CCS: Always almost ready, but never quite 11

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1. 

   Pangolin Posted 5:58 pm
   30 Nov 2007

   CCS, Hydrogen Car, Cold Fusion & Unicorns"Raindrops gone missing, Atlanta's confusion
   
   Carbon that's captured and cars run on fusion
   
   Jellyfish sandwich-es without the stings
   
   These are a few of my favorite things
   Hydrogen Hummers and algae whangdoodles
   
   Nuclear busses and bio-fuel noodles
   
   Rooftop wind-mills that got ver-ti-cal wings
   
   These are a few of my favorite things
   Greenlandic glaciers that make rapid dashes
   
   Snowflakes that stay on the high mountain passes
   
   Silver white winters with ten-minute springs
   
   These are a few of my favorite things
   When the dog bites
   
   When the bee stings
   
   When I'm feeling sad
   
   I simply remember my favorite things
   
   And then I don't feel so bad"
   .....sing to the tune of "My Favorite Things" while dancing around in circles lightly dressed in early March.
   Can we please quit singing silly songs and get to the business of installing solutions that work? Anybody?
   
   Put the Carbon Back

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2. 

   Ron Steenblik Posted 1:29 am
   01 Dec 2007

   The same argument is used by the ethanol industryTo paraphrase:
   "Corn-ethanol companies are well-served by having cellulosic-ethanol technology remain at the pilot and demonstration stage, devoid of any "industrial-scale" field deployments. It lets them point to a technology that will eventually make ethanol clean (or so they claim) -- forestalling complaints that subsidies for first-generation ethanol should be done away with completely -- while allowing the companies to claim they can't build something that hasn't already been built."

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3. 

   justlou Posted 1:54 am
   01 Dec 2007

   Likewise the Car of the Future"McCarthy views current trends in car-making, car buying, and car driving as deeply problematic.  But he sees little reason to believe that challenges like global warming and declining oil reserves and rising demand in China and India will be dealt with any more expeditiously than leaded gas was.  McCarthy takes up the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles only long enough to dismiss it as an evasive tactic.  By his account, the Clinton Administration initiated the partnership to avoid the more effective, but politically riskier, step of raising fuel-economy standards.  Ditto for the Bush Administration and the FreedomCAR program.  Talking up the car of the future, McCarthy suggests, is just another way Detroit has found to insure that it never arrives."
   'Running on Fumes, Does the "car of the future" have a future?', Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, Nov.5, 2007, p.87.  
   Note: This article was a review of books including "Auto Mania" by Tom McCarthy, Yale books.  

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4. 

   amazingdrx Posted 3:19 am
   01 Dec 2007

   Jeremy CarlSomebody better let him know about this.  ASAP.  
   
   http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

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5. 

   Biodiversivist Posted 4:13 am
   01 Dec 2007

   Where are they going to sequester this carbon?The number of wells available to pump this liquefied gas into represent a tiny spec of the volume that would be needed, regardless of cost, containment, and safety issues. Other than pumping it to the bottom of our already dying oceans, I am not familiar with any other ideas to get rid of it.
   
   In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

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6. 

   GRLCowan Posted 5:47 am
   01 Dec 2007

   This is encouragingIn this interesting blog entry, news that CO2 has been seen sequestering itself in mine tailings on a few-years timescale.
   This is encouraging to me because it suggests intentional dispersal of suitable calcium and magnesium silicates will just work. Until today I was worried, as discussed in this comment thread, that high-surface-area silicate dustmotes would not become carbonate quick enough.
   If you read much of that thread you may come to share my hope that future iterations of the internet protocol will include wilful ignorance detection and punishment. Oh, [flutter eyelids cleverly], why not just plant treeee -- zap! Thud.
   --- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
   
   How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?

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7. 

   GRLCowan Posted 5:56 am
   01 Dec 2007

   Sorry, broken linkTrying again with the interesting blog entry on CO2 capture by mine tailings.
   --- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert

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8. 

   Pangolin Posted 8:08 am
   01 Dec 2007

   Just Nuke 3 or 4 Volcanic Islands...Where are they going to sequester this carbon?
   The number of wells available to pump this liquefied gas into represent a tiny spec of the volume that would be needed, regardless of cost, containment, and safety issues. Other than pumping it to the bottom of our already dying oceans, I am not familiar with any other ideas to get rid of it.
   
   
   If climate change gets really bad we could reverse it in about 3 months. A series of high-yield H-bombs buried in Volcanic Islands in the Pacific and set off in sequence would do it.
   Using a variation in Edward Tellers instant harbor concept multi-megaton explosions could launch enough finely powdered silicate into the atmosphere to neutralize ALL the excess CO2 AND bring down global temperatures all at once.
   I'm thinking about 1/2 a Krakatoa event per year for five years and we could have this problem licked. Plus the extra radioactivity would deal with that pesky population explosion thing. For the next 60-70 years people could have all the sex they wanted and they would still be hard put to keep the worlds population above 1 billion at the end of it.
   As an extra added benefit the increased ionizing radiation would encourage speciation and help replace some of those extinct species that enviros are always moaning about.
   Climate Change is no problem really. Off the shelf.
   "OH NO
   
   There goes Tokyo,
   
   GO! GO!
   
   GODZILLA!!"
   Did I mention the fantastic sunsets we could look forward too also?  
   
   Put the Carbon Back

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9. 

   GRLCowan Posted 12:28 pm
   01 Dec 2007

   Failure need not be sharedUsing a variation in Edward Tellers instant harbor concept multi-megaton explosions could launch enough finely powdered silicate into the atmosphere to neutralize ALL the excess CO2 AND bring down global temperatures all at once.
   Don't let Pangolin trick you. I doubt he knows or cares whether such explosions would, in fact, powder enough silicate finely enough; he's just trying to distract you from more sensible possibilities such as ore crushers, which have become much more efficient in recent years in terms of kWh/tonne of rock pulverized. Even if nuclear detonations would do the job, it is unlikely they would do it efficiently.
   --- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
   
   How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
   
   http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

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10. 

    picassotrigger Posted 8:51 am
    05 Dec 2007

    Carbon Capture and RecyclingI don't have much knowledge regarding the technologies of CCS but, from a purely philosophical perspective, it would appear to me that CCS would simply shift the carbon dump site from the atmosphere to the ground or ocean. Would it not make more sense to eliminate the whole concept of a dump site for carbon? Should we not be working toward--in addition to a reduction of anthropogenic emissions of carbon--a recycling of atmospheric carbon that takes the output from Carbon Capture and uses it as an input for some other product?
    One such example of this recently in the news is a process to produce baking soda from captured carbon.
    
    http://www.news.com/Can-baking-soda-curb-global-warming/2 ...

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11. 

    GRLCowan Posted 9:10 am
    05 Dec 2007

    That's good if in your weekly baking,you need to follow a muffin recipe that includes,
    3) Add 1 cubic mile of sodium bicarbonate
    The taste of sodium bicarbonate is due to sodium ion. The other carbonates that are discussed above are insoluble and without sodium, and I expect they therefore would be flavourless.
    If they are spread over tens of millions of km^2 of the Earth's surface, tens of cubic km per year of carbonates are very unobtrusive, especially compared with the formerly atmospheric CO2 that they contain, for they can make an annual accumulation at most 1 millimetre deep. If plants grow on the land they fall on they'll tend to mix with plant remnants and become part of the soil.
    --- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
    
    How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
    
    http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

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