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    Canada Avalon Member Justplain's Avatar
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    Default Carbon Capture Tech Advance

    This carbon capture tech appears to be nearing commercially viable economies. In this example, they claim they can suck carbon out of the air at a cost just @25% more than it costs to pump oil out of the ground, with the output being usable fuel. They claim with this tech, even places without oil can produce gasoline. The question is whether this is paradigm shifting tech and whether the tptb will let it proceed if it is.


    Carbon Capture Tech Advance

    It sounds like spinning straw into gold: suck carbon dioxide from the air where it’s contributing to climate change and turn it into fuel for cars, trucks and jets.

    A British Columbia company says in newly published research that it’s doing just that — and for less than one-third the cost of other companies working on the same technology.

    “This isn’t a PowerPoint presentation,” said Steve Oldham of Carbon Engineering. “It’s real.”


    As policy-makers work on ways to try to keep global warming within the two-degree limit of the Paris agreement, fears have been raised that carbon dioxide emissions won’t be cut fast enough. Some say carbon will have to be actively removed from the atmosphere.

    In an article published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Joule, Carbon Engineering outlines what it calls direct air capture in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere through a chemical process, then combined with hydrogen and oxygen to create fuel.

    “If these aren’t renewable fuels, what are?” said David Keith, professor of applied physics at Harvard University, lead author of the paper and principal in Carbon Engineering.

    At least seven companies worldwide are working on the idea. Swiss-based Climeworks has already built a commercial-scale plant.

    It costs Climeworks about US$600 a tonne to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering says it can do the job for between US$94 and US$232 a tonne because it uses technology and components that are well understood and commercially available.

    “We’re tapping into existing industrial equipment and then defining a new process and applying some unique chemistry to it,” said Oldham.


    Carbon Engineering’s plant in Squamish, B.C., currently pulls about one tonne of carbon a day from the air and produces about two barrels of fuel. Since its components are off the rack, it should be easy to scale up, Oldham said.

    “We’ve bought the smallest scalable unit of each piece of technology we have.”

    Carbon Engineering’s fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil. Oldham said work is being done to reduce that.

    Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said.

    That footprint would shrink further if the plant were all-electric. And if it ran on wind- or solar-generated electricity, the fuel would be almost carbon neutral.

    Long-distance transportation would welcome such fuel, suggested Keith.

    “Solar and wind power have got amazingly cheap, but only in really great sites and only when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. That cheap power doesn’t magically make an airplane go from Winnipeg to Halifax.

    “What you need is a way to make a fuel in a place where you’ve got really cheap low-carbon power, and that will power the airplane. That’s the core idea here.”

    Putting a price on carbon has been crucial to Carbon Engineering’s development, said Oldham.

    “We would not be in business if carbon pricing did not exist.”

    Carbon Engineering’s next step is to build a full-scale plant. That’ll take about 2 1/2 years, said Oldham.

    One of the great benefits of making fuel from air is energy independence, said Oldham.

    “Any country, any region, can have its own fuel. They’d be no longer dependent on the geopolitical situation if Country X has oil and Country Y does not.”

    http://business.financialpost.com/co...aking-fuel/amp

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    Administrator Mark (Star Mariner)'s Avatar
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    Default Re: Carbon Capture Tech Advance

    Thought I'd post this here. A breakthrough definitely worth reporting.

    Researchers Find Low-Cost Way To Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

    AUGUST 5, 2020

    Catalysts speed up chemical reactions and form the backbone of many industrial processes. For example, they are essential in transforming heavy oil into gasoline or jet fuel. Today, catalysts are involved in over 80 percent of all manufactured products.

    A research team, led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with Northern Illinois University, has discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product and low cost. Ethanol is a particularly desirable commodity because it is an ingredient in nearly all U.S. gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries.

    “The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide.” — Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division and a UChicago CASE scientist.

    “The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide,” said Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division and a UChicago CASE scientist in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago. This process would do so by electrochemically converting the CO2 emitted from industrial processes, such as fossil fuel power plants or alcohol fermentation plants, into valuable commodities at reasonable cost.

    The team’s catalyst consists of atomically dispersed copper on a carbon-powder support. By an electrochemical reaction, this catalyst breaks down CO2 and water molecules and selectively reassembles the broken molecules into ethanol under an external electric field. The electrocatalytic selectivity, or “Faradaic efficiency,” of the process is over 90 percent, much higher than any other reported process. What is more, the catalyst operates stably over extended operation at low voltage.

    “With this research, we’ve discovered a new catalytic mechanism for converting carbon dioxide and water into ethanol,” said Tao Xu, a professor in physical chemistry and nanotechnology from Northern Illinois University. “The mechanism should also provide a foundation for development of highly efficient electrocatalysts for carbon dioxide conversion to a vast array of value-added chemicals.”

    More: https://www.naturalblaze.com/2020/08...quid-fuel.html
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    Default Re: Carbon Capture Tech Advance

    Here's another story of another breakthrough that the MSM choose to ignore. God forbid they report on good news. If it doesn't control us, dispirit us, or frighten us, then it is of little use as a headline.

    Wireless device makes clean fuel from sunlight and water

    London, August 25

    Researchers have developed a standalone device that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into a carbon-neutral fuel, without requiring any additional components or electricity.

    The device, developed by a team from the University of Cambridge in the UK, is a significant step toward achieving artificial photosynthesis - a process mimicking the ability of plants to convert sunlight into energy.

    It is based on an advanced 'photosheet' technology and converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and formic acid - a storable fuel that can be either be used directly or be converted into hydrogen.

    The results, published in the journal Nature Energy, represent a new method for the conversion of carbon dioxide into clean fuels. The wireless device could be scaled up and used on energy 'farms' similar to solar farms, producing clean fuel using sunlight and water.

    Harvesting solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel is a promising way to reduce carbon emissions and transition away from fossil fuels. However, it is challenging to produce these clean fuels without unwanted by-products.

    "It's been difficult to achieve artificial photosynthesis with a high degree of selectivity, so that you're converting as much of the sunlight as possible into the fuel you want, rather than be left with a lot of waste," said first author Dr Qian Wang from Cambridge's Department of Chemistry.

    More: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/sc...r-study-131219
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    Default Re: Carbon Capture Tech Advance

    I expect that these systems/devices will either, a: Never see the light of day. b: Be bought up lock, stock and barrel by an existing petro-chemical company, or c: The inventors, patent holders will be scared/paid-off into obscurity.

    That's usually the play-book.

    I know a man who had an illustrious career as a chemical engineer. A couple of years after retirement he busied himself with an idea that he had held for quite a long time, how to solve the problem of disposing of car tyres. Presently they are either buried, stored in massive 'mountains' or in some cases burnt (illegal). In a lot of developing countries these tyre mountains also help spread diseases such as malaria, as when it rains the water collects inside the rim of the tyre, becomes stagnant and the perfect breeding-ground for mosquitos.

    He came-up with a process, and the machinery, where-by a tyre was fed into one end of the machine/process, and at the end what came out was oil (re-usable) and steel (re-usable). Win-win situation, you'd think.

    He managed to raise private finance to build a 50% sized working prototype in Holland (I believe) to test the process further and show-case it to potential investors to enable him to take it world-wide.

    When I last saw him in 2016 he looked like a broken man. I sat with him in a pub beer garden and listened to what had happened, you can probably guess. Harassment, threats, false accusations, manufactured financial problems, etc, etc. He had poured every penny of his retirement fund into the project when other investors had come on-board (he now thought that these 'investors' where actual agents of some kind to help speed his demise) and was left virtually penniless.

    It is a sick, sick system we live in.
    May your Spirit stay unbroken, may you not be deterred.

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