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[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Well this all seems to heavily suggest a course of action: Institute universal brotherly love. People just don't know and love their neighbors.

[Egan_BW]

I wholeheartedly support the practice of cutting up young men for spare parts, provided that said young men belong to a demographic that does not include me. Minorities, maybe.

/s

[Reelya]

Actually there's a much easier system to fix organ donation rates. There's a tick box to opt in. Countries that instead make you tick the box to opt out get much higher rates of "agreement" to be donors. It's seems to be a psychological thing, where you don't want to think about it that deeply to make a choice, so people put off ticking or not ticking the box. Positive or negative choice is something that social engineers can take advantage of if they're clever.

Meanwhile:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38391034

An industrial plant is capturing the CO2 emissions from a coal boiler and using the CO2 to make valuable chemicals. It is a world first. And just 100km away is the world's biggest solar farm, making power for 150,000 homes on a 10 sq km site.

The industrial plant appears especially significant as it offers a breakthrough by capturing CO2 without subsidy. Built at a chemical plant in the port city of Tuticorin, it is projected to save 60,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year by incorporating them into the chemical recipe for soda ash - otherwise known as baking powder.

Here's how it works:

    The plant operates a coal-fired boiler to make steam for its chemical operations.
    CO2 emissions from the boiler's chimney are stripped out by a fine mist of a new patented chemical.
    A stream of CO2 is fed into the chemicals plant as an ingredient for soda ash - a compound with many uses, including the manufacturing of glass, detergents and sweeteners.

Zero emissions

The owner of the chemicals plant, Ramachadran Gopalan, told a BBC Radio 4 documentary: "I am a businessman. I never thought about saving the planet. I needed a reliable stream of CO2, and this was the best way of getting it."

He says his operation has now almost zero emissions. He hopes soon to install a second coal boiler to make more CO2 to synthesise fertiliser.

The chemical was invented by two young Indian chemists. They failed to raise Indian finance to develop it, but their firm, Carbonclean Solutions, working with the Institute of Chemical Technology at Mumbai and Imperial College in London, got backing from the UK's entrepreneur support scheme.

Their technique uses a form of salt to bond with CO2 molecules in the boiler chimney. The firm says it is more efficient than typical amine compounds used for the purpose.

They say it also needs less energy, produces less alkaline waste and allows the use of a cheaper form of steel - all radically reducing the cost of the whole operation.

The firm admits its technology of Carbon Capture and Utilisation won't cure climate change, but says it may provide a useful contribution by gobbling up perhaps 5-10% of the world's emissions from coal.

Lord Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell, and now director and head of the UK government's carbon capture advisory group, told the BBC: "We have to do everything we can to reduce the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels and it is great news that more ways are being found of turning at least some of the CO2 into useful products."

So the US gets Trump scrapping funding for clean energy and going 100% "drill baby drill" while the rest of the world works out ways to deal with the problem. The fact is, if uses can be found for CO2 then that completely shifts the problem. A good historical example is Rockerfeller and gasoline. He hated waste, so found uses for gasoline. That pushed his more wasteful and polluting competitors out of business, and got rid of a major problem with flammable rivers in the 1800s from gasoline dumping. "Sequestering" CO2 by turning it into inert substances and burying them in rocks is completely the wrong approach - it's not economically sustainable. Incorporating waste into usable products is the solution.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Sigh.... It was avoidable.

[Starver]

Makes sense. They're keeping other people from using it by making the patent, so if it's something lifesaving then it'd be irresponsible for them not to sell it.

Should also apply to those alleged 'fossil-fuel-free' solutions sat on by the petroleum companies, then..?  A class-action by those suffering from all kinds of current problems where a historic move away from for carbon fuels might hypothetically have mitigated the current status...

An interesting philosophical question. As well as dipping deep into various Conspiracy Theory territories.


(BTW, the 'zero emissions factory' sounds a bit perpetual-motionish in the description. Interesting to know what energy is needed to do all that, and produce the special 'patented chemical'. With luck, it's just that it's effectively encapsuplating all significant emissions, like feeding cows condoms so that they end up somehow producing fun novelty balloons (the eventual safe neutralisation/disposal of which is Somebody Else's Problem) instead of unconstrained farts, but that still doesn't take into account the impact of the condom factories required to be built/up-scaled to supply the necessary items.)

[Reelya]

(BTW, the 'zero emissions factory' sounds a bit perpetual-motionish in the description. Interesting to know what energy is needed to do all that, and produce the special 'patented chemical'. With luck, it's just that it's effectively encapsuplating all significant emissions, like feeding cows condoms so that they end up somehow producing fun novelty balloons (the eventual safe neutralisation/disposal of which is Somebody Else's Problem) instead of unconstrained farts, but that still doesn't take into account the impact of the condom factories required to be built/up-scaled to supply the necessary items.)

Really? I'd say there's nothing like a "perpetual motion" claim in just saying you're capturing CO2 from a coal stack. The point is that it's making stuff we need anyway, that would normally have a process that took energy to complete.

Well, we can guess quite easily at what sort of chemical this mystery stuff it is since the article says the catalyst is a type of salt, and that the output is soda ash - or sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃). Well it's clearly an organic salt of sodium, probably something fairly simple. These aren't the exact process probably, but are probably on the right track:

https://ec.europa.eu/environment/eco-innovation/projects/en/projects/nahco3
http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/washing-soda-capture-carbon-0432654/

Probably if I sat here balancing equations we could guess with 80% probability what the exact salt is, but it's 3am here so I should really stop

[Starver]

Really? I'd say there's nothing like a "perpetual motion" claim in just saying you're capturing CO2 from a coal stack.

Ish. I said "perpetual motionish"...  All awkward losses from the process (here CO₂, not friction losses) apparently zeroed out, and claiming it is a zero carbon solution when ambiguous external inputs of power (perhaps not directly, but effectively) are probably necessary to buff the process.  One could very loosely liken it to a hypothetical hydrogen-powered car that is supposed to electrolise its own 2H₂O->2H₂+O₂, on the move... There'd be a missing part to that process, in the form of energy and/or feedstock, either/both of which need to be considered but the description handwaves it away...

Not actual PM, of course, but the claim of 'zero emissions' just needs a bit more consideration. Material/energy supplies from truly carbon-neutral sources via truly carbon-neutral transportation methods, can count, probably after sufficient construction emissions (including that of the multi-level supply chain, both prerequisites and ongoing elements) have been offset by sequestering non-zero emissions in some carbon-negative scheme.

The point is that it's making stuff we need anyway, that would normally have a process that took energy to complete.

Still gonna need energy. The savings are that instead of using clean energy (from that solar plant 100km away?) to extract ?400?ppm of CO₂ from the air to obviate the need of carbon compounds being delivered, they import the coal, burn it to create the steam steam the plant apparently needs, then make additional efforts and use additional energy (give or take that this includes a token amount of waste energy from the steam process) to extract from the comparitively carbon-rich flue gases some (or most, but probably not all) of its pre-used carbon so that it isn't just chucking away carbon that it had previously caused/encouraged to be desequestered from the original coal seams...

What would be usefully novel is to develop a device that stuck up into the air and used the power of the sun to extract carbon straight from the atmosphere and channelled it into use as both raw chemical feedstock and perhaps also burnable brickettes for various brute-force storing-and-heating needs.  Looking not unlike the undersea device used in The Diamond Age to molecularly extract and microrefine all kinds of materials from seawater to serve the nano-tech fabrication society in Neal Stevenson's book, I suspect that the term 'dendritic' woyld describe my proposed device over multiple semantic levels...

But I don't deny that, in principle, that factory may well have some merit in leading the way to the better future. Much like my 'methane-filled condom' party-balloon analogy, but with a subtly different set of flaws at its heart... 

[inteuniso]

I believe the sunlight-classically-quantum-powered carbon-capture devices already exist and have for millions of years. They're called plants.

[Starver]

... I suspect that the term 'dendritic' woyld [sic] describe my proposed device over multiple semantic levels...

 

[PTTG??]

I believe the sunlight-classically-quantum-powered carbon-capture devices already exist and have for millions of years. They're called plants.

PLANTS VIOLATE THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY!

[Starver]

I believe the sunlight-classically-quantum-powered carbon-capture devices already exist and have for millions of years. They're called plants.

PLANTS VIOLATE THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY!

Burn them! Burn them all!

[Max™]

I believe the sunlight-classically-quantum-powered carbon-capture devices already exist and have for millions of years. They're called plants.

PLANTS VIOLATE THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY!

Burn them! Burn them all!

Wait, that's wasteful, let's compress them into a form we can process for useful products and fuel!

[inteuniso]

Wait, that's wasteful, let's compress them into a form we can process for useful products and fuel!

Why not just use them as our reactors and use the chemicals they produce to make better power plants/printers/etc.?

[Shadowlord]

Food printers? Plants turn CO2+H2O+sunlight into sugars.

[inteuniso]

Food printers? Plants turn CO2+H2O+sunlight into sugars.

Not just sugars, but acids and other chemical compounds that are highly utilizable in a variety of industries.

We just need to think high-tech with our low-tech and think low-tech with our high-tech.