Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Solvay Environmental Fix

I just found out that with unlimited energy, it would take me only two chemical processes to end global warming forever.

  1. Haber-Bosch Process
  2. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch's chemical process revolutionized modern agriculture by making endless amounts of Ammonia, thus taking away the limitation that agriculture used to have of the supply of Nitrogen in the soil, formerly limited to various animal poops, and maybe possibly composts. This has vastly increased the carrying capacity of the earth, and one fifth of the food on your pantry's shelves is directly due to this.

    Most industrial versions use natural gas for the hydrogen, but I'll be taken Haber's original, less polluting version (since I'm using unlimited energy as a conceit), electrically split water.

  3. Solvay Process
  4. The Solvay process makes baking soda. If you're not from the US, the baking soda in your local grocery store was made this way. It uses Ammonia to split up salt water, then absorbs CO2, resulting in Ammonium chloride and baking soda. Most commercial uses of this process then reclaim the Ammonia, because it is more expensive, and because Calcium chloride draws less attention when you throw it out, because it doesn't smell like solidified pee. I'll be using Hou Debang's variation on the process, which doesn't bother with the Calcium step.

With these two processes combined, I can solidify air, and both of these processes are automated, so once set up, they would continue to run no matter what I was doing. To truly end global warming, I'd have to send the baking soda off world, and I can use part of the components to do this.

An old recipe for "Heavy duty" batteries was to put a carbon rod between two plates of Zinc, and fill the difference between them with Ammonium Chloride. Each individual cell is fairly weak, but you can chain them together until you can produce huge amounts of power. Getting several pounds of Zinc, I produce enough batteries to power a railgun, and rocket the baking soda off to Mars, or some other place in need of Carbon.

And should I need to recover the carbon, I will get the cheapest plonk that I can get a hold of, bubble it for 3 months, and then pour that vinegar onto the baking soda. Presto.

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