Direct Capture CO2 Scrubbing

Efforts To Clean Up Earth Won't Cost The Earth

... and no longer have to.

When are we going to get the idea? Solar PV (PhotoVoltaic) energy is one of the least damaging ways to get energy that already falls on Earth, to do some Work on Earth, without Digging Up the Earth. THIS is a very innovative and valuable concept.

To the first person to comment with "but it needs eeeeennnneeeeerrrggyyyyyyy!" I am going to present a large mallet to smack themselves on the head with. I've posted in the past, on various of my blogs, that energy is going to become the one resource we'll have so much of that it may as well become free. And it will also be the least damaging to the environment. Energy is about to become dramatically democratised.

So setting these up at CO2 hotspots and powering them with renewable energy makes sense. As does that the energy companies pay some of their outstanding debt to the planet by supplying free energy to these installations. Without trying to screw their other customers for it. High time they paid their dues, anyway. Front up, you planet-destroying bastards!

Some Other Tech Worth A Mention

Also, this that I wrote about a while back may become the next way to cool the planet - using heat-beaming technology by the acre, powered by solar energy, to beam our heat back out into space. This technology can already be set up, and like solar panels, the technology will improve rapidly. It can then be used to pump heat out of the environment and beam it harmlessly out into space.

And I've been offering a simple method to cool solar panels (because once solar panels get much above room temperature they lose efficiency and produce less energy) which would capture that heat energy and also convert that to electricity, thus making the whole solar panel up to perhaps 30%-40% efficient as compared to only 24% efficient as they are now.

Then too there's been a recent interest in growing food crops under large solar panel arrays such as are used in solar farms. It makes sense, plants do need some sunlight to grow, but too much per day or too hot and their growth suffers and you end up producing less food per acre. Planning carefully just where crops are sited under the "canopy" of solar panels will ensure they get the optimum balance between light, shade, temperature, and evaporation. 

Now combine these ideas. 

Set up large scale solar farm. Get 24% of the energy back in electricity, another 16% back in recovered heat energy. Use some of that energy to bring up groundwater (a water bore) and distil it, use that to grow vegetables. They convert a tiny amount of CO2 back into O2 and food.

(I have been trying to develop this as a concept and making it available Open Source to anyone - or any company - to put in place.) 

Use the electricity to run CO2 scrubbers like the above-pictured, and take even more CO2 out of the air. Use the rest to power the farm and also to power a heat exchanger that will take more heat out of the air, and beam all that up into space. 

One installation that generates its own energy and microclimate, grows food, cleans CO2 out of the air, and provides some electricity and some fresh clean water to the respective grids would be a great start. Ten thousand of them would alleviate the climate issue over a few years.

Now imagine also that these installations can make H2 fuel and the batteries run an EV charger. You can set these up along routes everywhere, set them up as IoT/cellular connected nodes. You now have a resource that grows food which can be picked up in driverless trucks and distributed, and provide water, hydrogen, and a recharge point for drivers along that route. You can use low pricing to keep other EV chargers honest and drive prices down, supply any remaining energy to the grid. 

Parting thoughts.

In order to survive the coming years we're going to have to make radical changes in a whole range of our behaviours. I believe that changing our economic system to remove the profit motive and replace it with pure equity will be a necessity because as long as one person profits someone or something else loses, and for too long it's been the planet, and we can't afford to milk it for our greed any more.

Each, every, and any move that can be made to create self-sustaining operations such as the above combined system above will serve to refocus the economy away from profit at any cost to repair and restitution of the planet. After all, when there's no pressure to profit, all such operations are in effect costless, and the sooner we start this particular ball rolling, the sooner we can make reparations.

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