Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new paper claims the vast artificial airflow created by the world’s air conditioners could be harnessed to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, by adding or retrofitting a CO2 absorber and converter to air conditioners. But critics see a few problems with the concept.
Could Air-Conditioning Fix Climate Change?
Researchers propose a carbon-neutral “synthetic oil well” on every rooftop
By Richard Conniff on April 30, 2019
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A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy: Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour. Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air. So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?
This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The result: “Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells” in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. “The envisioned model of ‘crowd oil’ from solar refineries, akin to ‘crowd electricity’ from solar panels,” would enable people “to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths.”
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“This is a wonderful concept—it made my day,” says David Keith, a Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy, who was not involved in the new paper. He suggests that the best use for the resulting fuels would be to “help solve two of our biggest energy challenges”: providing a carbon-neutral fuel to fill the gaps left by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar power, and providing fuel for “the hard-to-electrify parts of transportation and industry,” such as airplanes, large trucks and steel- or cement-making. Keith is already targeting some of these markets through Carbon Engineering, a company he founded focused on direct air capture of carbon dioxide for large-scale liquid fuel production. But he says he is “deeply skeptical” about doing it on a distributed building or neighborhood basis. “Economies of scale can’t be wished away. There’s a reason we have huge wind turbines,” he says—and a reason we do not have backyard all-in-one pulp-and-paper mills for disposing of our yard wastes. He believes it is simply “faster and cheaper” to take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into fuel “by doing it an appropriate scale.”
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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-air-conditioning-fix-climate-change/
The abstract of the paper;
Crowd oil not crude oil
Roland Dittmeyer, Michael Klumpp, Paul Kant & Geoffrey Ozin
Nature Communicationsvolume 10, Article number: 1818 (2019)Climate change represents an existential, global threat to humanity, yet its delocalized nature complicates climate action. Here, the authors propose retrofitting air conditioning units as integrated, scalable, and renewable-powered devices capable of decentralized CO2 conversion and energy democratization.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09685-x
Turning every high-rise residential or office building air conditioner into a miniature flammable petroleum refinery which vents electrolysis oxygen. What could possibly go wrong?
Update (EW): Added more detail to the final paragraph
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Perhaps with a Unicorn repeating some mantra near each CO2 absorber-Air-conditioner the process could be more effective … with some diamond as a by-product ?
Publish or perish, I guess.
Feels like logorrhea on the train tracks, right before the train hits. When the thawing permafrost starts the methane loop/chain reaction, we’re going to need more than air conditioners.
Too bad, the human animal was an interesting development.
Did the Karlsruhe institute, also work with VW on how to reduce tail pipe emissions from their cars…..?
This cr*p is everywhere in the media these days. Just yesterday the BBC were ranting on about a “revolutionary new process” (/Sarc on) for making carbon neutral liquid aviation fuel out of wood chips by heating them up to 600C to produce synthesis gas and then presumably doing some kind of Fischer-Tropsch process to produce hydrocarbons. They report all this drivel without realising how stupid it is and, of course, the public is fed this daily diet of fantastical nonsense with no idea about thermodynamics. They are left with the idea that all this is possible and makes good sense if the government just provides funding to help this “research” – sad and increasingly unbelievable!
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-48097897
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I take it that this paper was produced under a hidden (sarc tag to test the stupidity of editors and Harvard Professors.
We already have a device that uses solar energy to remove co2 from the atmosphere to produce a source of organic climate friendly energy. They are called plants.
There is simply not enough VC startup potential and government grant program admin potential for political insiders with plants, unless you mean marijuana.
Bravo!
It is criminal to suck life-giving CO2 from the atmosphere, just like it is criminal to burn food in cars.
My idea is better: Use car-mounted wind turbines using the already-existing airflow past the car to charge an electric car’s batteries, allowing it an infinite range. Free energy. Genius. Now, where’s my grant?
After this is accomplished can we start on changing rust back to iron.
I’m still hurting financially from the last green new deal and lobbyist ploy that said changing the coolant type in AC units would cost pennies when in fact the chemical pressure differences had huge impacts from the design, mfg, service maintenance, and end user customer cost. As a saver, I will not soon forget that green smack down.
Suggestions like this are why we must get beyond temperatures and economics and focus on Carbon Dioxide as the Basis of All Life (on Land–some sea life comes from abiotic oil at the sea bottom).
This idea and so many others are monstrous because people would go hungry and endangered species have nothing to eat.
Another solution built around Unicorn farts.
On the other hand, if it works, I could become a member of OPEC.
‘a developing fix for climate change’
What is it? How can you ‘fix’ it when we don’t even know what it is?
Let’s just declare it fixed and move on.