Title.
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, it is possible. The explanations in here right now are either unnecessarily complicated or just flat out incorrect.
If you take the exhaust from a power plant and pass it through a catalytic converter you can easily isolate CO2 gas. You can do whatever you want with it really.
One commenter mentioned pumping it into a greenhouse, which is actually a beyond possible solution. I can’t go too into detail because of an NDA I signed (i can’t share any specific data or research), but i recently worked for a power company that wants to do exactly this. When you increase the CO2 available to plants by a factor of 5, the growth rate, size and strength of plants increases drastically as well. A greenhouse with CO2 added to it will produce much more food than one without.
Otherwise, we need CO2 for many products that we use. Plastics, synthetic rubber, carbonated drinks… the list goes on.
Someone pointed out that the only real way to capture carbon and store it away is by burying it or storing it in tanks, and that is true. However, it’s not impossible and it also doesn’t consume more energy than the power plant produces. Not even close.
I honestly don’t understand a lot of the pessimism in this thread. Capturing the carbon emissions from a fossil fuel plant is not at all a bad idea. I think a better way to put it is recycling them. While burying them is perhaps impractical, finding a use for the emissions is not. Carbonated beverages generally get their CO2 from a designated CO2 generator that exists solely to burn a gas (usually propane) and harvest the CO2 byproduct. By instead using the CO2 byproduct of our fossil fuel power plants, we’d be making a real impact.
So yes, it is possible and there are useful applications.
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