Friday, March 27, 2009

Chasing Carbon Capture

Article

Oh, those lovely photo-ops, Ms. Raitt! Nothing could be sexier than carbon capture, and that's a really big photo.

Will carbon capture actually do anything in the long run? First of all, you need to burn a lot more carbon purifying and injecting that stuff down a hole. Second, the co2 is freely available at the oil or coal sites, which have been punctured by a zillion swiss-cheese holes. I just don't see this working, and with a low muttered voice, I suspect some good old-fashioned porkifying here.

But I see co2 becoming a much more important industrial material. Maybe one day they will mix co2 with natural gas and extract it at the end, or maybe we'll see dedicated co2 pipelines. This has something to do with the hydrogen economy.

Since naked hydrogen is the world's worst fuel, I am following all the work to make synthetic hydrocarbons. The carbon acts as a binder to H2 and you can make Methanol or Octanol, which is also making it big in the biofuels area.

If captured co2 were cheaper and more abundant, we would see all sorts of uses that would save energy, and thus reduce the carbon burning.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure a bunch of the money Prez O is giving the science community will be spent on this area of research. I agree that injecting pressurized gas into fractured rock formations is likely to lead to a lot of leakage and loss back into the atmosphere.
Hopefully this will work. Makes sense to me that permanently converting co2 to rock would be preferable.

Harold Asmis said...

OMG... They're wasting good soda water!