Their goal is to quickly identify materials capable of effectively removing carbon dioxide from factory emissions, before they exit the chimneys into the atmosphere and further contribute to global warming
Chemist Jeffrey Long, from the University of Berkeley, leads a diverse team of researchers whose goal is to rapidly identify materials capable of effectively removing carbon dioxide from factory emissions, before they exit the stacks into the atmosphere and further contribute to global warming.
The researchers are betting on a recently discovered family of materials called "metal-organic frameworks", materials that boast the largest internal surface area. If you form and flatten a piece of such material, the size of a sugar cube, it will be possible to cover an entire football field with it. Also, the crystalline material can be adjusted so that it can adsorb certain particles to it. The idea is to engineer this highly porous compound into a kind of "hungry sponge" material that absorbs carbon dioxide.
The researchers hope to find this coveted material within the next three years, and possibly even sooner. To this end, they are developing an automatic system capable of simultaneously synthesizing hundreds of such substances, and then they will scan them to find the most promising candidates to further improve their activity.
"Our innovative process should be a hundred times faster than existing methods," says the lead researcher. "We need to quickly find the next generation materials, capable of capturing and releasing carbon dioxide without consuming a lot of energy."
Carbon capture is the first step in carbon capture and storage - a strategy to reduce climate change - which involves pumping trapped compressed carbon dioxide from large stationary reservoirs and injecting it into underground rock structures capable of storing it for extended periods of time. Many scientists, including the research team of the UN's international climate change program, believe that this technology is the key to curbing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, such as: coal and natural gas will probably still remain abundant and cheap energy sources in the coming decades - despite the ongoing development of alternative energy sources.
Carbon capture and storage methods are being tested on a large scale in only a small number of places in the world. One of the biggest obstacles to the industrial application of the method is the energy costs associated with it. Today, carbon dioxide capture materials, such as liquid amine materials, alone utilize thirty percent of the energy consumed in the plant.
To overcome this obstacle, scientists will look for alternatives that can operate repeatedly with low energy costs. This is a slow and tedious process. Promising materials, such as organometallic scaffolds, come in millions of forms, and only a few will succeed in capturing carbon. Finding the best material can take years.
However, this situation may change. "We are interested in running the detection process quickly and finding materials that consume only ten percent of the plant's energy," says the chief researcher. A computerized machine will automatically synthesize hundreds of organometallic skeletons and an X-ray diffraction test method will be used as the initial screening step to find suitable new materials. In the next step, a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) testing method will locate the materials with the most suitable pore size for capturing carbon dioxide.
In the next step will come the most important test: will the material be able to capture carbon dioxide from a chimney? Using state-of-the-art equipment, specially built for this purpose, a test of gas absorption will be performed to obtain the answer to this question. This equipment will be accompanied by computerized calculations that will scan the received information and help focus the next round of syntheses. Promising materials will undergo further evaluation to determine if their production cost is too high for commercialization. "We wouldn't want to find a promising material and then find out that the cost of producing it is so high that no one will use it," explains the researcher.
"We need to find the optimal range of organometallic chassis for each and every factory," the researcher points out. "Ultimately, this research will lead to the production of materials that are viable for industrial testing and their commercialization."
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The simple solution is based on extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into alcohol in a chemical process that has been known for years... When the abundance of alcohol is available there are two options: refueling cars or giving the population free alcoholic drinks and thus everyone will forget about the ecological problems..
What is the connection between the amazing film and the porous material
In addition to all humanity's crimes against the environment, a new crime has been added.
Capturing CO2 and not releasing it into the atmosphere is an act that will not be done. The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is a constant size.
It is recycled by the photosynthesis of the plants. Today the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is between 19-21%. If the oxygen is not recycled, within a year the oxygen in the atmosphere will run out.
So all those who want to reduce CO2 should burn less fuel and let the plants repair what they burned.
I hope irresponsible scientists don't start making CO2 traps.
The logical solution is to plant trees and lots of them.
A solution to virtual problems. Waste of time, energy and money.
The public will pay.
Get a free idea:
Above each chimney or next to it there will be a wind station and / or a solar station that will be able to generate electricity for a generator that will be connected to the compressor. All the air contaminated with large amounts of PADH and other explosives will be pumped by the compressor into compressed balloons (diving balloons, for example, reach two hundred atms, I suppose there are better technologies).
Now (and this is where I think the important idea is), the same compressed air that may also change the state of accumulation to liquid at this time, is transferred to special greenhouses that are built to receive high amounts of PDH and in which the growth rate and biomass production are higher. During the release of the gas, by the way, it is also possible to generate energy and move a turbine or something with it.
If there is too much pollution and too few greenhouses that consume it (it seems to me that at the rate of global growth this coupling is necessary to feed the masses, but anyway - that is not what we are dealing with now), this gas can be buried in mineral fuel deposits in the depths of the sea and return the carbon to where it came from He came to us. There, at this depth and at these pressures, it may liquefy or react with the environment and bond. In any case, these reservoirs are relatively closed and what goes in does not come out if it is not taken out.
It is possible to insert a pipe on one side and with the pressure created in the body of the ore use less energy for pumping.
The details are unknown and a lot of R&D is needed here, but it seems to me that it might pay off for everyone. Especially the coupling of PADH and dedicated greenhouses. As we all remember - Rubisco is a competitive enzyme between carbon and oxygen. High concentrations of carbon will increase the fixation efficiency and the net of the biomass.
Greetings friends,
Ami Bachar