CO2 molecule
Greenhouses to negate greenhouse effects?
The New Scientist today says “Carbon dioxide may be bad for the climate, but it’s good for the roses. Perhaps it’s time we rehabilitated this gaseous villain”.
While plenty of commercial greenhouses top up their air with extra CO2, what is unusual about this one is where its CO2 comes from. Until a few years ago, the greenhouse’s operators used to burn natural gas for the sole purpose of generating CO2. Today it is piped from a nearby oil refinery. Each year, 400,000 tonnes of CO2 are captured and then piped to around 500 greenhouses between Rotterdam and The Hague, where it is absorbed by the growing plants before they are shipped for sale around the world .
“It’s time we stopped thinking of CO2 solely as a pollutant and viewed it as a valuable resource,” says Gabriele Centi, a chemist at the University of Messina, Italy.
Cash for carbon
Capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and then pumping it underground is going to be an expensive way to combat climate change. For a coal-fired power plant, for instance, the process is expected to add 30 per cent to the cost of generating electricity. However, a handful of entrepreneurs are already beginning to turn a costly waste product into a valuable commodity.
Wikipedia
Take some flower-growing greenhouses in the Netherlands. There, CO2 emitted from a nearby oil refinery is piped to the plants, boosting their growth (pictured, and see main story). The scheme began in 2005, when Organic Carbon Dioxide for Assimilation of Plants (OCAP), a newly formed gas supplier, began pumping waste CO2from the refinery to the greenhouses along a disused oil pipeline. The refinery sells the CO2 to OCAP at a profit, which then sells the gas to greenhouses at a price lower than what they were paying to burn natural gas to generate CO2. “I think the best way to fight climate change is making money out of it, otherwise our efforts wouldn’t survive in the long term,” says OCAP director Hendrik de Wit.
Tags: carbon dioxide, Electricity generation, greenhouse flowers
The k2p blog 
September 29, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Finally! Something that makes sense comes out of this AGW eco-scare. CO2 is not and never will be a pollutant, and has not and will never cause runaway global warming. I am glad to see that instead of wasting valuable resources like natural gas to produce beneficial CO2, we are now smarter and being better stewards of our planet. Why pump valuable CO2 into the ground when it can be used to our benefit? Kudos to OCAP for utilizing the free market system!
September 29, 2010 at 9:20 pm
I agree. Using flue gas has some merits. Carbon capture and storage from the exhaust gas from a combustion process is a non-starter (though I am sure much money will be spent on this).
Calling CO2 a pollutant is also rather silly. Why not H2O as well- in sufficient quantities it can kill you. And I have seen what happens to someone who fell into a vessel shortly after it had been purged with Nitrogen. N2 is pretty inert but pretty deadly. It was not pretty.
September 29, 2010 at 9:36 pm
AND what is good for the greenhouses is great for the world outside!
CO2 is a trace gas that has never and never will drive the climate. Water vapor is the vastly dominant heat-trapping gas and comprises part of a massive global heat engine that dwarfs and effect, if any, that CO2 MIGHT have. It is clear that a thermodynamic was altered by the IPCC to create the myth of CO2’s heat-trapping ability, but this was dishonest and wrong.
CO2 is one of the big factors that has allowed the world food supply to keep up with the population. The only starving people were where the dictators would not give the people the food sent to them.
NOW the starving people have increased because of stupid biofuels initiatives which have raised the price of grains such that the poor cannot afford them.
Biofuels are evil and need to be stamped out.
September 30, 2010 at 12:04 pm
CH, nothing can ‘trap’ heat. The 2nd law of thermodynamics prevent this. Water, through evaporation and condensation, transfers heat around the atmosphere through latent heat. It will remove excess heat from the surface, by evaporation, and carry this heat aloft to be radiated to space. It can also, by condensing, warm a surface or atmosphere. An insulator does not trap heat it slows heat loss but can never stop heat loss.
I certainly agree about wasting good land to grow for biodiesel a complete waste of food crop land and wasted destruction of rainforest just to grow oil palms, a crime.
September 29, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Has the EPA ever explained how it came to the conclusion that the “greenhouse gas” of concern is CO2 and not water vapor (also a greenhouse gas and 50 times more prevalent) ?
September 30, 2010 at 11:57 am
A farmer in Kent, SE England, has gone one further. He uses a biodigester to rot down all his old tomato plants, producing methane. This is used to heat his greenhouses and the CO2 pumped into the greenhouses promotes growth. He grows 25% of tomatoes for the UK markets
October 7, 2010 at 4:15 pm
It amazes me how many greenies must have utterly failed 10 grade biology, particularly the photosynthesis unit. Remember the “formula”
CO2 + H2O+ >O< = CxHyOz
or carbon dioxide plus water plus sunlight = carbohydrates (plant food)
If you let these greenies do as they wish, the earth's plants have had it and so eventually will the animals.