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'a new way to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel or other chemicals to cut the effect of fossil fuel emissions on global climate, says Craig Grimes, from Pennsylvania State University, whose team came up with the device.'
Instead of fueling industries that only sell their product to US residents, we could be doing that plus setting up plants the world over, to actually use pollution to fuel industry.
Oh, and there is no such thing as 'clean coal'. It is a marketing term.
Plants are very efficient at converting CO2 into fuel. They are called seed oil and/or cellouse. We could go a long way toward energy independance by replacing corn grown for gasohol and syrup with hemp for fuel from the seeds and fiber from the stems.
CO2 and vapor, those things might be suited for cooling towers of dirty conventional power plants
The problem I see is that one would need an awful lot of those devices to produce fuel in significant amounts. And I assume the manufacture of those devices also consumes a lot of energy, not to mention titanium.
"If you tried to build a commercial system using what we have accomplished to date, you'd go broke," admits Grimes. But he is confident that commercially viable results are possible.
meaning that right now it is not commercially viable to produce energy in this manner, and that it will take quite some time before it is commercially viable.
heck right now we can create new sources of crude oil by using algae, carbon dioxide, and water. does that mean we can stop drilling for oil? no, because the situation is the same as with the one in the article the OP linked. it is not yet commercially viable, and it will be some time before it is.
i have said many times that we need every form of energy we can get our hands on if we are going to be energy independent. we can make ethanol from hemp, sugar, switch grass, etc. we dont have to depend on corn.
we can make biodiesel from a few different sources as well, but again not in the quantities needed.
we see promising technologies all the time, unfortunately many do not pan out economically on the scale that we need.
Actually the amounts of near future green energy is a drop in the bucket besides being much more expensive. Energy powers production and in a competitive world with so mnay products based on just crude that will have to be replaced we are likely to be depepdnt on it for deacdes to come.
Plants are very efficient at converting CO2 into fuel. They are called seed oil and/or cellouse. We could go a long way toward energy independance by replacing corn grown for gasohol and syrup with hemp for fuel from the seeds and fiber from the stems.
With Obama, we already went a long way towards green technology. A long way:
Wind farms, sea wave driven electrical turbines, solar energy and many others which create new green jobs! (Solyndra for example).
And wind? Its nature gift to mankind, non polluting and free. Its so free that Holland and England which built tons of them, are shutting them down. In Spain, a country blessed with year around sun, they replaced old industrial jobs with new solar energies. It proved so successful, that Spain now has only 23% unemployment.
The joke is that China's solar panel industry also took a hard hit and they are downsizing as well.
Oberon - I do not understand your post #7. What do you mean? Please support your assertions.
Well, look at the OP's post from 3 years ago where this magical technology was right around the corner. *crickets*
Pretty much green power generation is not a bad thing but it's in it's infancy and several of the options have proven problematic and have other ecological fall-out and have turned out to be dead-ends.
People making grand proclamations that we don't need nuclear, coal etc. plants and shouldn't be building them is insanity as we have NOTHING that can currently replace the scale of power generation that they provide. Yet.
Mathguy - I completely agree with you concerning nuclear power plants. I believe we should use the available conventional energy to replace convention fuel using plants with High Temperature gas cooled reactors with a full nuclear fuel recovery, recycle and breeding system. These reactors could also be used to create transportation fuel and feedstock from coal, water and air. With these reactors, nuclear fuel recycle we could have a permanent energy supply that actually made more fuel than it used.
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