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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-05-15
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmkPduxzhrA
uhhuh recently there was a fire alarm in my dorm I was sitting in the dining hall took Liam prepared but I immediately got up I %HESITATION incited my friends to join me and they left for the exits nobody followed my friends were saying well it's just another exercise still shut it down soon or not again I'm eating it took minutes before the building was eventually evacuated
and it turned out that there was only some smoke but I couldn't help but wonder what if there were a real fire with my friends have been trapped because they were still arguing about the authenticity of the alarm I think many parallels can be drawn between this incident and climate change the alarms are there the solutions are there but nobody is moving now our climate is
a very complicated system and in that system issue too acts as a thermostat the thermostat we have been putting very high recent I say we because we are responsible for issue two level in the atmosphere we can do something about it I think it's our moral obligation to act upon it now see you two is a waste we have been dumping in the atmosphere for way
too long and we are dumping a lot worldwide thirty billion metric tons per year are dumped into the atmosphere now do you know how much your contributing to this well personally I didn't know it either in the beginning but the average American is omitting some sixteen metric tons per year that there's the weight of sixteen family cars and moral as the volume of this room but
at this very hard to imagine how that small number eventually skills to that enormous number of thirty billion what is even more difficult to imagine is how measures a single person Deeks influence that enormous number so say for instance that the average person wants to reduce emissions by have by installing solar panels on its roof this would save eight storms per year but what will it
do to the total emissions so I think it's clear that we just need to think bigger and the number and that's might come very close to our total emissions its dispute three missions from the US electricity action that number is two billion metric tons per year it's almost half of the total emissions why do we want to look at that number because most of the electricity
in the U. S. produced in big coal and natural gas fired power plants no those are very stationary big sources of CO two and the idea is to take out this year to from the exhaust gases and to store them and reservoirs and the two grounds it which you could see in blue now the problem here is that the exhaust gases not only contains here to
that's only five to fifteen percent that's the rat than a brown it also contains nitrogen that's the blue molecules you see there and that is where carbon capture the part of my titles kicks in and that is actually the reason why I'm currently on a Fulbright at Berkeley I'm looking for materials that can selectively remove see you two from axles gas and you have to picture
these materials much like sponges only some ten to one hundred million times smaller not at that very small scale what you would see is that the nitrogen molecules in blue are a bit bigger than this you two molecules in rat them brown and so it's a harder to get into the porous and you would also see that's you to interact more strongly that the material than
those nitrogen so if you bring this bunch in the exhaust gases this bunch will soak up this year too and just let the nitrogen go true now once that material is full you can easily regenerate that that's what I call kitchen chemistry you can indeed just grease the spines and this you too will again come out or you could also heat up the material and now
you can think of a way to implement that in the power plants now there are hundreds of materials that already known that's good do destroy and now I'm going to tell your little secrets actually I never meet anyone of those materials because I am a computational chemist for my PhD I try to mobile chemical reactions and predict chemical properties by that solving chemical and physical decrease
since like the now luckily I don't have to solve these equations by hand supercomputers can do to stick the advantage of this supercomputer approach is that it's actually pretty fast once you think of the material you can insert the structure in the computer run the simulation and in a matter of minutes you'll know every property off that's structure you can see some structures on the top
of the slight and you can correlate the properties of that material no this is very practical because you can that scan while hundreds thousands or even millions of hypothetical or known materials for their suit too properties and then select the best one and focus your experimental effort on those materials not what is the best material but the best material can be at several points you want
to sponge that soaks up a lot of CO two you want a sponge that doesn't they can I mean nitrogen you want the sponge that prefer oblique isn't too expensive you also want the sponge that you can use the screens and for a while all these factors determine the best material now I've touched to the cost of this process of course well unfortunately carbon capture is
not free I am a well now I'm going to the door side actually my professor at Berkley recently set let your motto chemist you want to reduce everything to dirty dollars I'm not sure whether I should take it as a compliment or not but anyway and here it comes so as I said before that the US electricity production is admitting to billion tons of CO two
and it is estimated that's you to capture carbon capture O. will close around fourteenth at the lower spur Tom decides the total price thank to staggering eighty billion dollars but if you compare this to the possible affects of climate jeans see a hurricane like Katrina the total property damage off the Katina was eighty one billion dollars but of course the real tragedy of this natural disaster
where the one thousand eight hundred three fatalities and in that incident and I think this really puts the whole price thank in perspective now you may think that carbon capture some futuristic matter but actually it's not carbon capture it's ready to day we only need to take the initiative now going back to the alarms of climate change a I think they will still continue to sounds
