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I feel like the only way electric cars can be truly “environment friendly” is if the carbon produced is captured at the plants.
Not sure if it’s at all possible, though.
In: Engineering
Yes you can do it. There are a group of chemicals called amines that *love* carbon dioxide. So the idea is that you pump the exhaust from the power station through a column containing an amine spray. The amines absorb the carbon dioxide and the cleaned gas goes up the stack.
Then, the amine is sent to a machine called a regenerator where it is heated, the carbon dioxide escapes from the amine which can then be reused to trap more carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide itself then has to be compressed or liquified for disposal. As people have said above, this can be done in geological storage such as depleted oil fields.
The problems are many. Amines are nasty chemicals (not least that they stink), they will corrode many metals and there will always be a small amount of leakage – in the environment, not only do they smell bad, but they react with the air to produce a number of toxic compounds.
Heating and cooling the amines, compressing and liquifying carbon dioxide all use energy which reduces the efficiency of the power plant itself.
And finally, we are producing so much carbon dioxide that there just isn’t enough possible storage in the world.
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