Teaching High School Chemistry
  • Introduction
  • Book
  • Blog
  • Topic List
  • Teaching Resources
  • Biography
  • Contact

inventions to recycle carbon dioxide

11/6/2015

0 Comments

 
Happy Friday!  I hope you’re settling into Fall and 2015 is going well for your class.  For your information, my future blog posts may be on Fridays.
 
For inexpensive chemistry labs to expand your repertoire, buy my lab book
Chemistry on a Budget for $23 at amazon.com or lulu.com.
 

http://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Budget-Marjorie-R-Heesemann/dp/0578129159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389410170&sr=1-1&keywords=chemistry+on+a+budget

http://www.lulu.com/shop/marjorie-r-heesemann/chemistry-on-a-budget/paperback/product-21217600.html
 
There are two versions of each lab, one with a ten-question conclusion and one with directions for a full lab report.  This way the teacher has the option!  Each lab is two pages to allow for one two-sided handout. 
 

It will take a week or so to get to you, so Order Now!
 
*Some of you have purchased my lab book – be sure to check out Page 141 !
 
From an article in 2012:
“With global greenhouse gas emissions [CO2] still on the rise... maybe the time has come to think differently about the climate crisis. Yes, we need to burn less coal, oil and natural gas, but clearly fossil fuels are going to be around for awhile. So why not try to clean up the mess they make?”

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/geoengineering_carbon_dioxide_removal_technology_from_pollutant_to_asset/2498/
 
According to a recent article in
Scientific American:
“Last year, human activities released about 32 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. According to the UN’s 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), those greenhouse gas emissions must fall to almost zero by 2100 to avoid irreversible damage to our environment. …
On 29 September [2015], the 
XPrize Foundation … announced that it would award $20 million...to the winners of its new Carbon XPrize, a competition intended to stimulate CCU research [Carbon Capture and Utilisation]. Entrants will submit ideas for using CO2 from either gas- or coal-fired power stations, and the best technologies will be tested at demonstration-scale plants. The teams that convert the most CO2 into the highest value products will be victorious.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inventors-race-to-find-best-way-to-recycle-polluting-carbon/
 
Here’s an article about a company in Canada,
Carbon Engineering, whose goal is to be a Carbon Capture Plant:
“Carbon Engineering’s plant is one attempt to bring the fossil fuel cycle into a more full circle-style recycling system, one that produces a finished, recycled product: concentrated, pure CO2, which can be used as feed-stock for gas or diesel, moving CO2 from tailpipes back into fuel tanks.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hilarybrueck/2015/07/24/this-company-wants-to-recycle-carbon-dioxide-from-the-atmosphere/
 
This idea is not new – here is a National Geographic article from 2011:
“…
Carbon Sciences, focuses on the post-collection phase: turning carbon into fuel. It does this by combining CO2 with natural gas in the presence of a proprietary metallic catalyst it has developed and licensed. “
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/08/110811-turning-carbon-emissions-into-fuel/
 
From the same article:
“...[T]he oil drilled and pumped from underground holds the energy of eons' worth of sunlight energy collected by plants and stored as organic matter. Over millions of years of heat and pressure, the energy in that organic matter has been further concentrated to yield hydrocarbons such as oil, natural gas, and coal.”
 
This article also addresses the limitations of using CO2 for fuel:
"You have to put energy in to re-create the fuel," … [Hans Ziock, a technical staff member at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory] explains. "And because re-creation is never 100 percent efficient, you end up putting more energy in than you get out. ... 

Due to the "energy penalty" of creating hydrocarbon fuel indirectly, he says, it has always made more sense for society to use the liquid fuels made directly from crude oil as long as crude oil is available. … But he warns...the benefits of this approach will be limited unless the energy to create the hydrocarbon fuel comes from a source other than the burning of more fossil fuel.”
 

Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) is another topic that could be used as an Extra Credit opportunity, class discussion topic, or Homework reading assignment.
 

This Blog contains several entries that would be helpful to your chemistry classroom.  Remember, you can check out the Topic List to help you to find past Blog entries.

The lab book
Chemistry on a Budget is very useful to your Chemistry classroom with labs and class article ideas.
Order Soon! 

Also, 
Write To Me about your successes, challenges, or questions in the Chemistry Classroom.
 

Have a good weekend!​
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Marjorie R. Heesemann is a chemistry teacher with 15 years of experience who is now working to develop resources for the Chemistry classroom.

    Archives

    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.