Chemical Engineers Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Useful Industrial Materials (phys.org) 52
"Chemical engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed new technology that helps convert harmful carbon dioxide emissions into chemical building blocks to make useful industrial products like fuel and plastics," reports Phys.org:
The researchers, who carried out their work in the Particles and Catalysis Research Laboratory led by Scientia Professor Rose Amal, show that by making zinc oxide at very high temperatures using a technique called flame spray pyrolysis (FSP), they can create nanoparticles which act as the catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into 'syngas' — a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used in the manufacture of industrial products. The researchers say this method is cheaper and more scalable to the requirements of heavy industry than what is available today...
"Syngas is often considered the chemical equivalent of Lego because the two building blocks — hydrogen and carbon monoxide — can be used in different ratios to make things like synthetic diesel, methanol, alcohol or plastics, which are very important industrial precursors," says Dr. Lovell, co-author of a paper published this week in Advanced Energy Materials. "So essentially what we're doing is converting CO2 into these precursors that can be used to make all these vital industrial chemicals..."
The researchers say in effect, they are closing the carbon loop in industrial processes that create harmful greenhouse gases... "The idea is that we can take a point source of CO2, such as a coal fired power plant, a gas power plant, or even a natural gas mine where you liberate a huge amount of pure CO2 and we can essentially retrofit this technology at the back end of these plants. Then you could capture that produced CO2 and convert it into something that is hugely valuable to industry," says Dr. Lovell.
"Syngas is often considered the chemical equivalent of Lego because the two building blocks — hydrogen and carbon monoxide — can be used in different ratios to make things like synthetic diesel, methanol, alcohol or plastics, which are very important industrial precursors," says Dr. Lovell, co-author of a paper published this week in Advanced Energy Materials. "So essentially what we're doing is converting CO2 into these precursors that can be used to make all these vital industrial chemicals..."
The researchers say in effect, they are closing the carbon loop in industrial processes that create harmful greenhouse gases... "The idea is that we can take a point source of CO2, such as a coal fired power plant, a gas power plant, or even a natural gas mine where you liberate a huge amount of pure CO2 and we can essentially retrofit this technology at the back end of these plants. Then you could capture that produced CO2 and convert it into something that is hugely valuable to industry," says Dr. Lovell.
Big deal... (Score:5, Insightful)
biological imperative (Score:3)
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The problem with this is that in order to be proper CO2 sequestration the crop should be buried, possibly in clay, and left underground for a few million years. As it is, producing bioplastics does only slow down the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, rather than actively reduce it.
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Converting CO2 into synthetic diesel or plastic and then using that doesn't really keep it away all that much either.
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Not if the material you grow is capable of being used as construction material, so hemp fibre glued togethor bits of fake timber, hemp grows fast as well (and you can sell the buds and leaves for extra profit). Double plus bonus, don't need to chop down trees any more, also does not need that much water, bonuses all round 'BUT' corporate greed must be served first, last and everything in between is it permanently patentable, no, BAN IT and use a more profitable highly polluting monopoly synthetic instead, i
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corporate greed must be served first, last and everything in between is it permanently patentable, no, BAN IT and use a more profitable highly polluting monopoly synthetic instead, it has been done before and specifically to hemp and by some cunt shit head establishment family connected to government by money.
We can do the hemp thing now, we could have done it twenty years ago but NOOO, psychopathic greed and an insatiable lust for more power and ego, comes first.
I call bullshit. If someone could turn hemp into timber and make a profit at it, they almost certainly would have. Alleging some vast conspiracy is preventing it from happening is just the wide-eyed rantings of a lunatic.
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Sure, go ahead, Trump made that legal two years ago. Surprise!
President Donald Trump signed the 2018 farm bill on Thursday afternoon, which legalized hemp â" a variety of cannabis that does not produce the psychoactive component of marijuana â" paving the way to legitimacy for an agricultural sector that has been operating on the fringe of the law.
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Yep. Because the only country in the world that has hemp and could figure this out is the good old USA. Too bad our stupid ban kept the whole world from being able to grow and use hemp.
Dolt.
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Put down the doobie long enough to look this up on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Growing hemp for rope and such has been legalized in the USA for years. The USA may be the largest producer of industrial hemp given the large growth in production in the last couple years.
Re: Big deal... (Score:1)
What's really needed is a concrete/cement-like substance that sucks CO2 from the air as it cures.
Basalt based cement (Re: Big deal...) (Score:3)
What's really needed is a concrete/cement-like substance that sucks CO2 from the air as it cures.
I've been seeing articles about basalt based cement many times over the years and it sounds like a promising technique to lower CO2 emissions from cement and concrete.
As it is done now the lime for cement is from limestone. Limestone is not lime until heated to the point that the CaCO3 becomes CaO and CO2, the CaO is the lime and the CO2 is released into the air. Basalt is a natural source of lime but not near as a convenient source. Limestone is a relatively soft rock that is far easier to break up and
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It's also back breaking work
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Corn isn't that useful except for people/animals eating it. Syngas can address other markets. Agricultural production also ties up land and consumes water. Lots of water.
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Burning food is a bad idea (Re:Big deal...) (Score:2)
Farmers and loggers have been doing it for centuries...
Yes, they have. What has also happened for centuries, for millennia really, is the collapse of civilizations when they start burning their food for fuel.
We didn't stop burning whale oil for lamps out of a lack of whales. What stopped that practice was access to kerosene. Also, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stones. It ended because people found better alternatives in copper and bronze, followed later by iron and steel.
Could the USA power it's current energy needs from farming and logging? We coul
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A lot of good thoughts there but I have to ask: why are you talking about energy, when TFA and my reply were about industrial materials - not energy?
Here's the first paragraph from the first linked article:
Chemical engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed new technology that helps convert harmful carbon dioxide emissions into chemical building blocks to make useful industrial products like fuel and plastics.
(The emphasis is my own.)
They want to make fuel and plastics from this process. The plastic we use today is from the same petroleum we use for fuel.
I wondered once where the ethane from petroleum goes. Methane is just natural gas by another name. Butane and propane mixed in various ratios is LPG. Pentane, hexane, octane, on up to cetane and a few longer carbon chains are used for gasoline, kerosene, fuel oil, and such. Longer chains are jellies,
No Free Lunch? (Score:3)
I don't get it. How is this process carbon neutral, much less carbon negative?
Did I miss something or is the amount of energy you get out of burning the synthesized fuel less than what you put into making it? If so what is the point?
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"I don't get it. How is this process carbon neutral, much less carbon negative?"
It could be, if the equipment was cheap enough, and you used solar power (which pays back the energy investment in about a tenth of its lifetime.)
But you'd do even better with biofuel from algae using solar power to run the mixing paddles and the pumps, because that is actually carbon-negative itself - some of the "waste" is carbon-based and can be used as fertilizer. Another option is methane from poop, which has the same benef
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How is this process carbon neutral
Because the same amount of carbon goes in as it goes out?
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I wonder if it could make use of waste heat from other industrial processes.
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And due to the second law of thermodynamics, you're likely creating more CO2 to generate the energy, than you're using up in the conversion powered by that energy.
That's absolutely not how it works. This would only apply if the way of creating that energy were 100% burning coal, because burning coal is the reverse of what you're attempting. But we have ways of generating energy that emit *much less* CO2 than burning coal.
As most of our forms of energy generation create CO2, most methods of "turning CO2 into useful materials" requires creating more CO2 to power the conversion process.
Let's say that generating the energy to convert 1 kg of CO2 into useful would require emissions of 0.1 kg CO2 from a wind or nuclear or solar plant. So you'd emit 0.1 kg of CO2 into the air, but simultaneously you'd convert another 1 kg of CO2 into p
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Less fossil fuel is dug up (Score:2)
Which means the natural environmental processes are given a chance to bury the excess and recover from the man made assault.
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I don't get it. How is this process carbon neutral, much less carbon negative?
If you take carbon dioxide that would have been released to the atmosphere, and use it (plus non-carbon chemicals and carbon-zero energy sources) to make fuel or chemical feedstocks, even if the product is all eventually burned to carbon dioxide and released you only release carbon that would have been released anyhow. So it's carbon neutral. (Meanwhile it's out of the atmosphere for a while.) If some of it never gets released,
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I don't get it. How is this process carbon neutral, much less carbon negative?
I agree, this is not carbon neutral. The problem lies in their mention of the use of power plants burning coal or natural gas as the source of carbon. If they use a "carbon free" energy source, like hydro, onshore wind, or nuclear, then that would help. Then they'd have to source the carbon from the environment. They can extract it from the air. They can extract CO2 dissolved in water that's exposed to the air. They could extract carbon from municipal and industrial waste.
Did I miss something or is the amount of energy you get out of burning the synthesized fuel less than what you put into making it? If so what is the point?
The point is getting fuels su
The study is interesting, but... (Score:3)
I'm getting tired of these university PR pieces being implicitly misrepresented as published research. Take a look at the byline and the end credit there - it's a PR piece put together by the University of New South Wales about research being done at their university.
PR pieces are fine... just represent them as such.
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93 Escort Wagon complained:
I'm getting tired of these university PR pieces being implicitly misrepresented as published research. Take a look at the byline and the end credit there - it's a PR piece put together by the University of New South Wales about research being done at their university.
PR pieces are fine... just represent them as such.
To be strictly fair, essentially none of the "articles" on phys.org are published research. All but a tiny handful are exactly like this one: press releases issued by press relations departments of an array of universities, research institutes, technology startups, government agencies, and the like, announcing everything from research initiatives to the recent or upcoming publication of articles to journals or preprint archives. So your complaint here would better be directed to p
No, not again (Score:2)
Indeed (Score:2)
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"Yes. Please demonstrate it."
He lives in Africa and it's a powerful stone.
No Tiger on the whole fucking continent.
https://roaring.earth/why-tigers-in-south-africa/
Altered Carbon (Score:2)
Sure, I'll play.
First, stop digging. (Score:2, Interesting)
When you find yourself in a hole the first thing you should do is stop digging. This technology is a nice variation on a theme since it's been done before. It sounds like the only real advancement above other techniques is the use of cheap zinc instead of the far more expensive palladium. I'm a bit baffled on why they intend to use this technology on captured exhaust gasses from power plants fired with coal or natural gas. They aren't taking the problem of CO2 in the air if they are still burning fossil
Syngas = CO + H2, where's the hydrogen from? (Score:2)
Natural Chemical Engineers (Score:2)
Already do that since a few billion years. We call them "plants".
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Yeah, you get carbon monoxide because that's a necessary component of syngas, which in turn is used to make other hydrocarbon compounds, after which you DON'T have carbon monoxide anymore. It's not like the CO is just being released into the atmosphere.
Plastic? (Score:1)
Really? We need more plastic? We're up to our eyeballs in plastic. Matter of fact there's probably micro plastic in the fluid around our eyes. Let's stop it people. No more water bottles. Drink tap water.