Carbon Dioxide – Natures Wondrous Raw Material
What a waste, spewing valuable carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
The wonders we could create with this fundamental building block of life. Worse still, government bureaucrats with their limited intellectual toolbox want to treat this incredibly useful natural material as a harmful pollutant and tax it. Imagination, have we American’s lost our capacity to think and innovate? Have we become mindless automatons who only see gloom and doom and ignore the opportunities right in front of our eyes? Carbon dioxide (CO2) doesn’t have to be a tax on society; there are countless ways it could be turned into useful products for the betterment of mankind. Let’s examine a few:
Back to basics -it’s sophomore year in high school and it’s the biology class that environmental scientists seem to have slept through. Let’s see carbon, oxygen and what else do we need - ah yes, a bit of hydrogen from water (H20) and my biological tinker toy is prepared to make a myriad of wondrous organic compounds. Why don’t we start my letting nature show us what she would do with carbon dioxide (CO2) water (H20) and a little sunlight:
6H2O + 6CO2 ———-> C6H12O6+ 6O2
Six molecules of water (H20) plus six molecules of carbon dioxide (CO2) produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen. For millions of years, green plants have employed this process, photosynthesis, to capture energy from sunlight and convert it into electrochemical energy. One goal of scientists has been to develop an artificial version of photosynthesis that can be used to produce liquid fuels from carbon dioxide and water.
Researchers with the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have now found that nano-sized crystals of cobalt oxide can effectively carry out the critical photosynthetic reaction of splitting water molecules. Photooxidation of water molecules into oxygen, electrons and protons (hydrogen ions - H+) is one of the two essential half reactions of an artificial photosynthesis system - it provides the electrons needed to reduce carbon dioxide to a fuel.
The basic concept is to integrate light-harvesting systems that can capture solar photons and catalytic systems that can oxidize water, then to combine this water oxidation half reaction with a carbon dioxide reduction step in an artificial-leaf type system to produce a liquid hydrocarbon, such as methanol (CH3OH), that can be stored, transported, and used as transportation fuel.
Imagine carbon-neutral liquid fuels produced from the carbon dioxide emanating from smokestacks. While it may take many years to commercially develop such a system, it is clearly a better use of our limited resources than taxing the economy and impoverishing the middle class. If we use the bureaucrat’s solution, the already economically hard-hit middle of the country, which is dependent on coal-fired plants for electricity, will be disproportionately taxed. The White House talks the talk when it comes to helping the economically challenged States of the “Rust-Belt,” but they sure don’t walk the walk.
This is but one potential way to capture and use carbon dioxide (CO2) productively; others may be closer at hand. As an article in the online edition of Scientific American pointed our last August - Cement made from carbon dioxide could be a concrete cure for global warming.
By simply bubbling the carbon dioxide (CO2) containing flue gas through the nearby seawater, a new California-based company called Calera says it can use more than 90 percent of that CO2 to make something useful: cement.
“It’s a twist that could make a polluting substance into a way to reduce greenhouse gases. Cement, which is most commonly composed of calcium silicates, requires heating limestone and other ingredients to 2,640 degrees F (1,450 degrees C) by burning fossil fuels and is the third largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S., according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Making one ton of cement results in the emission of roughly one ton of CO2-and in some cases much more.”
This new process of making calcium carbonate cement wouldn’t eliminate all CO2 emissions, but it would reverse this equation - for every ton of cement produced, half a ton of CO2 is sequestered. The U.S. used more than 122 million metric tons of Portland cement in 2006, according to the Portland Cement Association (PCA) and China used at least 800 million metric tons.
Other companies are also working on similar projects that will convert CO2 into useful commercial cement. It may require some time to fully adapt these processes and provide the quality control required by industry, but it is clearly a better use of our recourses to support such efforts than merely whine and tax our economy.
Even expensive sequestering technologies can be converted from a burden on the economy to a method for reducing the price of oil and our dependence on foreign producers. Carbon-capture technology is designed to catch carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and store it deep underground, rather than emitting the CO2 into the atmosphere. But others have a better idea than just burying it at great expense to the economy.
One of the best ways to increase the productivity of an oil well is by Enhancing Oil Recovery (EOR). CO2 is pumped into the ground, to be specific into oil wells, and thereby boosts their productivity. There are numerous advantages to this method, one of them being that the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere can be dramatically reduced.
Investing in CO2 extraction can be a very profitable proposition, since productivity is improved by injecting this troublesome greenhouse gas into the well. The amount of oil extracted from an old well can be increased by as much as 30 to 60%.
The mere idea of classifying, the basic building blocks of life itself, carbon and oxygen as pollutants boggles the mind. The next time you hear someone advocate a Cap-and-Trade tax scheme maybe you should suggest they put their thinking cap on instead and look for more productive solutions.
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April 22nd, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Great solutions. I question the “truth” of AGW, but I’m a big fan of free-market technological solutions that make sense.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:31 am
That sounds like some great ideas. But here’s the question: who pays for them in your perfect world?
Free markets and private investors are typically very bad at creating totally new technologies. They’re awesome at finding uses for established, proven technologies, but it takes the government to get new technologies to that point. You mentioned Dept of Energy studies in this very post. Of course, government also created the technologies that enable the internet and satellite communications, among countless other products that would not exist without government laying the groundwork for the technology. And that ultimately means tax dollars.
You can raise those tax dollars through an income tax (taxing productive labor and arguably reducing the incentive for it) or a carbon tax (taxing the burning of finite resources) or any number of different means of taxation that all have their downsides. To me, the carbon tax seems the most fair. As to it being regressive, I don’t understand why you think that’s the case. People who live in big houses and drive big cars will pay a lot more tax than people with modest houses and small cars or no cars at all. Personally, my wife and I live very modestly, spending less than $300 annually on home energy and less than $500 annually on gas. A 10% tax on that energy use would be a drop in the bucket for our finances. True, we’re not poor-we’re simply happier with a simpler lifestyle. And there probably are poor people who by necessity need to use more energy. But no tax can be perfect. I’d rather we have taxes on behaviors we’d like to discourage (energy use, which is often wasteful and can easily be cut back on in most cases) than behaviors we want to encourage (productive economic activity).
Oh, and by the way, manure is a basic building block of life, too, but I’m sure you would agree there should be limits on where and how much of this can be simply dumped into the environment
April 28th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Development of Carbon Dioxide derivatives should not rely on the false premise that it has anything to do with global warming.
May 4th, 2009 at 8:59 am
its awsome i like it
May 8th, 2009 at 11:04 am
CO2 isn’t really our problem though. Human kind accounts for less than 2% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. If CO2 is a pollutant than the ocean is the biggest polluter there is. Volcano’s are another huge problem are or forests and their rotting leaves. This is all a sick trick and used to further take power from the people and put it into the hands of the idiots in government. No different than Al Gore flying on a private jet, being shuttle by a caravan of SUVs, that are left running cause he likes them cooled by the AC, while he delivers a speech about evil SUVs. Pathetic.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:56 am
An excellent post, overlooking your ‘whine and tax’ diatribe. The comment responses are interesting as well, especially Devin’s.
In any case, good work and a couple of chuckles are good for the soul too.
May 17th, 2009 at 1:30 am
Bravo for saying what many, many more should be saying. Carbon dioxide isn’t a problem. Global warming is a theory that enjoys POLITICAL consensus, not SCIENTIFIC consensus, but as politicians control the purse strings, they’re going to morph this tenuous theory into a way to get more money out of us.
More at halt-global-warming.blogspot.com. Keep up the good work!
May 19th, 2009 at 5:48 am
Is it REALLY possible, in this day and age, that there are STILL people out there who do not actually “get it”??!
Nobody with any serious understanding of the whole subject is saying that CO2 is a pollutant, or is not a “wonderful” building block of nature, or even that the human-generated fraction of the stuff is more than an INCREMENTAL fraction of the “NATURAL” level.
Many seem to imagine that something that is “merely incremental” simply cannot be very significant. But try applying THAT sort of simplistic “thinking” to, say for instance, the example of a BOILER in which a temperature differential of just a FEW degrees (added on top of HUNDREDS) makes all the difference in the world as to whether or not the bolier BLOWS UP!)
The real problem sems to be that lots of ideological idiots of a “POLITICAL” stripe somehow seem to imagine that they have the freedom to “take or leave” the REAL substance of the whole subject based on mere dint of some sort of “consensus” pretense and wishful thinking — or that the supposed “free market” can be relied upon to resolve problems as big as the HUGE economic disruptions that will arise.
Carbon Dioxide is, to be sure, NOT a POLLUTANT — being, after all, in effect BREATHED IN BY PLANTS as the “other half” of the “Grand Balance of Nature” Carbon Cycle whereby plants and animals provide each other with oxygen and carbon dioxide. And over the eons, “Nature” has established an at least QUASI-stable “equilibrium” at about the current level. (Perhaps interestingly, if it were not for the level of CO2 that has been built up over the eons by LIVING THINGS, the average temperature of the whole planet would be barely above freezing. This planet has actually been “Terra-formed” — in the parlance of Star Trek — since time immemorial!)
But a LARGE POWER PLANT is NOT MERELY ANOTHER ANIMAL, and has, by comparison, a HUGE “METABOLISM”. And when the “natural balance” of things is MARKEDLY SHIFTED for ANY reason the excess of CO2, which is a “greenhouse gas”, acts to “TRAP” more of the sun’s easily-INcoming LIGHT energy that ends up being converted (by quantum-mechanical interactions with the atoms comprising the Earth’s surface) to HEAT — to which that gas is OPAQUE, so that the HEAT is “bottled up” and cannot re-radiate off freely back out into space! And so the Earth gets HOTTER — the infamous GLOBAL WARMING that drives more intense HURRICANES and other storms, and MELTS THE POLAR ICECAPS, which by some estimates could perhaps FLOOD OUT UP TO A THIRD OF ALL HUMANITY that tends to concentrate along seacoasts!
Now the magnitude of the “human activity” contribution to that whole balance shift is debated by some. But even if there ARE indeed other, NATURAL processes afoot that ALSO contribute to the same problem, “WE” HAVE NO BUSINESS ADDING TO IT — at ANY level! (What “we” ACTUALLY need to be doing is TO ASSUME INTELLIGENT MANAGERIAL CONTROL of the whole planetary energy input/output balance! Accomplishing THAT sort of thing would involve implementing TECHNOLOGICAL schemes to ADD “OUR” OWN OZONE to the ULTRAVIOLET shield layer (which actually consists of ONLY A FEW THOUSAND TONS OF MATERIAL world-wide) as might be needed, and/or perhaps more generally to contrive to increase the population of REFLECTIVE ICE CRYSTALS INJECTED INTO THE STRATOSPHERE by all those high-flying aircraft.)
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Please, folks — if you are going to form an opinion about the subject, at least UNDERSTAND the SUBSTANCE of what it is that those whose ideas you would discredit and reject are ACTUALLY SAYING!
May 24th, 2009 at 12:26 am