so steam from the local heat system and/or an electric heating element is sufficient. This makes the amine granules release the CO2 they're holding, which accumulates in a storage tank. The granules are then ready to absorb more CO2. The other two-thirds of the machine, which measures about 2 meters tall, 5 meters long, and 1 meter wide, deal with turning that CO2 into a usable fuel. First, there's an electrolyzer that splits water to make hydrogen gas. Then hydrogen is combined with CO2 in a methanation reactor to produce pure methane gas.
Finnish? (Score:3, Funny)
I got a Nordic girlfriend once, not sure what nation, but not Finnish, because every time when we had sex, she insisted: "I'm not Finnish!"
But more seriously, so we could build a mask with electric ventilators fueled by our bad breath?
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I got a Nordic girlfriend once, not sure what nation, but not Finnish, because every time when we had sex, she insisted: "I'm not Finnish!"
I think you wanted to write:
A Møøse once bit my sister...
We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. (Score:2)
I think you wanted to write:
A Møøse once bit my sister...
We apologise again for the fault in the
subtitles. Those responsible for sacking
the people who have just been sacked,
have been sacked.
Low tech might be an option, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, you know, offices with mind-clouding levels of carbon dioxide might implement a competing carbon dioxide recycling technology that turns the offending human off-gas back into oxygen: plants.
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Or, you know, offices with mind-clouding levels of carbon dioxide might implement a competing carbon dioxide recycling technology that turns the offending human off-gas back into oxygen: plants.
That's also turning CO2 into fuel, as it so happens.
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Some wit in the article's comments suggested harvesting office plants - Incinerate them and then pump the resulting CO2 back into the office to be consumed by the next generation of plants! :)
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In a closed system you'd need several hundred potted plants per person to keep the atmosphere breathable. The space and energy requirements would be much higher.
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In a closed system you'd need several hundred potted plants per person to keep the atmosphere breathable. The space and energy requirements would be much higher.
Sure, but an office building is almost never a truly closed system, outside level four virus containment facilities.
Buildings leak air, even if HVAC fresh air makeup systems are disabled. Bathroom exhaust fans, among other devices that vent conditioned air to the outdoors, create negative indoor air pressure that's quickly replaced through minor imperfections in the building's skeleton... not to mention the routine act of door and window opening(s).
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create negative indoor air pressure that's quickly replaced through minor imperfections in the building's skeleton
Most of the buildings I've worked in pulled it in from the parking garage.
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Possibly by design... that way you get a sweet, sweet mix of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, to get you thru to the afternoon java break.
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The next revolution in telecommuting - ask if your local plant nursery's greenhouse has WiFi.
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Water filled tubes with spirulina growing in them are much more compact. There are still sizable energy requirements, but it's generally lower than for plants. How compact it can be depends mostly on how much light you can evenly distribute throughout the tube without overheating. The light can be provided directly, or you could channel in sunlight via fiber optics, etc. Other types of algae can work as well. Depending on the algae choice, you might also be able to harvest it for biofuel.
Of course, the ques
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Moss is apparently a good option. Very low maintenance and hard to kill, large surface area for CO2 absorption.
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Moss is a good substrate for growing mold. It makes more sense to use spider plants, ficus, or another macro plant which is easier to clean. (Yes, literally, clean. It's common for services which come in and tend plants to dust them.)
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Or perhaps since they're having to invest in building ventilation anyways, increasing it.
After all, most buildings were designed in a previous life where all incoming fresh air needed to be air conditioned (or rarely, heated) by the system. Given modern air handlers have heat exchangers to recover the heat or cool it
Offices are toxic (Score:3, Funny)
Literally. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to work in a toxic, low-oxygen atmosphere designed to put you to sleep.
I'd rather sit outside on the lawn and code.
Re:Offices are toxic (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's significantly less lethal than starvation.
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Why would you starve if you had the option to do your work outside in fresh air, with sunshine?
I hate being forced to sit in an office so management can feel important and interrupt me to talk about their latest stock purchases instead of having to settle for letting me do my work and accepting the results.
Re:Offices are toxic (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because sunshine is rare, and most indoors electronics fail rapidly due to wear and tear caused by weather. If they start at all.
Not to mention that humans are not really all that well adapted to use said electronics in any kind of adverse weather. For example, typing on a keyboard in heavy gloves is very uncomfortable.
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I'd rather sit outside on the lawn and code.
You must be using one bright screen, unless this is night time.
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I don't have any trouble seeing a Macbook screen or a Dell screen outside. Maybe get your eyes checked?
Re: Offices are toxic (Score:1)
You said you are a coder. So clearly youn cannot also be a Mac user/usee. And ... a Dell? Really? I didn't know there were working-poor coders. :P
Unless you built your tower PC yourself, no, sorry, you are not a coder. At best a JS web hack.
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Literally. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to work in a toxic, low-oxygen atmosphere designed to put you to sleep.
The people at C-SPAN are dedicated to bringing information to the people.
Re: Offices are toxic (Score:1)
I have allergies, you insensitive clod!
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I'd rather sit outside on the lawn and code.
If you've got a good screen that does well in the sun, that might work well. You probably would still need a desk/table and ergonomic chair though. It's not always so easy or great for your wrists to do that in a lounge chair.
Idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)
"Whether it's economically viable is another question."
That is probably one of the bigger understatements of the 21st century.
Their fundamental reaction is CO2 + 2 H2O + ENERGY!!! -> CH4 + 2 O2. You will later attempt to recover some of the ENERGY!!! by running CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O + energy. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics (Respectively: "You can't get something for nothing", and "You can't even break even") make it quite clear that this is a losing proposition.
Carbon dioxide is very, very stable. So is water. That means that splitting the water to make hydrogen, to reform the CO2 into methane, is going to be EXPENSIVE, and splitting the CO2 will also be EXPENSIVE.
Plant trees. Plant corn. Plant ANYTHING. Let Mother Nature run photosynthesis. She knows a lot more about how to do this than we do.
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You should be able to just harvest the methane directly [dilbert.com].
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Plant trees. Plant corn. Plant ANYTHING. Let Mother Nature run photosynthesis. She knows a lot more about how to do this than we do.
And run that photosynthesis where the easy light is, outdoors. A capture system for the carbon that humans exhale makes sense only of the office is a space vehicle, where you're willing to spend a lot just to keep re-using a limited supply of oxygen.
Re:Idiocy (Score:5, Informative)
Reversing the CO2 production process, to recover the oxygen, is by definition not easy. C + O2 -> CO2 + energy is exothermic, highly so, meaning that the reverse reaction will be endothermic, expensively so.
Scrubbing exhaled carbon dioxide is easy, and has been done for a long time.
Henri Fleuss patented his oxygen lung in 1878, which included a CO2 scrubber. It was first used operationally in 1880. (One of the first users, on a commercial dive to some 80 feet, far too deep to be using pure oxygen, got the first recorded CNS oxygen toxicity hit. He not only lived, but he went back down THE NEXT DAY, in conventional hardhat dress, to finish the job.) Submarines have been doing this for decades, at the very least. (World War II was arguably the heyday of submarine warfare.)
Jacque-Yves Cousteau, who with Emile Gagnon first developed practical open-circuit SCUBA, was an oxygen rebreather diver.
Note: Cousteau and Gagnon did not get there first. Rouquayrol and Denayrouze got there first, in 1864. The limitations of metallurgy at the time meant that their system could only hold enough air for a few minutes at depth: it was not possible at that time to make a small, light tank that could hold the necessary pressures.
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Meanwhile... https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com]
Re: Idiocy (Score:2)
Photosynthesis is crazy inefficient, by the way, dear smokestack huggers.
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No, it is hyper efficient. I thought you were German, did you not go to a german school?
The Proton transfer in photosynthesis is triggered by a single photon. Can't be more efficient than 100% - seriously?
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So, it i s100% efficient :P
So what?
Oh, only photons of the right wave length can do that? Sure - but that does not make "photosynthesis inefficient". Inefficient it would be if half or or more of the protons got lost somehow.
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If you made a solar powered gizmo that took in CO2 and output diamonds and oxygen I think you might come out ahead.
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Industrial diamond is already pretty cheap now, so you'd have to compete with that. Only natural diamonds are worth any significant money, because suckers.
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I was thinking in terms of diamond dust. It's not as expensive as big rocks controlled by a cartel, but it is industrially useful. More importantly it doesn't get burned as fuel, so the carbon doesn't end up getting rereleased into the atmosphere as CO2.
Re: Idiocy (Score:2)
How, viable is "the alternative" of causing literally mass-extinctions and the apocalypse then, hm?
Also, who cares if it is efficient. It's not like we will run out of solar power anytime soon. This does not need to run at any specific time of place. Just run it whenever there is excess solar power. Like, globally, freaking *always*.
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I thought the article said the process to turn CO2 into methane involved hydrogen, derived from electrolysis of water. I can't find the actual chemistry reference, but I think it might go like CO2 + 4H2 -> CH4 + 2H2O.
I quite agree that this involves energy input, first to extract hydrogen from water, and second to do whatever reaction is needed to make methane from CO2. If you want a fuel, why not just use the hydrogen?
I suppose methane has advantages over hydrogen as a fuel, as hydrogen is notoriously d
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Congratulations, you can join the "I use thermodynamics to make a point when the topic has nothing to do with thermodynamics CLUB".
Welcome!
Here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The monetary and energy economics may not end up working out, but this is clearly not a perpetual motion machine. It relies on a constant input of energy to run.
Narrative is getting insane (Score:3)
>Depending on the source of the energy running the machines, these fuels could be carbon-neutral since the carbon comes from the air.
This logic is utterly insane. It takes CO2 emissions to build your solar panel or wind turbine. There are already plenty of regions on the planet, including entirety of Finland where a solar panel or wind turbine will never make environmental sense, because you need more emissions put into building, transporting and mounting one than CO2 savings from having it instead of hooking it to grid and going off average CO2 emissions from the grid.
Just because you can hook your ridiculously inefficient process of extracting CO2 and then combine hydrogen with it to create methane to a solar panel doesn't make it carbon neutral.
And jury is out on the process being economically viable. It's not even remotely so.
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It's a sisu [wikipedia.org] thing. A true Finn will push his way through a stone wall with pride, while others are smart enough to walk around it.
It's obvious that turning CO2 into CH4 is going to need more energy than what's released by burning the latter. The capture part itself is interesting, if not novel, though.
Paradoxically, removing CO2 from office air could be really bad for your health. If you're holding your breath, it's the CO2 accumulation that triggers the breathing reflex, not the lack of oxygen. So by
Re:Narrative is getting insane (Score:4, Informative)
Removing all the CO2 from the office air will not lead to hypoxia; only if you removed it directly from someone's lungs (or the corresponding carbonic acid from their blood) would it have that effect. The Wikipedia article you link to refers to divers who hold their breath after hyperventilating (which removes most of the CO2 from their lungs), or encounter hypoxia during ascent (because the partial pressure of oxygen in their lungs decreases as the absolute pressure decreases). Removing the CO2 from the air you breathe in would have a minuscule effect, because the CO2 that causes us to want to breathe comes from us (as we combust our food), not from the ambient air.
Re: Narrative is getting insane (Score:2)
I have to assume the scrubber would only kick on if CO2 levels are too high though.
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People have been making this net carbon footprint against renewables since the 1990s; and in the 1990s the argument made sense. Circumstances have changed, though. Modern solar panels are more powerful and longer lasting than their 20th century counterparts. A reasonably installed PV panel will generate as much total energy as used to manufacture it in about three years, and can be expected to last 25-30 years. Also, the fraction of non-renewable energy to make a PV panel has dropped from 100% to about
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>reasonably installed PV panel will generate as much total energy as used to manufacture it in about three years
Translation: If installed on a movable base that moves to face the sun and located in the rare (on planetary scale) region of high solar intensity. Most of such regions are deserts.
On most of the planet's surface, with today's technology solar PVs with typical rooftop installations are a crime against environment, in addition to being utterly stupid from economic point of view.
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On most of the planet's surface, with today's technology solar PVs with typical rooftop installations are a crime against environment, in addition to being utterly stupid from economic point of view. ... in case you want to nitick about your stupidity).
Strange that we have so many solar panels in Germany then that simply point to a random direction what ever your roof is pointing at (obvioulsy not north
Forget my suggestion to go to Finland, come to Germany. You could make a fortune here to consult people ab
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I know, I know. Germany controls wind. I guess it controls Sun too now. And magically Germany is not a region of medium to low solar intensity, but a region of very high or high one.
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Are you aware what latitudes Germany occupies? There may certainly be issues with the practicality of the system described in this article, but the nonsense you're spouting about the viability of solar power is just wacky. The fact is that even the information above claiming an energy payback time of 2-3 years for solar panels is outdated by a few decades. They are going to generate more power than used to create them in only a small fraction of their service life just about anywhere they're installed (barr
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Are you aware that latitude has a poor correlation with solar intensity? For example, South-Eastern China sitting on the same latitude as Sahara has less solar intensity than much of Northern Europe.
Sahara is one of the highest areas of solar intensity in the world, second only to highest mountain peaks like Himalayas and Andes and Central Australia.
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On average, Latitude has a strong correlation with solar intensity and it is, overall, the main determinant of solar intensity on Earth. Without any atmosphere at all, it would be pretty much the only determinant over large areas. With an atmosphere, latitude sets the baseline and then altitude and weather are secondary factors that can reduce intensity by various amounts but cannot increase it. So, even at the equator you can have areas that have low solar intensity due to weather or areas that have higher
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>On average, Latitude has a strong correlation with solar intensity
False. I literally cited you one of many such examples. You have wild fluctuations among the same latitude on the same continent even. Best US solar intensity areas are in California. Florida, not so much. Essentially same latitude, same continent massive differential.
>The south facing side of a mountain in the northern hemisphere has great solar power potential, but the north facing side has terrible solar potential whereas over a lar
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False. I literally cited you one of many such examples. You have wild fluctuations among the same latitude on the same continent even. Best US solar intensity areas are in California. Florida, not so much. Essentially same latitude, same continent massive differential.
Not false. Of course there are regional variations due to local climate and altitude, but the amount of sunlight any band of latitude gets on a spherical Earth is entirely dependent on its average tilt relative to the sun over a year. How much sunlight a line of latitude gets is primarily dependent on its latitude. Altitude and weather are modifiers on that. Sure, you have regional variations, and particular latitudes that, for example, might have a lot of land at high altitude, but the strongest correlatio
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and in the 1990s the argument made sense.
No, it did not. Already in the 90s the time to recover the energy spent to make a solar panel (including aluminium frames) was only 3 years.
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People have been making this net carbon footprint against renewables since the 1990s; and in the 1990s the argument made sense. Circumstances have changed, though. Modern solar panels are more powerful and longer lasting than their 20th century counterparts.
They are, but the difference is not so great that the argument made sense in the 1990s, either. Solar panels of the 1970s could be expected to last over 20 years, still have over 80% output (in some cases, over 90%) and repaid their energy investment in under 7 years. The CO2 is produced while the energy is being consumed, and they provide an alternative to CO2 being produced while they are producing energy past their break-even point, so a solar panel built in say 1973 would have broken even by 1980 and wo
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Well, there are questions about the economics of it, but the main point of having it in offices is to reduce CO2 levels to make employees smarter and less sleepy. That could be accomplished with just a scrubber though. The point of processing it to methane is to store energy (and, according to their website, create chemical feedstocks) for later use, which can certainly be worthwhile. Whether it can beat battery storage for efficiency and cost is another story.
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It depends what you do with the energy generated. If you use it to subtract CO2 from the atmosphere then it can be neutral or even negative.
For example using electricity to help grow trees, or irrigate land.
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Ah yes, perpetual motion engines. They do work.
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Perpetual motion engines "work" (obviously they don't actually) without the input of energy. Obviously this has fresh energy continuously input, so it's not a perpetual motion machine, whatever other flaws it may have.
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Sometimes I just hate how poorly written word on the internet conveys the meaning you're trying to convey.
I'll try to be more obvious in expressing sarcasm next time.
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Well, sorry if I misunderstood. So what is it that you were actually trying to say?
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including entirety of Finland where a solar panel or wind turbine will never make environmental sense, because you need more emissions put into building, transporting and mounting one than CO2 savings from having it instead of hooking it to grid and going off average CO2 emissions from the grid.
Strange that they build solar plants and wind plants anyway there.
Hey, I have an idea!! Why do you not travel there? Finland and Scandinavia are very open to foreigners who speak english as in work permits etc. You
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I think you should try catching this virus harder. It would be a massive upgrade from your current "Germany controls wind, and I'm an expert in wind power" nonsense.
Let's see the energy balance (Score:1)
Sounds useful for undersea and space (Score:2)
Eliminating CO2 from enclosed area is a pain in the butt, and is very useful in undersea and space applications. Creating usable fuel is a plus, and particularly in space the electricity/heat needed to jumpstart this process is plentiful.
Added plus, you can run rocket engines off the methane!
Alternately, it looks like it can also be used as feedstock for fertilizer if you want to get it back into a stable habitation loop.
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If you can collect sufficient energy on your spacecraft to reform the CO2 and water to CH4 and O2, you can just as easily use that energy to heat the CO2 and use it directly as reaction mass for your engines, and you'll probably get better net efficiency.
Jerry Pournelle once described a proposed jet airplane, that didn't use fuel in flight. Instead, it was painted by an orbital laser. Air was sucked in by the compressor, heated by the laser, and exhausted through the turbine. This wasn't his idea, it was
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What rocket engines run methane?
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Plenty ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This is news if you drop the fuel segment (Score:2)
Efficient removal of CO2 from recycled air like you find in a home or office setting (or even a submarine!) is a good thing. That's all the story needs to establish - they remove co2 and vent it outside. This is a great step towards better building air quality.
They go off the rails when they then try to turn CO2 into fuel. This is a VERY inefficient and energy hungry process. The electrolysis step alone is extremely inefficient and with the end result being something you intend to burn, again releasing
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TFS seems to imply that by removing CO2, they can get away with bringing in less outdoor air. But CO2 is a surrogate for overall indoor air quality. If they reduce outdoor air intake because CO2 is controlled, plenty of other gases and odors will build up and the indoor environment won't be so great.
Heat recovery ventilation (Score:2)
But there's much more energy efficient ways of doing this.
In my (airtight) house, I have a heat recovery ventilation system. It actively refreshes the air inside without losing the heat energy in that air.
It has two air streams, a fresh incoming air stream gets fed into living areas in the house. It has a stale air stream, extracted from the poorer-air-quality areas in the house (think, kitchen, bathrooms, etc). These air streams meet in a heat exchange core, transferring the heat from one stream to the
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Thank you!
Yes, it's a shame that these units are not more widely used. They are common in Europe where all this technology is developed, but practically unheard of here in Australia.
There are a few manufacturers. A friend of mine installed the Zehnder ComfoAir in his house, and it is exceptional. It's the rolls-royce solution. I didn't quite have the budget, so I went with the Nuaire MRXBOX95.
I installed mine myself because there is nobody in my city who knew anything about them. In fact, I was the fir
It's a Plant, Right? (Score:3)
Methane is incredibly cheap (Score:2)
CO2, collected from office buildings, electrolyzed using expensive electricity to make cheap methane ... It is like the strategy to catch waterfowl by placing butter on their he
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I used to drive by pig farms in North Carolina where I sure *wish* they collected the methane.
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Even in energy expensive countries, like India, even where labor is very cheap, like India, even when it was short in scarce foreign exchange, like 1980s, even when the government was subsidizi
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Methane is incredibly EXPENSIVE (Score:2)
It is only "cheap" because you steal from us, by not removing the trash that you make, and not putting back the resources you took from us, and not paying for literally destroying the planet with floods and droughts and mass extinctions like an apocalypse.
If you add those in ... Well, what is the price for even a single species that is forever extinct? (And can I pay it to get rid of humans? Cause I hate them more and more.)
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Methane is produced for free from farm waste. Even then it is not economical to collect it. The methane collection technology for farm waste is involves basically spreading a plastic sheet on dung heaps and tapping the gas bubble that forms under it. Even then the value of methane collected is too little pay for that plastic sheet.
If you have a feedlot it's economical to sluice the poop into a bag and collect the methane. If you have to rake up the crap then it's not economical any more.
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BTW, I learnt a lot about diesel engines and commercial diesel trucks from you. Thanks.
Be engineers for 2 seconds. (Score:1)
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And the hope is to hack it to produce C2H5OH? (Score:2)
You know...to buzz up the office?
Can't violate thermodynamics (Score:2)
Cement plants (Score:2)
Perpetual motion machine with a power plant (Score:2)
Wouldn't a coal power plant produces much much more CO2 than any office building? AND they can get as much steam and waste heat as they wanted from the plant too!
Then if this device actually works, the methane produced can be fed back to the power plant and this will become a perpetual motion machine.
Re: Perpetual motion machine with a power plant (Score:2)
Given enougj solar power to run thos cycle it, and given the coal or whatever also coming from thos process, making it 100% green and, renewable and sustainable, I would finance that, just for the sole reason of seeing he brutal brutal pain on some millitant tree-hugger's face for not being able to ban it by his own rules. :D
(Hint: Partial tree hugger myself. What can I say? I'm kinky! ;)
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Then if this device actually works, the methane produced can be fed back to the power plant and this will become a perpetual motion machine.
That is precisely what is wrong with this idea. In order to get methane from CO2, you need to provide energy to drive the chemistry. The carbon may be recycled, but it is certainly not a perpetual motion machine. It appears to be a rather inefficient way of sequestering carbon.
Danger of deaths and brain damage (Score:2)
This could be very dangerous.
The human respiratory system doesn't directly detect oxygen levels (which is not easy to use as an indicator in part because of the way haemoglobin binds to it). Instead it works on the easier-to-sense carbon dioxide level.
In effect it assumes that the CO2 is primarily the result of metabolism and when it's up the O2 is down by the appropriate amount. Higher CO2 means you breathe faster and maintain a reasonable O2 level in your blood.
This works well if the assumption is satis
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I believe carbon monoxide poisoning is a type of oxygen deprivation. The CO displaces oxygen in the hemoglobin in red blood cells, so starving the body of oxygen. You eventually fall unconscious, with no breathing distress.
At the assembly line at work, we have a nitrogen extraction machine, that produces nearly pure nitrogen to provide oxidation protection in a soldering process. Chemical alarms were set up to detect low oxygen, in case of a leak of nitrogen displacing oxygen. Workers would notice nothing u
Wait, wouldn't a solar power tower be perfect? (Score:2)
Just pass those amine granules through the focus point of all those mirrors of a solar power tower. Use solar power to move them too. Tadaa! Free CO2 collection!
Come on, we couls create all kinds of fuels in bulk at basically single-time investment costs!
Any chemist here who can tel is what those "amine granules" actually are, and how a non-chemist can obtain them?
Of course the process will take up more energy... (Score:2)
... than you could get by burning the CO2 in the first place.
I have one in my office! (Score:2)
Re: Perpetuum Mobile? Or counter-productive? (Score:2)
No, because all those conversions don't come for free.