[Terrapreta] Catching Carbon

[Kurt Treutlein]

lou gold wrote:
>
>  It triggered a question: if such a technology were to become
>  feasible, might it be possible somehow to convert the scrubbed CO2 to
>  char for soil rather than deep-burying it in the ground?
>
>  I would prefer to stay away from the valid ethical question of using
>  ANY more fossil fuels unless one is prepared to offer a realistic
>  alternative fuel resource for economic development in China and
>  India.
>
>  thanks,  lou

I think it is highly unlikely that any process but photosynth would do 
this economically. We use carbon and heat to extract metals from ore, to 
extract H2 from water and so on. This works because C is a highly 
effective O2 grabber. All these processes end up with CO2 as the end 
product.

So photosynthesis will do the job. There is a whole mob trying to grow 
algae, which does the photosynthesis job quite effectively. Their main 
idea is to produce veg oil to run diesels. Many of them are proposing 
their processes to scrub CO2 from powerstation exhaust gases. The 
resultant algae are biomass and after drying could quite easily be 
pyrolysed to provide char, which could possibly be used for TP, or 
perhaps fed back into the powerstation. The algae ponds would thus 
become giant solar collectors, with the powerstation merely converting 
the biomass energy into electricity. The process is still highly 
experimental.

Kurt