Can't we simply filter the carbon emissions from an automobile? Just use an air filter. Is that too impractical? Use a giant one and it'll work. Is that too big? Then miniaturize it. I think its that simple. I've recently written a simple paper on filtering greenhouse gas emissions. As I understand it, CO2 is the main problem, but it can be easily filtered. Mix the emission with steam at a high temperature, cool the mixture, separate the junk from the water with a filter and voila we have a co2 filter. For a more in depth explanation read this paper I put on vixra, http://vixra.org/pdf/1311.0103v1.pdf
We give Nobel peace prizes to those whom complain the loudest. It takes a good scientist to point out the problems but it takes a great one to come up with the solutions. Is my protocol feasible or have I lost my mind?
You can scrub out CO2 but the equipment and storage weight gets large and impractical. Say you have a gas tank with 15 gallons of gasoline composed of octane C8H18. The gas weights about 120 pounds. Since we are burning the gas we are adding the extra weight of O2 to make H2O and CO2. Octane weighs 114 grams/mole. We will get eight molecules of CO2 for each molecule of octane with each CO2 weighing 44 grams per mole. The collection of CO2, from 120 pound tank of gas, weigh more than the original tank of gas. We may have to empty 350 pound of CO2 each tank, which is too much work for lazy people. It can be done but people will not want to do the extra work.
I think the entire need falls short at the fundamental assumption of CO2 being a harmful substance, since CO2 is a natural part of the cycle of life. If took away all CO2 life on earth would no longer exist. More does not harm life but promotes life. Although the planet has warmed slightly (1 degree in 100 years), and this is attributed to CO2, all the predicted doom and gloom has not materialized. We still have polar caps and polar bears even though we were assured this would happen. The fear of the doom and gloom got the herd to move but it turned out to be someone yelling fire in the theater. The entire con job, also crafted by the democrats, uses the same template as ObamaCare. It was designed for a power grab, which first has to ruin an/or inflated the cost of the free market, so the incompetence of government looks like the solution. Once you control energy, then you can control all of industry. ONce you control healthcare you can control behavior. I would challenge the experts to show where predicted doom and gloom has appeared in the scale of the original con.
I think it will cost at least a generation to de-decarbonize carbon again and it will go into history as the most foolish ever witch hunt. But we could point out that we have a greener world nowadays.
Not only is it not simple it is not even feasible. The problem is that CO2 is a molecule so you would need a molecular sieve for that. Putting something like that in the exhaust stream of a car would cause the back pressure to go so high that you could not even come close to starting the car let alone driving it. You cannot economically filter out molecues of CO2 as I said. Geeze, it is like saying you have solved the water problem is in Africa - just take some sea water filter out the junk and voila we have clean water!! Problem solved. So for $6 (or one weeks wages) they can have a liter of clean water.
This is in part the purpose of a catalytic converter, although the odds of getting it to sequester the carbon are slim to none. In the context of vehicles this implies a paper dust filter which has no effect on the gases that pass through it. Worse, it simply is ineffective. Oversimplification doesn't solve real problems. You have actually tackle the problem of sequestering the emissions. That requires some actual science. Now that some of the more poisonous gases have been treated by the catalytic converter, that does indeed leave CO[sub]2[/sub] as the main contender by volume for harm to the atmosphere. Unfortunately that's not true. If it were remotely true, don't you think this would have been addressed long ago? Anyone who could produce such a device would be a trillionaire. The incentive is huge, yet the solutions are far away. That should be a first clue, to tell you there is more to this than you may think. Liquid water will quickly vaporize in the heat of the exhaust pipe, but to no avail. You need a chemical reaction, and water and CO[sub]2[/sub] are both stable compounds that barely react. Try this at home. Bring a kiddie pool into your living room and fill it with water. Bring in a lawn mower and connect a hose to its exhaust (you can use duct tape until it breaks down under the heat) and place the other end of the hose under the water. Start the mower and tell us how long you can stand it before you have to turn it off. You'll discover that the pollutants pass quickly through the water into your room creating an intolerable noxious result. The water will be fouled too. All you've done is spread the pollution - you haven't solved anything. When you start contemplating the ways to recover clean water from polluted water, you'll discover it's exorbitantly expensive to do so. So nothing was solved. Further, the engine was put under strain by loading the exhaust side with work (the same work that would tire you if you had to exhale by blowing through a straw against a column of water). The result for vehicles would be a reduction in mileage with no tangible improvement in emissions. My guess is that the net result will be an increase in air pollution as the engine struggles against the back pressure Origin mentioned above. Unfortunately there isn't any technical depth to what you wrote. Water barely reacts with any of the products of gas engine emissions, so it simply won't work. The reaction CO[sub]2[/sub] + H[sub]2[/sub]O -> H[sub]2[/sub]CO[sub]3[/sub] sequesters a tiny fraction of what's being emitted. Therein lies the rub, which is why, if you try the home experiment I suggested, you'll foul all of the items in the room with the stench of exhaust fumes. They pass straight through the water, barely reacting at all--just enough to foul the water and spread the problem. This is why catalytic converters don't have water sloshing around in them. Water isn't effective. The catalysts are effective to a degree - but not in sequestration. Unfortunately the only real solution is to stop burning fossil fuels. And the impracticality of this answer is what has everybody stumped.
Even if the two are mixed at a high temperature while they are vapours (CO2 and H2O)? If you mix them hot and then cool them would it be more effective in producing a mixture with a higher concentration of CO2 (carbonic acid)? CO2 converts to carbonic acid H2CO3 in water.
That's not quite correct. Only trace amounts will react. Fortunately, too, or no life could exist (as we know it) since all water sources would be highly acidic. Think about it. If you leave water standing overnight, does it absorb CO[sub]2[/sub] and become acidic? How about boiling water -- or collecting condensate -- do you notice that it's acidic? Finally imagine rainfall. If this reaction was opportunistic, the water vapor would clean the carbon from the atmosphere as it falls. There would be no greenhouse gases, having all been purged by precipitation that all would have washed into the oceans. Note the oceans are so vast that the trace amounts absorbed turn out to be huge. It's estimated that if we reduced all anthropogenic CO[sub]2[/sub] by 50% then the oceans would take care of the rest. But this gives you an idea of how much water you need. Take the surface area of the all of the oceans and divide it by 7 billion people creating the load. You'll find that every man, woman and child on Earth will need about 28 sq km of water to address the problem this way. Of course the numbers will go up because more fuels will need to be burned to process all of that water. The problem is that both CO[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub]O are already products of more basic reactions. They've given up their energy in the reactions that formed them, and since a great deal of energy was liberated in the process, they're not going to dissociate (into their respective atoms) without equal or greater energy added back to them. A few thousand Joules of heat simply won't do it. And there is no return for this investment: so much CO[sub]2[/sub] is still produced in the reaction that it's simply not worth it. That is, even when you add that energy back to them, most of the reactants will return to their lowest most stable (lowest energy) products which are CO[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub]O. You simple can't coax them into forming carbonic acid even with additional measures such as extreme pressure, which is infeasible. This leads to the other glaring issue, the one Origin referred to concerning back pressure on the engine. You can't pressurize a tailpipe or the engine will stall. That means you will be venting the reactants into the atmosphere as fast as the raw exhaust is coming out of the engine. You won't be able to collect it and sequester even the trace amounts you create, since the engine will die as soon as you try to pressurize the vapor in some sort of condenser. You could try to introduce freezing coils but it would require a huge compressor many times larger than the one that comes with the car. Again, you'll burn more fuel doing this and vent more CO[sub]2[/sub] in the process. And all of this just to collect a trace amounts of CO[sub]2[/sub]. But it all goes back to basic chemistry. You can't easily reverse highly energetic reactions like the ones that form CO[sub]2[/sub] and H[sub]2[/sub]O. You can't do it at all without the expenditure of large amounts of energy and/or the use of catalysts. And you can't prevent the production of vast amounts of CO[sub]2[/sub] as trace amounts of carbonic acid are being generated. This is why carbon sequestration remains an elusive and difficult challenge. It's not impossible, but it's next to impossible. By all practical means available for a moving vehicle, it's certainly impossible, at least until some new technology comes along that changes the range of practical solutions. As you see, it won't be based on carbonic acid production since the yield is way too low.
The purpose of the catalytic converter on automobiles is to completely burn out the toxic partially combusted hydrocarbons. The convertes do this by burning the hydrocarbons in the exhaust with a catalyst. The combustion products are water and CO2. So a catalytic converters acutally increases the amount of CO2 that comes from the operation of automobiles. It does greatly decrease pollution from the hydrocarbons though.
Right bonehead, the point is it is not economical.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
