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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mannie who wrote (8256)	7/25/2008 6:24:29 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24225

I've been talking abut that with the most eccentrically creative denier.. Message 24785558 == I thought it was a good science project for middle school. Why? From the original paper,... "The first step of the process – breaking down limestone into lime and carbon dioxide – seems counterintuitive as it uses a lot of energy and actually produces carbon dioxide. But this carbon dioxide can either be safely stored away or used to help grow crops in very dry areas. You can find out more about this here." Well, in 8th grade, you can pull a bottle of this stuff off the shelf in the chem lab, but, in real life, he forgets step zero... Mine, process, and transport the limestone to the kiln. He's missed a lot of his CO2 production. Or, rather, totally ignored it. Also, But wait...it gets better when our 8th grader gets to college and does a global warming project. First, he realizes that there is the additional energy cost of building the infrastructure to support this; roads, a rail network, whatever. More CO2. But, our daring experimenter has also taken college chem by now, and he understands that this... "the process of making lime generates CO2, but adding the lime to seawater absorbs almost twice as much CO2. The overall process is therefore 'carbon negative'"... is wrong... CaCO3->CaO + CO2 Then you hydrate it: CaO + H2O-> Ca(OH)2 And add it to water, where it absorbs 2 carbon dioxide, initially - and if the pH is right: Ca(OH)2 + 2CO2->Ca(HCO3)2 But, and a big but, ...calcium bicarbonate is unstable and will eventually decompose, liberating back CO2: Ca(HCO3)2->CaCO3 +H2O +CO2 So, no net sequestration of CO2. But, as we noted, there is a lot of CO2 produced in the process. All we hae accomplished is moving limestone from the mountain to the bottom of the ocean, creating CO2 in the process. Better to just leave it there, and use all that energy in other way. Like connecting his solar to the grid, cuz nobody builds stranded solar, unless they are living off the grid. Furthermore, in grad school, the studies now become: How much transient CO2 burp is there from the ocean heating up due to the heat of the chemical reaction, and how do all those Ca ions effect the other lytes in the ocean? All in all, a good 8th grade project, not applicable to Planet Earth. However, he's on the right track, cuz we need lot of ideas, and, hopefully, some of them will work out. Oh, I forgot one little detail... To soak up as much CO2 as we currently add to the atmosphere each year, you would need to start with about 30 billion tonnes of limestone, about ten times the rate it is currently mined. Message 24790843