From people who get grants, but may be thermodynamically challenged.~ctm
November 13, 2018 by Anthony King, From Horizon Magazine
When astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) exhale carbon dioxide (CO2), it’s removed from the air and pumped into space. Could an Earth-based version help remove greenhouse gas emissions from our atmosphere?
In order to limit global warming to 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels and avoid some of the worse impacts of climate change, it means eliminating all 42 billion tonnes of annual CO2 emissions by 2050.
One way of doing this is to cut emissions. Another is to design materials that can remove the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere or before it’s expelled. The problem is that no one has quite worked out how best to do this – yet.
The air filter system in space inspired Professor Stefano Brandani and Dr. Giulio Santori from the University of Edinburgh, UK, to develop a way of capturing and concentrating CO2 directly from the atmosphere. This ambitious strategy – to build a so-called artificial tree – would see CO2 captured to be stored in large underground reservoirs.
Zeolite
The CO2 breathed by astronauts aboard the ISS is captured by using a sponge-like mineral called a zeolite, which has tiny pores to lock in a CO2 molecule. On the space station, the zeolites empty their CO2 when exposed to the vacuum of space.
As part of a project called ACCA, Dr. Santori is hacking the system so it will work on Earth. This is more challenging. “There is so much more CO2 to capture and concentrations are more dilute to begin with on Earth, so it is much more energy intensive,” he explained. “The starting concentration of CO2 on the ISS is one order of magnitude higher.”
The new system works by having a series of zeolite adsorption beds. Each takes in CO2, concentrates it a little and releases it when heated up. “It is like a sponge. You regenerate the material using heat. When it is cold, it takes in a lot (of CO2),” said Dr. Santori.
This CO2 then moves into a new adsorption bed, which again pushes the gas molecules closer. The gas is thereby compressed more at each step, without the need for moving parts like vacuum pumps. Temperature changes are the engine of this process. Heating and cooling the spongy material causes it to release the gas, and take up more.
With five beds of zeolites, emptied with heat – which could be waste heat from an industrial facility – and cooled at ambient temperature, CO2 could be captured at a purity of above 95%, with little energy consumed.
“If you could capture CO2 from the air, this will allow you compress it and to store it in a nearby geological facility,” said Dr. Santori, who believes that large-scale carbon capture and storage is the ideal strategy for decreasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
In the long term, zeolites could be used in stations that could capture CO2 directly from the air – but this is a long way off as compressing CO2 is just part of the problem. Because CO2 is very dilute in ambient air, technology such as giant fans would be needed to suck it towards the stations without spending too much energy or money – something that is still too high a hurdle for current technologies. Prof. Brandani said: “The issue is how much it costs and who then owns the CO2.”
A nearer-term option is to focus on stripping CO2 from the waste gases produced by industry before it is released into the atmosphere.
CO2 spews from fossil-fuelled power plants, but industries such as steel and cement emit lots of CO2 as well. The chemical reactions needed to turn limestone into cement, for example, set free CO2 gas and cement-making alone releases 7% of all global carbon emissions.
Membranes
The idea is to install membranes that trap CO2, which can then be concentrated and compressed for storage. “Membranes are efficient and can save energy compared to other systems,” said Professor Marco Giacinti Baschetti at the University of Bologna, Italy.
In traditional strategies used by industries such as coal plants, CO2 is captured in special liquids or solid sponge-like structures, but these must then be heated up to release the CO2. This is not needed with membranes. All existing technologies, however, are costly. Current membrane materials are not durable enough and do not separate CO2 well enough to be economically sensible.
Prof. Baschetti runs a project called NANOMEMC2 which is developing a number of different membranes for CO2 capture. In November, the team is to test a new membrane in a Colacem cement facility in Italy.
Developed by project scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the membrane is made of hollow fibres, about a millimetre thick, and covered with an extremely thin layer of nanocellulose and polymer mixed with artificial amino acids. The nanocelluose, which is made of miniscule fibres from wood, allows CO2 to permeate, while blocking other gases. The amino acid grabs onto CO2 and pulls it across the membrane.
Explore further: Hollow fibre membrane modules show promise for carbon capture
Provided by: Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine 
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-space-station-astronaut-exhalations-earth-based.html#jCp
HT/LdB
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Lots of things can be made to absorb CO2, concrete for example. It’s not even close to being original. I’ve seen better science fair projects, a lot better.
99.9% of these hair brained CO2 capturing schemes give no thought to economics. That means a couple of high school science fair entrants are smarter than 99.9% of scientists who propose CO2 capture schemes.
I’ve got a 10 step zeolite process that turns CO2 into diamonds and releases O2 as a waste product.
With a mere 100 trllion in funding we could bring this to market. This is a sure thing as the diamonds produced will quickly repay the initial investment and afterwards operate at a net profit.
Send money to scam@invest.co2
@ferdberple
Contact a Mr. Al Gore as he’s good at funding these ‘sustainable’ schemes.
They’d only have to handle a MILLION TONNES of air to recover FOUR HUNDRED TONNES of CO2.
The clowns.
Not to worry – the climateers would never support this.
The globalists only want $$$ (a.k.a. cap & trade).
The politicians only want the ‘fear votes’.
A significant subset of scientists only want their research money, not a solution that puts them out of business.
And the low information masses have no idea what they really want, except perhaps to blather on about the sky falling.
This is definitely the stupidest thing I’ve heard all week.
““The starting concentration of CO2 on the ISS is one order of magnitude higher.””
Wait – CO2 on the ISS is 4000 ppm?
And they are NOT dying from heat death? Even though they have a solid ‘greenhouse’ shield around them?
Did these guys just nuke the entire AGW scam? 😀
One recent reference (http://explorecuriocity.org/Explore/ArticleId/6421/carbon-dioxide-on-earth-and-on-the-iss.aspx ) states “Carbon dioxide levels are monitored and controlled on the ISS by the Atmosphere Revitalization (AR) subsystem of the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS). NASA has set the maximum allowable 24-hour average CO2 on board the ISS at 5,250 ppm (4.0 mmHg).”
An older (2015) reference says that NASA used have a maximum such limit of 7,000 ppm on the manned ISS.
I can only speculate that the pragmatism of ISS operations engineers has discounted all of the dire warnings from NASA climate “scientists” about humans living with a doubling of current atmospheric CO2 levels (from 410 ppm today to 820 ppm one hundred years from now).
SO the idea is to heat and cool, over and over, beds of material to move the CO2 to a point it can be stored.
Does it also treat the CO2 from the power generation required to run the heating and cooling? Because, with my limited knowledge of the real world and physics, I am betting there’s a net loss to this system, which means this will never work.
“The chemical reactions needed to turn limestone into cement, for example, set free CO2 gas and cement-making alone releases 7% of all global carbon emissions.”
This must refer only to human carbon dioxide emissions, since total human emissions are themselves only 5% of global emissions.
I think the Professor already knows the answer! Or he hasn’t realised it yet!
” the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is very dilute” Therein lies the (lack) of a problem!
Whenever I exhale I try to point my head upwards to give the CO2 a better chance of exiting the atmosphere. Every little bit helps.
I have a much better idea: simply recognize the fact that CO2 DOESN’T CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING, which will save us wasting a whole lot of money on CO2 mitigation and removal when CO2 ISN’T THE PROBLEM!
Incredibly stupid comment contained in the above article: “Another is to design materials that can remove the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere or before it’s expelled. The problem is that no one has quite worked out how best to do this – yet.”
Well, maybe no person has quite worked out how best to do this because Mother Nature evolved the “solution” starting some 2.5 billions or so years ago: it is called cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. These microbes conduct photosynthesis: using sunshine, water and carbon dioxide to produce carbohydrates and oxygen. In fact, all the plants on Earth—including grasses and trees—incorporate symbiotic cyanobacteria (known as chloroplasts) to do their photosynthesis for them even today.
I can confidently state that humans will never exceed the overall efficiency that cyanobacteria have evolved on removing atmospheric CO2 on a global scale, while at the same time converting it into some things that humans find quite useful: oxygen and food.
+10
If Climate Alarmist’s really believed their BS (instead of just wanting climate cash) they would push for fertilizing the oceans and seas with trace amounts of iron dust or having shops tow barges of steel wool. The plankton in the water would increase its conversion of CO2 to O2, and as a ‘side’-effect provide tons of food for fish at the very base of the food chain, helping every species above. Might I also add, that this would also offset the effects of commercial fishing. Basically win-win-win, but since they don’t really want to help the biosphere, but only want to help themselves to our money, they block the idea at every turn. It was used by a Native Canadian tribe on the west coast for 2 years and got record salmon catches both years, before the government came in and enforced poverty on them.