Producing Energy From Carbon Dioxide In The Air or Ocean

Producing Energy From Carbon Dioxide In The Air or Ocean

Producing Energy
Producing energy is not really all that difficult.

The question is however, how to use greenhouse gases to create energy and there by reduce green house gases…

…Or at possibly reduce ocean acidification.

One idea for producing energy is to make alcohol.

Another idea is to create hydrogen. For example, a cheap solar voltaic panel that could not create enough power electrically to boil water (without storing and amassing energy) could create enough hydrogen (and possibly even better with oxygen) to easily boil water. What have you observed, does boiling water take about 1200 watts?

What makes producing hydrogen using a solar panel so appealing is how simple it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofmann_voltameter

Three cylinders and two electrodes, this is class room do-it-yourself stuff…

The Hofmann Voltameter also shows that oxygen actually burns better than hydrogen.

VitalBodies saw hydrogen being produced many years ago at a fair. They had no storage for the hydrogen! They made the hydrogen On Demand. At the booth they boiled water for herbal tea. They gave away free all day every day! The tea was make on an old Coleman stove converted to hydrogen.

There are people using propane in cars, and that might be an easy step towards using hydrogen in a car. There was an article in the paper in 2008 about people in Utah running on propane as there were propane pumps there, and propane was 65 cents a gallon compared to over $4.00 a gallon for gasoline. Lift trucks run on propane.

VitalBodies has three solar panels that combined (45 watts) do not create enough electricity for most people to bother with except for emergency use or outdoor lighting. But these same panels could possibly produce enough hydrogen to run part of ones household appliances. All one needs is the right burner hole size (from a drill bit?) to convert a propane stove to hydrogen. The same is said to be true for a propane oven, water heater, fridge, dryer, or furnace etc.

So what are the belief systems that are in place that are holding up the works? Hydrogen Storage is one of them. So for now lets just skip storing hydrogen. We can make the hydrogen on demand (solar, wind, hydro etc) and store excess electricity to make the hydrogen when we can not make it on demand.

But how would this simple solution reduce greenhouse gases other than prevent other fuels from being burned?

A better idea might be to create energy out of what we currently seem to have an excess of, Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide or gas pollutions of various kinds, providing of course, that producing energy would actually reduce pollution.

Most power in in 2008 is created from hydrocarbons (hydrogen and carbon) like petroleum, natural gas and most other fuels like methane, gasoline, jet fuel, butane etc….
So why not create power from carbon dioxide?

Or

Other greenhouse gases like, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons (see IPCC list of greenhouse gases). Or another significant greenhouse gas (not yet addressed by the IPCC (or the Kyoto Protocol)) nitrogen trifluoride.^[5]

One of Hydrogens claims to eco fame is that when burned the effluent is water. One would have to dig a little deeper to know what some of these greenhouse gases would convert to. Carbon dioxide seems like a pretty safe bet on what the byproduct might be but a bit more challenging to know how to actually pull it out of the atmosphere or the ocean.

Carbon Dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere. Below is an eceprt from the Wikipedia on Greenhouse Gases. Can you spot the best path for both creating energy and reducing greenhouse gases?

Removal from the atmosphere and global warming potential

Aside from water vapor, which has a residence time of days, most greenhouse gases take many years to leave the atmosphere. Although it is not easy to know with precision how long it takes greenhouse gases to leave the atmosphere, there are estimates for the principal greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases can be removed from the atmosphere by various processes: (from the Wikipedia)

• as a consequence of a physical change (condensation and precipitation remove water vapor from the atmosphere).
• as a consequence of chemical reactions within the atmosphere. This is the case for methane. It is oxidized by reaction with naturally occurring hydroxyl radical, OH· and degraded to CO₂ and water vapor at the end of a chain of reactions (the contribution of the CO₂ from the oxidation of methane is not included in the methane Global warming potential). This also includes solution and solid phase chemistry occurring in atmospheric aerosols.
• as a consequence of a physical interchange at the interface between the atmosphere and the other compartments of the planet. An example is the mixing of atmospheric gases into the oceans at the boundary layer.
• as a consequence of a chemical change at the interface between the atmosphere and the other compartments of the planet. This is the case for CO₂, which is reduced by photosynthesis of plants, and which, after dissolving in the oceans, reacts to form carbonic acid and bicarbonate and carbonate ions (see ocean acidification).
• as a consequence of a photochemical change. Halocarbons are dissociated by UV light releasing Cl· and F· as free radicals in the stratosphere with harmful effects on ozone (halocarbons are generally too stable to disappear by chemical reaction in the atmosphere).
• as a consequence of dissociative ionization caused by high energy cosmic rays or lightning discharges, which break molecular bonds. For example, lightning forms N anions from N₂ which then react with O₂ to form NO₂.

When one considers the electrical potential from earth batteries and combining this untapped renewable source of energy to make something like hydrogen fuel then things start to light up and get exciting. Earth batteries could run indefinitely to create both hydrogen and oxygen as fuel. This combined with simple technologies like the solar heating of air and water plus passive solar could help off set a huge amount of energy use. Still, if this was used to reduce ocean acidification or reduce carbon, that would be even better.

What about the idea of using really large but low efficiency, low technology devices to make power 24/7/365.
The goal for industry is usually high efficiency and everything else is rejected. That does not mean that what is rejected has no value.
Like a how about a large Earth Battery that generates hydrogen 24/7/365.
Or possibly some how making use of a salt brine type battery that size of a above the ground swimming pool.

Another idea is a battery that is made out of metal scrap.

Imagine this Voltaic Pile but big:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile