Their conclusion is that we should emit less CO2. Certainly a good idea, but their data clearly point to better ventilation.
Better ventilation is something we can do right now, that will improve things immediately and 100 years from now.
Maybe the best thing would be the mandatory installation of powerful ventilation systems with heat exchangers for new buildings, and incentives to upgrade existing installations. That would help with both problems: getting more fresh air and limiting energy expenditures which can, in turn, reduce CO2 emissions.
> mandatory installation of powerful ventilation systems
In my country that's already been a thing for the last few years. The HRV system is around €1000, so it isn't a major cost for the benefits you get. From this year all newly installed units need to be 90% efficient.
Also "powerful" is probably not needed, the system I have at the lowest speed changes the air in my entire apartment every 3 hours, and is basically the same noise level as a barely audible computer fan.
The difference in scale between your apartment and most schools is no trivial matter.
At my high school, our one building, with tall ceilings, large cafeteria and so forth, housed around 1300 people every day. Some are smaller, some much bigger.
Moving all of that air at least once a day would require powerful exchangers indeed. If nothing else, it would probably be cheaper and better for students to have plants everywhere. One of my teachers' classrooms was like a tiny jungle. I can't say that it made a significant difference, but it was pleasant at least.
If you're happy for it to have rechargeable cartridges, you could easily build one with a once/week cartridge change. The cartridge needs to be ~the same weight as all the food eaten by all the people in the building.
The material the cartridge is made from is dirt cheap (literally limestone!), and recharging is a simple matter of heating it up.
With a pipe to the outdoors and some vents on a servo, the machine could even auto-refresh its cartridge every day, making it almost maintenance free.
I'm curious about this cartridge idea. I'm picturing a pipe with quicklime inside and coffee filters on the ends, with a blower to force air through. How tightly would the contents be packed?
This is a little different from what I'd been thinking before your message, which would be more of a fluidized bed reactor -- like quicklime swirling around in air in a garbage can. I think that's closer to how some powerplants treat exhaust.
I've read that there are microscopic changes to the quicklime particles after a couple absorbtion/heating cycles (their pores fill up or something), after which you need to do something to further refresh it, maybe by dissolving it and precipitating it back out of solution.
This led me to considering whether aqueous chemistry might be better.
The simplest would be to react air with calcium hydroxide (would you use a bubbler? Or a packed counterflow tower? Or a spray tower?) and collect the calcium carbonate that precipitates out.
But, based on my shaky chemistry, I understand solubility of calcium hydroxide is low, so you do better with a two-stage process like the Kraft Process:
1. Absorb CO2 in contactor:
2NaOH + CO2 -> Na2CO3 + H2O
2. Regenerate solution in causticizer:
- CaO + H2O -> Ca(OH)2
- Na2CO3 + Ca(OH)2 -> 2 NaOH + CaCO3
3. Decompose calcium carbonate:
CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2
The concentrated NaOH solution would be very caustic, so you'd have to be careful with that, but apart from that none of this seems too terribly scary?
Some parts of the above are endothermic, others exothermic, so maybe this could even let you shift energy from the summer (solar furnace?) to the winter when you need it, as part of the deal.
Or maybe this is all too complicated and you should just use a canister of soda lime granules, like an anesthesia machine? ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime )
I'd be interested to hear more from people whose chemistry is better than mine.
Here I assume that the gas has to dissolve as part of the reaction so use CO2(g) instead of CO2(aq) on the left hand side. I get an enthalpy delta of -111.33 kJ/mol. This differs from some homework answers I find online like [4] because I use NaOH(aq) while they use NaOH(s), etc; I hope I'm right for this application.
The easy thing would be to run at least (2b) (causticization) concurrently with (1) so you're always precipitating out CaCO3 and don't accumulate any Na2CO3 solution. It would also be easiest to combine (2a) with (2b) in a single causticization chamber. And it'd be simplest to skip (3) entirely, just treat CaO as a consumable, and be happy that you've sequestered carbon as CaCO3.
However, in a temperate climate, you can imagine doing the following to shift energy around the year (how realistic this is I don't know):
- Only run (2a) during the winter, to heat your home; you'd accumulate Ca(OH)2 solution to be used during the summer in (2b).
- Only run (2b) during the summer, to cool your home. During the winter you'd accumulate Na2CO3 solution from (1), which you'd need to store.
- If you're doing (3), do it during the summer, when a solar furnace can be operated. This gives you a reagent that you'll use in (2a) during the winter.
- You'd want to run (1) all year round, to scrub the CO2.
The main inefficiency this is trying to make useful is that you need to go down in energy with (2a) and back up in (3). And down in energy with (1) and back up in (2b).
I'll next need to understand the soda lime method to compare.
Large scale carbon capture would be more economically beneficial and would provide more direct control over atmospheric levels of CO2. Bonus points if you can find a good use for the carbon.
Better ventilation is something we can do right now, that will improve things immediately and 100 years from now.
Maybe the best thing would be the mandatory installation of powerful ventilation systems with heat exchangers for new buildings, and incentives to upgrade existing installations. That would help with both problems: getting more fresh air and limiting energy expenditures which can, in turn, reduce CO2 emissions.