Better Understanding Carbon Dioxide--Taming the Hysteria

Carbon Dioxide is a topic of much debate, often verging on hysteria. A better understanding of CO2, and how to manipulate it, would go a long way toward taming the hysteria.

Recent discoveries at UC Riverside suggest one way that nanotechnology could be used to pull CO2 out of the air--molecule by molecule--and transport it selectively to a chosen point of release.

A research team, led by UC Riverside’s Ludwig Bartels, was the first to design a molecule that can move in a straight line on a flat surface. Now this team has found a way to attach cargo: two CO2 molecules, making the nano-walker a molecule carrier.

The work will be published Thursday, Jan. 18 in “Science Express” and later in the print-version of the journal “Science.”

“This is an unprecedented step forward towards the realization of molecular-scale machinery,” said Bartels, associate professor of chemistry and a member of UCR’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering. “Our experiments show a means to transport molecules reliably. This will become as important to the molecular machinery of the future as trucks and conveyor belts are for factories of today.”

The last paper Bartels and his team published on this subject generated a great deal of interest. It was included in the American Institute of Physics “Top 25 Physics Stories for 2005.”

The new molecule carrier runs on a copper surface. It can pick up and release up to two carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules and carry them along its straight path. “Carrying a load slows the molecule down” explained Bartels. “Attachment of one CO2 molecule makes the carrier need twice as much energy for a step, and a carrier with two CO2s requires roughly three times the energy. This is not unlike a human being carrying heavy loads in one or both hands.”

Bartels explained that using machines at the scale of single molecules will ultimately be the most efficient way to build objects or to deliver material.
“It resembles the way nature does it: the molecule carrier transports carbon dioxide across a surface,” he said. “In the human body, the molecule hemoglobin carries oxygen from and carbon dioxide to the lungs, thereby allowing us to breathe – and to live.”

Source.

Carbon dioxide is far more useful and versatile than generally imagined. Besides being the vital fuel for plant growth, CO2 is used chemically in creating chemical feedstocks from alkanes. Under pressure, CO2 can be made into a toughened glass similar to diamond, for use as a coating. In fact, CO2 can actually be converted into diamond itself. Some of the techniques for CO2 conversion can be found here.

In other words, nanotechnology is being taught to pull CO2 molecules from the air and transport them to chambers where the CO2 can be concentrated and used in chemical processes, or converted to a quartz-like material, or perhaps diamond.

Climate change is not due nearly as much to CO2 as the media and political alarmists attempt to claim. But CO2 is freely available in the air, and if productive uses can be made of it, that would be grand. Enough of hysteria. Humans need to learn to think constructively for a change.