fuel from carbon dioxide

from a much warmer time - mid-summer actually - down near the back of my garden...... (remember to click on the image to fill your screen with green goodness).



right now it's sunday, the last official day of festive season holiday for me and my family. outside it's very foggy and if you listen really carefully, you can hear the snowmelt dripping from the eaves, the sound of water trickling down the driveway, and the gentle gurgle of a little stream wending its way down the street on its way back to the river, then to the sea.

last days of holidays are often a quirky admixture of crazed happiness - a sort of last fling - and grumbly moroseness. two worlds, home and work, as distinct as anything you can imagine, suddenly return to compliment and even overlap each other after a time without schedule, without rules, without expectations. it would drive anyone crazy if they really thought about it!

this morning i am reminding myself of my tremendous fortune in having two uninterrupted weeks of time with my family and friends.

speaking of this morning, i was barely out of bed, one slug of coffee coursing through my veins and i was already reading an article on a project that, like so many others, may never come to fruition but which offers a possibility that can't be ignored. like many new technologies, its scale and cost is prohibitive at the moment, but if you read between the lines, you will see or can imagine the possibilities.

so read this first.

and then read this article which is a bit more technical but still meaningful to the lay person.

finally. this article shows some of the front line work being done in this area where the goal is something that may apply to a machine on a small scale.

Sun converts carbon dioxide into fuel by ZDNet's Roland Piquepaille -- We all know that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a major impact on the Earth climate. But now, chemists at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have developed "a device that can capture energy from the sun, convert it to electrical energy and split carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen." As carbon monoxide can easily be converted to liquid fuel, this prototype device kills two birds with one stone: it helps saving fuel while reducing the concentration of a greenhouse gas.

from this limited reading it seems as if the technology is there, but its cost and scale are still a deterrent to any plan to install a similar item on something as relatively small as an exhaust system on a vehicle. but then consider that at one point the computing power sitting on my lap at this very moment would have required a machine the size of this house. also consider that the technology as it exists, with some refinement, could be applied to something on the scale of a coal-fired generating station.

if like me you are interested in something resembling a more immediate - well i was going to say solution but it's not really that - means of managing carbon dioxide, then these two companies will allow you to buy carbon offsets or buy green-friendly products that combat carbon emissions.

carbon neutral.
carbon fund.

i have dealt directly with the carbon fund, buying carbon offsets for a car i travel to work in as a passenger when its too ugly to bike - or i'm simply too wimpy,- as well as for my brother's journey from vancouver and then back. it works.