Carbon Scrubbers - Grant-seeking publicity?

The amount of publicity given to an experiment magnified as a  "breakthrough" which managed to capture a small amount of carbon dioxide shows how desperate the global warming supporters are for news and funding .This approach seems to be more of a crackpot idea than "conventional" carbon capture and storage if that were really possible but I am sure it will attract a pile of dollars that could have been directed towards practical research on something useful to humanity.


Using cheap, readily available materials, a team of chemists has developed a new compound for drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

The compound holds the potential to drive down the cost of capturing carbon, although it's too early to say by how much, the scientists say.

The results "add to the list of possible materials that can absorb CO2 from the air, and it potentially could be quite a good one," says Klaus Lackner, who heads the department of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University in New York and was not part of the team formulating the material.

Capturing carbon represents one approach to combating human-triggered global warming, which most climate scientists attribute in some degree to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide from industrial activity as well as to carbon dioxide released through land-use changes.

Aside from the relatively low cost of the materials needed to make the new CO2 sponge, the compound can absorb significant amounts of CO2. It can endure several cycles of absorbing and releasing the gas for sequestration or recycling. And the energy needed to release the gas is low compared with many current materials.

"It has some nice qualities," Dr. Lackner says of the material, although he adds that it remains to be seen how practical the material could be.