Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Sun, 15 Apr 2012 07:51:09 +0100, Dave N wrote:

Er I assumed that the idea of this conversion was to produce a
liquid
fuel that would then be burnt. How does that "dispose" of the
orginal
C02? The carbon is still fossil in orgin.
Obviously it doesn't but wouldn't burning recycled carbon be preferable
to mining and extracting new sources of carbon?

Provided that the energy required for this caputure didn't require
any more fossil (would TNP prefer "ancient"?) carbon to be released.
There is so much spin and distorion of the facts in this area that
one has to be very careful in the choice of words used. "Dipose"
carries implications that the problem has been safely solved, it
hasn't by any measure.

Re-use of stored energy is arguably better than burning more and more
new sources of carbon energy, which would add to the total of free
carbon dioxide?

Depends on where that carbon energy is sourced from. Fossil/ancient
sources releases carbon that has been stored for millions of years.
Biomass releases carbon that was taken from the atmosphere in the
last few tens of years or even shorter. The latter has the potential
to become a carbon cycle, like the water cycle.

well of course you only need to look at blue-green algae to realise how
piffling fossil carbon burn is.

The guardian reckons 30 Gigatonnes of CO2 per year from fossil sources.
wiki says that "Living biomass holds about 575 gigatons of carbon, most
of which is wood. Soils hold approximately 1,500 gigatons,[4] mostly in
the form of organic carbon, with perhaps a third of that inorganic forms
of carbon such as calcium carbonate."

and

"The rate of energy capture by photosynthesis is immense, approximately
100 terawatts,[3] which is about six times larger than the power
consumption of human civilization.[4"

"photosynthetic organisms convert around 100€“115 petagrams (gigatonnes)
of carbon into biomass per year.[5][6]"

So a mere 30% increase in biological photosynthesis would be enough to
sweep all the human CO2 back into the organic matrix..to make
ultimately 'more fossil fuel'


Just bubble CO2 from powerstations into et see and let blue green algae
work.

The sea is a massively better construction than anything man made when
it comes to sweeping up CO2.


As is planting crappy scrubland with crappy trees.

The worst thing you can do is build more affordable housing, patios,
decking and solar panel farms which destroy significant parts of the
land for growing any vegetation.

Probably deforestation is far more dangerous than fossil fuels




--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.