No word in yet from the Easter Bunny…
Scrambling for climate change solutions
Eggshell membrane can absorb 7 times its weight in carbon dioxide
The food industry generates a lot of waste products, but one of these, eggshells, could help combat climate change, according to research published in the International Journal of Global Warming this month.
Basab Chaudhuri of the University of Calcutta and colleagues have demonstrated that the membrane that lines an eggshell can absorb almost seven times its own weight of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide thus trapped could be stored in this form until energy-effective methods of using the gas could be found that would not compound the environmental problems associated with carbon emissions. Carbon dioxide is widely used in the chemical industry for the preparation of a wide range of products as well as in some settings as an alternative to toxic solvents. It might also one day be possible to efficiently convert trapped carbon dioxide into a clean fuel.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been rising since the mid-nineteenth century when fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas – first began fuelling the industrial revolution. The rise in average global temperatures seen in recent decades is due mainly to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In 2005, carbon dioxide levels were more than a third higher than they had been prior to the industrial revolution; rising from 280 parts per million by volume of gas to 381 ppm. As of October 2010, the concentration is 388 ppm. To put these numbers into perspective, almost 300 billion tonnes of carbon have been released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and cement production since 1751, but half of this carbon has been released since the mid-1970s.
The Calcutta team explains that eggshell comprises three layers, a cuticle on the outer surface, a spongy calcium-containing middle layer and inner layer. The second and third layers are composed of protein fibers bonded to calcium carbonate. The membrane is just below the shell and is about 100 micrometers thick. Separating the membrane from the cuticle is currently not an efficient process. But, given that India alone consumes 1.6 million tonnes of eggs each year, there is certainly an incentive for improving on this situation in order to use the membrane material in climate change amelioration.
Chaudhuri and colleagues have demonstrated that a weak acid can be used to separate the membrane from the shell for use as a carbon dioxide adsorbant. The researchers point out that a mechanical separation method would be needed to make the process viable on an industrial scale. However, Chaudhuri also muses that we could all help reduce CO2 levels by exposing our egg membranes to the air after eating our eggs.
“Utilisation of eggshell membrane as an adsorbent for carbon dioxide” in Int. J. Global Warming, 2010, 2, 252-261
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Eat more eggs and bury the shells. Would that do the trick? Science is a wonderful thing.
I always wondered about this possibility (not about eggs, but about the prospect of finding a method for absorbing CO2 as fast as it’s created).
What would the warmists say about it? Would they say “Whew! Now we can drill/mine/refine/drive/fly/burn until our heart’s content.” or would they continue to push for the reductions in CO2 production? It would certainly separate the religious from the agnostics.
Now is the time for all vegans to do their part to save the world by eating more eggs — as long as it’s free-range chicken, of course.
Hm. Looks like the recently founded journal may be a bit short of contributions.
Well there you go. Just expose your egg shells to the air and suck up CO2. Why are we spending billions of dollars to figure out ways of sequestering CO2 under ground? At an amazing ability to absorb 7 times its weight in CO2, how much of these egg shell membranes will we need? Given 300 billion tons of CO2 excess, or is it just the 150 billion tons since 1970 that we need to fear, we would need a paltry 20 or so billion tons of the membrane material.
To put these numbers into perspective, they say, and then immediately put them completely out of perspective.
This is either satire (the name of the “journal” seems to be a hint), or evidence that human stupidity is indeed endless.
Did the corn/ethanol lobby miss a payment?
If everyone on the planet just stopped breathing it would be far more effective than trying to seperate out eggshell liners to use as CO2 sinks.
Bonus! There’d be no one left to care about CAGW. ;o)
Seriously, how long could one expect the CO2 to remain sequestered in the liners? Wouldn’t the the workers breathing on the liners as they seperate the liners from the eggs use up the CO2 storage capacity of the liners?
they’re going to suck all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and we’ll all die of starvation
What about all those chickens needed to produce the extra eggs? Won’t they produce lots of extra CO2 (breathing)? Will there be a shortage of eggs ( and higher prices ) for food and vaccine production? Will we now be required to “recycle” the membranes from our breakfast?
So many questions, so little time. 😉
Why is there an international journal of global warming? Hard to be objective about GW if that’s the name of your business.
This will work great, until we compost the egg shells and then boom. Back where we started from.
Seriously how much energy would it take to store those membranes until disposal?
Hey,
quit trying to mess with my plant fertilizer. Especially in India they should know not to mess with their food supply!! If any of these schemes worked they would lose several percent of their food supply. Anyone want to explain to the people starving or paying more for their food why they are doing it??
How much CO2 does a chicken generate to produce an egg? How much CO2 and CH4 do we produce having eaten an egg?
That’s what Nature does all the time. Have you wondered why are there so many gigantic deposits of calcite (calcium carbonate, lime, marble) all over the world?…..”Elementary my dear Watson!”
Welcome back to primary school, global warmers!
I am really trying to find the right comment for this… but nothing is quite right.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic
Eggs from headless chickens perhaps?
🙂
The first correct use of “comprises” I’ve seen in months!
[REPLY – Yes, people will insist on saying “comprised of” (or “by”). ~ Evan]
As Father Jack would say “ar**”
http://www.fathertedonline.ukf.net/whois.htm
which problems? Oh, carbon, they mean soot…
Now, that’s an interesting concept. [/sarc] Looks somehow like a perpetual…
Unfotunately, the rise of temperatures only happen in the climate models, nature doesn’t participate.
Am I walking on eggshells if I tentatively suggest that Basab Chaudhuri may be yet another Indian in search of the Golden IPCC chaairmanship? Just a thought. Or he may just end up with egg on his face. Either way, it’s an eggstraordinary article.
What utter, foetid dingos’ kidneys!
Good grief, this has to be one of the most ridiculous recommendations ever made. How much does one of these membranes weigh (and is dry weight or wet weight the right weight)?
Let’s be generous and call it 1 gram. How far did I commute today? Let’s be really generous and call it one mile, it’s only off by a factor of 45 or so. I get about 30 mpg when the car is warmed up, so that’s 1/30 gallon (please excuse the ridiculous American units, but this post doesn’t deserve better). A gallon is about 6 pounds, so that 1 mile trip burns 1/5 pound of fuel, a pound is 454 grams, so I burned about 95 grams of fuel. Oh dear, I forget what amount of CO2 that is. Gotta be more than 95, call it 98 because it’s a round number – i.e. 98/7 = 14 egg membranes.
So I need to eat 14 eggs for each mile I drive.
This post belongs under ridiculae!
It would make a lot more sense to engineer hens and/or their feed to make thicker egg shells.
Why do you think you have to throw this trash at us: “The rise in average global temperatures seen in recent decades is due mainly to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In 2005, carbon dioxide levels were more than a third higher than they had been prior to the industrial revolution; rising from 280 parts per million by volume of gas to 381 ppm. As of October 2010, the concentration is 388 ppm. To put these numbers into perspective, almost 300 billion tonnes of carbon have been released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and cement production since 1751, but half of this carbon has been released since the mid-1970s.” I will put these numbers into perspective for you: carbon dioxide is not the cause of any warming in recent decades. The only warming that occurred within the last thirty years started in 1998, raised global temperature by a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. The eighties and the nineties that preceded it were a period of oscillating temperatures, not of rising temperatures as temperature charts from NOAA, NASA, and the Met Office indicate. How do I know this? Because we have satellite records that prove it. The oscillations are not some noise or artifact but are real and record alternating El Nino and La Nina periods that have a global climate influence. There were five such El Nino peaks in a twenty year period with cool La Nina valleys in between. The warming we are told about began in the late seventies and Hansen testified in 1988 that the warming was here and that carbon dioxide was the cause. That testimony was false. The temperature curves we are shown have been falsified by raising up the bottoms of cool La Nina periods and this way giving the curve an upward slope that they call the “late twentieth century warming.” NASA and the Met Office, that is. NOAA simply threw out the La Nina periods entirely, all to pretend that a greenhouse effect is here. The greenhouse effect can’t even warm the Arctic which is melting because of warm water carried north by currents, not because of some magical “arctic amplification” that does not exist. And global warming does not exist. Ferenc Miskolczi’s work explains why this is so. Using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948 he was able to show that the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs had been constant for 61 years and had a value of 1.87. This means that addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for all these years had no influence on the transparency of the atmosphere to heat radiation from below or the optical thickness would have increased, and this did not happen. You can also put it this way: the supposed greenhouse absorption signature of carbon dioxide is simply missing. This is an empirical observation, not some theory, and it overrides any calculations from theory. It looks like the good old Arrhenius theory needs to be updated to accommodate physical reality.