So many kids were “taught” to drive by their parents or siblings, but my first time driving ever was when i was 15 years old and picked up by my driving instructor from school. It seemed like at that time everyone was assumed to have been sneak-driving for years, because he didn’t even bother to explain a single thing to me. Ok, let’s die together then!
My first time driving a stick was when my latin teacher wanted someone to pull her 60s era VW Van to the front of the building. I couldn’t even figure out how to get it out of 2nd gear… but did manage to get it going.
As I recall, Magnitite isn’t particularly rare, but most of the biomes where it can be found have some nasty predators running around. We’ll need a lot of Prawn suits if we want to harvest it in bulk.
I don’t think magnesite will ever be usable for at-scale sequestration, since it only stores a half-ton of CO2 per ton of magnesite. It’s much harder to make magnesite than it is to mine/burn the coal that will saturate it.
Could you explain why this would be a problem? I’m not seeing why it would be.
Eh, according to their paper, this is a reaction which takes place at room temperature, so the only cost is creating the polystyrene microspheres, which can apparently be reused after the fact.
It sounds like the ultimate plan with this kind of sequestration technology would be to just spread this stuff out somewhere, and let it just start sucking up CO2 automatically out of the air.
I’m not clear if they’re using Magnesite or if they’re forming Magnesite.
it’s just Magnesium Carbonate (MgCO3). I doubt (?) they’re making Mg(CO3)2. It sounds like they’re using a catalyst with Magnesium to speed up reaction with atmospheric CO2.
Yes, they aren’t manufacturing Magnesite.
They are using polystyrene microspheres as a catylyst to cause the normal crystallization of magnesite to happen orders of magnitude faster than it naturally occurs.
It wasn’t to long ago I read a maybe 10 year old Clive Cussler book in where some scientist discovers an element that when treated in a certain way will absorb the worlds dangerous levels of CO2. Of course an evil corporate bad guy tried to kill her and hide the secret of her discovery, but Dirk Pitt managed to save the world by defeating the evil capitalist.
The cost is not the polystyrene spheres; you still need on the order of 20 tons of magnesium-bearing rock to create the magnesite to sequester the CO2 from one ton of coal. Magnesium-bearing rocks are common, and you can find some as naturally-occurring sand, but it’s still difficult to imagine this process making any economic sense even if the carbonation reaction is “free”.
I was wondering what happened with one of the other promising looking carbon-capture technologies, the one with the nanotubes (“diamonds from the sky”). It looks like they’re trucking along, still promising, but not much more:
That’s the biggest issue with any speculative carbon capture technology. Even if we had our 100% ready approach decided on now, how long will it take to actually scale to any kind of useful industrial level?
All of the Carbon XPrize teams are interesting though:
I’m still not getting the skepticism though… I mean, 20 tons of rock… isn’t that much rock. It’s kind of a trivial amount of it. Also, what’s the 20 ton number coming from?
76.4 billion tons of magnesite a year? Where is that gonna go?
I am all for exploring solutions! Hopefully people smarter than me can think of that problem.
The issue I have with all of these solutions is that they are likely a decade plus away from any real implementation, and the rate that we are increasing the CO2 emissions, we are rapidly reaching a tipping point where sequestration technology won’t ever be able to catch up with.
i.e. we should have been doing something 30 years ago.
I mean, it is, but that’s still a lot of material and it’s not a one time investment, it’s a continuous thing.
Assuming a 1-to-1 translation, that’s still more than say all the steel production on the entire planet several times over. So you have a system that would be on par with the oil industry. Without any profits. And oil companies are collectively the largest sector of business in the world.
Might have done the math a little wrong on my 20 ton estimate: Magnesium-bearing rock is usually 20% Magnesium Oxide by weight, which is precursor of magnesite. 2.4 tons of CO2 from burning 1 ton of coal. 50% of weight of magnesite is MO. So for 1 ton of coal you need 2.4 * 5 = 12 tons of magnesium-bearing rock.
