Carbon Capture on Earth may apply to Mars

tahanson43206 · 2022-02-02 10:59:22

This topic is offered in hopes members will contribute links or text from resources that are about carbon capture, and how it might apply both to Mars and to Earth.

The article at the link below reports on MIT originated research that (appears to have) made significant improvements in energy cost for pulling CO2 out of the air, by using electric fields instead of temperature changes to collect CO2.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/bill … 15641.html

Verdox has spent about $4 million on research and development so far, which it raised from government grants and smaller investors. In addition to Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital participated in the recent funding round.
The new funding should be enough capital for four or five years, Baynes said. Some of it will be spent building three prototypes in 2022 that could capture as much as 100 kilograms of CO₂ a day, which is about 35 tons in a year. One prototype aims to directly capture CO₂ from the air, whereas the others will trap it from factories. Baynes wouldn’t name the companies where the prototypes will be built, but said that one was an oil company in the U.S. and another a metals company in Europe.

(th)

tahanson43206 · 2022-02-02 15:54:01

As a follow up to #1 ...

A failure mode reported in the article is that the system collected too much Oxygen....

That is interesting ... green houses on Mars are going to have an abundance of CO2 to feed the plants.

Oxygen is only needed to ** start ** plants (this is detailed in archived posts in this forum).

However, Oxygen ** is ** generated by plants, and it ** is ** needed by humans and animals who may be present.

The more efficient (less energy) molecule sorting system may be helpful on Large Ship, and in habitats on Mars.

(th)

Void · 2022-02-02 19:04:37

OK, it seems that you might be open to suggestion. I have seen a mention that the ocean water contains 50 times as much CO2 as air.
http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Bi-Ca/ … phere.html
Quote:

Of the three places where carbon is stored—atmosphere, oceans, and land biosphere—approximately 93 percent of the CO 2 is found in the oceans. The atmosphere, at about 750 petagrams of carbon (a petagram [Pg] is 10 15 grams), has the smallest amount of carbon.
Read more: http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Bi-Ca/ … z7JmyjTDN7

Now if you use a force distillation process.....That is where motors, pull a vacuum on the water to boil, and so cool it and extract water vapor.
Then the water vapor is compressed into a hot liquid.

What should also happen is that the CO2 is pulled out of the water also, the water that is being subjected to a vacuum. What is left may be cold brine. On the compression side, where hot fresh water is to be created by compression, an accumulation of CO2 should occur, and the liquid being hot, it should not so easily absorb the CO2.

So then, if the process you have mentioned were compatible, the residual mix that came out of the boiling sea water could be subjected to it.

After that in this type of distillation, the heat from the compressed liquid is pushed into the sea water input, but not the cold brine residual.
The cold brine residual could be accepting of the concentrated CO2, so that it could dissolve into it under pressure.

Then you have a cold brine which is heavy per cold and salt, but also made heavy per added CO2.

That could be dropped into the ocean to sink into a basin, and so to hold the CO2 there.

Some may object, but nature does this as well for instance, let's look at brine pools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_poo … ep%20ocean.

And so, for your efforts you would dispose of CO2 for a fair amount of time, most likely, and would then have the product "Distilled Water".

While this process will reuse the latent heat of the situation, (I only partially understand that), you could also involve it with a solar heating process, and store heated sea water, for use.

So, kind of green, but environmentalists of some sorts might go nuts about it. The anti-humanist variety. The ones that would think we would please them more if we were dead.

------

You must remember to consider that we are being bamboozled by many parties around the globe for many reasons.

#1, there are those in my country who did resent the industrial sections of the country and did have a marvelous time making sure that we would have to import oil from the M.E. Also, they also had a grand time with cheap foreign labor. Those effects are coming to an end by now, the rust belt has better chances. But don't take things at face value. Always wonder what the motivation is for various parties pushing for some things. Shut down a pipeline and get money under the table for importing oil for instance is one possible one.

The Tonga eruption is a concern.

The year without a summer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

Are we aware of what would happen if such a similar event were to occur? Maybe a somewhat warmer globe is not entirely a bad thing.

At least think about it.

Done.

Last edited by Void (2022-02-02 19:22:06)

SpaceNut · 2022-02-02 21:04:38

The voltage was actually breaking down the co2 as to why it was producing excess oxygen.
Submarines use a system that is used to filter dirt or dust as well as other particles as part of the system.
The home version is the ionic breeze which as well suffers from causing the oxygen to breakdown forming ozone.

tahanson43206 · 2023-11-15 19:46:00

The article at the link below is about a company that has started pulling CO2 out of the air.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/united-state … 02769.html

Futurism
United States Opens First Facility to Suck CO2 Out of the Air
Noor Al-Sibai
Wed, November 15, 2023 at 9:38 AM EST·2 min read

Self-Storage
For the first time, a commercial facility that can suck carbon out of the air and store it underground has opened in the United States.
In a press release, the team behind Heirloom Carbon Technologies said their newly opened direct air capture (DAC) facility near San Francisco will be able to siphon CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it securely underground in concrete for paying customers.
Though dozens of carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities have been operational around the world for more than a decade, the majority of CCS plants are involved in capturing and storing new emissions made by other pollutive processes like coal mining, leading to the so-called "clean coal" technology that experts and activists argue is anything but.
Direct air capture, meanwhile, sucks out ambient carbon from the air without any other industrial process alongside it. In the case of Heirloom, it's stored in what the company insists are secure concrete repositories underground.
As the New York Times acknowledges in its reporting on the new plant, Heirloom's first facility in Tracy, California is pretty small and only able to capture 1,000 tons of CO2 from the air per year — though as CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala points out in the press release, that number "has gone from [one] kilogram of CO2 to up to one million, or 1000 metric tons, in just over two years."
"We want to get to millions of tons per year," Samala told the NYT. "That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over."
Credit is Due
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Jennifer M. Granholm, the head of the Biden Administration's Department of Energy, ventured to the Golden State's Central Valley during the Heirloom plant's unveiling last week to laud it as a "blueprint" for the current White House's plans to reduce American carbon emissions.
Perhaps the biggest value proposition for companies like Heirloom — and its well-heeled backers, which includes the likes of Microsoft and Shopify — is that it will sell "carbon removal credits" to companies looking to offset their own emissions, a higher-tech iteration of popular reforestation campaigns in which companies vow to plant a bunch of trees as an offset for their pollution without actually reducing it.
While it's definitively good that companies like Heirloom are being built all over the planet in efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, critics argue that those in the business of selling carbon credits are giving businesses a "license to pollute" with a clean conscious because they are, after all, offsetting their emissions by paying someone else to suck it out of the air.
At the end of the day, direct air capture still seems like a step ahead of the now-traditional carbon capture schemes — though if companies and governments want to get serious about reducing their emissions, they need to just do it already.
More on CO2: Here's What It Would Look Like if Carbon Emissions Were Visible

What interests me about this process is that it ** may ** deliver CO2 that is well filtered, so that carbon that might be extracted from the captured CO2 would be itself free of contaminants.

(th)

Calliban · 2023-11-15 23:47:48

TH, this is interesting. Direct CO2 air capture and storage is simple in principle. One compresses air to high enough pressures for the CO2 to pass into its liquidus point. At a high enough pressure, it should condense out on cold surfaces. One then stores the CO2 as liquid or solud in a pressurised container or relies on the hydrostatic pressure of water or rock.

But this all takes a lot of energy. We are using carbon based fuels as an energy source in the first place. By using energy to capture the carbon, this process ends up running up its own arse. You end up burning more natural gas, putting more CO2 into the air, in order to power the plant that removes CO2 from the air. And then someone presumably has to babysit the stored CO2 from now until the end of time. Which is comparable to the problem that we have built for ourselves around nuclear waste. Something else that we use once and are then required to babysit until radioactivedecay has done its work. So this is really a money pit.

One way of reducing the amount of energy required to capture the CO2, is to apply the process to flue gases at the point of production. CO2 is present in air in concentration ~400ppm, or 0.04%. It is present in flue gases in concentration up to 20%. So removing it from flue gas should require 500x less energy than removing it from air. The problem is that carbon capture adds a lot of complication to combustion and isn't really practical for distributed users.

Another option is to build compressed air energy storage plants, which store air at very high pressure. At high enough storage pressures, any CO2 in the air can be removed as liquid and pumped into the deep ocean. This dramatically cuts the energy needed per unit of CO2, because it is a byproduct of compression and the energy needed to compress the air is recovered. But we are still spending energy to compress and remove something that someone else used as an energy source in the first place. Wouldn't it be better to simply cut the pollution at its entry point?

Last edited by Calliban (2023-11-16 00:07:06)

tahanson43206 · 2023-11-16 07:11:55

For Calliban re #6

Thank you for noting the announcement in Post #5, and for your perspective on the field.

In light of your (quite reasonable) objections, I went back to the article to see if it is using renewable energy to perform the carbon capture, and I did not find a confirmation, one way or the other. That is a (again quite reasonable) question, so I invite our members to investigate further. As stated in my post, I am not so much interested in the CO2 removal aspect of the process, as I am in securing large quantities of pure carbon for industrial processes.

I don't ** know ** that the CO2 collected is pure, but am definitely interested in finding out.

Your observation about collecting carbon at the source is consistent with visions posted by kbd512 (and others) about doing exactly that, as a way to make methane using traditional processes on Earth, to replace the sourcing of hydrocarbons from stores in the mantle.

This topic appears to have a lot of growth potential, both on Earth and certainly on Mars. Whatever the technology is that is applied by this company, it would seem applicable to the Mars case.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2023-11-16 19:12:25

The equipment is to modify the climework units which the blowers are most likely at or under 500 rpm to the same as the mars helicopter capable of 3 to 4000 rpm as that would allow a blower of co2 compatible to the units here on earth for mars use. The remaining part of the unit is untouched to perform the same act as we would on Mars.

https://www.science.org/content/article … rectly-air

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climeworks

capture about 900 tons of CO2 annually Fans push air through a filter system that collects CO2. When the filter is saturated, CO2 is separated at temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius.

Climeworks’ new direct air capture plant, called Orca for the Icelandic word for energy, will be able to draw down 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. That’s about how much 790 passenger vehicles might pump out in a year — not a huge amount, even though it’s the largest operation of its kind in the world

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tahanson43206 · 2023-11-16 19:32:38

For SpaceNut re #8

Thanks for this helpful follow up! The article does not specify how energy is obtained for the project, other than it is "waste heat". Calliban seems to be under the impression that fossil fuel is the source of the waste heat, but there doesn't seem to be anything in the article to indicate one way or the other.

However, for ** my ** purposes, the CO2 captured would be cleaner than that obtained at a power plant smokestack.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2023-11-16 20:19:39

Yes the nuclear waste heat can be used and so is the geo thermal that Iceland has in abundance.

Calliban · 2023-11-17 05:36:56

On Mars, carbon capture is easier. On Earth, carbon dioxide is present as a trace gas - only 0.04% of air, though the proportion is slowly rising. To capture one volume unit of CO2, we must compress 2500 volume units of air.

On Mars, CO2 is 95% of the atmosphere. Additionally, the atmosphere is cold, averaging about 210K. This is almost 100K beneath the critical point of CO2. These two factors taken together, mean that relatively little compressor work is needed to produce compressed and pure CO2 on the surface of Mars. The only problem is that the low density of the Martian atmosphere requires a relatively large compressor per unit of mass harvested. But harvesting CO2 will require much less energy than on Earth.

This has important implications. Synthetic fuel and polymer production requires a concentrated CO2 feed. Food production using algae, yeast or chloroplasts, requires that concentrated CO2 is injected into water. And CO2 has its own uses as a propellant. Whilst the cold CO2 atmosphere of Mars is inconvenient from a human habitability perspective, it is useful from an industrial perspective. It makes food production using acetic acid much easier, because the CO2 feedstock for acetic acid production is easy to concentrate.

Last edited by Calliban (2023-11-17 05:43:04)

SpaceNut · 2023-11-17 18:55:46

The difference is earths pressure for the percentage to compare with mars.

0.0004 x 14.7 psi=0.00588
0.95 x 0.088 psi= 0.0836

As you can see earths is much lower and it works here so its going to work on mars even better with no changes.

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#1 2022-02-02 10:59:22

Carbon Capture on Earth may apply to Mars

#2 2022-02-02 15:54:01

Re: Carbon Capture on Earth may apply to Mars

#3 2022-02-02 19:04:37

Re: Carbon Capture on Earth may apply to Mars

#4 2022-02-02 21:04:38

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#5 2023-11-15 19:46:00

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#6 2023-11-15 23:47:48

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#7 2023-11-16 07:11:55

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#8 2023-11-16 19:12:25

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#9 2023-11-16 19:32:38

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#10 2023-11-16 20:19:39

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#11 2023-11-17 05:36:56

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