An EV that removes CO2 from the air
voitureblog.com
voitureblog.com
To really move the needle in terms of carbon capture, it needs to be at scale, with a plan to do something with the carbon. It needs to be positive return on investment.
Something like scrubbing the CO2 from a steel plant and reusing the carbon in the furnace. (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/02/15/...). The reason this could succeed is that it makes steel cheaper to make because you don’t need to buy coal anymore. The environment benefits because fewer fossil fuels are burned but that’s not the driving factor for potential widespread adoption. Economics is.
In the US, .855 lbs of CO2 are produced per kWh (in 2021). If that moves the car 5 miles (same as a Model 3), the car gets 26.3 miles per 4.5 lbs CO2. Since the car absorbs 4.5 lbs per 20k miles, it absorbs .132% as much CO2 as was produced by driving it.
If the filters increase the weight (and drag) of the car by .132%, then the extra consumption will cancel out the absorbed CO2. What's .132% of, say, 3500 lbs?
4.6 lbs. If the filters weigh more than 2.3 lbs, the weight of the captured CO2 will cause more CO2 to be emitted than is captured.
Using the US fleet average (26.4 mpg), an average car produces 4.5 lbs CO2 every 6 miles. These filters can absorb .03% of the CO2 emissions of a combustion car.
I think it's closer to 0.15 pound / mile, or 0.85 pound / 6 miles if you like.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
Greenwashing is going to end up doing more harm in the long run. Instead of coming up with real solutions, we’re burning even more fuel to pretend to reclaim a fraction of a percent of the production costs.
Otherwise I fully agree, CO2 scrubbing makes the most sense at the point of large scale emissions. Government taxes on emissions are also required so people start doing this before they all find a way to make economic use of the carbon.
TLDR; We need 2,318 ZEM cars to remove same amount of CO2 as one diesel car produces per year.
- Average diesel car makes 144g CO2 per 1 kilometer (0.62 miles).
- Zem car removes 2,000g of CO2 per 32,200 kilometers or 0.062g of CO2 per kilometer.
- Zem car needs to drive 2,318 km to remove 144g of CO2 that Diesel car produce on 1 kilometer.
- Average person drives around 21,726km per year and produce around 3,128,564g of CO2 (if Diesel).
- If Zem car would theoretically drive the same 21,726km per year, it would remove 1,349g / year.
- That means that we need 2,318 ZEM cars to remove same amount of CO2 as one diesel car produces.
- Makes sense to produce it, right?
Also, if we want to reverse global warming carbon sequestration is non-negotiable. We can’t just stop digging up coal and oil cold turkey, and the earth has already warmed enough (and will continue to warm to about 2C) that we will need to go carbon negative, not just neutral.
In familiar units: 0.05 g/km. Contrast that to the ~100 g/km emitted by a modern ICE car with decent efficiency. Of course, as mentioned:
> same amount of carbon as a mature tree absorbs annually
Is enough of a comparison to understand that this is more of a gimmick than a viable solution to anything.
Cool student project nonetheless; the "dashboard made of cooking oil", 3D printed parts and the added solar panels are likely of more significance.
It is a positive gain, even if small. Now multiply that gain across thousands of cars (assuming this tech became mass market) and you have a significant positive impact.
On the other hand, if the filter was disposed of appropriately, that carbon would be removed from the carbon cycle and the atmosphere would be freed of some CO2 as a consequence.
Talk about bikeshedding. The clicks are probably worth it tho.
if you have to pay any amount comparable to a low-end car: maybe.
any more than that and the answer becomes: highly unlikely.
but whether or not this is a good idea or efficient under any definition of the word? idk. probably a bad idea, too consumer oriented for a problem that could be better tackled on a larger scale
Computers were once huge and slow and inefficient, but now for example we have Raspberry Pi which is orders of magnitude faster, cheaper, smaller, and more energy efficient than most computers 15+ years ago.
This new carbon capture tech could see similar gains.
just because you can drive one "artificial tree" around doesnt mean you should pursue in making those on a scale fit to dent the problem, because in making those "trees" you just release more dead-tree-gas and make the problem worse before you can make it better.
Where did I specify the point in time when this would be practical?
> nobody is telling anyone to stop improving shit
Look up "vitriolic". Also ask yourself why you are so angry at a stranger's neutral comments. This kind of interaction does not make the internet a better place.
im just stating the obvious, idk why you feel the need to defend this, but if you are affiliated with the team then just go back to the drawing board and dont waste your time trying to talk people into liking this. it's a sensationalist claim, obviously people will dispute it.
Because location doesn't matter, putting lots of small battery-powered mobile units is always going to lose to a large fixed industrial unit with an industrial-scale energy supply. Probably orders of magnitude worse on both CAPEX and OPEX.
I's clear that with many environmental matters, and specifically atmospheric CO2, we are at the tragedy of the commons, and have been for a long while, and strategies should be around getting us out of there.
No, we need to look at externalities and real world long term side effects.
The "per dollar" part is why we're in the current situation in the first place
No, because it doesn't scale, and its dramatically worse than a lot of other approaches, which range from 'also don't scale' to 'somewhat scale'.
https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/audi-urba...
Technically, combustion cars already do that because the air in the combustion chamber must be ideally free from any contaminants - they just add other pollutants via the tailpipe.
I think it's a neat and relatively cheap way to deal with this problem in EVs - existing radiator fans are more than enough for this task.
From the page it looks like it just sucks in from the front grill, I wonder if it could suck from the wheel wells too, to grab brake dust at the source?
It is more efficient to put them in a specialized facility where you don't have to make them mobile and can put more at the same location.
Well, this doesn't actually work because the drag of the windmill, even if you do something clever like put it in a tunnel, costs more than the energy recovered. Even an EV is still running mostly fossil based energy on average.
Drag is the big energy cost on a vehicle. Anything you mount on the vehicle to purposefully catch air is going to be a net negative.
The problem then is - where are you getting that energy from?
For CO2 capture, it must be green energy - not emitting CO2 itself - and you need to capture CO2 at volumes great enough to have a global impact.
Doing so at such volume requires massive development of green energy sources - and given we're not even building enough green to replace ditry (currently globally, we're building lots of green and lots of dirty, too), the idea we will then additionally build another civilization-scale supply of green energy for CO2 capture seems improbable.
This is entirely depending on whether you think nuclear is "green enough".
But anyway the original article is bs.
There is in fact a chemical reaction going on, and energy (stored in the chemistry of the filters) is being consumed to capture the CO2.
There are rocks - concrete does it too - which absorb CO2. This also is a chemical reaction, where the rocks and the concrete are giving up energy to capture the CO2.
not only inefficient - the added weight of the scrubbers means that the car is now less efficient at carrying people.
CO2 scrubbing doesn't work. I think massive, industrial capture, and chemical and electrolysis conversion of CO2 into usable raw materials (such as raw carbon) is the only way forward. The energy to power that process needs to come from solar or other clean renewables.
Relying on the (clean) grid for charging is actually the better approach.
Those students should build something they can afford...
Technology demonstrators that push the limits like this may not be immediately 100% economically useful but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable in other ways.
Incredible project!
As it says they are in the process of applying for a patent for the carbon capture system, I assume that is why there are few details about how it works in the press release and corresponding blogs.
They remove CO2? How? Direct air capture tech isn't exactly trivial. How much does that weight and how much does that increase the energy consumption? And most important of all: What do they do with the CO2? Do you have to drive to a geological storage site every now and then? How often?
I really wish we would adopt lighter cars. Extra tax on SUVs, trucks and so on. But the reality is we ban light highly efficient gas cars, in favor of 2 ton monsters!
There’s no such thing as an efficient ICE.
ICE engines waste 60%+ energy as heat, and this is unfixable. OTOH stationary coal and gas plants have modern efficient steam turbines that capture most of that heat energy.
Even a 100% coal-powered EV emits less CO2 than an ICE engine.
Surely they are not claiming having a solar panel integrated, as removing CO2 from the atmosphere, as that would be an outright lie.
It is not clear to me how these filters work but we can see they are not claiming the magic is in solar panels.
Though I am confused. How can a passive filter remove CO2? Don't you need to add energy and use some sort of chemical reaction?
AFAIK you're right that energy has to be put into creating those compounds, tho that can be provided by the sun.
But yeah, overall a quite silly idea, like the solar roadway[2] type proposals.
The amount of CO2 they capture is very low.