<I actually applied recently for a research fellowship at Princeton on economic analysis of carbon sequestration - haven't heard anything from them yet>
Good luck! I visited Princeton a couple of years ago and it's a really idyllic little town and pleasant university.
< - another idea is pumping it into oil and gas reservoirs for enhanced recovery. >
That's a better idea than putting it into the ocean, except that there would be a transport problem to get it back to the oil fields and it wouldn't all fit into the oil wells [since liquid CO2 is a LOT more in quantity than the hydrocarbon which produced it due to the O2 being added from the atmosphere]. Heavy CO2 would sink beneath the oil, displacing it upwards into floating puddles in the reservoirs. CO2 would have more value doing that than going back into the ecosphere.
<//A few years later, Mitsubishi patented my idea! I think it was Mitsubishi//
That doesn't sound fair. Did you publish your idea somewhere?>
No, I had just done some calculations on a piece of paper. I didn't know such things were patentable. Anyway, I was working for BP Oil International at the time [in Belgium] and they would have owned the patent. It wasn't my job to figure stuff like that out - it was just out of interest. It's neither here nor there to me whether BP or Mitsubishi has the patent. BP didn't offer money for good ideas [most companies don't]. I like ideas. I don't care if anyone pinches them because there are plenty to go around. Ideas are fun. Patenting and producing are the hard work.
Here's another one, diesel plus 3% methanol [or ethanol] plus [approximately] 3% de-ionized water in the methanol for neutral buoyancy, plus emulsifier and maybe ignition improver for cheap, clean-burning fuel for diesel engines. That should also be good for Capstone Microturbines in buses to reduce pollution even further than the already low levels which Capstone can give. You can probably patent the methanol/water blend for buoyancy, with emulsifier to keep the drops small enough to go through filters and in suspension in the diesel.
<//Plants do use ultraviolet light, as well as visible light below the green//
I did say both sides of green. They may use some near UV but what I have read is that a lot of the UV coming through from the sun would be very damaging to them. Big range of wavelengths.>
I'm pig-ignorant about botany, but I learned in the science museum in Paris, on another leave-pass trip from the Kiwi bush, that plants love ultraviolet light. I'd asked about the light they were using to keep the plants going which a guy there was showing me. As the wavelength shortens, I suppose, like us, they'd suffer increasing levels of damage. But they sure do like some of the ultraviolet wavelengths. How short they like it I don't know. I suppose it would be a bit lucky if the ozone depletion let through just the right ultraviolet and the gamma rays and other shorter wavelengths were absorbed up high. Do you have any factual links on acceptable wavelengths?
<...If we don't pump the carbon out of that fossil fuel very fast into the atmosphere most will end up in new limestone anyway I think.>
Wouldn't it end up in sharks, top of the food chain [or whales], and other marine beasties, which sink when they die [if not eaten beforehand]? Then, at the bottom of the ocean, if not eaten by hagfish etc and kept in the food chain somehow, they get buried in radiolarian ooze. The bones and shells would form limestone. The oily parts would float back up. Oh, I've just realized, fish poop! So do whales and other mammals, I suppose. Where does fish poop go? In our aquarium it sinks.
Now I understand how the organic material gets to the bottom of the ocean and gets buried, then subducted, then feeds volcanic activity and natural gas and oil deposits. It's fish and whale poop! The rest is bones and shells. Bones and shells for limestone, poop to propel volcanoes.
<Deflecting incoming comets will prove easier than stopping global warming IMO.>
I think comet deflection is worth doing! People will get a very, very big fright when, one day, [when, not if], they realize a collision of large significance is on the way and it will NOT be a near miss.
They will suddenly wonder why they wasted all their time on military manoeuvres [to improve the economy as CB claims], financial collapses and the greenhouse effect. People in greenhouses shouldn't throw stones and should look out for stones being thrown at them.
Mqurice |
