[ExI] Carbon

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 3:05 PM,  "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>>
>> Twenty two years ago I wrote:
>>
>> ". . . the real carbon dioxide crisis will be when there is
>> too little from people taking carbon (the strongest
>> engineering material) out of the air... "Some civic minded types (the
> Autaban Society? Serria Club?)
>> might burn coal fields to bring the level back up so plant
>> productivity wouldn't be seriously hurt." Keith
>
> Ja, but we wouldn't need to haul down the carbon out of the air.  Rather we
> would deliver it directly to the homes and factories in the form of coal,
> the old fashioned way.

By the time carbon is coming out of the air more than it goes in, we
will have solved the energy problem.

Let's say you have a 100 amp service at 240 volts.  That's 24 kW, 576
kWh/day.  17,280 kWh per month.

To get a ton of carbon out of the air takes 360 kWh.  To make it into
hydrocarbons (or carbon) takes ~50 times that much, about 18,000 kWh
which is close enough to a month of power feed to your house.  18,000
kWh at a penny per kWh is $180.  That's a bit more than coal cost
delivered to power plants, but probably around the same price as
retail delivery of coal

Besides, CO2 out of the air has got to be a cleaner starting source.

> Also, the quantities of carbon I expect we will use
> is miniscule, since all the really cool stuff I can imagine we would build
> would be tiny.

Think in terms of a fractal floating beach, 100 meters for every
person on the planet anchored in the Pacific.

Keith

>Reason: we don't have the space to build really big stuff.
> We already build our homes mostly of carbon.  If we made them from
> better-organized carbon, it would take far less than we currently use.
>
> spike