A-Listers Fly to Global Warming Conference in Private Jets

Scientists Just Pulled CO2 From Air And Turned It Into Coal



Scientists have discovered a breakthrough technology, a way to pull CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it back into coal. This new discovery has the potential to change the way we think about CO2.



The research, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, provides a step-by-step guide in turning CO2 into coal, acting to remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and lock it away in solid carbon form...



When the researchers electrically charged a vessel with CO2 and the liquid metal, the carbon dioxide began to convert into small flakes of coal. The solid carbon flakes naturally detach from the liquid metal and fall to the bottom of the vessel, allowing for continual production of solid carbon from carbon dioxide. The end product can also hold an electrical charge, meaning it could be used as a supercapacitor after the process.



www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/02/27/scientists-just-pulled-co2-from-air-and-turned-it-into-coal/#4835970e4563





Bob

Good news. Let's see them do it at the scale required.

By 2050, almost six billion air conditioners could eat 37% of global electricity, according to the International Energy Agency. That's because as India and China get richer -- and the planet gets hotter -- people around the globe are buying A/C units at levels approaching the United States.



This is an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen.



But one startup from the tiny town of Enschede in the Netherlands aims to change that via a technological marvel that turns heat into cold without requiring energy itself -- or any of the nasty gases that most A/C units use today. The technology, which SoundEnergy unveiled at CES last week in Las Vegas, uses a process similar to a Stirling Engine, which was first conceptualized 200 years ago in the early 1800s.



It sounds like magic, or a perpetual motion machine, but it relies on well-understood principles of thermo acoustics and was originally developed in U.S. Department of Defense research, the company says.



The first step is transforming heat into sound.



"We take thermal energy ... [and] we transform this thermal energy into an acoustic wave," SoundEnergy CFO Roy Hamans told me at CES last week. "This wave travels through a pressurized infinite loop (the blue ring in the picture on our website) in which it continues to be amplified ... the feedback process makes the sound wave stronger and stronger."



So far, so good. SoundEnergy has built a machine to turn heat into mechanical energy.



But eventually, you want more. You don't want to just remove heat ... you also want to return cold. And, according to Hamans, SoundEnergy's device does that as well.



"This huge mechanical power will be transformed into a delta T [lower temperature] down in the last two vessels by connecting them in reverse," he told me via email this week. "The sound waves produce cold by distracting the heat from the particles like in a classical Stirling cycle."



If you don't understand how that works, you're not alone. I don't either. Hamans tried to comfort me that saying that only about two or three dozen people globally, all experts in thermo-acoustics, truly understand this process.



It seems quasi-magical, but the company has been shipping commercial product since last September. SoundEnergy's first customer was Dubai, which purchased a unit for cooling in a plant which condenses drinkable water from the air. Another government has purchased a unit for cooling in a remote, off-grid space.



One of the reasons why?



This high-tech A/C unit does not itself require power.



"The system itself does not consume electricity/energy," Hamans told me via email. "It takes 100% of stack-emitted waste energy, or solar thermal ... and converts that for 40-50% [efficiency]."



www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/01/18/this-dutch-startup-converts-heat-into-cold-via-a-stirling-engine-and-could-just-save-the-planet/#65f00e666744



Bob