

Electrolytic Process Converts Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide into Carbon Nanofibers - igravious
http://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=44352

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dogma1138
Hmm.. How is it different than the "Plastic" from air / "Oil" from air
projects? [http://newlight.com/](http://newlight.com/)

None of this is practically new, and all of these methods require quite a huge
input of energy so none of them are not really either cost or "carbon"
effective...

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igravious
If you're taking in CO2 and producing C (carbon nanofibers) then O2 is your
by-product.

With plastics or oil you're going to need a decent source of hydrogen as well
as air. A decent source of H2 is going to bump up your energy requirements.

Extracting hydrocarbons from the air seems like a puzzling move considering
they are readily available in the ground.

There would be no real point in generating carbon nanofibers from the air if
the over-concentration of CO2 in the air wasn't a worry in the first place.
For instance, let's say CO2 goes up some more and then plateaus. Global
temperatures keep increase but lag behind. Assuming environmental
repercussions then projects which use up the CO2 in the atmosphere will be
welcomed.

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dogma1138
That's a given but and that's an important but it's still a crazy idea... CO2
has a bond strength of 800 kJ/mol it's a very expensive molecule to break up
using electrolysis (double the required energy of to break water).

Most of the other carbon siphoning methods such as making plastic polymers use
a chemical method to combine the CO2 into complex carbohydrates and even they
aren't any where close to being environmentally viable.

On top of this you need to scale this process up and start filtering air to
gather CO2 which is insanely expensive on it's own, for this process to have a
neutral carbon footprint on it's own all of the energy has to come from non-
carbon sources.

Besides that this process needs to stand up to being competitive against other
processes and most importantly it self while being fed carbon or CO2 from
none-natural sources, which i have high doubts it can achieve that.

And lastly say you have managed to scale this process up made it commercially
viable and environmentally sound (gl on both of those) how much carbon you
going to suck in? 1000 tonnes a year? 10,000 tonnes? that's nothing a car
emits on average 6-7 tonnes per year this means that a small city(10-15K
residents) say 5000 cars would emit 30000 tonnes of CO2 per year do you really
think this process or anything like it will have an impact on the environment
on any plausible scale?

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a3n
Sequester atmospheric carbon in hockey sticks.

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marak830
Is this legitimate ? If so, wow. Would be a good turn of events for our
environment, for a change.

