“The resulting powder closely resembles a commercial product that has been safely used for years to melt ice on highways and airports.”
It has not been used as snow melt on highways… I fucking wish…
I have a 50lb bag of sodium formate sitting in my garage… It’s not a common snow melt, it’s a very premium (roughly 4x the price of rock salt at the retail end) snow melt that’s much nicer to your cars, your pets (we use it because our poor dog has sensitive paws), your grass, your concrete… And it works way better.
Dumping mass tonnage at every highway maintenance yard instead of rock salt would be a massive benefit to vehicle longevity and the environment in general.
It’s a really fucking good idea even without the fuel cell part of the deal :)
We can make coal from wood for centuries. The only thing we need to do is to grind it down and bury it. Even better we can make biogas and store it in empty gas deposits.
Yes, and we should do that as well. Trees are a nice CO2 capture process but they take time and space. These people propose a process that instead takes energy, which is good as well as we know that a switch to intermittent renewables will mean we will have periods of abundant energy with negative price.
Good luck dealing with megatonnes of this powder if you ever want to make a small dent in global emissions. It’s one thing to capture it, but the sheer amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere is such that we wouldn’t be able to handle the amount of product that this process makes.
All the CO2 in the atmosphere weights on the order of 10^15 kg. That’s roughly the size of a lake like the Titicaca lake. I did not do all the calculation as sodium formate is heavier than water but part of its weight is from added atoms (sodium and hydrogen) but that gives a scale of the room it would take. More likely, every country would have a few storage facilities, probably in closed down mines.
This is cool, but plants are already a thing. This is just a new way to do something life has been doing for billions of years.
Plants have a fixed life cycle. Unless we found a way to make all plants like bamboo, capable of growing at extreme speed (there are species of bamboo you can observe groing in real time with your naked eye), plants take a set time to absorb a set amount of CO2.
The promise here is to syphon CO2 straight from the atmosphere into a solid state we can store, reuse or dispose of, safely.
I get that, but the title should be “Scientist Discover a New Way to Convert CO2 into Powder That Can Be Stored for Decades”.
Plants dont make powder
They do. Pollen is plant powder. You can also just grind up a tree, but I’ll give you that sawdust is not naturally occurring.
Pollen is not plant powder, its a living organism.
Pollen is a powdery substance produced by most types of flowers of seed plants for the purpose of sexual reproduction.
My guy, read your own link. Those are tri celled organisms, wikipedia even drew you a pretty colorful picture.
Just because the mediocre website used the word powdery doesnt make the living organisms a powder.
If I describe a leaf as feeling leathery, that does not make the leaf leather.
Grab the torch, I’ll bring the pitchfork, and let’s ask the writer just why didn’t made the title less click bait.
Looks sound, but I’m not qualified to say if success will follow. It’s certainly stable and also a low-grade fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_formate
Upon heating (in the range from 253 C to 411 C), sodium formate decomposes into various compounds - either hydrogen and sodium oxalate, or hydrogen and sodium carbonate - so it’s true that it can be used as a fuel without releasing the carbon. Shipping it somewhere where it gets converted back to sodium formate is the tricky part, because that seems unlikely to happen onsite (on a small site, anyway).
