Saturday, February 17, 2007
Virgin Earth Challenge
My quite possibly half-baked answer for the Virgin Earth Challenge for solutions to CO2 buildup/removal:
This suggestion might be either naive or old hat, but: Why not sequester carbon where the wells are, filtering it from the general atmosphere and then pumping it underground,?
We do something like this already to filter out oxygen from airliners' fuel tanks to prevent explosions:
"Called a fuel tank inerting system... Before it enters the tank, air is forced through bundles of fibers that filter out the oxygen.
Steve Zimmerman: These fibers are really in the structure of very small straws the size of a human hair. So there's millions of these fibers laid axially down the length of the air separation module. So, air that's 24% oxygen enters these fibers and starts traveling down their length. Now because of the nature of the fiber and the structure of the molecules, oxygen's allowed to be absorbed into the walls of the fiber, and then exits the fiber and is collected and dumped overboard. Whereas the balance of the air that continues traveling down these fibers, becomes more and more nitrogen enriched as it flows down the length."
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/innovation/transcript_episode5.html
Now if you have two filters, and first take out everything bigger than CO2 and then use a second filter to take out the CO2, you can use wind power or other erratic but renewal sources of power to pump air through fiber filters and take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the sites of old oil wells, and put it underground.
Granted, it would be still better to suck it from your auto tailpipe and shove the dirty CO2 underground, but it's not possible to do that economically, on an industrial scale.
This suggestion might be either naive or old hat, but: Why not sequester carbon where the wells are, filtering it from the general atmosphere and then pumping it underground,?
We do something like this already to filter out oxygen from airliners' fuel tanks to prevent explosions:
"Called a fuel tank inerting system... Before it enters the tank, air is forced through bundles of fibers that filter out the oxygen.
Steve Zimmerman: These fibers are really in the structure of very small straws the size of a human hair. So there's millions of these fibers laid axially down the length of the air separation module. So, air that's 24% oxygen enters these fibers and starts traveling down their length. Now because of the nature of the fiber and the structure of the molecules, oxygen's allowed to be absorbed into the walls of the fiber, and then exits the fiber and is collected and dumped overboard. Whereas the balance of the air that continues traveling down these fibers, becomes more and more nitrogen enriched as it flows down the length."
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/innovation/transcript_episode5.html
Now if you have two filters, and first take out everything bigger than CO2 and then use a second filter to take out the CO2, you can use wind power or other erratic but renewal sources of power to pump air through fiber filters and take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the sites of old oil wells, and put it underground.
Granted, it would be still better to suck it from your auto tailpipe and shove the dirty CO2 underground, but it's not possible to do that economically, on an industrial scale.
