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.
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