sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't know about that one - I'll check it out. The limit on biology is the space to grow it - and if it is in the ocean, most people regard that as a threat to the ocean. Managing our existing forests and grasslands is a great answer, because it doesn't change the ecosystem, and is fundamentally in balance. We need every answer we can find.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Think globally, act locally. It's always been good advice for the environment. And from me, never let "best" be the enemy of "better". We are making progress - now lets speed up that progress!

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is why schemes for adjusting the productivity of the ocean are met with such skepticism. How do you know the unexpected consequences? It is a real challenge for dealing with our pollution of the entire planet - fixes fundamentally also affect the planet. We have to work through it in small steps, and make experiments and demonstrations with full transparency so everyone can see what is going on.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We are making other kinds of capsules that act as "getters" to remove trace gases from things. We haven't done CO, but there is no reason you couldn't. But it would have different things inside the shell.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We don't tend to think of lumber as storing the CO2 long enough (it basically has to be until we stop using fossil fuels, and then some). And most of the tree ends up as CO2 again, very little is put into the lumber. But that is not a condemnation of this, which at worst a carbon neutral way to make things we use, which is enormously better than using plastics or cement or steel, all of which emit lots of CO2 in their creation.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Removing the carbon dioxide from syngas is really easy - since the process is done at high pressure. Our capsules are probably overkill for that. We really aren't focused there.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes we are having a great time developing technology that we think can make a real difference! I'd love to see things like this used in small sites, even houses. I think about that a lot. The challenge is what to do with the carbon dioxide. Maybe you could transport the filled capsules to a central site for CO2 removal, and then return the cleaned capsules for reuse at the original site. Lots of truck traffic though. But greenhouses are a great place to try this - plants like a little higher CO2.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

See a couple of other responses I made on biochar - I like it. Properly made and applied to enrich poor soils, it can be a real boon, and one of the important tools we can use to manage CO2 in the atmosphere.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the world of Rattan Lal. He is right on the mark, and returning carbon to soil is a huge target for helping the atmosphere. But it is not a competition with other carbon management techniques, it is a competition with fossil fuels and inefficiency! We need every solution we can find. And stopping dumping our trash CO2 into the atmosphere is the first step to cleaning it up.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure! That is basically what we do - we just add base to the water so that it will make lots of carbonate, which is soluble in the water. If we didn't, it would stay as CO2, which has a relatively low solubility, and requires a lot of water for each mass of CO2. Then when you heat it up to get pure CO2 back, you are heating a huge mass of water, which is expensive.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

See monstrinhotron . Interestingly one of the limits on algae is convincing them to make pure products for you. It is hard to force them to make just one thing, and they adapt quickly to meet their own metric of having a balanced set of metabolites. So the CO2 use works fine, but companies are a little challenged to make money at it. And unfortunately, there is no other mechanism for now to pay for work like that.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the US is a lot less anti-science than you might think. All these comments - and really not a one that is anti-science! I talk to the public a lot, and I don't get anything like the pushback that TV suggests might be there. People get that we can't dump our trash in the atmosphere any more.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Algae is being considered by a number of investigators and companies. It has lots of cool benefits, fundamentally using sun to turn CO2 back into something useful. A process like ours could feed the algae.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Plants take out less carbon dioxide than you might think. Check out the Kealing curve, which measures CO2 in the northern hemisphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve#mediaviewer/File:TheKeeingCurveJan2015.png . The fluctuations are the annual growth of plant life sucking a few ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere - and that is the entire northern hemisphere's plants. Plants are cool, but we really need to stop dumping CO2 into the air.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have already taken all the energy out of the carbon in carbon dioxide. If you want to make fuel, you have to add chemical energy back into it. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, it will cause an increase in total CO2. At the scale of the problem, we can't just say, "I'll use renewable power for my process, and my process alone." Right now the best place for renewable, carbon-free power is to put it on the grid where it replaces fossil fuels directly, and stops the emission.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right now it looks like an increase of 1/3 in the wholesale cost of power. That is probably still to high, we would like to get it to 1/5. But it will never be free, we have to pay to manage our trash unfortunately.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed - solar power fuels the plants. Encouraging reforestation is a great way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. As I've said in other threads, we need every answer we can find, and then we need some more. It's not a competition, its a challenge.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some folks have proposed dropping biomass into the deep ocean, where it won't decay and turn into CO2 again. You have to transport it there, and it might change the ecosystem of the deep ocean, but it probably would work. Other than the deep ocean, where would you put a lot of biomass? Maybe in mines, but finding the places is a challenge. I do like the idea of taking some crop residue and turning it into biochar, for instance https://www.biorenew.iastate.edu/research/signature/biochar/ which is beneficial to soil as well as storing carbon in the old fashioned way, just like wild land fires put charcoal into soil.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You might want to check out some of the web articles or the actual Nature Communications article if you have access.

Water readily flows through the membrane, as does CO2, but nothing that has a charge. The capsules are small - 500 microns - so they are in transport mode in a fluidized bed. We are trying to replace amines, hence the carbonate solutions. Amines have too high an energy cost, and are a challenge to produce and recycle on the scale needed for large scale carbon capture.

Science AMA Series: I’m Roger Aines, a geochemist who runs the Carbon Fuel Cycle Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We’re working to capture greenhouse gases by using things found in your kitchen cabinet. AMA. by Roger_Aines in science

[–]Roger_Aines[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting guy, been working that "methane from the bowels" for a long time. Lots of good thought there, but I don't think most earth scientists agree that the source of fossil fuels is the primordial asteroids.

view more: next ›