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Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

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Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll repeat here--that I don't believe altruism will solve greenhouse gas emissions and global warming: it'll only be solved when it becomes economic to do so. Completely agree. We need governments to ensure externalities (both positive and negative) are reflected in market pricing so that economic forces can operate efficiently. Implication: there must be a debt to pay for past and present GHG output. It should not…

Who would pay that debt for past emissions, and what price should they pay?

Let's tax at 50% every private property of a few million. That would do it.

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#92
post #77
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a robust carbon tax.

That is economic today for people who rent out the credits that arise by purchasing land then not harvesting the trees. That is economic today for people who claim carbon credits for purchasing new equipment, where the old was at EOL anyway. And so on. The existence of brokers for carbon credit sales should tell you something. For real economic viability that isn't scam-based, something based in reality is needed.

You're talking about carbon credits, not a carbon tax.

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#93
post #11

So let's do some math. Let's consider natural gas. According to the US government [1], natural gas produced 1.358x10^12 kWh of power and 5.6x10^8 metric tons of CO2 so 1 metric ton of CO2 equates to ~2400 kWh of produced power. This post suggests the energy cost is ~230kWh/ton. This is an important sanity check because it means that (capital costs aside) and if it scales you could technically remain carbon neutral fo…

>I'll repeat here--that I don't believe altruism will solve greenhouse gas emissions and global warming: it'll only be solved when it becomes economic to do so. Completely agree. We need governments to ensure externalities (both positive and negative) are reflected in market pricing so that economic forces can operate efficiently. Implication: there must be a debt to pay for past and present GHG output. It should not…

It’s remarkable how effectively the fossil fuel industry has gotten progressive environmentalists to believe that we can solve this problem without carbon tax.

The moment you mention how a carbon tax works (that it’s a market mechanism) progressives recoil. When evangelizing to progressives, I try to focus on “making polluters pay for the damage they are doing” (as opposed to making taxpayers bail us out) since they are more likely to be persuaded by appeals to fairness rather than efficacy.

Similarly, conservatives recoil at “tax” nomenclature, so when evangelizing to the , I refer to it as “carbon pricing” and emphasize the economic efficiency argument.

In either case, we have a long way to go, politically.

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#94
post #11

So let's do some math. Let's consider natural gas. According to the US government [1], natural gas produced 1.358x10^12 kWh of power and 5.6x10^8 metric tons of CO2 so 1 metric ton of CO2 equates to ~2400 kWh of produced power. This post suggests the energy cost is ~230kWh/ton. This is an important sanity check because it means that (capital costs aside) and if it scales you could technically remain carbon neutral fo…

The news reporting on this article has been a little misleading. First, the main goal of this is not to reduce CO2 into carbon, but simply to sequester CO2. The "carbonaceous sheets" that are produced are "graphene oxide", which is less oxidized than CO2 but still highly oxygenated. So the energy required is much less than what would be needed to reduce CO2 completely. But yeah, you won't be able to burn the end prod…

Ok makes a hell of a lot more sense now. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#95
How can they capture 92% of the CO2 generated by burning coal for less energy created by burning it, creating steam, running the steam through a turbine which then runs a generator, through a switching yard, and out to the world? The Carnot limit is far less than half, and yet this can get most of the Carbon back, with a balance of almost half of the energy? I did the math on this in the thread about this last week, and it seems like over-unity, a big red flag.

The need for the worlds supply of gallium and a lot of silver and other chemicals signals more red flags.

HN Story 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28873458

My response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28874831

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#96
post #78

If we would charge the fossil fuel industry for the cost of destroying the environment, the millions of lives lost due to pollution, it would become infeasible to pump or mine more stuff out of the ground. We don't need technological solutions, we need political solutions. Now

Well, well, well…

The political solution were nuclear plants in the 70’s. They were damned by the Ecologists (at least in Europe). We are reaping what we sowed.

Where do you want the energy to come from?

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#97
post #11

So let's do some math. Let's consider natural gas. According to the US government [1], natural gas produced 1.358x10^12 kWh of power and 5.6x10^8 metric tons of CO2 so 1 metric ton of CO2 equates to ~2400 kWh of produced power. This post suggests the energy cost is ~230kWh/ton. This is an important sanity check because it means that (capital costs aside) and if it scales you could technically remain carbon neutral fo…

Gallium cannot be produced at scale because it does not form concentrated ores in nature. It cannot be usefully mined directly. The only reason it is relatively inexpensive is that there is limited demand for the minuscule quantities that are currently produced. Gallium is currently supplied by reprocessing the waste from other convenient metal ores to extract the traces of gallium. Even if we maximized gallium extra…

> The only reason [Gallium] is relatively inexpensive is that there is limited demand for the minuscule quantities that are currently produced.

It is possible that we might be able to find more if we actively start looking for it? This would not be the first time that what was once a waste product becomes valuable once we know how to use it. Regarding gallium itself, its presence as basically waste product in bauxite ore suggests we can increase production (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...) and there may be other sources if we start searching.

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#99
post #11

So let's do some math. Let's consider natural gas. According to the US government [1], natural gas produced 1.358x10^12 kWh of power and 5.6x10^8 metric tons of CO2 so 1 metric ton of CO2 equates to ~2400 kWh of produced power. This post suggests the energy cost is ~230kWh/ton. This is an important sanity check because it means that (capital costs aside) and if it scales you could technically remain carbon neutral fo…

>I'll repeat here--that I don't believe altruism will solve greenhouse gas emissions and global warming: it'll only be solved when it becomes economic to do so. Completely agree. We need governments to ensure externalities (both positive and negative) are reflected in market pricing so that economic forces can operate efficiently. Implication: there must be a debt to pay for past and present GHG output. It should not…

> there must be a debt to pay for past ... GHG output

A debt which should be paid by past users, not current users who merely share the same country.

Re: Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen

#100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gallium cannot be produced at scale because it does not form concentrated ores in nature. It cannot be usefully mined directly. The only reason it is relatively inexpensive is that there is limited demand for the minuscule quantities that are currently produced. Gallium is currently supplied by reprocessing the waste from other convenient metal ores to extract the traces of gallium. Even if we maximized gallium extra…

> The only reason [Gallium] is relatively inexpensive is that there is limited demand for the minuscule quantities that are currently produced. It is possible that we might be able to find more if we actively start looking for it? This would not be the first time that what was once a waste product becomes valuable once we know how to use it. Regarding gallium itself, its presence as basically waste product in bauxite…

Gallium is found everywhere, it doesn't make sense to actively search for it because it doesn't concentrate anywhere. That's the whole problem. There is little that distinguishes bauxite ore from my backyard in terms of the amount of gallium that can be extracted.

The advantage of extracting it from certain ore waste streams is two-fold even though they don't contain much gallium. First, the chemical processing cost varies with the chemistry of the rocks you extract the gallium from, and certain types of ore waste such as bauxite, zinc, etc are cheaper to deal with. Second, these rocks have already been dug out of the ground as part of a mining operation, which is much cheaper than strip mining an arbitrary place to extract the same trace quantities of gallium -- you get to free-ride on the extraction costs of the primary mineral someone already paid for. If it doesn't matter where you dig, then all you can really optimize for is the processing cost of where someone already dug.

It would make no sense to increase bauxite production for the purpose of gallium production. Extracting gallium from bauxite is only economical to the extent that there is healthy demand for the aluminum produced from that bauxite. This is common in mining operations -- a secondary mineral that cannot be economically mined by itself becomes profitably extractable from the same ore if and only if the primary mineral is sufficiently profitable. Many less common metals are produced solely via secondary extraction because they cannot be profitably mined directly even when they concentrate.

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