Carbon Capture and Sequestration 8

[awhicker84]

Hi all,

Is there a forum on this community dealing with carbon capture and sequestration?

This is a huge potential industry and we need it. I'd like to read up on the current engineering problems and solutions.

Thanks and cheers,

 

[HamburgerHelper]

I like the idea of putting something up to block some of the sunlight. I saw a proposal for a diffraction grating that cost to 10 billion to set it up and make it and 10 billion extra to maintain it. Blocking a little bit of the light is probably easier than trying to fix our atmosphere.

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[ornerynorsk]

The clairvoyance of The Simpsons yet again comes to the forefront.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[georgeverghese]

The writing has been on the wall ever since we got to see the Hubble's pictures on where we stand in the universe, if you ask me. All this huffing and puffing about global warming is just a small manifestation of the utter hopelessness of our attempts to wrest some "progress" out of Nature (at its expense) for Man's sole benefit. We will never escape our near neighbourhood in space, unless some one can prove Einstein wrong very soon. If and when we get to Alpha Centauri (in about 300 000 years or so ?) and see the desolation there, we'll realise all we have is this precious blue planet we live on. Like it or not, we've got to recognize our biological limitations and take our place in Nature, turn out the lights and go back to the Stone Age in 10 000BC, and get back to worshipping trees, if we dont want to choke and drown in our own puke on this planet. More and more of the puke we generate these days has a half life of no less than 10 000years to boot, and a fair bit of it is blowing in the wind in the desert in Iraq. Pardon me for this rant, but I had to get this off my chest. Dont let this stop you from your quest to seek out economical ways to sequester CO2.

 

[beej67]

You are right, some carbon is retained as organics in the soil, or indeed in the bodies of various organisms that feed on the rotting tree.

Anybody here know the ratio?

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[IRstuff]

for the most part, creatures excrete about the same amount that they ingest, so machts nichts as far as carbon sequestration. Obviously, their offspring do grow up and assimilate nutrients. But, this article

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

reports that insect biomass has decreased.

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[davefitz]

In the US, carbon sequestration is not practical, partly due to the fact that there are tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that were capped with a type of cement that eventually dissolves in the presence of carbolic acid, releasing the CO2 back to atmosphere. That acid would be formed if the CO2 were sequestered in areas drained by those wells. The main economic driver for carbon dioxide capture is for its ndustrial use , including tertiary oil recovery. In those cases, the CO2 is either directly leaked back to the atmosphere after its industrial use or would generate several times more CO2 when the recovered oil is later combusted.The idea that the CO2 is permanently sequestered is misleading and is used for public consumption. The current trend to use fracking to recover oil and gas would only worsen the rate of CO2 leakage from wells.

The most efficient process for CO2 capture is the Allam cycle, due to improvements in the cryogenic air liquifaction part of the cycle. If the demonstration project is successful, it would yet be more costly to build and less reliable than a conventional power cycle, due to the more complex configuration with many more opportunities for cycle components to fail.

The impact of anthropogenic combustion of carbon to CO2 is not the primary cause of recent warming, and those computer models that were used to justify that fear have been demonstrated to have exagerated the impact of CO2 on the tropospheric temperature by a factor of at least 3. In addition, those models did not properly consider the effect of clouds on the temperature of the lower atmosphere, which is another gross error of those models.

Recent work by Nir Shaviv and Henrik Svensmark demonstrates that a major cause of global climate change is the formation of clouds, and that rate of formation is related to available aerosols and their interaction with cosmic rays. Earth's exposure to cosmic rays changes based on the magnetic activity of the sun , and also the changing distance of the earht to the source of cosmic rays ( supernovas) over very long time periods . It is predicted that the current quiescence in sun magnetic activity will lead to global cooling over the next 20 yrs.

"...when logic, and proportion, have fallen, sloppy dead..." Grace Slick

 

[cranky108]

If the solution is grow more trees, then you need more water. Consider the complaints of runoff on the Mississippi delta, which appears that the water needed is available in the middle of the country, and not in the West (general areas).
Another erosion factor is the wind in the middle of the country, which at one time was a concern of the USDA, which at one time recommended planting of trees around large planting areas.
That planting is no longer recommended, and since then prices for crops have dropped.

Just saying.

 

[SuperSalad]

Well to be fair, I believe the idea of planting more trees would probably include the condition of planting them in areas that can naturally sustain forest growth.

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[GregLocock]

cranky - I did some work a long time ago on water retention by trees in the catchment zones of reservoirs. It is pretty complex. Basically we were able to demonstrate to the inquiry's satisfaction that if the water authority chopped all the trees down then the water collected in the reservoirs would drop, because science. Now, to be honest that was the conclusion we wanted, I think if the water people had put their minds to it that they could have produced some valid counter arguments (I could). But the optics were terrible, as the politicians would say.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[cranky108]

My point is that, while the west looks like more trees can be grown, the middle (area drained by the mississippi river) is a more likely area.
The problem is most of that area is farmland.

 

[SlideRuleEra]

In the US, modest scale reforestation has been proceeding for several years. The intent is not carbon capture / storage, but other benefits of reclaimed (former) forest land.
The program in the southeast that I'm familiar with is the Longleaf Pine Initiative.
The effort will never restore the historical 92 million acres of longleaf pine forest, but acreage has gone from 3 million acres a few years ago to over 4 million now.

For reference: In general, when engineers, and others, talk about "how good lumber was in the 19th century"... they are talking about longleaf pine.

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[ornerynorsk]

Also known as southern yellow pine by us Yankees, and yes, it was very good lumber.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.

 

[SuperSalad]

My apologies cranky108, it seems I misunderstood your original statement.

My take on it, we can't take back what's been done. I think he best and most effective solution we can implement is to adapt, learn from our mistakes, and keep on moving forward. The earth will take care of itself one way or another. Much of the "help" people want to implement is more likely to cause harm than good. Moving forward as a species and trying to minimize our impact the first time around would be the best policy rather than trying to get the cat back into the bag.

Pie in the sky? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.

Andrew H.

http://www.mototribology.com

 

[moltenmetal]

There's a distinct difference between old growth and plantation/new growth lumber irrespective of species. My own house had true old-growth white pine trim, and the difference between that lumber and modern plantation white pine lumber is more significant than the difference between lumber from several different species of tree. Modern plantation white pine is barely denser than balsa wood and you can easily dent it with a thumbnail- you could break your thumbnail on my trim without denting it.

 

[cranky108]

'Modern plantation white pine is barely denser than balsa wood and you can easily dent it with a thumbnail-'

Maybe you should try oak trim. You can bend a nail with that. Or should I say a modern nail (modern cheep crap).

Modern things just don't seem to be as good as the old stuff.

 

[moltenmetal]

I use oak, ash, cherry, even a little maple- and only use white pine when I need to make something cheap- but that isn't my point. The point is that the old growth wood, with closely spaced growth rings, is much more dense and stable material. So much nicer to work with it's like it was a different species entirely.

 

[hokie66]

Growth rate does affect wood hardness, but the bigger thing is probably moisture content. When it dries out, it gets harder.