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Comment by earthscienceman | Hacker News Reader

Soooo. I suppose this has the potential to be very interesting and at the least is very relevant to my personal research. I'm actually working (with a small team) to develop methanol powered autonomous climate research stations. It would be very neat if we could power them via CO2, or poetic.

However, wtf is this press release? Is this research? This is announcing a patent? This doesn't seem like science to me? Where's the publications, where is the methodology description? What about the constraints? Energy density of methanol is high, but what's the energy input necessary for the conversion process? Is this only effectively helpful if renewable powered? This press release is useless to anyone who actually cares about the work. It's mediocre marketing at best. God I hate academic press offices.

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Looking at Google Scholar it appears the related paper is here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6463/ac006f/...

There also appears to be a patent but I don't trust my googlefu enough to try and search for that.

Thank you for this very much, I didn't manage to find it. I stand by the fact that an academic press office isn't linking to the original paper is absurd.

After a brief skim of the paper... the press release is (as typical) pretty out of touch with the research. Chemistry is nothing short of impressive! And I hope methodologies like these push towards viable carbon capture, mostly so we don't get idiots continuing to experiment with riskier techniques like iron fertilization etc. However, the paper leaves me with so many questions. Methane is shown to be an output of the chemical reaction leading to methanol, they claim the methane output is reduced by their modifications to the method but they make no attempt to quantify the amount of methane released in the reaction or how that compares to the CO2 capture.

Also also. I'm not a chemist, but it's pretty weird to be measuring energy in eV is it not? If this were truly climate-centric, they could very easily put the Wattage required per kg of carbon capture. Which, although probably extremely high given they haven't had time to optimize it, would give a very clear idea of the efficiency of the capture.

It looks like some of this might be quantified in the patent but I can only read French, not German :(

It's measured in eV as it's the most precise* measurement you can make. Ultimately it does turn into enthalpy.

Process takes place at 21 bar and 300-500C. I do not see this being efficient unless powered by nukes. This is fine though, and more accessible than the gasoline production methods that use similar high pressure high temperature reactors.

It is the most precise measurement of the energy input required chemically. It says nothing of the efficiency of the process. The energy required to get to 21 bar and 300-500C and maintain it while that energy input is being provided for that specific chemical reaction.

I'll reiterate, I have no issue that it's inefficient, that's to be expected. It's not hard at all to give a net energy input for the entire process. In fact that would be the easiest part of the paper. If you're giving your research to your press office to make a statement about "climate protection" I damn well expect that number to be provided. Powered by nuclear as you propose is wonderful, btw. I personally would take nuclear waste over atmospheric CO2 every day of the week.

Let's make a giant offshore nuclear-powered CO2->petrol production facility and become techno oil barons.

Maybe bond villains too. You have to do something with the money, right?

I want to see this movie.

> It's measured in eV as it's the most precise* measurement you can make.

Er, no. Just no. eV is just a unit, that doesn't make it more or less precise. eV had its origins in early accelerator physics work where it was a convenient unit to use, and it's use spread from there to other subfields of physics, including ones where the connection to the original processes measured in the early accelerator work is tenuous at best.

You're right. Precision really isn't the right word. I meant something more like most useful. In the field that produced this paper, eV is going to be the most convenient way to specify it, because it relates to the movement of electrons and not just e.g. exploratory particle physics.

"Unless powered by nukes" means "not". Power from nukes is the most expensive source.

But surplus solar is by far the cheapest. It does not seem like operating this process intermittently, i.e. only when power is cheapest, would be impractical.

If the equipment was very expensive, it would need to be operated at near 100% to earn back its cost. But molybdenum disulfide is not expensive. Usually it is only when you need gold or platinum catalysts that capital cost dominates.

Who's experimenting with Iron Fertilization?

I was thinking of doing a Kickstarter and renting out a boat but I got told in no uncertain words not to do it by some scientists who contribute to those IPCC reports.

These days the research is more in this direction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)

but the short path to that is to spend about $1B developing a new airplane to inject SO2 into the stratosphere because no off-the-shelf airplane flies high enough. That's a little out of reach for a Kickstarter.

Isn't SO2 a nastier dehydrated form of sulfuric acid? How does that not turn into acid rain?

SO3 can react to form H2SO4. If you dissolve SO2 into water you get 'sulfurous acid', which is not a strong acid. The Wikipedia article on 'acid rain' mentions the chemistry to convert SO2 is as follows:

SO2 + OH· → HOSO2· HOSO2· + O2 → HO2· + SO3 SO3 (g) + H2O (l) → H2SO4 (aq)

It does turn to acid rain.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s the effect of global warming was attenuated by SO2 emissions in the troposphere, one of the many reason deniers were able to deny as long as they did.

SO2 particles last a few days in the troposphere but last a few years in the stratosphere. So the cooling effect you get is hundreds or thousands of times more per unit mass so the amount of acid rain you get for the amount of cooling you get is much more favorable than in the bad old days.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida-gwaii-...

> but I got told in no uncertain words not to do it by some scientists who contribute to those IPCC reports.

What was the rationale?

I understand to not dump a million tons of iron in the ocean at once, but what's the harm in first dumping 100 kg, then seeing the results, drawing conclusions, and deciding to go to 1 ton, or to stop? If 100 kg is considered too much, then maybe 10 kg is ok, no?

A major reason is that iron fertilization might simply be borrowing ecological production from the near future.

"Renting a boat" is also a bit of a simplification of what is required. The first time people tried iron fertilization they were unlucky and had a current suck the iron deep into the ocean right away and it had no effect. To do an ocean fertilization experiment you need a whole flotilla because you need to track where the iron goes.

The amount that it takes get effects you can notice is in the 10 ton - 100 ton range

https://www.nature.com/articles/545393a

Sulfurating the stratosphere has obviously disastrous consequences. Among others, it fails to stop ocean ecosystem collapse as atmospheric CO2 rises without bound.

Seeding the deep ocean with iron occurs absolutely routinely in nature, via dust from the Sahara blown to the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, putting iron where dust does not reach could have at worst limited negative impact.

The hysterical reaction to experiments is peculiar at best. The worst anyone has said in public, that I have encountered, is that it would not help. But that does not come close to justifying the hysteria.

> I stand by the fact that an academic press office isn't linking to the original paper is absurd.

Academic here. I agree with you that there should be a link to the original paper, but I can kinda sorta explain this.

For one, unfortunately (very unfortunately), the papers are often behind paywalls or otherwise inaccessible. This one isn't, but it might explain the bad habit.

Also, and again unfortunately, scientists are often not in the habit of presenting their results to the general public. It's not really part of our training, or something we're expected to do.

My own interactions with my university's communication staff have been a little bit tense; faculty often have utilitarian web pages aimed mostly at students and colleagues in the discipline, whereas communication staff seem to mostly want to drive publicity for the university as a whole.

It can be worse. Here is a 2018 USC press release in my discipline:

https://news.usc.edu/144995/visiting-professor-solves-math-m...

The Lindelof Hypothesis was not proved, the paper was not peer reviewed, nobody prominent in the field ever endorsed the result, and the claim was later retracted. The press release remains up.

> scientists are often not in the habit of presenting their results to the general public

That is true. Here in Ōtepoti there is a university department of "Scientific Communication" trying to address that. Good luck to them, and hopefully this is changing.

> Also, and again unfortunately, scientists are often not in the habit of presenting their results to the general public. It's not really part of our training, or something we're expected to do.

In my opinion, a professional who can't explain the work they do to a normal human is not really a professional. I've heard so many scientists complain about the quality of science reporting but they might be partly to blame. I know not every scientist can be a Carl Sagan of course.

Outreach has an unlimited ability to soak time away from doing actual science.

Sometimes it's a net benefit, but sometimes not. See: scientists beefing with flat earthers, who will never be convinced of anything.

In my opinion, the explanation isn't the hard part.

What's harder is: attracting an audience in the first place; being able to entertain them in addition to explaining the science; understanding how the media works; making the right connections; knowing how to pitch a reporter; etc.

The amount of foundational knowledge it takes to make heads or tails of a lot of research is well outside what can be reasonably assumed of a lay person.

For example, let's say you found something interesting in Particle Physics. You figured out the mass of the W boson to another 3 decimal places or some such. To make that result at all interesting to a lay person, you need to pile on enough background information to establish context. What's a W boson? Well it's part of a symmetry group in the Standard Model -> Symmetry Groups? Quantum mechanics? -> etc etc.

Know what they call enough background information to be able to begin to appreciate the research in a given field? A bachelors degree.

>>(very unfortunately), the papers are often behind paywalls or otherwise inaccessible

This is what Aaron Swartz was suicided for (allegedly) (I have my own theory on why he died, but I would never share that on HN.

---

Its a complex problem though - ESPECIALLY when said papers/research are fully funded by public tax payer dollars, then de-facto those papers should be public... but it IS also a matter of national security...

If [ENEMY STATE] can just harvest all the academic research of the US, then why do it themselves. So there is that.

Though, one could take a CIA route, and change aspects of the papers which are public such that the gist comes across, but methodologies are either tampered with or omitted such that one would still have to do the remaining work to succeed.

This was what was really interesting to me about DUQU/StuxNet.

But yeah, Swartz was not killed for JSTOR access/theft... (or maybe he was to prevent enemy states getting all these papers?)

[ENEMY STATE], as you put it, can already harvest most of everyone's (including the US') published research via Sci-Hub, and probably some similar projects. A nation-state actor could probably run their own internal Sci-Hub equivalent that uses stolen credentials etc if they wanted/needed to.

Published research already is de facto public, the question is just about whether we want to make those people who access it criminals, to oversimplify a bit.

I'm a bit worried by your semi-nationalist attitude, but I suppose that is besides the point of this comment.

In addition, if you're a foreign intelligence agency, it would probably not be that hard to create a shell company and just purchase a regular subscription.

Paywalls keep out all kinds of people, but I find it hard to believe they keep out foreign agents.

I'm not a chemist, but it's pretty weird to be measuring energy in eV is it not?

An electron-volt is a very small unit of energy. Since atoms and molecules are also very small, the eV is a common unit of measurement for chemical phenomena described at this scale.

See for example this table of molecular bond dissociation energies, where eV is one of the units offered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond-dissociation_energy#Repre...

eV's are very commonly used in Chemistry and Physics. They're very convenient for talking about the energies involved in chemical (or nuclear) reactions. Assuming you're looking for energy in kilowatt-hours, just divide by 2.25*10^25

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2022073055A1/en?q=co2+me...

I think....

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2022073055A1/en

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