Nanocopper CO2 catalyst û???? 2

[jmw]

From MIT comes news of a new paper claiming that nanocopper catalysts can help convert CO2 to CH4......

This seems a bit like perpetual motion to me. You burn fuel (including CH4) and get CO2 and H2O etc. and then convert the CO2 back into fuel?

But the claim is that it will reduce greenhouse gases.... well not really. Methane is also a greenhouse gas.... that's why all the fuss about cow farts. Except presumably it will get converted straight back into CO2 when used as a fuel again.....

If this were from the usual sources with fancy graphic web sites and a list of directors that outnumber everyone else and calls for investment I'd know where I stood. But MIT and a link patent? And unless the original press release was on the 1st of April and not the 11th.......
Oh my head hurts. I'm off to the pub.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[imagitec]

My browser must be broken, because when I clicked on the link, it took me to a feel-good, for-the-layman article about research being done at MIT and not the Nigerian-prince sponsored perpetual motion machine that jmw's link was supposed to take me to.

Nanoparticles get a lot of press because they're cutting edge, and the press (and universities' press offices) don't do a stellar job on hard science (do you expect them to)? But that doesn't mean nanoparticles and this application in particular are cow farts. It's advanced research for sure, but isn't that what universities are for?

I'm just a dumb mechanical engineer, but I've been fortunate to work on a project recently with scientists and chemical engineers on a lab reactor for producing a certain kind of nanoparticle for a certain application. Thanks to this, I now understand (though am by no means expert) what is meant by the shorthand of "nanoparticle" when someone uses it.

It's a given that copper can be used in a process to convert CO2. That's not open for debate or the claim of the article. Nor is there a claim of water running uphill*. It's not even that nanoparticles require less energy than bulk copper to convert CO2. It's that these particular nanoparticles require less energy than those nanoparticles over there.

Why are copper nanonparticles more efficient than bulk copper at converting CO2? It comes down to surface area, which is the same property of nanoparticles the scientists are taking advantage of in the project I'm working on. As a (poor) analogy, it's said that Vermont would be bigger than Texas if you could just iron out all the wrinkles. It's curvature, baby.

Why are these particular copper nanoparticles more efficient than other copper nanoparticles? Because they include gold nanoparticles which help prevent the copper corrosion we're all familiar with, on the nanoscale. Corroded copper, nano or otherwise, does a poor job of reacting with CO2.

So what's the big deal? They're just making itty bitty bits of pure metal. You could turn them out all day long if I just gave you a small enough lathe, right? Well, give it a try. One of the challenges with producing nanoparticles in bulk is that they like to stick together and stop being nano (agglomeration). Not to mention controlling a mixture at such a tiny scale.

Of course, nano technology is all the rage these days. Nano-technology, catalysts, gold doped copper, green - it's a dead cert to win some of Obama's cash.

The people who published this paper should be run out of MIT on a rail.

Based on this and similar threads, I guess talk radio has come to eng-tips.com. Where can I get in on some intelligent design vs. evolution action?

Rob

* Of course, they waited til the fourth paragraph to explicitly state that input energy was required and that this was not a perpetual motion machine. What cons! Think of all the people who were duped because they stopped reading at the fourth paragraph. All legitimate scientific articles should begin with a disclaimer that perpetual motion machines are not possible, otherwise the natural assumption is that that is what they're selling.

 

[imagitec]

But let's not blame the MIT news department. The blame lies with the researchers:

Quote:
Co-author Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli of MIT says the findings point to a potentially energy-efficient means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from powerplants.

"You normally have to put a lot of energy into converting carbon dioxide into something useful," says Hamad-Schifferli, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and biological engineering. "We demonstrated hybrid copper-gold nanoparticles are much more stable, and have the potential to lower the energy you need for the reaction."

There is no reason to doubt the second part of the statement, that a catlysed reaction will be more efficient than other methods to dispose of CO2. But it requires some leap to believe it will lead to more energy efficient power generation. More than a leap.

It can't.

I'm shocked - shocked - that a researcher is talking about potential applications of their research.

However, the researcher can't be blamed for your poor reading comprehension. The article as a whole does not claim it can lead to more energy efficient power generation. Nor does the text you quote, just before you suggest it does. It only states that if this type of carbon sequestration (I'm using the term imprecisely) is implemented on a power plant, it will require less energy than if this type of carbon sequestration is implemented without the benefit of these particular nanoparticles.

For the record, nuclear is the only practical near term option I see for significantly reducing CO2 emissions.

 

[jmw]

The article makes valid claims for the use of gold doped copper nanoparticles as a more energy efficient means to convert CO2 to CH4.
It would have been fine if it had been left at that.
But read again what Prof Kimberley is actually reported to have said.
An look at the way it has been interpreted in various media articles.
The whole article is a big so what.
Unless there is some important application somewhere where this has a pay off, it isn't in fossil fuel burning.
It isn't in reducing green house gases.

I think it is reasonable to expect that an institution such as MIT should take care to present research material in a clear and unambiguous way.
They have failed that.
Actually, I think it is a stretch to excuse this article and claim that it is being misrepresented.

It's there in the second paragraph:

Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants:

This is an energy consuming process.

The outcome is valueless.

If they had some magic means to convert CO2 to N2, then you'd be talking.
But CO2 is around 20 times less powerful as a greenhouse agent than the CH4 produced.
So how does that help?
This is a vicious cycle of CO2 to CH4 and back to CO2 again and consuming energy each time the CO2 is converted.

The advantage of copper nanoparticles, gold doped, is that they consume less energy that straight copper and last longer. And that's where the article should have stopped. Interesting, but WTF.

It's nice science but without any real benefit in the field in which they are talking it up.
It is still a process that consumes energy.
It doesn't destroy CO2 or CH4.
You always have one or the other.

So you can justify an expression claiming the development results in a process that is "more energy efficient" than straight copper, but you cannot justify any expression or intimation that there is some form of "energy efficiency" as an outcome and as applied to fossil fuel burning.

But:

Co-author Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli of MIT says the findings point to a potentially energy-efficient means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from powerplants.

Now that is nonsense. OK, in exactly what has been said, it is energy efficient. But you can't separate out the reduction of CO2 from the production of CH4, especially as this leaves you in a worse condition than when you started.

Now tell me again what I missed here.
Tell me that this isn't what was explicitly alleged to have been said by prof Kimberley.
Tell me where this leads to more efficient energy use than simply releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere.




JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[moltenmetal]

"I'm shocked - shocked - that a researcher is talking about potential applications of their research."

So am I. I'm shocked that the "potential application", no doubt also the one they used in their grant application to fund the work in the first place, was so blatantly foolish. Sadly, it is less of a shock that the work itself was funded: what with the two research worship phrases "nanotechnology" and "CO2 emission reduction" both being present, it was a shoe-in.

It doesn't matter if their process takes less energy than some other process that also consumes substantially more than the ENTIRE output of the "power plant" it would be fitted to. The approach of reducing CO2 from a fuel-burning appliance back to FUELS is a total non-starter, which anyone with more than a passing knowledge of chemistry should understand immediately. The comments section of the article indicate that JMW and I were not alone in this feeling. The claim was either entirely disingenuous or the people making the claim are totally clueless.

If they were targeting partial reduction products of some value such as formic acid or formaldehyde, perhaps they'd be on to something, and perhaps their research will lead them there. But their stated targets are highly reduced species such as methane, ethylene and perhaps, at a stretch, methanol. Making any of these, with the possible exception of methanol, starting with CO2 as a feedstock, is highly questionable at best.

 

[KENAT]

Hey, quit knocking nanotechnology you lot, it's been paying my bills for several years now.:-(

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[jmw]

Heck, no one's knocking nanotechnology, just the researchers who are trying to parlay a "so what" piece of research into a planet saver so they can claim a bunch of the US taxpayer's money.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[KENAT]

It's not just US taxpayers.

We sell a lot of instruments to Europe for this kind of research. Quite a lot to Asia Pacific (inclucing China) thought a lot of that is for industrial use as well).

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[jmw]

You mean you will be flogging this CO2 to CH4 route around Europe? That's what the tax payers will be subsidising, not simply nanotechnology but specifically nanotechnology for this objective.


JMW

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[KENAT]

I won't be, I'll be helping to design instruments to measure things at the nano-scale.

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[jmw]

Then you're one of the good guys who have to make their living honestly.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

JUST because you're a good guy DOESN'T mean that you HAVE to make your living honestly, only that you PROBABLY do ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E.
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Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

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UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[cranky108]

If we have a large amount of CH4, and the price is droping, why in the world do we need to make more?

Talked to a gas engineer the other day, and he said we do have enough CH4, the problem is it's in the ground. There isen't enough pipes and drilled wells to support an increase in gas usage to the likes of what some are wanting to do.

I still perfer using a solar conversion of CO2 to bio oil process.

 

[jmw]

Well this is a novel way to convert "fossil" fuel to Methane. Burn it to get the CO2 and then convert the CO2 to methane. Love it. It should make a killing on the stock market.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

Or, you separate the CO2 from the atmosphere and convert that to methane. That's good too. And do we get more energy from the methane than we put into creating it? Must do for this to be a useful idea.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[cranky108]

Not really. Just leave off a few zeros in the calculations, convence investers, sell your shares early, and take the company bankrupt. Worked for Selendra.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

cranky108

Please don't mention Solyndra, it gets my blood pressure up. No one I have ever met in the solar industry thought they stood a chance. Even in the years before the DOE investment, if you asked almost any well informed scientist/engineer in PV, they would have told you Solyndra was a loser. But, for some reason, the government doesn't seem to have asked the right people, or they ignored them when they did answer.

I know, it's not exactly shocking that the government could screw something like this up, but the whole debacle has really hurt the image of the PV industry in the US, and at this point we seem to be ceding the whole thing to the Chinese. Which is a shame, because where I stand I see very real promise in the technology.

 

[StoneCold]

I think we should be happy that at least one person in America is doing research. Even if the claims are bad. Most articles you read are about Japanese or Chinese researchers. It is embarrassing.

Regards
StoneCold

 

[KENAT]

You are joking right StoneCold? There's lots of 'research' being done in the US. Now much of it is done by students originally from some of the countries you mention but it is done in the US.

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[jmw]

The problem is that once the research is done and the products designed, they shift manufacture off to China.... it's where all the wind turbines etc. are being manufactured either in association with the originating manufacturer or as a straight copy.

If we are expected to pay through the nose in subsidies for wind turbines you'd think government would insist on spending that money domestically. But the UK Gov. has spent its money with Dutch firms (who now have to hunt abroad since their own country came to its senses) and they have closed their European factories and now manufacture in China.

So we lose whatever.

But I long ago stopped expecting anything useful, sensible or even wanted, to be done by Governments.



JMW

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[KENAT]

jmw - that would the 'merican in you coming out.

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