If carbon dioxide
saturated water was the carbon source plants would need to process only 462
liters of the solution through their root systems to make every kilogram of
plant products saving 96% of the water now used in agriculture. At the present
time they have to process 148,667 liters of air through thousands of tiny
stomata with pinhole sized apertures. This is a ridiculous system and
especially considering that our food depends on its function.With SCAF and genetic engineering a huge improvement will be possible. SCAF will conserve water now lost to transpiration and in field evaporation. Where 70% of all the water is used for agriculture saving 96% of it is saving 67.2% of all water. This will bring an era of water abundance for man by tripling the amount available to people and industry with no new sources!
The implications of SCAF are profound. The direct application of carbon dioxide as fertilizer is the greatest opportunity science has ever had to advance agriculture because it converts ground water into something on which the plants can thrive as never before. Plants are already equipped to access carbonated water from soil which is ready to accept carbon dioxide gas if it is injected or piped to the correct depth.
The Internet publication “LiveScience.com” says, “According to the United Nations, water supply shortages will affect billions of people by the middle of this century.” This shortage affects millions of people in the drier countries on every continent now. And, the numbers are growing.
Carbon dioxide has been in increasingly short supply for green plants over 1.5 billion years. Early Earth had a 12% CO2 atmosphere that gave photosynthesis the opportunity to thrive before animals could live in it. Carbon dioxide is not toxic, but it is suffocating and we can tolerate up to 1.5% of it in air, 15,000 parts per million. Curiously, we use a lung concentration of 12% as the signal to take a new breath, reducing the CO2 from that of geologic antiquity to what is today. Perhaps we are much more in tune with our origins than we know.
Green plants flourished converting CO2 to oxygen and plant products. They were so successful CO2 has virtually vanished by the 20th century. It is an endangered molecular species with 99.68% of it having vanished into plants and the abyssal depths of the seas. A major fraction of this had been fossilized as hydrocarbons and man uses it to recover energy stored there in geologic antiquity. Industrial activity has raised the CO2 level to 380 parts per million with good effects but in turn has alarmed government paid scientists, psycho-neurotics who have a need to be alarmed and politicians pursuing power with panic promotion.
There are 380 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in today’s air, 0.038%. Thus, green plants must transpire huge quantities of water to keep stomata open and exchange water for the carbon dioxide they need. CO2 enters the stomata by chance as water vapor leaves. CO2 is only one of every 2640 molecules in air, but it is favored to enter the plant as it is 54.2 times as soluble in water as oxygen and 73.5 times more soluble as nitrogen. But, the relationship between plants and CO2 in nature has become ridiculous given its’ importance to green plants. We change that.
More Food, Fiber and Wood
There are two reasons
for improving the green plant acquisition of carbon dioxide: increased
production of food, fiber and wood plus water conservation. The United
Nations has declared water sources will be the leading world problem after
2010. We believe the development of SCAF technology will then be critical
to maintaining world peace. Nations go to a r for what they need.
Reducing needs contributes to world peace.
SCAF technology will then be critical to maintaining world peace. Nations go to war for what they need. Reducing needs contributes to world peace.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the Carboniferous Age (360,000,000 BC to 300,000,000 BC) forests was on the order of that in modern green-houses. Known as “the era of Eden,” the forests, savannas and seas were much more lush and productive than ours today, but modern environ-mentalists become hysterical at the thought of this returning.
Demonstrations with tented fruit trees in atmospheres boosted to 700 ppm CO2 (0.070%) result in young trees two to three times the size of those growing in normal atmospheres have been done many times in the US, England and Europe. They are documented at the “CO2 Science” website: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp
SCAF technology will then be critical to maintaining world peace. Nations go to war for what they need. Reducing needs contributes to world peace.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the Carboniferous Age (360,000,000 BC to 300,000,000 BC) forests was on the order of that in modern green-houses. Known as “the era of Eden,” the forests, savannas and seas were much more lush and productive than ours today, but modern environ-mentalists become hysterical at the thought of this returning.
Demonstrations with tented fruit trees in atmospheres boosted to 700 ppm CO2 (0.070%) result in young trees two to three times the size of those growing in normal atmospheres have been done many times in the US, England and Europe. They are documented at the “CO2 Science” website: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp
Previous Scrubber Patents
Inputting
the string “sodium hydroxide scrubber automobile” to the automatically ANDing
Google patent search system returns 318 hits, but the great majority are for
industrial processes and the documents do not include the word
“automobile.” We wonder why they were included in the output, but such is
the nature of Google “ANDing.” Where a true "AND" searching
process would only return an entry that included all four elements, "sodium,
hydroxide, scrubber and automobile" the Google version produces all with
any of the elements. Thus, there were only two solid hits in the entire
list. It is amazing Google cannot get this right.
Patent
3,853,484 calls for the use of sodium hydroxide solution or the molten material
as the apparatus uses a Venturi vacuum pump to spray the absorbent into
the exhaust gas stream. The product solution is recycled continually with
no indication of when it is to be changed so the device would appear to have a
limited operational life with no way of determining when the absorbent was
exhausted. It is thus not a practical system and especially so where the
hydroxide is recycled in a way that will release the CO2 in the apparatus where it will rejoin the exhaust gas!
Patent 3,909,206 deals with air intake for fuel cells as it is claimed carbon dioxide interferes with the operation of such cells and several exotic hydroxides are called for in this application. Sodium hydroxide is by far the cheapest and therefore the preferred one used in industry. This scrubber is not designed to capture carbon dioxide for sequestration and does not relate in any way to SCAF.
CO2 Sequestration
CO2 sequestration
will be legislated soon and several methods have been suggested for dealing
with the gas. All treat carbon dioxide or carbon as garbage or pollution
and all are expensive.
The most practical concept would be to put the gas into old oil wells for the purpose of pushing more oil out of the rocks. That works up to a point, but at the very high pressures of very deep wells CO2 is totally miscible with oil and dissolves into it completely and entirely. The solution of oil and gas separate as soon as the oil comes to the surface.
An additional step of capturing the gas
before the oil can be shipped will have to be done. In all these
processes some CO2 comes with any oil
recovered with the gas. Provision for recapture has to be engineered in
any case where CO2 is use to recover oil. For this reason
we do not expect these schemes will be allowed or considered viable.
The only other scheme using old oil wells is simply as a dump. Norway has officially proposed using their old North Sea oil wells purely as carbon dioxide vaults and has
done so experimentally. This will work, but it is not cheap and sees CO2 as waste instead of a valuable product.
Pumping the gas into old caves has been suggested, but where many of these have not been fully explored questions arise: "What may we be burying with the gas?" "What evidence of previous civilizations may we seal from science?" And even more importantly with so little known of the caves could we be pumping the gas in one end only to have it escape from another opening? That pressure is not rising as we pump gas into a cavern would be an indication, but how do we solve the problem and insure the investment in making a seal at the opening we know. Suppose a second opening is high on the side of a mountain impossible to seal? The problems we walk into with this approach are not only many, but unknown, expensive and potentially harmful to some plant or animal species.
In any case we are going to have to store the captured gas for some time
in tanks. High pressure gas tanks are not cheap and occasionally spring
leaks. One alternative is to use the solid hydroxide of our NatroX™
process, which compresses the gas as well as pumps generating over 8,000 pounds
per square inch, then wet and heated to recover the gas in the field. Heating
carbonates generates a lot of gas and pressure from a low volume solid weighing
two and one-half times as much as water per unit volume.
We are confident there will be many solutions to these problems before the optimum paths are found competitively.
Patent 3,909,206 deals with air intake for fuel cells as it is claimed carbon dioxide interferes with the operation of such cells and several exotic hydroxides are called for in this application. Sodium hydroxide is by far the cheapest and therefore the preferred one used in industry. This scrubber is not designed to capture carbon dioxide for sequestration and does not relate in any way to SCAF.
CO2 Sequestration
The most practical concept would be to put the gas into old oil wells for the purpose of pushing more oil out of the rocks. That works up to a point, but at the very high pressures of very deep wells CO2 is totally miscible with oil and dissolves into it completely and entirely. The solution of oil and gas separate as soon as the oil comes to the surface.
Pumping the gas into old caves has been suggested, but where many of these have not been fully explored questions arise: "What may we be burying with the gas?" "What evidence of previous civilizations may we seal from science?" And even more importantly with so little known of the caves could we be pumping the gas in one end only to have it escape from another opening? That pressure is not rising as we pump gas into a cavern would be an indication, but how do we solve the problem and insure the investment in making a seal at the opening we know. Suppose a second opening is high on the side of a mountain impossible to seal? The problems we walk into with this approach are not only many, but unknown, expensive and potentially harmful to some plant or animal species.
We are confident there will be many solutions to these problems before the optimum paths are found competitively.
Notable Experiments
Pumping CO2
into oil wells, mines and caverns and even under the sea off Norway has been done. The
processes are expensive, inconvenient and unreliable due to high pressures,
leaks and blowouts. Old wells are not always close to the facilities
capturing carbon dioxide so transportation costs can be significant.
This method does not deal with elemental carbon or “carbon black” from high temperature atomic reduction systems, the most common method and one that cuts burner efficiency by raising the fuel to air ratio. Chemical capture systems will prevail as they are cheaper and produce a salable product.
Pumping CO2
into oil wells, mines and caverns and even under the sea off Norway has been done. The
processes are expensive, inconvenient and unreliable due to high pressures,
leaks and blowouts. Old wells are not always close to the facilities
capturing carbon dioxide so transportation costs can be significant.This method does not deal with elemental carbon or “carbon black” from high temperature atomic reduction systems, the most common method and one that cuts burner efficiency by raising the fuel to air ratio. Chemical capture systems will prevail as they are cheaper and produce a salable product.
In Japan the Frio
Brine Pilot test well was drilled to 4900 feet before it found permeable
sandstone that would accept gas for sequestering. At the half million
dollars these wells cost this is clearly not a practical system.
Ages of Waters
Water age increases with depth. Topsoil water may be from a few
minutes to a few months old considering it to be new precipitated from
vapor. One to three feet down soil usually has 10% water by mass and it
may have been a few years since it fell on the soil. Water age and percentage
increase with depth. At 200 to 300 feet it is as much as 30% of the soil
and centuries have passed since it fell as rain.
Layers of clay and rock seal water bearing soil into channels, “rivers,” veins or aquifers. In US locations layers of water bearing strata are often found with the deepest levels having waters of great antiquity. The age of recovered water is one characteristic water purveyors have missed in their amazing marketing of something you can get virtually for free! Determining the age of water is a matter of knowing the depth from which it has come and the rate it moves through layers of rock and soil. Geologists determine these factors with dyes injected to certain depths.
There are underground aquifers under unlikely places like the Nevada and Arizona deserts. Water there may not be sufficient for crops like corn and wheat. Both use large amounts of water when the atmosphere is their source of carbon. SCAF reduces water demand 30% to 50% for today's plants and can take it all the way down to 4% of what it is today with new, genetically engineered plants.
Some will see threats of disasters and falling skies in the change to plants more dependent on man, but this is something that has been going on for many thousands of years. The wheat we use for bread does not occur in nature. It was derived from two different plants that were crossed by putting the pollen from one on the unfertilized seeds of the other. This was done to make a plant that would hold its' seeds for us to harvest rather than let them blow away like those of ordinary grasses. As a result there is more wheat growing now than if it were a wild plant. That will be the future for many of our crop plants.
In arranging for a better, more convenient to the plant, more efficient ways of getting carbon to plants we are only continuing the great tradition of man's stewardship of the planet. We are part of the environment and eco-system. We have functioned with the intelligence we were given by chance or design and should continue to do exactly that. For self-styled “greens” to tell us anything touched by man is bad is clearly nonsensical. When we take a plant or animal into our economy the result is more of it every time. There are now almost as many Bison living in the west as there ever were, but they grazing on fenced land and not running wild. There are more horses than ever lived before and certainly more chickens, turkeys and swine.
Perhaps our greatest opportunities in protein production are in aqua-culture. Fish and shrimp protein is the most efficient to produce as cold water animals are very efficient at converting grain to animal protein. Cows are the least efficient, pigs follow them with fowl being the most efficient of the land animals in making meat from grain. In any case, grain is at the base of the food chain and SCAF technology will improve grain production in a way no other single improvement has.
Layers of clay and rock seal water bearing soil into channels, “rivers,” veins or aquifers. In US locations layers of water bearing strata are often found with the deepest levels having waters of great antiquity. The age of recovered water is one characteristic water purveyors have missed in their amazing marketing of something you can get virtually for free! Determining the age of water is a matter of knowing the depth from which it has come and the rate it moves through layers of rock and soil. Geologists determine these factors with dyes injected to certain depths.
There are underground aquifers under unlikely places like the Nevada and Arizona deserts. Water there may not be sufficient for crops like corn and wheat. Both use large amounts of water when the atmosphere is their source of carbon. SCAF reduces water demand 30% to 50% for today's plants and can take it all the way down to 4% of what it is today with new, genetically engineered plants.
Some will see threats of disasters and falling skies in the change to plants more dependent on man, but this is something that has been going on for many thousands of years. The wheat we use for bread does not occur in nature. It was derived from two different plants that were crossed by putting the pollen from one on the unfertilized seeds of the other. This was done to make a plant that would hold its' seeds for us to harvest rather than let them blow away like those of ordinary grasses. As a result there is more wheat growing now than if it were a wild plant. That will be the future for many of our crop plants.
In arranging for a better, more convenient to the plant, more efficient ways of getting carbon to plants we are only continuing the great tradition of man's stewardship of the planet. We are part of the environment and eco-system. We have functioned with the intelligence we were given by chance or design and should continue to do exactly that. For self-styled “greens” to tell us anything touched by man is bad is clearly nonsensical. When we take a plant or animal into our economy the result is more of it every time. There are now almost as many Bison living in the west as there ever were, but they grazing on fenced land and not running wild. There are more horses than ever lived before and certainly more chickens, turkeys and swine.
Perhaps our greatest opportunities in protein production are in aqua-culture. Fish and shrimp protein is the most efficient to produce as cold water animals are very efficient at converting grain to animal protein. Cows are the least efficient, pigs follow them with fowl being the most efficient of the land animals in making meat from grain. In any case, grain is at the base of the food chain and SCAF technology will improve grain production in a way no other single improvement has.
Earth's Carbon
In the top section of the model we show the amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, where it is the familiar dioxide. At the lowest levels of the atmosphere and in the soil it is found as carbohydrates, starch and cellulose in green plants. Below soil, in deep earth, it is found as hydrocarbons in oil, gas, coal, tar sands and shales. And, we deal with the amounts that change locations every year for the recent period for which data exists and because the modern era has more bearing on us than the distant past or future.
These figures are largely from "The Carbon Dioxide Question" by George M. Woodwell in the Scientific American publication "Energy and Environment," 1980 edition. We have translated his figures, originally in grams, to "gigatons," billions of tons as this has become the common unit of discussion in the controversy and we express the quantities exponentially.
| Note that 10^9 means 1 followed by nine zeros or one billion, i.e. 1,000,000,000, prefix "giga." This is a huge quantity, but the important points will be how these change and what will it mean?
The Atmosphere
1978 Atmosphere - 700 x 10^9 tons
2007
" - 847 x 10^9
"
|
Contributions and
Losses
From man - 5 x 10^9 tons/yr Forest decay - 6 x 10^9 tons/yr Respiration - 50 x 10^9 tons/yr
Other Sources - 7 x 10^9 tons/yr
The Seas - 2.5 x 10^9 tons/yr Photosynthesis - -50 x 10^9 tons/yr |
The Surface, Soil to 10 feet
Vegetation - 827 X 10^9 tons Humus - 3000 X 10^9 tons |
The Sea -
above 100 feet
Marine Life - 2 x 10^9 tons Dissolved Organics - 30 x 10^9 tons |
Deep Subsoil - Inactive
Fossil Fuels - 5,000 x 10^9 tons |
Below Thermocline - cold water
Dissolved Organics - 3000 x 10^9 tons Deep Ocean 38,000,000 x 10^9 tons |
Below 5,000 ft. - no known carbon
|
Ocean Bottom Sediments - 16,000 feet
Carbonates - 20,000,000 x 10^9 tons |
A Serious Question
The above translation from grams to tons is from the only
source of its kind we have been able to find and there is a problem. The
amount of carbon in the 1978 atmosphere is wrong for 2007 given man's activity and
an unidentified source here noted as "Other Sources." A
calculation in the next paragraph deals with it. We salvage the
data for today by assuming the additional carbon in the system has all come
from fossil fuel, the sea and vegetation, splitting unknown production in the
ratio they exist to account for the differences. This is a technique may
not be appropriate, but it seemed reasonable to us.
Earth is a sphere with a surface area found by 4pi x r^2 and is 2.02 x 10^8 mi^2. Every square foot of air has about a long, or metric, ton of air on it and each square mile is 5280 ft^2 so we find each square mile has 2.7 x 10^7 tons of air on it. The total weight, or mass in metric tons of air is 5.45 x 10^15 tons by (mass per mi^2) x (miles^2) and this translates to 5.45 x 10^6 gigatons of air.
Earth is a sphere with a surface area found by 4pi x r^2 and is 2.02 x 10^8 mi^2. Every square foot of air has about a long, or metric, ton of air on it and each square mile is 5280 ft^2 so we find each square mile has 2.7 x 10^7 tons of air on it. The total weight, or mass in metric tons of air is 5.45 x 10^15 tons by (mass per mi^2) x (miles^2) and this translates to 5.45 x 10^6 gigatons of air.
This air is now 0.00038 carbon dioxide is 2.07 X
10^13 tons of CO2 which is 27.2% carbon
or 5.63 X 10^12 tons of carbon having grown by X 1.69 X 10^13 tons in the 29
years since the data were compiled in 1978. The mean annual addition
has been 5.82 X 10^11 tons and that is in good agreement with the
literature. But, this outcome has been interpreted strangely:
According to James Hansen, Ph.D., Director of NASA's Goddard Space Laboratory at Columbia University, man-made CO2 in the air remains up to 500 years. He has given three different figures in as many speeches. While these figures show a net gain we believe the gain is due to the natural absorbers or "sinks," acting normally rather than their being a significant difference between CO2's coming from nature or man's burning fossil fuels.
The early 19th century idea that man-made chemicals were different from "natural" atoms and molecules was shown false in experiments many times. We do not believe in Vitalism, intelligent control of molecules by tiny pilots or Divine Intervention in chemistry.
It would appear all of the man-made CO2 has gone into the biome as the only part of it that is tracked very carefully has increased by an amount consistent with the new CO2 in the air. It appears the biome has adapted to the increased supply. Crop yields are increasing by 0.3% per part per million of CO2 increase which correlates well with the increase.
According to James Hansen, Ph.D., Director of NASA's Goddard Space Laboratory at Columbia University, man-made CO2 in the air remains up to 500 years. He has given three different figures in as many speeches. While these figures show a net gain we believe the gain is due to the natural absorbers or "sinks," acting normally rather than their being a significant difference between CO2's coming from nature or man's burning fossil fuels.
The early 19th century idea that man-made chemicals were different from "natural" atoms and molecules was shown false in experiments many times. We do not believe in Vitalism, intelligent control of molecules by tiny pilots or Divine Intervention in chemistry.
It would appear all of the man-made CO2 has gone into the biome as the only part of it that is tracked very carefully has increased by an amount consistent with the new CO2 in the air. It appears the biome has adapted to the increased supply. Crop yields are increasing by 0.3% per part per million of CO2 increase which correlates well with the increase.
The atmosphere
has the smallest part of Earth's carbon compared to the lands and seas.
It took only a very small part of the existing elemental carbon to make
the 12% CO2 atmosphere of early Earth.
Today the sum total of carbon around and in the planet is 5.8 x
10^16 tons of which the atmosphere has 0.0012%. Any natural event
severely disrupting carbon now at rest in the seas, soil as carbonates and
fossil hydrocarbons could render our atmosphere unbreathable. However,
given the amount of time this planet has been at rest the chance of any
such event coming from within seems remote unless time has been working
against us, "winding the joy buzzer."
The catastrophe would most likely have to be a storm of volcanos around the "Ring of Fire" surrounding the Pacific Ocean. It is thought that such a cataclysm gave our atmosphere the 12% carbon dioxide atmosphere it had 1.5 billion years ago. That brought on the age of green plants as a result of nature playing with every combination of matter and energy in eons of time.
The Mysteries
The catastrophe would most likely have to be a storm of volcanos around the "Ring of Fire" surrounding the Pacific Ocean. It is thought that such a cataclysm gave our atmosphere the 12% carbon dioxide atmosphere it had 1.5 billion years ago. That brought on the age of green plants as a result of nature playing with every combination of matter and energy in eons of time.
The Mysteries
We know that more CO2
is getting into the air than we can account for with known plant and animal
respiration, decay and natural processes. The most likely source is the sea
from the marine CO2 cycle for phytoplankon
that is immense and hard to track. However, these processes only take
place in the top 100 feet of seas that have an average depth of 16,000
feet.
Below 100 feet seawater is very cold, usually at four Celsius degrees, the temperature where water is most dense. Seawater at this temperature dissolves CO2 readily and while some escapes to the upper layer at the "thermocline" boundary it seems that an equal amount enters the lower levels for no net change.
At the beginning of the 20th century the atmosphere had 280 ppm, parts per million, of CO2 and at the end of that century it had 380 ppm, a gain of one ppm per year. Where the atmosphere has a mass of 5.45 x 10^15 tons every "ppm" would be 5.45 x 10^9 ton, and man has been making almost exactly that same number of tons per year since the mid-20th century with nature adding another 180 x 10^9 tons so much new CO2 is coming from somewhere not yet identified by science. It seems highly likely that the source is the sea as it is the only source big enough to account for the huge difference and hard enough to track that the question could continue without answer.
Man can tolerate up to 15,000 ppm of CO2 so at the rate of gaining one ppm per year we have 14,620 years left before we find ourselves in an atmosphere we cannot breathe. Although, it would happen so slowly we would likely adapt and produce a new species of man more like a green plant than not. Could it be that our destiny is to be green, not have an alimentary canal with our only needs sunlight and water plus a few minerals? With nature doing every possible experiment over infinite time nothing is too bizarre.
Continue to CO2 Enriched Atmospheres
Table of Contents
Below 100 feet seawater is very cold, usually at four Celsius degrees, the temperature where water is most dense. Seawater at this temperature dissolves CO2 readily and while some escapes to the upper layer at the "thermocline" boundary it seems that an equal amount enters the lower levels for no net change.
At the beginning of the 20th century the atmosphere had 280 ppm, parts per million, of CO2 and at the end of that century it had 380 ppm, a gain of one ppm per year. Where the atmosphere has a mass of 5.45 x 10^15 tons every "ppm" would be 5.45 x 10^9 ton, and man has been making almost exactly that same number of tons per year since the mid-20th century with nature adding another 180 x 10^9 tons so much new CO2 is coming from somewhere not yet identified by science. It seems highly likely that the source is the sea as it is the only source big enough to account for the huge difference and hard enough to track that the question could continue without answer.
Man can tolerate up to 15,000 ppm of CO2 so at the rate of gaining one ppm per year we have 14,620 years left before we find ourselves in an atmosphere we cannot breathe. Although, it would happen so slowly we would likely adapt and produce a new species of man more like a green plant than not. Could it be that our destiny is to be green, not have an alimentary canal with our only needs sunlight and water plus a few minerals? With nature doing every possible experiment over infinite time nothing is too bizarre.
Continue to CO2 Enriched Atmospheres
Table of Contents
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