Putting a lid on carbon dioxide

[Bruce]

This was the title of an article in Chemical and Engineering News, December 20th, 2004, page 36. The opening paragraph:

It sounds so painless: Concentrate, capture, pressurize, and inject carbon dioxide deep into the Earth's geologic formation and avoid, or at least delay, the likely damage of global warming. There, the greenhouse gas would rest forever, providing the U.S. with time to develop a long-term solution to overcome the climate-change impact of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

As a PhD Inorganic chemist, my official position on this is:

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!! :roll: :roll:

[MESchlum]

But it's so obvious! I mean, you can't go around pumping gas into the earth's crust (it might rise), so you'll need to compact that nasty CO2... into liquid, or solid form, say.

I hear there's this place where they have plenty of the solid stuff, we could use it as a template to make out own. Other areas have lots of the liquid, and it seems to be easy to transport, so we should set up factories everywhere to make it ;)

Of course, we need to find a good place to leave it in. Fortunately, there are lots of areas where people dig holes deep in the ground and pull stuff out, so we could just fill them up afterwards. I hear the US has just recently acquired a large stretch of sand with lots of storage space underneath it. Maybe they hope to fill it?:D

[cesium]

Solid CO2 (dry ice) would be easier to store then the liquid
form of co2 due to the fact that liquid co2 only exists at high
pressures.

I personaly think that there would be major impacts of removing
vast quantities of a gas from our atmosphere, especialy effects
on plants and alges.

another issue would be the energy required to extract CO2 from
the air, drill into the ground, and either inject the gas or solidify the gas and store it somehow. It may be more efficiant and better
to use a chemical or electrochemical process to seperate the carbon and the oxygen.

[CBL4]

CO2 could be used to force additional natural gas and oil out from somewhat depleted fields. I am not sure if the CO2 would remain in the earth or not.

CBL

[Diamond]

There's a much simpler answer: stop breathing. That way a) less carbon dioxide to cause global warming (which its never managed to do in the past and b) your worries about climate change will be over!

:D

[CBL4]

I did a quick look and pumping CO2 into oil fields in real and still pretty minor but big enough to have some potential

In some cases, production from an oil or natural gas reservoir can be enhanced by pumping CO2 gas into the reservoir to push out the product, which is called enhanced oil recovery. The United States is the world leader in enhanced oil recovery technology, using about 32 million tons of CO2 per year for this purpose.
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/geologic/index.html

To put that in perspective, in 1994 the world produced about 24 billion tons of CO2. Assuming a 25% increase over the last decade, that means the US is sequestering 0.1% of the CO2 the world produces. In some ways this is peanuts but since pumping the CO2 actually increases profits, it has the potential to grow.

Here is a link to other experimental sequestering techniques:
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/index.html

CBL

[Bruce]

The whole idea is so ridiculous, it's barely worth debating at all, but the fact that it's a feature article in C&E News boggles my mind. Putting aside all the logistical absurdities, it's not even theoretically sound. It would be the equivilant of perpetual motion or lifting yourself up by your boot straps. For those that don't understand what I mean, lets do a scale down:

Imagine you have a lump of coal and you design a lab-scale electric generator. Let's give the theoriticians the benefit of the doubt and assume that our system is 100% efficient, and 100% of the coal is completely combusted. We burn our coal to generate heat, which boils water to make steam, which is used to power an electric generator, which is used to power a lightbulb. Our forum engineers could tell you how long you can power a light bulb given the mass of coal and 100% system efficiency.

Now what we want to do is design a system that will trap, isolate, and compress all the of carbon dioxide that comes from that lump of coal and attach a pump that will pump all of it into the ground. We want to do all of this using the energy generated from that lump of coal. Do you really think that you could design such a system and power it with the energy from that lump of coal, AND have enough left over to power the light bulb at all, let alone for a reasonable amount of time and cost.

Now throw in the fact that coal powered electric plants are terribly inefficient, the logistical problems of degining a low energy CO2 trapping and compressing system, scale it all back up to real-world, then ask who is going to pay for all of this. Doesn't this proposed system sound an awful lot like a perpetual motion machine? It's taking more energy to trap the CO2 than what is generated from the coal.

The only way to get around this is to pull energy from a non-coal source such as solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear, but if you're going to use all this energy to trap CO2, why not just use that energy to power everything in the first place? Aaargh.

And what makes you think that if you pump CO2 into the ground that it's going to stay there?!? Aaarrgh!!!

[MESchlum]

Turn the CO2 into oil and coal. It's easier to store that way.:D

[Bruce]

I should have been an engineer. I'm starting to understand why engineers rarely do research. There is no way in hell that most engineers would get a government grant. Most engineers would be spending more time explaining why it wouldn't work and how expensive it would be than suggesting how it might work and how it might some day be better than existing technologies.

Our senior engineer got a bigger laugh out of this article than I did and went into further detail about the absurdities of trying to eliminate carbon dioxide from industrial processes.

[CBL4]

Our senior engineer got a bigger laugh out of this article than I did and went into further detail about the absurdities of trying to eliminate carbon dioxide from industrial processes.What kind of engineer?

I know a man with a masters in chemistry who understands that it is perfectible possible to use some of the energy from coal burning to bind the CO2 with other materials and still have excess energy. It may or may not be feasible but it is possible.

As far as pumping CO2 into the ground, the energy can almost be cost free. At night there is an excess of energy from nuclear and hydroelectric plants. This is especially true in the summer but in most places it is true even in the winter.

CBL

[Soapy Sam]

"CO2 could be used to force additional natural gas and oil out from somewhat depleted fields. I am not sure if the CO2 would remain in the earth or not. "


Hmm. I was on a well in Saudi once , where CO2 was bleeding into the mud from a carbonate reservoir. To maintain the mud pH above 9, I was using a truckload of lime a day. Next to H2S, CO2 is about the most corrosive substance you are likely to encounter in a well.

Anyone wanting to put the stuff in on purpose can find himself another mud engineer.

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam

Hmm. I was on a well in Saudi once , where CO2 was bleeding into the mud from a carbonate reservoir. To maintain the mud pH above 9, I was using a truckload of lime a day. Next to H2S, CO2 is about the most corrosive substance you are likely to encounter in a well.


You want to know what CO2 can do? Open a soft drink and stick your tongue in it. If you can hold your tongue in carbonated beverage for more than 30 seconds without being in EXTREME pain, then you are far better than I am. I gave up in 10 seconds.

The pain is generated from the carbonic andhydrase in saliva that converts the CO2 into carbonic acid, and the acid is going after your tongue.

(BTW, Bruce, I learned that from CE News a couple of years ago)

[Rolfe]

Do I gather they're actually doing this? Someone else brought the subject into conversation on Saturday afternoon (as we were chewing over the global warming/dimming dichotomy as presented on Horizon on Thursday) and he seemed to be implying that the procedure was actually underway.

The "BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!" was endorsed with knobs on, by the way.

Rolfe.

[Bruce]

Originally posted by pgwenthold
You want to know what CO2 can do? Open a soft drink and stick your tongue in it. If you can hold your tongue in carbonated beverage for more than 30 seconds without being in EXTREME pain, then you are far better than I am. I gave up in 10 seconds.

The pain is generated from the carbonic andhydrase in saliva that converts the CO2 into carbonic acid, and the acid is going after your tongue.

(BTW, Bruce, I learned that from CE News a couple of years ago)

Cool! I've never tried that one. My dad told me about a little experiment he tried as a little kid. He decided to see what would happen if he put a recently yanked baby tooth in a glass of Pepsi over night. The next morning, it was gone. Completely dissolved. Gotta love carbonic and citric acid.

Very interesting story from Soapy Sam. That's the kind of first-hand news you can get here that you will never find on the news channels or from science articles written by elite college professors. Nobody wants to hear about the draw-backs of putting a lofty ideas in to practice.

Rolfe, tell us more about this conversation.

[Michael Redman]

Originally posted by MESchlum
Turn the CO2 into oil and coal. It's easier to store that way.:D If we don't find anything better in the near term, I think this will be done for us, without any intervention on our part. It will just take a little longer than we're willing to wait.

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by Bruce
Cool! I've never tried that one. My dad told me about a little experiment he tried as a little kid. He decided to see what would happen if he put a recently yanked baby tooth in a glass of Pepsi over night. The next morning, it was gone. Completely dissolved. Gotta love carbonic and citric acid.


Pepsi's got a lot of phosphoric acid. Probably more of a problem than the citric acid.

I told my General Chemistry class about the "tongue in coke" thing one year. Of course, they all went out and tried it. Most said they could only last 20 seconds or so, but one woman claimed she never had a problem. She was a rugby player and had a high threshold for pain, she says.

The next class, two guys show up with a cooler with Coke and a glass, and they say, "We don't believe her. Make her come up front and show us."

I'm kind of like, no, fellas, I can't quite do that. I agree that there's no way she didn't have any problems, but no, I am not going to make this woman come up in front of class and demonstate that she can stick her tongue in glass of Coke indefinately.

[Bruce]

Originally posted by pgwenthold
Pepsi's got a lot of phosphoric acid. Probably more of a problem than the citric acid.

I told my General Chemistry class about the "tongue in coke" thing one year. Of course, they all went out and tried it. Most said they could only last 20 seconds or so, but one woman claimed she never had a problem. She was a rugby player and had a high threshold for pain, she says.

The next class, two guys show up with a cooler with Coke and a glass, and they say, "We don't believe her. Make her come up front and show us."

I'm kind of like, no, fellas, I can't quite do that. I agree that there's no way she didn't have any problems, but no, I am not going to make this woman come up in front of class and demonstate that she can stick her tongue in glass of Coke indefinately.

I didn't know you were a chemistry teacher. High school or college? What's it like? Did you do any industry work prior to teaching? I've considered applying for teaching positions, but I don't think the salary range will pay my bills. :(

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by Bruce
I didn't know you were a chemistry teacher. High school or college? What's it like? Did you do any industry work prior to teaching? I've considered applying for teaching positions, but I don't think the salary range will pay my bills. :(

College. Only one time have I ever even set foot in an industrial lab, to look at some equipment that they were considering donating.

In terms of what it is like, let me just say that I don't consider myself a teacher, as such, more of a scientist who teaches (although, what am I doing today? Preparing notes for Organic class...)

If you keep your back issues of CE News, you can find two references to me in there last year. One is in the Sci/Tech Concentrates in the 2/2 issue, and one of my students is in the ACS fellowship section of the 11/29 issue.

[B.S]

Originally posted by Bruce
Cool! My dad told me about a little experiment he tried as a little kid. He decided to see what would happen if he put a recently yanked baby tooth in a glass of Pepsi over night. The next morning, it was gone. Completely dissolved. Gotta love carbonic and citric acid.

The Mythbusters did the "tooth in the cola" thing and the tooth didn't dissolve. Just discolored.

[Abdul Alhazred]

Originally posted by Diamond
There's a much simpler answer: stop breathing. That way a) less carbon dioxide to cause global warming (which its never managed to do in the past and b) your worries about climate change will be over!

:D

Kidding aside, if we really need to reduce CO2, why not plant a lot of trees?

[Rolfe]

Originally posted by Abdul Alhazred
Kidding aside, if we really need to reduce CO2, why not plant a lot of trees? Where? Where do we find enough land to off-set the trees being cut down other places?

Rolfe.

[Bruce]

Originally posted by Abdul Alhazred
Kidding aside, if we really need to reduce CO2, why not plant a lot of trees?

I remember from my high school environmental class that trees are actually the least efficient at converting CO2 to O2. The most efficient I think might have been plancton.

I'm going to sit here and wait for a life sciences expert to smack me upside the head for spreading misinformation, and then tell everyone the real story...

[Abdul Alhazred]

In the USA forestation has been increasing for quite some time.

Enough? I don't know.

Plankton may be a more efficient converter of CO2, but adding more plankton is problematical.

[CBL4]

I remember from my high school environmental class that trees are actually the least efficient at converting CO2 to O2. The most efficient I think might have been planctonI seem to remember a report saying that if the whole Brazilian rainforest were eliminated, it would not make a big difference in CO2 concentration. It would be a disaster but not in the CO2 part of it.

CBL

[Diamond]

Originally posted by B.S
The Mythbusters did the "tooth in the cola" thing and the tooth didn't dissolve. Just discolored.

Link, please.

[EvilYeti]

Originally posted by Abdul Alhazred
In the USA forestation has been increasing for quite some time.

Enough? I don't know.

Plankton may be a more efficient converter of CO2, but adding more plankton is problematical.

The vast majority of biomass is, at best, a temporary carbon sink. When the organism dies and decomposes all the carbon is returned to the atmosphere. You can actually see this effect (called the carbon cycle) by looking at seasonal trends in CO2 atmospheric concentrations.

Regarding plankton, deep-ocean carbon sequestration via fertilization of phytoplankton is a very active field of study. Here is a list of some abstracts:

http://cdiac2.esd.ornl.gov/ocean.html

Oh, and Bruce, nature has been sending carbon deep underground for billions of years, using no more than the power of the sun and the miracle of photosynthesis. Heard of limestone? You know, calcium CARBONate? ;)

[aerocontrols]

Originally posted by Diamond
Link, please.

How about Snopes? (http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tooth.asp)

[aerocontrols]

I would take all of this nyuk-nyuk winking and BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!-ing more seriously if the US Dept. of Energy (http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/sequestration/index.html) was also laughing at the idea, if the Norwegian company Statoil (http://www.statoil.com/STATOILCOM/SVG00990.NSF/0/01A5A730136900A3412569B90069E947?opendocument) wasn't already doing it in the Utsira sandstone formation and if a team of organizations including the US Department of Energy and BP Energy weren't also (http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/press/2004/tl_frio_injection.html) doing it at the Frio Brine Pilot experimental site in Texas.

If you examine the USDoE website, you'll see that other carbon sequestration technologies are also being studied, including pumping CO2 to the bottom of the sea.

Now throw in the fact that coal powered electric plants are terribly inefficient, the logistical problems of degining a low energy CO2 trapping and compressing system, scale it all back up to real-world, then ask who is going to pay for all of this. Doesn't this proposed system sound an awful lot like a perpetual motion machine? It's taking more energy to trap the CO2 than what is generated from the coal.

It could be that it would take more energy to trap the CO2 than what is generated from the coal, but it's not immediately obvious to me that this is true. It would only sound like perpetual motion if the claim was that the CO2 was going to be returned to a coal-like state. Recapturing CO2 is more difficult than sweeping up ashes after a fire, but cleaning up waste products is not equivalent to claiming the existence of a perpetual motion machine.

MattJ

[B.S]

Originally posted by Diamond
Link, please.
The best I could find was on their fan site. It lists the results they got for the different cola tests they did.

http://www.mythbustersfanclub.com/html/buried_alive.html

Also the Snopes one above was good.

[TillEulenspiegel]

Till <-- not a chemist.
Wouldn't it be feasible to use an artificial carbon cycle 1 engine instead of stack scrubbers at industrial sites. The waste is 02 and sugar , yes? I'm not sure of the energy or volumetric constraints in RE efficiency and speed, but I would think you could do some fancy molecular footwork and use the sugar with other compounds to supply ( as an adjunct ) the energy to breakdown the CO2 ?

[Bruce]

Originally posted by TillEulenspiegel
Till <-- not a chemist.
Wouldn't it be feasible to use an artificial carbon cycle 1 engine instead of stack scrubbers at industrial sites. The waste is 02 and sugar , yes? I'm not sure of the energy or volumetric constraints in RE efficiency and speed, but I would think you could do some fancy molecular footwork and use the sugar with other compounds to supply ( as an adjunct ) the energy to breakdown the CO2 ?

Bruce <--- not an engineer.
What is an artificial carbon cycle 1 engine?

[TillEulenspiegel]

An electrochemical cell or a passive catalytic cell , both would use energy ( UV? Electricity? regents ? ) to chemically separate the carbon from the O2 with sucrose as a waste product. I have seen some reaction vessels that do this a long time ago, so I was just wondering at the scale since the concept is viable. ala fuel cell or catalytic convertor.

[Bruce]

Originally posted by TillEulenspiegel
An electrochemical cell or a passive catalytic cell , both would use energy ( UV? Electricity? regents ? ) to chemically separate the carbon from the O2 with sucrose as a waste product. I have seen some reaction vessels that do this a long time ago, so I was just wondering at the scale since the concept is viable. ala fuel cell or catalytic convertor.

Do you have any links? I did catalyst research in graduate school. That sort of catalyst has been discussed as the "dream" catalyst by my colleagues, but to my knowledge, no one has ever discovered one.

[Kilted_Canuck]

So many chemists... :p



KC<-------Wants to be a chemist (and is in both organic and inorganic chemistry this semester)

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by Bruce
Do you have any links? I did catalyst research in graduate school. That sort of catalyst has been discussed as the "dream" catalyst by my colleagues, but to my knowledge, no one has ever discovered one.

I've seen working fuel cells with methanol, but nothing with anything more oxidized.

CO2 is a huge thermodynamic sink. I'd like to know the other reagent that might be used. For example, CO2 + water to give sucrose and oxygen is endothermic by 100 kcal/mol per CO2 If I try other alternatives, something like methanol needs 190 kcal/mol per CO2. Probably the best thing you could imagine, methane, still requires 27 kcal/mol per CO2. That's a lot of energy that has to be overcome.

[Bruce]

Originally posted by pgwenthold
I've seen working fuel cells with methanol, but nothing with anything more oxidized.

CO2 is a huge thermodynamic sink. I'd like to know the other reagent that might be used. For example, CO2 + water to give sucrose and oxygen is endothermic by 100 kcal/mol per CO2 If I try other alternatives, something like methanol needs 190 kcal/mol per CO2. Probably the best thing you could imagine, methane, still requires 27 kcal/mol per CO2. That's a lot of energy that has to be overcome.

That's the thing that astounds me about plants!

There were some interesting dissusions related to this subject on the skeptical community board. I'd like to invite you and anyone else that is interested for comments.

http://www.skepticalcommunity.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=4585

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by Abdul Alhazred
Kidding aside, if we really need to reduce CO2, why not plant a lot of trees?

Some people are planning to do just that, eg, I think Australia plans to do that to meet it's Kyoto obligations. It hasn't signed up for Kyoto, but it is going to do it anyway. Talk about having an each way bet.

Of course, if you are going to do this, you need space, water, etc. Australia has cleared a lot of land in it's brief history, so that won't be a problem. Getting the water to the trees so they grow could be a problem.

[TillEulenspiegel]

Bruce
I guess I was talking about lithium hydroxide as the catalyst. Most prevalent are Biological reaction vessels that use bacteria..
I had no idea that this is a holy grail of chemistry, that's why I was asking questions. Since this appears to me to be a strait forward chemical process (Carbon cycle) Is there no way to craft an emulation of the bio breakdown mechanism seen in plants?

[Bruce]

Originally posted by TillEulenspiegel
Is there no way to craft an emulation of the bio breakdown mechanism seen in plants?

There probably is, but to this day, scientists have been unable to even come close to mimicing the remarkable and efficient ability of plants to to harness sunlight and use it's energy to reduce carbon dioxide into sugars or other organic products. It really is a holy grail.

One of the research projects I was working on in graduate school was a platinum catalyst that appeared to oxidize water to O2 and H+ without the use of electricity. This is another holy grail. It would have got me a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, it turned out that the oxygen was oxidizing the phosphine ligand on the platinum catalyst rather than being released as O2. Nine months of work down the drain, but I still got a publication out of it in Inorganic Chemistry.

Another catalyst holy grail was discoverd several decades ago. I believe it's called the Wacker process. It's a process were you expose N2 and H2 to a platinum catalyst and you get ammonia, NH3. If there is a catalyst that can do this, then there is probably a catalyst for the other two.

I really wanted to be a catalyst researcher when I entered college, but nobody appears to be hiring catalyst researchers anymore. It's probably because nearly all catalysts are discovered by accident. Discovery happens on its own time. It's hard to make money on something like that. :(