thunderf00t's Contribution to Climate Change
The scientist and youtuber Philip E. Mason also - or probably better - known as thunderf00t has been busting “exciting” and “new” ideas about energy for years now. If you haven’t seen his criticisms of gravitational energy storage, solar roadways, the hyperloop, rotational space launchers, solid hydrogen storage, carbon-dioxide capture or lithium batteries, you should probably do so. It won’t necessarily make you change your mind or boost your hopes about how close we are to solving climate change, but I bet you will come back out of the other end seeing more clearly.
Recently (ok, 5 months ago, but I am busy), he has proposed a contribution to the question of combating climate change, which is producing a lot of smoke. Literally.
The idea uses some chemical processes that have been used on industrial scale. The first step is to split sodium-chloride, preferably by electrolysis. The electricity could come from any carbon-free energy source: solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, nuclear. Mason has made some genuine scientific progress in the study of water-alkali metal interactions, which has been, at least partially funded by youtube and patreon sponsors. During the study of the sodium-water interactions, he observed that the reaction forms a dense, white smoke, which has a high settling time, indicating that the particle size is really tiny. In other words, it forms a rather persistent cloud.
Sodium is a rather dense store of energy. It can be burnt either with oxygen and water or with methane. The first route will leave sodium hydroxide. Sodium used in that way has an energy density of ~13MJ/kg or roughly 30% of gasoline. It can also be burnt as “hybrid fuel”, where you burn methane or another hydrocarbon with sodium. This is a quite clever setup, because water is a waste product of burning methane, but necessary for burning sodium. Given that oxygen can generally be acquired from the air for free, this increases the energy density of the fuel considerably, brining the mixture to about 30 MJ/kg. Interestingly, this reaction produces solid sodium carbonate (Na2CO3). There is no CO2 being released from this reaction into the atmosphere.
Most of us would see a plume of caustic, persistent smoke as a negative. It’s literally a cloud of the stuff that makes drain cleaners work! But Mason sees it as an opportunity. Not for everyday use in cars or in home heating systems, of course, but for a really hard to decarbonize sector: ship transport across oceans.
These ships are using highly specialized engines to burn “bunker fuel”, basically the residue of regular fuel production. It is so thick that it has to be heated before you can pump it. Mason’s idea is that these ships, which have a highly specialized fuel supply and engine systems anyway, could be built to use a fossil-sodium-hybrid fuel, while they are on the ocean and far away from civilization. The persistent smoke produced by burning this hybrid fuel would linger in the air and form seeds for water condensation: these ships would create clouds. Bright white clouds. These reflect solar radiation. Converting ships to this hybrid fuel, would be a tool of geoengineering. Or rather a tool of intentional geoengineering as compared to our unintended geoengineering, which would be an apt description climate change.
Additionally, once the sodium carbonate has rained down on the ocean, it will increase the pH value of the water, countering, albeit of course to a small degree, the acidification of the ocean. The sodium and carbon will probably find their way into some form of chalk at the ocean ground. Another possible application could be the powering of planes, making the conspiracy theory around “chem trails” somewhat real. This should be testable on a small and reversible scale. Exactly the kind of activity researchers and economists would favor.
I think that carrying around a literal boatload of sodium near water is not free of risks. But the probabilistic risk assessment should of course be done by people with far more knowledge in the area. Sodium is of course awfully expensive at the moment, because it reflects the cost of electricity for the electrolysis of salt and there is no big market for it at the moment. I pretty sure that an industrial build out of this will reduce the costs, but I have no idea, if the reduction will be big enough to make this route viable.
The efficacy and cost of increasing the earth’s albedo has of course to be compared to alternatives; how about nuclear-powered roboships with huge high-pressure pumps that spray around a fine mist? Is that more cost-efficient than creating the sodium carbonate smoke? The amount of CO2 that is removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering the atmosphere has probably a really small effected on the world’s energy radiative equilibrium compared to the effect of the increased albedo. So maybe such roboships could offer more benefit per buck?
Let’s assume that we went ahead and created vast quantities of sodium. What would happen to all the chlorine? Could we make plastic? Polyvinyl Chloride is the world’s third-most widely produced synthetic polymer (C2H3Cl). Getting the acetylene, ethane or ethylene from CO2 captured from atmosphere or out of the ocean is of course a different challenge. Maybe, just maybe, some of the work that has been done on lignocellulosic biomass conversion could create enough “bio-ethelene” at low enough costs to make sense? Anyhow, getting ANY carbon out of the atmosphere is a very difficult question. Could the stuff of vinyl records be the carbon storage of the future? I think it’s unlikely and there will probably be smarter uses for cheap chlorine.
The quest for solving climate change is vast and there is probably no silver bullet. Mason’s idea could help a little bit; hopefully it is cost-effective compared to the costs of building the infrastructure for electrolysis, the engines, the fueling infrastructure, the sodium-handling and fire-extinguishing systems and the chloride sink.
I wish him luck in doing some of the groundwork for this idea. It might change the world for the better. Just like all good science. Update: Here are a few first, tiny steps towards it.