A Catastrophic Amount of Carbon Could Leak From the Soil By 2050
Written by
SARAH EMERSON
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
December 2, 2016 // 09:30 AM EST
The term “snowball effect” is an unfortunate way to describe climate change, but a new study is predicting just that.Climate scientists warn that by 2050, an astonishing 55 trillion kilograms of carbon could be released into the atmosphere from the soil. To put things in perspective, that’s the emissions equivalent of adding another United States to the planet. And, like a rapidly tumbling snowball, more emissions mean more warming, and more warming means… well, you get it.Of course, this nightmare scenario hinges on our inability to curb carbon emissions—a fate that’s become significantly more realistic with Donald Trump, a vocal climate change denier and coal aficionado, about to enter the White House. Our failure to meet the goals mandated by the Paris Agreement would result in “about 17 percent more than the projected emissions due to human-related activities during that period,” Tom Crowther, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, said in a statement.
Source: A Catastrophic Amount of Carbon Could Leak From the Soil By 2050 | Motherboard
–OK, this is BAD.
–BUT
–What if: 55 trillion kilograms of carbon = 55 trillion kilograms of Ethanol?!
Source: Scientists Accidentally Discover Efficient Process to Turn CO2 Into Ethanol
Scientists Accidentally Discover Efficient Process to Turn CO2 Into Ethanol
The process is cheap, efficient, and scalable, meaning it could soon be used to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change. Their findings were published in the journal ChemistrySelect. [Go herefor a new in-depth interview about the findings with one of the lead researchers.]
The researchers were attempting to find a series of chemical reactions that could turn CO2 into a useful fuel, when they realized the first step in their process managed to do it all by itself. The reaction turns CO2 into ethanol, which could in turn be used to power generators and vehicles.
“By using common materials, but arranging them with nanotechnology, we figured out how to limit the side reactions and end up with the one thing that we want,” said Adam Rondinone.
This process has several advantages when compared to other methods of converting CO2 into fuel. The reaction uses common materials like copper and carbon, and it converts the CO2 into ethanol, which is already widely used as a fuel.
Perhaps most importantly, it works at room temperature, which means that it can be started and stopped easily and with little energy cost. This means that this conversion process could be used as temporary energy storage during a lull in renewable energy generation, smoothing out fluctuations in a renewable energy grid.
The researchers plan to further study this process and try and make it more efficient. If they’re successful, we just might see large-scale carbon capture using this technique in the near future.
Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory via New Atlas
New Method To Make Ethanol Out Of Carbon Dioxide35 SharesShare on FacebookShare on TwitterTechnologyNew Method To Make Ethanol Out Of Carbon DioxideAlfredo CarpinetiBy Alfredo Carpineti20/06/2017, 20:19Ethanol is one of the most important biofuels used in the world and researchers could soon reduce its impact on the environment significantly.Thanks to a new technique, ethanol could soon be produced directly from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Ethanol is currently made primarily from fermented corn, so it takes a sizable chunk of agricultural resources. The new method, presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses water, carbon dioxide, and electricity delivered through a copper catalyst.”One of our long-range goals is to produce renewable ethanol in a way that doesn’t impact the global food supply,” principal investigator Thomas Jaramillo, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford and of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said in a statement.The secret to this new method is in the particular crystal structure used for the copper. The team used three types of copper – copper (100), copper (111), and copper (751) – and tested their ability to convert water and carbon dioxide into ethanol.”Copper (100), (111) and (751) look virtually identical but have major differences in the way their atoms are arranged on the surface,” said Christopher Hahn, an associate staff scientist at SLAC and co-lead author of the study. “The essence of our work is to understand how these different facets of copper affect electrocatalytic performance.”The team discovered that a particular arrangement in copper (751), where the atoms are quite far apart and with only two close neighbors, allows for the production of more liquid fuel than other types of copper.”An atom of copper (751) only has two nearest neighbors,” Hahn said. “But an atom that isn’t bonded to other atoms is quite unhappy, and that makes it want to bind stronger to incoming reactants like carbon dioxide. We believe this is one of the key factors that lead to better selectivity to higher-value products, like ethanol and propanol.”While biofuels are carbon neutral, they still use resources that could be used for food production. They also have been linked to potential deforestation in developing countries. This method might provide a truly green alternative.”The eye on the prize is to create better catalysts that have game-changing potential by taking carbon dioxide as a feedstock and converting it into much more valuable products using renewable electricity or sunlight directly,” Jaramillo added.In order to look for the best possible set up, the team aim to test the same approach on other metals to see how different surfaces affect ethanol production.
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