Energy from Air While Removing CO2: How does it work?
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 4. 05. 2024
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Australian television outlets were recently raving over a supposed âworld-first breakthrough converting carbon dioxide into electricityâ. It's a device that takes carbon dioxide from the air and turns it into power. The TV people say the technology is ânot just carbon neutral but one step better, consuming CO2 and creating powerâ. Can this possibly be correct? Letâs have a look.
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s4146...
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So does this mean tney can turn the hot air from politicians into energy?
It might encourage them to talk more.
At least in the US, politicians are elected. Whoâs to blame?
Best comment
â@@jeffkilgore6320 Uh, the politicians who lie and gerrymander to trick people into voting for them? Duh?
we can make them turn a lever continuously while filibustering
As an Australian, Channel 7 has a reputation for not being very smart. It has a track record of not understanding the concept of fact checking. It has a reputation of posting information and then retracting it once the faults have been highlighted. There is a bumper sticker that asks, " Chanel 7, how many misidentifications have you done this week?" Thanks for the clarification Sabine.
Nobody at Channel 7 can spell thermodynamics, let alone articulate its relevance to this article.
Since I live in Australia, use CZcams, and consume news, the algorithm feeds me clips from Australian TV channels and some "news" organisations.
I've gradually clicked the "don't show me this channel" option for all but The Australian and the (Australian) ABC. Sorry about the tautology.
Not that I watch either much. It's not a balanced diet: one is ultra right and the other is centrist, so the balance is closer to dissonance, cognitively speaking.
I'm sure one or both will violate my news ethic sense at some point ...
Yeah our news/tv is painful sometimesâŠ
the target demographic is aging and prone to believing anything they get fed so comprehensive accuracy is a low priority.
Change Channel 7 to *_all Australian media_* Stopped watching that garbage back in 08 when I was still in High School.
@@Windswept7 I guess I'm in that demographic. I haven't turned on TV news for years. Maybe decades.
I watch some special events, but more and more of those are streamed, so the TV stays off.
In chemical engineering the term "absorption" means something different then what Sabine is using here. The paper says it: aDsorption.
Absorption describes the process of gas dissolving in a liquid, while Adsorption describes a fluid binding (chemically or physically) to a surface.
Thanks for clearing that up.
I dunno why, but listening to you makes understanding science easier. I've tried listening to a lot of others and my brain almost falls asleep instantly.
Thank you.
Yeah.. she's good at cutting straight to the point in plain language.
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Sometimes it's a pain but hearing that it's good for something makes it all worthwhile â€
I think it's easy to listen to is
1. Because she actually tells the important points in a short form instead of stretching it in a 90min lecture
2. She is good at changing the ... Betonung.. so Change Front a higher to lower voice from loader to more quite which keeps the mind attached
Other people often go in a monotone and dull voice if they talk about such topics there the mind easily wanders of
â@@tosendeelemente8948 "betonung"...what language is that?
@@TwisterTornado German.
Sabine is an ice cube who restores hot headlines to equilibrium ââ€ïž
not shure women like to be called ice cube,đ imagine call them that in front of their manđ€Ł
â@@robertpotvin8872 Huh?
@@nickcoul699you want to have an anwser,,tell you,re girl friend ,hey my love: you are a lovely ice cube,,,be carrefull,cause might hurt hard,đ€Ł
Sabine is a glass of warm water melting the icy headlines.
@@charlesbrowne9590 that,s betterđâlol
Cremation of bodies described as "burning the midnight oil"..
Yup, there flew my coffee LOL đ
What's the going price for the midnight crude benchmark?
The only good thing Aunt Mildred ever did for anyone.
Germany moment
@@delayed_control OK, but Sabine doesn't deserve that comment. It is more appropriate elsewhere.
man if I had a cent for every "groundbreaking" science news that popped and flopped out in the last 20 years....
You could probably fund a Manhattan Project.
You should notice that it is not the scientists that say such things.
It goes back a LOT longer than 20 years.
Science looks into the unknown. There have always been many failures for Evey success.
We just didn't have the internet to keep talking about it.
When a scientist discovered something, you heard about it once on the news. If it didn't work out, you never heard of it again.
Now you hear about the failures every day, for years sometimes, until it fails.
Nothing has changed, except how often we hear about it. đ€·ââïž
@@lordgarion514 Skull measurements, chiropractors, the HIV vaccine, self driving cars, the Satanic Panic, the Titanic, and red being a color associated with hunger.
I just spent 5 min remembering all the "groundbreaking" research, that I could, that was pushed by media organizations before the invention of the internet.
All of these, except for self driving cars, were later shown to be not "groundbreaking" (the Titanic may have been icebreaking). Self driving cars were mocked by media some years after it's first daybue in the Ford Futurama car expo. It's risen back to the title of "groundbreaking" lane assist.
Yes scientific failures exist and media will jump on a story if it gets clicks (before or after the hype).
Nothing has changed, except how often we hear about, how much we here about it.
đ€·ââ
I suppose if the carbon sponge is not destroyed when you take out the CO2 then it is marginally better than planting trees used for firewood.
If the carbon sponge can be built directly into the exhaust port of a power plant, it can have a higher CO2 concentration to work with than a forest a few miles from the power plant would. Higher concentrations might result in better absorption efficiency.
@@billberg1264 i wonder if it would work at a paper mill. They have built in power plants that burn their waste products to generate power.
carbon cost to manufacture this sponge?
It depends on how much energy it takes to desaturate the sponge, and what is done with the CO2. If firewood is used to heat a house instead of electricity, that is carbon-negative overall. If the wood is used to generate electricity, it *could be* even better (depending on how much CO2 is used to transport the wood, process the wood, etc).
I am afraid the CO2 sponge may be in some ways worse than a field of Arundo or miscanthus on the marginal land. 1. to regenerate the CO2 sponge you need to get the energy from somewhere, with plants this is already taken care of 2. having pure CO2 means nothing if you cannot lock it up. Pumping it underground usually means using boreholes left after oil extraction and hoping that there will be no leaks. Biomass is not optimal for the long term storage but it should be easier to convert to carbon or something else than CO2. And we get rhizomes and soil trapped carbon as well.
"Science isn't magic, but science has the advantage that it works."
Great quote!
5:15
Engineering is the art of making things that "work". Not science. Science is about acquiring knowledge, and confronting that knowledge to "reality".
@@joseoncrack Science is applying the scientific method. That is: asking questions, defining deferientiable options and testing them. Investigating the question: "how can we make this absorb more CO2?" is a perfectly reasonable scientific question an engineer will ask during the job. I would say Engineering is applying science to make stuff.
Hahaha... When I did my chemical engineering degree (in Australia no less) we only did one pure physics subject in the whole course... but as a materials engineer you have my 100% confidence to comment on any subject đ
FYI: All your courses were physics.
@@mikemondano3624 I am thinking that there are very diffrent ways to look at and perhaps comprehend what and how one chooses to perceive. There may be often be a useful way to use physics to describe a thing but if other description modes were not also useful they would not exist or exist for long.
In other places you're supposed to study quantum physics and physical chemistry on top of a basic physics course for a Chem Eng degree.
@@sourcerror Chemical engineering without the chemistry is "engineering".
@@luck484 Engineering is applied physics so engineering perceptions are also physics.
"It doesn't mean what tv peoples suggest it means" News channels seems to do this quite often with science type stuff.
And every other type stuff
Pretty much with everything. You only notice it however when they're talking about something you're knowledgeable on. And yet people still treat them as credible despite this.
That's because science is quite complex, especially for non-scientists, and explaining complex stuff to average people makes them get bored and look for entertainment elsewhere. But media needs the attention of the consumers to turn it into profit. So it's basically a human nature thing, combined with the circumstances given by capitalism.
Shhhh, Sabine. I've been telling folks all my life that chemical engineering is magic. (Not the other chemical engineers, of course.)
She said the quiet part out loud.
Brings a whole new meaning to (quite literally) vaporware
First real-life laugh from a youtube video in ages. RIP Mildred. GJ Sabine.
There is a well-researched, very efficient process that creates stored energy from solar energy, water, and the air while removing CO2: photosynthesis.
"very efficient" is a bit of a stretch. Solar cells are far more efficient than plants.
Sure, but photosynthesized sugars are tasty.
This is like one of my *brilliant* genius ideas that turns out to work, but not to the degree that I think it will, making it inefficient and not cost effective!
"Proper Australian accent" -- you are hilarious! đ Thank you!
But these papers claimed reversing entropy.
What do you think about this?
Experimental Demonstration of Energy Harvesting by Maxwell's Demon Device
And
An Autonomous Mechanical Maxwell's Demon
it sounded like a new zealand accent to me
@@hewaahmedmustafa8027 No, it's not. But Sabine recently made a video about such an observation, titeled "Aging is Reversible, in Glas"
@@lana_del_reiit was a New Zealand accent. I guess geography is not physics
But what do you expect from an Austrian!
@@lana_del_rei well then you're feckin deaf and I sincerely dislike you for spreading false info
Science may not be magic but it is the best show around...
Once the magic is understood it's "oh Wow, dude" factor is lost. The thrill only happens once.
Your body uses this same principle in many ways to store and release energy. Your body is constantly creating imbalances, then controlling/using the restoration of equilibrium.
There is very little in the body that is ever in equilibrium.
@@mikemondano3624 homeostasis would like a word
Poor Midlred, already ascended into pure energy.
I guessed that was a pun to talk about... photosynthesis.
Your comment is suspiciously like my first thought when I saw the headline; "Sounds like what trees do"
My first response within 10 seconds... um... nature's plants????
ItâSabine extremely rewarding to have subscribed to your channel.
Thanks for the insights here
explanations of papers like that are exactly why I'm watching you, thanks Sabine
I will be honest your analogy on the ice in water showing entropy just finally made it click in my mind. Thank you đđœ
Thanks for explaining this!!
Thank you for the video.
The ice water one reminds me of mixing cold and hot water. You can see this because the density of hotter and less hot water is not the same so light takes slightly different paths. The potential creates a swirling effect between the two until the temperature or energy states are equal.
As a chemical engineer, your assumption that my entire field is just physics is ... perfectly accurate. Great explanation of energy gradients, equilibrium, and driving forces!
Well, software is basically just applied electronics, which is basically applied physics, so why do we even need IT experts when we have physicists? đ
Didn't I talk about 'A shorted membrane electrochemical cell powered by hydrogen to remove CO2 from the air feed of hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells' a month or two ago?
It's claimed that a 25âcm^2 shorted membrane EDCS [ electrochemically driven CO2 separator ] can achieve >99% CO2 removal from 2,000âstandard cubic centimetres per minute (sccm) of air for 450âhours and operate effectively under load-following dynamic conditions. A spiral-wound EDCS module can remove >98% CO2 from 10,000âsccm of air. Our technoeconomic analysis indicates a compact and efficient module at >99% CO2 removal costs US$ 112 for an 80âkWnet HEMFC [ hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cell ] stack.
No one was interested at the time.
why would anyone want to remove CO2 from the air?
@@dunravin to induce famine and get rid of the excess population.
Sucking 420 ppm CO2 from air is plant work. Sucking 4,200,000 ppm CO2 from a smokestack is, is... *enviroterrorism!!!*
â@@dunravintehnological gas I guess... since it's so rare... even rarer than argon
That strikes me as a stageringly small amount of air, 2,000 cubic centemetes is just 2 leters, and that would contain only about 1 cubic centemeter of CO2. That sounds orders of magnitutde too slow and too energy intensive to be practical for climate change mitigation.
generating sustainable energy from co2 requires mr fusion
Or photosynthesis...
@@FranLsk that is fusion
Unfortunately it is not. Photosynthesis is a biochemical process.
@@FranLskEnergy is from the sun, photosynthesis is not an energy production method.
@@utkua It is like a battery -- storing energy for future burning.
Thank you for deepening my understanding of how we develop electricity. Greetings from Austria. đ
Absolutely, understanding the limitations of new technologies is as crucial as the innovations themselves
I think the goal of the project isn't finding a source of energy, it's finding an efficient way to remove CO2. While the net energy from recouping the CO2 from the atmosphere is negative, I think the way to think of it is: We can collect CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels with a system that uses energy created from renewable sources. So while the net energy is negative (ie: more energy when into the overall process than we got out), so is the net CO2, which is the real focus.
Okay but how is sequestering CO2 (note: not chemically, meaning the CO2 will eventually come back out) a good solution? What is the end goal? Bury it deep in caverns with natural CO2 deposits and hope that it doesnât come back out into the atmosphere? Thatâs just burning more energy (most likely from fossil fuels) in a hope to kick the can down the road to future generations. Until our energy production is from a majority of renewable resources thatâs just making the problem worse. Why waste the money on figuring out the sequestering problem before weâve figured out the RENEWABLE ENERGY PROBLEM. (Hint, that problem was solved and the answer stars with an N, but thereâs less money to be made thereâŠ)
To be fair, if CO2 sequestration was economically efficient, fossil fuel plants would be doing it right now. You don't need exotic nano materials to capture CO2 from power plant exhaust - it's already heavily concentrated there.
When it comes down to it, nothing is cheaper than free, and without regulation to impose some cost on atmospheric dumping, it's always going to be free.
More than that.
czcams.com/video/yN5fz8QgDuY/video.html
â@@henryptung Of course if it was economically efficient they'd be doing it. Hence this research -- searching for ways to do it as cheaply as possible. Companies have shown time and again that they aren't going to be willing to put forth one extra cent towards environmental efforts unless absolutely forced. So unless it's totally free, they won't do it. But even if they did, we still need to find ways of accelerating the process. It's not enough to limit current output. We need to sequester existing CO2 volumes.
Use quicklime or koh or naoh to wash the exhaust gases. There you've captured co2.
economics is part of sociology, which is based on biology, which is based on chemistry, which is based on physics.. thus - *can u please talk about a technical flaw in money called the zero lower bound that leads to money failing to circulate in the economy when gdp growth falls below the inflation rate which leads to all sorts of issues?*
Economics is the dismal science. Inflation occurs when the rate of minting new currency exceeds the real rate of growth of the economy (not all minting causes inflation, because the economy does have some real growth). The whole of "monetary theory" that is dedicated to justifying inflation is just a dumb lie (that is universally taught to students and "experts"). We don't have inflation because it improves the economy, we have inflation to enrich private bankers. The Federal Reserve is not part of the Federal Government, the word "Federal" in the name is a trick like the Federal express. The 10,000% inflation since the Fed was created in 1913 is a naked pyramid scheme.
or the issues with "green" tech like electric cars (cash grab). we'll develop total control of the weather and be able to undo whatever they've deemed to be 'damaged' before any amount of reducing carbon emissions will make a difference... and governments will have it decades before we ever know.
@@iyziejane But why was it said to be "dismal"? It wasn't the science itself (no matter what your classroom experiences) but the horror seen by the inequality of resource distribution.
(I don't think you really understand inflation. You do know that it has occurred in all economies even back into ancient times?)
@@mikemondano3624 The total inflation rate in the USA from 1796 to 1913 was -0.2%. A single dollar was worth slightly more in 1913 than it was worth in 1796. Compare that to 10,000% total inflation since 1913.
@@iyziejane Federal income tax was invented. The camel got its butt into the tent.
Hey Sabine! I love your channel. Itâs been one of my favourites for a while. Thanks for science! The paper you linked in the description is titled âLiquid metal-embraced photoactive films for artificial photosynthesisâ.
I didnât check the title before scrolling down to the results and felt extremely lost until I realised đ x
Fusion, the only way to move forward.
useful fission is available now, usable fusion is still a hope
@@mattklapman Not a hope, we know how to create it. we just need a less explosive method.
There is a risk in this line of thinking, because ultimately it means the petrol industry doesn't have to turn off the tap.
What's intrinsically wrong with using oil?
They probably shouldn't "turn off the tap" because there will always be use cases for hydrocarbon fuels that just make more sense than alternative methods for the foreseeable future. Carbon capture is going to have to be part of the solution because the cat is already out of the bag in terms of how much carbon has been released into the atmosphere anyways.
@@Strideo1 Carbon capture a part of the solution for what?
@@LoganChristianson
The problem is obvious, it's the quantity at which industries use petrol that is the issue.
And no, "it's too late to do anything about it" is not a solution @Strideo1
it can get a lot worse very very quickly.
poly-carbonates for production have a lot of uses, but the large scale production of CO2 has to be minimized to near totality as soon as possible, and that means energy sources have to shift from combustibles.
FYE, you can buy (or at least used to be able to buy) a Stirling engine which will sit on top of your coffee cup, using the dT to run a small propeller.
A good point for a macroscale application of a technology like this is that low-grade heat energy harvested, say, by a trough collector, could regenerate the material. A bad point is that looking at the picture, the stuff's likely too expensive to make to have boxcars full of it sitting around waiting to be shoveled into power plants.
Always remember:
1) you can't win
2) you can't break even
3) you can't get out of the game.
Anyone who claims otherwise is at best ignorant and at worst out for your money.
I'm new to your channel, but I absolutely love your content. I came here from Reddit after seeing your video on losing faith in academia, but I stayed because watching your videos on nuclear energy has been super fun and informative. Thanks for the high quality content!
Is carbon dioxide stored energy so well it should be good for instolation. Even being fuel itself
CO2 is carbon in its most commonly known oxidized (burnt) state. You aren't getting any more energy out of it unless you expose it to a stronger oxidizer than O2. If you want to extract the carbon to make fuel out of it, you need to put energy in.
@@teardowndan5364 its should be hot You should be able to biol water by poiting a bottle of carbon dioxide in the water
@@osmosisjones4912 If you discharge a CO2 capsule into water without blowing it away, you end up with fizzy ice chunks.
Never as good as promised.
But these papers claimed reversing entropy.
What do you think about this?
Experimental Demonstration of Energy Harvesting by Maxwell's Demon Device
And
An Autonomous Mechanical Maxwell's Demon
Great video.
The problem with all these processes is that energy, time, cost to do this often just doesn't work out.
Over the years I have reviewed many, many alternative energy sources, primarily for a data center I was setting up in a remote location.
Just an example, not directly involving chemistry might be illuminating. For ethanol production you could use the stalk of the plant as well as the corn. I have a relative who is a farmer. He looked into it. The cost to gather the stalks, ship them, etc. was greater than the value of the stalks. Labor and cost of equipment was not figured in because it was his farm, and he already had the equipment.
There are power plants that reuse waste heat, as indicated. They are very efficient. I got a tour of the power plant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They used coal and gas turbines. They captured the heat and used it to drive secondary steam generators, and they also used waste heat to run a chiller plant for HVAC on campus. Their efficiency is fantastic. This is also complex, but efficient because they had a compact facility to use all these methods. There is no one size fits all. That's where the engineering comes in.
That's what I imagined. And we aren't taking into account the production of the device. Of course there are a lot of other things to analyse for scalability, like where will we put the CO2 and how?
@@VeteranVandal Great points.
@02:27 "Burning the Midnight Oil" ... Another Aussie reference! Well done! â« "How do we sleep when our beds are burnin'?" â«
Carbon dioxide stored energy.a botltle of carbon dioxide left out in the sun .should actually be used. It could be used boil water in turbins
Adsorption is the key word here. The important thing, like all adsorption based storage, is that it can store energy indefinitely (in its "dry state"). I.e. use cheap solar in summer to prepare the material for winter. You have missed the systemic advantage completely.
You address the electricity production side of this, but I would like to know about the other side - turning the CO2 into fuel. Does it take more energy to make the fuel than other it takes to produce other fuels.
Not a lot of point extracting CO2 if the process indirectly produces more CO2 at the power station, than this process is extracting from the air.
Thank you for helping me to better understand this topic.
Regard to energy, I have question! You cannot create energy from nothing, than how rotation of moon around Jupiter creates heat in itâs core? Itâs a free energyâŠ.! How?
assuming the heat is caused by convection currents created by gravitational forces, then what's happening is that the moon is slowing down over an enormously long time and the kinetic energy is being converted to heat energy. The moon was captured by the gravity of the planet a very long time ago, and was moving very quickly at that time. it will eventually slow so much it falls out of orbit (if the sun doesnt explode first)
@@jon...5324 How about our moon? Itâs getting away from Earth! Earth still creating some energy to it, maybe in minimal amount the same energy created by low or high tieâŠ
â@@protoword10It's called "tidal accleration" and the energy comes from Earth's rotation.
@@protoword10 the tides act like friction and gravitational energy is slowly lost. Like, for example, a rotating raw egg stops rapidly because the angular momentum is lost in the core.
@@skynet5828 no, not from earths rotation; because tides will be there even if the earth is not spinning. the energy comes from the gravitational potential energy of the earth-moon system
For context, I'm not a scientist, but don't plants already kinda turn CO2 into energy? And then they produce oxygen, which we like?
You're thinking of sunlight. Plants photosynthesize, turning CO2 into O2 in the process. The energy comes from the sun.
Also not a scientist, btw.
You have exactly backwards. You can't just throw words together and make progress. For a plant to do anything with CO2, it has to USE energy. In the form of photons. From sunlight.
Duh. So CO2 isn't PRODUCING energy.
Now lean over here so I can slap you.
Well, they use solar as energy input. So no, they don't turn CO2 into energy. They turn CO2+energy into energy
Wow. I was just thinking/talking about this, this morning... Great job Sabine!
As a Chemical Engineer and Physics Teacher I agree. The latter is condensed physics.
If CO2 removal from the atmosphere is to make a difference, it means effectively filtering all the 5.5 quadrillion tons of earth's atmosphere. I don't think we have seen a proposal that scales to this level.
Yeah there will never be such a proposal. The concept is absurd. Even IF you could somehow do it, thereâs nowhere to store hundreds of billions of tons of anything let alone do so in a carbon free manner.
I think itâs called reforestation
@@baomao7243 Forests are not sequestration. Thatâs a temporary carbon sink. It would not be helpful at all, in fact putting too many trees on the earths surface would increase its albedo and make things worse.
@@jadusiv Fossil fuel is temporarily stored carbon as well.
@@baomao7243 I think you need to learn what the word sequestration means. If the carbon is stored for geologic timespans, itâs sequestered. The fact that humans can drill for oil and burn it is not a natural or relevant to the concept of sequestration. If we didnât drill for it and burn it, it would stay there.
4:50 - the best use in my opinion for those low currents is if they're enough to power a small circuit that embeds some behaviour on the thing you're making.
So suppose you want to literally remove CO2 from the atmosphere; You make a device and it would basically be able to power itself to do something simple like measuring it's own saturation and sending a signal at a certain threshold where someone would be notified it's done and needs replacement.
If it is enough it's also not that hard to measure the rate in which it's changing so we could get data an create an expectation of CO2 distribution around an area, since we can assume the more concentration of CO2 somewhere the faster the material will saturate.
And I'm sure we can thing of a lot more things to do and measure.
I plug my surge protectors each into its own first socket. FREE ENERGY!
one of the best (simplest also) explanations of energy, equilibrium and entropy. By the way, isn't the best machine to remove carbon from air a TREE? I would love to be straightened out on this one if I am wrong.
That joke about burning corpses on 02:21 was really unexpected and made me laugh.
Thanks for the material, really interesting topic.
It's tragic how few people truly understand thermodynamics. I feel the biggest benefit of taking organic chemistry in college was how well they taught thermodynamics.
Thank you fr this great, short explanation!
I remember a few years ago headlines circulated about "the military found a way to make fuel from sea water".. and my facebook friends shared it and added some conspiracy of why they keep this back.. fuel from water? I researched.. and well, yes the military do take carbonhydrates from sea water and create jet fuel with it on air carriers by using the power of the nuclear reactor!! This interesting from a military perspective as it allows the aircraft to keep fyling without fuel resupply.. but the headline just dropped the fact it uses a lot of nuclear power..
Thanks for cleaning that up I thought it didn't add up
Thanks for making a video about stuff you are an expert on Sabine
P.S. As a side note: Although somewhat difficult and marginally expensive initially set up, we can extract a large portion of the CO2 directly from current coal fired power sources through similar methods, yet we mess with even more complex carbon extraction from air where concentrations are low and even more difficult and expensive to extract. I can never quite get my head around that.
It's as if we are caught in some paradigm where we fly the longest path possible to get to the destination because the the plane has lots of gadgets and looks really cool in our photo album.
This gives me huge hopes! I hope we can apply this to our current surroundings as quickly (and efficiently) as possible!
I did a (chem eng) study in undergrad, converting CO2 in wastewater to Ethylene using electrolysis. The energy required for electrolysis was high, and the gas created was mostly CO2, with like less than 5% Ethylene. So then you need to refine that majority CO2 into a usable fuel which takes a lot more energy than the Ethylene will create. Our electrical grid is powered by mostly fossil fuels, which completely defeats the purpose. You could break the cycle by powering by using 100% solar energy, but in practice that energy is most efficient being sent straight to the power grid. Using adsorption may require less electricity than electrolysis, but also probably requires a recirculation pump and maintenance. Neat idea but... there is no such thing as free energy.
Hi Sabine, thank you for the explanation! I was noticing this is the second time, someone tries to use the exhaust gases from a combustion engine (H2O + CO2 mostly) and âput them back into the tankâ, the first was the electrolysis of water to run H2 engines/fuel cells. The hottest article in todayâs hi tech society are the invisible ânew emperorâs clothesâ
Your australian accent is superb Sabine. I don't know how you do it.
Ordered low entropy systems can make power as they become chaotic high entropy systems... So what you're telling me is... Chaos is a Ladder
Something i don't quite understand : we are always looking for cheap energy storage, 5 years ago i was in a small town that stored electricity through "air cryogenisation", a big tower was fed excess day power to cool the air to liquid, then the air was stored into tanks, and finally re-heated to activate turbines during hours where power was eneded... But this thing was able to capture and separate CoÂČ super efficiently with air in liquid state, so one could pretty much deal with it separately and burry it underground or something, so i don't understand why we don't do that, it's pure green energy storage with decent efficiency and very cheap
I could see this and similar technologies as viable for âmicro-energyâ production: stuff that doesnât dwarf other sources of power, but makes use of energy from various sources.
Think of recycling heat from stovetops and ovens, attaching scaled-down generators to a gymâs exercise equipment, putting quartz in dance floors, etc. as kinds of âmicro-energy.â
In this case, you could make this porous, carbon-catching material into filters to put on gas motor exhausts. Then collect and exchange those filters periodically to use in a separate facility to make power. The logistics would be a lot of work, but it could be made easier if you piggy back off of existing garbage and recycle collection infrastructure.
I like how you point out we don't live in a closed system. The great fusion reactor in the sky keeps injecting gigajoules into our system continuously.
Hmmm... Ok, now it makes sense. Thanks, Sabine! đ
Stay safe there with your family! đđ
Sabine, I would be interested in your thoughts on the Everloop geothermal systems.
It seems a very practical solution to some of the drawbacks of geothermal energy.
what happened to the EV update video 3 days ago? It seems it is now behind a paywall. I watched it before it went behind the paywall and gave some tongue in cheek critical feedback on the topic/conclusion observation and then it disappeared. I enjoy Sabine's videos, but the cynical side of me wonders why has this video disappeared. Please keep making videos Sabine. I do appreciate them. Really :)
ItÂŽs not behind a pay wall, she made a correction, and itÂŽs not published yet, just available for channel members currently. So I think it will be republished the next hours or tomorrow
okie dokie
The grindr load sounds are triggering me; high camp! Love these videos
If I am not mistaken the largest CO2 use (as : getting some really useful product not pumping it to get more oil..
) could be the fertilizer production => urea.
For that the sponge absorbing CO2 from i.e. steel mill fumes can be a great application.
Pumping tons of regular air to get CO2 and store it somewhere is a good way to suck some government subsidies but otherwise makes little sense
The way to actual get energy from CO2 removal is to 'fisnish' burning the Carbon into CO3 ions by use of calcium and magnesium. Producing the pure calcium and magnesium will take energy but it will returned in the reaction and produce solid Carbonate which we don't need to find some osbsure geological repository for as it can just be disolved in water and enter the ocean where it will be benificial.
The thing that is interesting about this tech is that a device can generate rather than lose energy while it is adsorbing carbon from the air, which is useful if you use this in carbon capture to run a small device or even measure carbon in the air without energy once the seal is broken.
It's also always good to point out that even if energy generation is not net positive, it's not a closed system. It may indeed be very advantageous to "saturate" in one environment, and "revert" in a separate environment. Even if that second environment may take more energy than generated from the first, we may still have performed very valuable "work" by changing environments!
Sabine daily... the only news I trust!
As for needing even more energy to reverse the state of the material. It's still a promising technology because due to solar and wind energy sources being unreliable and overproduce during peak times, we can use that as a buffer: use excess energy at solar/wind peak and remove CO2 during solar/wind downtime.
If the material could be used in something in its saturated state then while its not an energy gain, it would be essentially free energy provided we actually do need or want whatever the material is being used for. For example, if it was a material that hardens into something akin to a brick or concrete as it becomes saturated with carbon dioxide, then you could use it to pull carbon out of the air, generate energy, and create a building material.
Course, it won't be the most efficient building material, but thats when you weigh up whether its good enough for your needs or not. And if making the material is cheap enough, pulling carbon out of the air is its own reward. I'd rather have all that carbon dioxide in a bunch of barrels in storage somewhere than in my lungs and in the atmosphere.
My latest idea is to get everyone to eat snail meat instead of ruminants. Three reasons worth looking into: A- less gut methane. B-more efficiency in conversion to protein C - locking the carbon away in the shell, and making new limestone. D - scaleable at minimal cost
Diversity of methods based on regional conditions type of industries in useis extremely appealing and defensively rational and worthy.
You can definitely build infrastructural cycles where each facility fuels the other through various methods of existing technology, but this isn't profitable enough and probably only can be managed on medium scales.
This is one of many alternative methods of separating public & private utility grids to ensure a safe breaker box artificial intelligence future. Power to compute ,power for local regions to operate way of life around or above and beyond statism becomes so much more important in this new paradigm
Statism becomes something very different in this new paradigm that has to be dealt with appropriately
Simplest form to create energy out of air.
Grow weeds, dry the weeds, burn the weeds, power steam engine, drive generator.
Keep on farming weeds.
If the gen and engine use certain techniques, they are low maintainance and by result
have a higher energy output than it is required to create them.
And greetings Sabine.
Yeah wow how did nobody think of that one before
Or grow huge ferns, compress them over hundreds of millions of years, burn the coal. Only trouble is that we have skipped the planting new ferns stage.
@@shitlordflytrap1078 Well, many people did, but somehow humans never grasped the concept of 'no-shortcuts' and just only burn the fossil stuff.
@@alexanderheyworth3242 Well, there's a plan somewhere, to capture carbon and put it back into the deep underground in it's plant state, and after filling to add pressure and heat to regrow fossil fuels.
It's a bit ambitious, and it's actually easier to simply grow more plants and burn those after drying.
Green energy is about using natural energy (sunlight) to grow more fuel, or using the energy directly.
Only in Australia - I'm also from an Australian Chemical Engineering school.
"But it doesn't mean what the TV people suggests it means." Isn't that always the case?
It also has the potential to lower the cost carbon capture if we can recover some of the energy needed to do it.
Great explanation.
You do an excellent job explaining. Thank you.
Could you do something on these small nuclear batteries that have been talked about please? They are obviously quite weak but touted to have 20k+ year lifespan, so if you put a lot of them together surely that would provide immense power abilities.
Very well said,Sabina. Thanks again for the informative information. It's nice to hear a non-bias professional opinion,Sabina. Peace âïž đ from Canada, eh. Sabina
Glad I was one of the ones who asked. Thanks for the explanation.
4:16 âŠwhere they discuss how you can get the carbon dioxide out of the material and what you could possibly do with it. Reversing the material to its initial state will require energy.
It means that it could be a rechargeable battery, provided that the material and process are economically and ecologically reasonable.
From an engineering standpoint, a much more promising approach is using Stirling cycle engines to make use of otherwise wast heat. Not great efficiency, but it at least could make some sense in some applications.
Theoretically couldn't we concentrate renewables in areas that are conducive to said renewables and use them to power carbon capture which is then sold as fuel? Since we are pulling it back out of the air it would essentially become the sale of unconventional battery units for other areas that cannot use the excess power.
I think it was the SciFi writer Heinlein who said "Magic is technology we don't understand". Thanks for the video!
This process has potential value for the production of hydrocarbon fuel using excess electric grid capacity, providing pure carbon dioxide extracted from the air, and which is not sourced from burning fossil fuels. It could also be used to purify nitrogen gas without cryogenic liquefaction, when used in combination with an oxygen generator.
Sabine, if a system that is not in equilibrium means that its entropy can still increase and go to chaos, shouldnt we say that when entropy increases the system goes to order (equilibirium) instead of chaos? Chaos being the contrary to equilibrium is so weird
Generating energy from Aunt Mildred caught me off guard and I spilled my coffee! LOL! Sabine and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics strike again.
very very unkind Sabine!!
I'd love to see a deeper dive into the impacts of the technology on the projects. Is it a significant amount of energy captured from absorption? Is it worth the cost of implimenting compared to simplified CO2 absorbing technologies? If its close to 10% of the amount of energy required to remove the CO2 from the medium and not that expensive to impliment, I can see it being a huge improvement to the process. Itll require external power regardless but the differnece between 50 solar panels and 45 would be a huge impact on cost (50->45 pulled from 10% i said earlier).
Couple years ago I watched a documentary about a CO2 extraction pilot project here in Canada. Among other things (this was real science reporting) they talked about a method of extracting the CO2 and turning it into a liquid fuel that might be a substitute for gasoline including the part where it released CO2. Thought it was amusing that we could just skip the whole plants using atmospheric CO2, things eating plants and in millions of years we get crude oil we can turn into gasoline. The reporters interviewed some environmentalists who seemed less amused by the concept.
Presumably you could replace the 'porous material', rather than 'recharging' it by using energy to remove the CO2. But this would likely not be practical, and little doubt would require more energy to manufacture new material than energy recovered in the process.