New Material Can Scrub Carbon Dioxide Right Out of the Air at Unprecedented Rates

So we could line the inside of exhaust pipes with this that would be sweet

about time, cheers

yea but by the time the implement it we would all read be using energy that is not-polluting.

@dorin, actually we still haven't created a feasible method of harnessing some kind of green energy. that's one of the problems that we have. petroleum and coal have been such a used resource for the sole reason that they have a freaking amazing energy coefficient. hydrogen is like 40 times less as hot when burning the same amount of mass.

this is an insanely good invention and i would personally invest in making sure it gets to market asap. it's not a cure all by any means, it's kinda like plants, it can't exactly destroy the carbon dioxide or neutralize it into carbon and oxygen, but it can store it in a safe and in this case effective container.

if we really wanted to fix the carbon dioxide problem we would look into some kind of electrolysis that could tear the oxygen off of the carbon. it could be run at a higher efficiency at the sites that we sequestered the carbon dioxide. creating jobs, saving the world, and costing millions to use.

but we still shouldn't leave the look for a different fuel alone. we are running out of petroleum at an exponential rate eventually there won't be any more, personally i think that we will see a resurgence to nuclear energy as we find that the alternatives just aren't as effective as petroleum or coal. i would be for it, but i think that we would need to make sure it was safe, we already do a lot to make nuclear power plants safe but in all reality there is very little accountability to keep things from going wrong.

fukushima is a good example of this, there was little in the way of accountable operation in a safe manner no matter what the cost was. which is why we now have another radiation zone in japan. i believe that with the proper associations we can make sure that the power plants are not only structurally sound but are run in a manner that can avoid disaster.

to mars or bust!

Maybe we don't want to clean the CO2?
popsci article human-co2-emissions-could-avert-next-ice-age-study-says

@JPB

yeah, agreed ^^ i like it warm too ^^

---
bored? lets go mine the stars... ^^

You saw it here first - global warming ended by the never before discussed anywhere in the blogosphere technique, I modestly call it Sethquestering.

Sethquestering uses dirt cheap clean and green nuclear power, now approaching $1B/GW with factory production ramping up in China.

It would take about 70 nukes running 24/7 built in Greenland, Ellesmere Island or Antarctica to turn 1 PPM of atmospheric CO2 into 1 cu mile of dry ice. A coupla of canyons filled with dry ice should do'er. To take us down 40 ppm to the recommended 350 ppm over the ten years we'd need to build the 10000 nukes costing $10000B replacing fossil fuels world wide, would take roughly 300 nukes temporarily tasked. When the job was done the dry ice would be layered over with ice, one or two of the nukes would be used to keep it all frozen, and the rest assuming the units are MSR's transported south on barges.

Hopefully, those future nuke builds will use GenIV reactors requiring our corrupt politicians all on Big Oil's payroll, to end their thieving treasonous ways.

Faint hope, I know but perhaps somebody in the US (hello Dr. Chu are you listening?) will now get behind the US invented nuke waste burning Molten Salt Reactor. We can spent $100B's on weapons R&D but we have nothing for something as fundamental as the nation's power and the Sethquestered end of the global warming.

David LeBlanc at the U of Ottawa has redesigned the Molten salt reactor as a nuke waste burning DMSR which would resolve all safety and cost issues with nuclear. This tech was actually built and ran in a reactor for many years - even flown around on an airplane. By using existing nuclear waste for fuel it could power the world for hundreds of years.

All it needs is $5B, 5 years, and a place to build em , and factory produced units would be streaming out fast enough to eliminate fossil fuels 5 years later.

Nuke waste could be remanufactured into DMSR fuel right at existing nuke sites.

Call your politicians and ask them if all that Big Oil graft is enough pay to sell out their country.

Funny, try as we might, we just can't match nature. If you want to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, plant a tree - still the finest CO2 scrubber ever invented, and completely harmless (beneficial, actually) to the environment.

If it works in the open enviroment, we could just make things out of it. Packaging that was recycled would absorb CO2 over it's many lifespans. Those superthin shopping bags at the market would provide lots of surface area.

I wonder if it needs lots of time and movement to fully saturate as the solution of CO2 in air is low. Then having a thin sheet out and about, moving around, would be ideal. I have a hard time believing it would remove enough CO2 to be worth it.

It would be great if there was a valid reason to recycle all the packaging that is now thrown away. 100% packaging recycling would be doable if the packaging itself gained in value by absorbing CO2.

Good news for space suits.

This is better then putting some kind of carbon dioxide eliminating gas in the atmosphere that could have catastrophic chains of events.

Seems like it would be much more beneficial to just stop cutting down the almost 50,000 acres of trees we cut down worldwide every day. That would scrub quite a bit of CO2 and release oxygen in addition to a host of other benefits.

Making common items out of this material, as PhillnYork suggests, seems like a good approach, at least at first. Then I remembered they also said the material can be caused to easily give up its absorbed CO2 without specifying what the trigger is. If the trigger is something that may be encountered fairly commonly, we could just end up with grocery bags, packing materials, etc. absorbing but soon releasing C02 for no net useful gain.

@Ghost: You do have a process for tearing oxygen off carbon. I.e. CO2 + 3H2 -> CH2 + 2H2O. (It's a combined reverse water-gas shift and a fischer-tropsch.)

If you do efficient high-temperature electrolysis with nuclear plants (or less efficient ordinary electrolysis with wind power) and can do efficient scrubbing of CO2 from the atmosphere, you can, in effect, recycle CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels. (You can go on from CH2 to create high-quality gasoline or diesel.) You wouldn't need to use fossils anymore.

A problem with this is cost. Even if you sequester and electrolyse effortlessly, the chemical process obviously waste two thirds of the hydrogen (energy).

Well, considering it is a proven fact CO2 is NOT a green house gas this is stupid. CO2 acts as a buffer and is "plant food". The more there is...the bigger plants get. Get a grip...all this nonsense was done for one thing and one thing only...CONTROL OF THE PEOPLE! The evidence is overwhelming the numbers were manipulated. www.climatedepot.com

Here's an alternative power source, How about nuclear FUSION instead of this highly radioactive fission crap. Plus there is an abundant source of tritium and deuterium. If the governments would actually invest money into this technology instead of "clean coal", and the wars over oil in other countries, we'll get a reliable source of power that doesn't have all the side effects of digging for uranium and the storage of all the spent rods.

Another huge plus is that any waste that is left behind will have the same radioactivity as coal ash in about 300 years (a hell of a lot better than uranium's half-life, don't you think?).

Hello, I am a young scientest already working on a new invention that will incorprate this new material. This new invention wil fit onto the exhaust pipe of cars and will scrub the carbon dioxide out of the fumes from your exhaust pipe. If you would like to contribute to my project then please feel welcome to E-Mail me at mhjordan77@ahoo.com.