There is a letter in the NY Times today that is signed by someone claiming to be a professor of materials chemistry at MIT; otherwise I would dismiss it out of hand. He says that we should be working on a process that “enables the burning of coal so as to emit no carbon dioxide.” Is there way this makes sense? And if it does, why doesn’t this professor of materials chemistry work on it?
The key word here may be “emit”. He may have been referring to Carbon Capture and Storage systems, which capture CO[sub]2[/sub] produced by large sources (e.g. coal power plants) and sequester it rather than emitting it into the atmosphere.
Meh. Plenty of kooks out there with all kinds of fancy labels, although Don Sadoway is the real deal, if a bit past his prime IMO.
The actual quote is:
As mentioned, CCS is an option. Not sure if that’s what he’s getting at though, because it’s not exactly a new process.
I am not claiming to be a professor at MIT. I am. Who are you to say otherwise.
The technology to destroy CO2 before it enters the atmosphere is possible. How can you judge it to be fantasy?
And then one other critic (a legless man who comments on how well others run) has declared that I am past my prime? Really?
This is a site for mediocrities.
Time to fold.
Straight Dope? More appropriately, Dope.
Then you are rightly claiming to be. And that title gives you enough credibility for this thread to have been created by someone curious enough to find out more.
Your letter is a bit light on detail. Please enlighten us on what already exists and what you expect as future developments.
Ah, so those of us who might be interested in knowing more about this are locked out because you’re so easily offended? We’re talking about saving the planet, here.
The SDMB is, despite appearances, one of the more civilised forums out there. Elsewhere, folks would be contesting the notion that CO2 has an influence on climate, or that humans have anything to do with it.
Don’t you think that you have something better to do with your time than ego surf, Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT? Then join a forum just to bitch at people barely mentioning you, Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT? This could backfire so bad for you, Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT. Aren’t you familiar with the Streisand effect, Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT? The Straight Dope gets high Google ranks for pretty much any search term you plug in, it would be unfortunate if someone googling for Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT one of their first hits was someone saying something like “Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT likes to be choked during sex by El Salvadorian midget crossdressers” Or “Doctor Don Sadoway of MIT once killed a rare black-foot ferret so that he could make a fur cozy for his crack pipe.”
Forgive my ignorance, but are fur cozies for crack pipes really a thing, cause I’ve never heard of them, but they do sound cute.
If the man wants cozies, I say let him have them. Life must be dull after the stroke and not being able to take grad students any more.
Was that really the professor coming onto the board and insulting people? If so, that was pretty cool 
To be completely fair, on this board you’re dsadoway. It’s a fancy handle but that’s about it.
Let’s work on the assumption that you actually are the writer of the letter.
So what are you suggesting? Carbon Capture seems the most obvious, but you’ve written about molten oxide electrolysis minimizing CO[sub]2[/sub] production in the steel making process. So what is the “deployment of technology that in real time renders benign the greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels”?
Why didn’t you choose to dispel ignorance by posting something of substance, rather than an angry, misdirected rant?
What is this technology that destroys CO2 and how does it work? What are the energy requirements to run it, and are they lesser than the energy derived from whatever process produced the CO2 as a waste product?
The good professor, who hopefully isn’t the one posting huffily to this thread, is on the right track with the optimistic strategy presented:
Where he goes wrong is suggesting this should be some form of carbon capture. It’s obvious that the bold, imaginative thinking should be in the form of super-efficient solar cells and super-batteries. Never mind that people are and have been working on all of the above for decades, and the pursuit of all of them is perfectly compatible with a cap and trade policy on the remaining carbon use.
And since I got lost in some heavy sarcasm there, my point in clear text: It’s a silly complaint against cap and trade, based on a presumption that a heavily researched field has a miracle solution hiding around the corner.
Meh, I’ve been insulted by Ph.Ds from Caltech and UC Berkeley. This was weak sauce in comparison. I expect something stronger from Boston. “My boy’s wicked smaht.”
As for carbon capture from fossil fuel emissions, it can be done but with a substantial energy cost; for coal, which has a very carbon-rich exhaust, the penalties are on the order of 30% or more (no commercial carbon capture system has yet been deployed so the actual operating costs and issues are still somewhat speculative). Given the increasing costs of coal versus large reserves of cleaner burning natural gas, it makes little sense to focus on carbon sequestration of coal except in the case of developing countries with no significant natural gas reserves, and even then it is probably more economical to subsidize the use of natural gas or low emission renewable sources such as solar and wind rather than to invest in complex and maintenance intensive capture systems.
Petrocarbon and synthetic hydrocarbon fuels will remain in our portfolio of fuels for smaller portable and mobile applications for the foreseeable future, and pursuing carbon capture and point-of-use sequestration technologies makes sense as an interim step to eventual low carbon and carbon-neutral technologies such as high efficiency renewables, low carbon synthetic hydrocarbons like methanol and dimethyl ether, fourth generation nuclear fission, and hopefully at some point, nuclear fusion and glucose-based fuel cycles, but coal-fired plants–requiring a fuel that has to be extracted from deep seams by either hazardous longwall mining or highly destructive open cut mining–are a 19th century technology that needs to go the way of peat fuel, horse-drawn carriages, and silk top hats.
Stranger
True, quality of the insult wasn’t that high. But just seeing an article quoted and then the author of the article joining the board just to throw insults around is pretty neat.
Heh, it’s a slow work day. 
What exactly is the point of laboriously digging up coal, burning it, and then using some energy intensive method of splitting apart the CO2 produced? Wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient to just skip steps 1 through 3?
I believe the point is to use coal, which for some, is an end onto itself. Particularly if a talking squirrel tells you that you should.
A sensible energy policy which considers the cost of controlling emissions will look for the most cost and energy efficient ways to reduce the innate carbon footprint in a practical, scaleable manner, which means transitioning to accessible hydrocarbon fuels that release less CO[SUB]2[/SUB] per unit of energy produced and utilizing readily deployable renewable sources as a supplementary source of energy while ultimately investing in the development and deployment of innately low carbon and carbon neutral sources of energy. Trying to make coal a “clean” carbon neutral energy source is like hiring children to follow a horse to clean up road apples instead of riding a bicycle.
Stranger
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No warning issued, but please tone it down.
ITD IMHO moderator
The other “miracle solution” that allows us to just keep burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow is the fantasy of geoengineering: “we’ll just spritz some crap into the atmosphere on a global scale and that will cool things off, or else we’ll put some giant beach umbrellas in orbit around the earth.” 
There’s a lot of that going around (using and even ramping up the use of coal as an end in itself, not necessarily the talking squirrels). Partly because of how much coal miners love their jobs. I once looked up the health statistics of one of these coal regions where they mine a lot of coal and also burn a lot of it in local power plants, and, obviously, vote for coal-favoring politicians. Short version: they’re dropping dead like flies, mostly from lung and cardiopulmonary diseases.
When I said “claimed to be a professor at MIT”, I was merely saying that I didn’t know it for a fact, but I was also not saying he wasn’t, so I stick by my wording. He could have elaborated on what he meant since, unlike a newspaper letters section, there is no real space limitation. If what he meant was sequestration, that is not new, although I don’t think it has been deployed on any scale. So I would still like to know what he had in mind, but I am beginning to think there was nothing there.
What I imagined was some kind of partial combustion that produced some energy but produced an end product that wasn’t just CO2, but something non-gaseous. And I seriously wondered if that was even conceivable. But I guess the MIT professor’s nose is too far out of joint to give a serious answer. And he never answered my second question: why isn’t he working on such a process since it would seem seriously to be in his bailiwick.