chemists & biologists & physicists read this!
Hi, I'm new to the forum and I'd like to expose an idea I've had recently and want to share it with the community.
I'd like to discuss the idea with people that can work on it. I am a theoretical physicist and unfortunately I have not enough background to develop it, but I'm willing to collaborate to the best of my possibilities.
As is well known, CO2 is released to the atmosphere as a result of a combustion reaction. In such a reaction organic molecules holding C and H are combined with oxygen to produce CO2 and water H2O plus some other products, releasing energy in the reaction.
Now, where did this energy come from? The answer is clear: The Sun. Plants gather energy from the sun using the photoelectric effect in a process that is called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is essentially the inverse reaction to combustion, taking CO2 from the atmosphere and water, and put them together using the energy of the Sun, and storing them in highly energetic molecules such as the ones present in fossil fuels.
The photoelectric effect is usually regarded as a means to generate electric current. Looked at this way it is useless at reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere unless it is massively used as a source of energy so that finally replaces combustion. However, Nature shows us that the photoelectric effect can store energy in other ways which really take CO2 away from the air and store it in highly dense and compact forms such as wood, coal, etc... So the thing would be to emulate this process massively. But it must be done using the energy from the Sun, or some other clean source. Using energy from a fossil combustion plant to activate the photosynthesis is no use. What you clean on one side you screw up in the other.
Whether the result (product) of this process should be buried underground (where it belongs) or used as a source of energy is also a matter worth discussing.
In the best of the worlds, the product of the process should be buried, which is where most of this C came from (fossil fuels). However, from a more pessimistic point of view, where we can't afford discarding sources of energy, we could still burn this product to obtain energy and throwing to the atmosphere NO MORE CO2 than what was already there. In this sense, it would be a clean source of power. In fact it is not a source of energy, is is a vector, because it STORES energy, it doesn't generate it.
Whether this idea is new or has already been proposed I don't know. I just wanted to discuss it. I'd like to spread it and hopefully, reach scientists who can elaborate, see if it is viable and implement it.
If Microsoft can be fought through the Web (read: Linux) so can the global warming!
If you have some scientific background which may be of help, please let me know. I'd like to take this seriously and see what can be done.
Thanks a lot
Have a nice day
Alex
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