Scientists suck carbon from the air and build with it

I thought this was very interesting in todays world...

Carbon is both one of the crucial building blocks of the material world, and causing our planet’s ecological destruction. So a team at George Washington University have developed a way to harness the material power of elemental carbon, while drastically reducing environmental emissions.

In fact, the team claim their process could return today’s levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in no more than 10 years, even if humans continue emitting greenhouse gases at our current rate.

The process basically plucks usable carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air, and allows them to shape pretty much anything out of the material. In theory, an industrialised application of the system would allow for low-cost, environmentally friendly manufacturing of anything from airplane parts to synthetic diamonds.

The process works by capturing carbon dioxide from the air, and applying an electrochemical process to convert it into separate carbon nanofibres and oxygen molecules.

more ... www.msn.com... p

That's a big call, to say they could return the carbon dioxide levels back to pre-industrial levels in no more than 10 years, but hey would be fantastic if true.

Start pumping dudes!

But does this mean we will still be continually forced to rely heavily on fossil fuels, instead of weening off them in favour of cleaner energy?

originally posted by: gps777
I thought this was very interesting in todays world...

Carbon is both one of the crucial building blocks of the material world, and causing our planet’s ecological destruction. So a team at George Washington University have developed a way to harness the material power of elemental carbon, while drastically reducing environmental emissions.

In fact, the team claim their process could return today’s levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in no more than 10 years, even if humans continue emitting greenhouse gases at our current rate.

The process basically plucks usable carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air, and allows them to shape pretty much anything out of the material. In theory, an industrialised application of the system would allow for low-cost, environmentally friendly manufacturing of anything from airplane parts to synthetic diamonds.

The process works by capturing carbon dioxide from the air, and applying an electrochemical process to convert it into separate carbon nanofibres and oxygen molecules.

more ... www.msn.com... p

That's a big call, to say they could return the carbon dioxide levels back to pre-industrial levels in no more than 10 years, but hey would be fantastic if true.

Start pumping dudes!

But does this mean we will still be continually forced to rely heavily on fossil fuels, instead of weening off them in favour of cleaner energy?

good. now just make sure u have a resource management plan so we dont go converting all the carbon in the atmosphere to diamonds to the point where we have too little carbon in our atmosphere.

Less Carbon Dioxide, less food, the greenhouse food growers will have to keep their Methane burners going full blast.

a reply to: pikestaff

Plants grew just fine before the industrial age.

a reply to: gps777

It's a shame there isn't more CO2 in the air,then.

It's only 0.06% of the atmosphere.

Removing methane may be a better idea.

granted this question comes out of absolute ignorance, but it's up to you guys to deny me that!
So, plants need carbon dioxide to do their thing, and we need plants, lots of them, especially given how many people live on earth right now.
Assuming they can pull this off, Reducing the CO2 to levels that existed before the industrial revolution...would the renaming amount still be able to cover our agricultural needs?
considering the world population back then was about 680 million according to good old wikipedia now we are well over 7 billion.
If not does it mean we will have to GMO everything?

setting my ignorance aside though, it's great to see people coming up with ways to produce goods with minimal impact on the environment

a reply to: gps777
That claim is somewhat preposterous given it would take a facility larger than Texas, even larger than New South Wales, to do it.

From OP source:

The catch is that the facility required to do this would take up some 940,000 square kilometres of space. Researchers prefer to call it “around 10 per cent the size of the Sahara Desert”, but at 9.4 million square kilometres, the Sahara Desert is substantially larger than Australia (7.7 million square kilometres of space). So you’re talking a facility bigger than the state of New South Wales (which, for the record, is larger than Texas, which is the largest state in the continental USA).

So with a more realistic sized facility scaling down the results it might put a small dent in the increase of CO2.

I like the fact they are trying to turn a problem into an opportunity so even if it's a small step it would be a step in the right direction, if it's economically feasible and we can't determine that from the article.

originally posted by: [post=19939861]Arbitrageur

So with a more realistic sized facility scaling down the results it might put a small dent in the increase of CO2.

I like the fact they are trying to turn a problem into an opportunity so even if it's a small step it would be a step in the right direction, if it's economically feasible and we can't determine that from the article.

I`m guessing they are hoping this tech takes off and is used around the global in manufacture.

I agree though a small step in the right direction.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I'd be interested in the amount of space taken up by all of the golf courses on this planet...in the UK the average percentage of land used for hitting a little white ball around on equals roughly 3.0% of all land, in Bermuda the figure is almost 10% of available land space is used for Golfing.

Totals for the world are hard to come by, but it's interesting to note that land used for golf courses is almost double that used for homes in the UK, or stands at roughly (it's hard to get accurate figures) 270,000 hectares for golf.

I would estimate, that individual 'Carbon crunching units', could be built in every town and city, especially situated in industrial areas, could achieve an overall area the size of NSW or Texas. Probably wouldn't be a good idea to build a single gigantic facility, but many thousands of manageable, smaller sized ones instead.

It could be done...if we can cover a significant percentage of the surface of our planet with courses to hit a small white ball around in for fun, surely we can cover it with facilities that would help to clean it up.

a reply to: MysterX

Wow that's amazing

Yeah it does make a great deal of sense , I doubt those long short checkered pants and little French caps wearin oldies would have their priorities straight with it though. All the hot air coming out of them about it, they`ll have to build more carbon dioxide plants to cover them.

I shouldn't worry about the size of the facility.

100 such sites at 1% the size would do wonderfully and spread the employment opps around.

We already have solar powered devices that use an electro-chemical process to extract carbon from the atmosphere and convert it to environmentally friendly building materials. They are called "trees."

Without having much technical expertise to seek out any BS in these claims, this does sound pretty cool.

But here's the caveat: CO2 levels in the atmosphere are always fluctuating and changing, and is a part of the natural cycle of the earth. Pretending like the levels pre-industrial era were perfect for the world and humanity is based absolutely on ignorance, as we don't know how long that level would persist and in which direction it would naturally go.

Keep in mind that humans had deforested much of the areas in which we live (for towns and farming) for centuries prior to the IR--does that ever get taken into consideration when discussing the perfect CO2 levels in the atmosphere?

My point is that we don't know what harm we will do overall by removing C from the atmosphere, and it's an endeavor that seems noble on the surface, but could be problematic in the long run.

a reply to: Ericthedoubter

Just think of it this way;

When there is enough methan in te atmosphere, it may just ignite and this part of the polution problem will take care of itself.

originally posted by: tinymind
a reply to: Ericthedoubter

Just think of it this way;

When there is enough methan in te atmosphere, it may just ignite and this part of the polution problem will take care of itself.

When there's enough methane in the atmosphere to ignite, pollution, as well as the Animal Kingdom (I'm not sure about plants) will have long since disappeared from the Earth. As Cornelius Evazan once said (at the Mos Eisley Cantina) "You'll be dead!"

originally posted by: VictorVonDoom
We already have solar powered devices that use an electro-chemical process to extract carbon from the atmosphere and convert it to environmentally friendly building materials. They are called "trees."

Good point! But termites eventually devour wood and maybe they can't devour carbon fibers as easily? So carbon fiber materials might be more durable until termites evolve to be able to eat those too!

a reply to: gps777

yeah but the size of the facility required to do that...just immense.

And after the CO2 levels go down...what to do with that infrastructure?

a reply to: gps777

These schemes usually have a problem. This is it:"The process works by capturing carbon dioxide from the air, and applying an electrochemical process to convert it into separate carbon nanofibres and oxygen molecules."

It takes much more energy to reduce the carbon with this process than the energy generated in producing it. To do this without compounding the perceived CO2 problem, one would have to use power that did not depend on combustion of fossil fuels. If one had that amount of power available, one could just supply that power to the grid and displace fossil fuel combustion processes. Plant photosynthesis would then gradually reduce the CO2 concentration in the air.

hmmm...this tech is useless...it could potentially stifle carbon tax scheme.

We can't have that.

originally posted by: pteridine

It takes much more energy to reduce the carbon with this process than the energy generated in producing it.

I`ve heard this line of thought on solar panels before and I don`t believe it, people have had solar panels on their roofs for over 10 years here in Australia, I have 12 large 2.5kw panels on mine and have done for 6 years generating me free electricity and I`m supposed to believe that these panels created more CO2 in their manufacture than they would have already saved, let alone in their life time.

Solar power can also be used to create solar panels.

As with this new Tech, heck I`m sure these guys have thought about how much CO2 they generate to capture carbon.