Co2 recycling

CO2 is heavier than air, I'd say it's not impossible to imagine a system for collecting it up (or most of it) and recompressing it. Don't know how the economics will work out, but whoever supplies your CO2 now must have to expend energy compressing it themselves.

Any greenhouses nearby?

How about a little horticulture engineering...

Your process spent CO₂ could increase the growth and yield of many types of plants - Normal atmospheric CO₂ concentration is roughly 375 - 380 PPM. Many plants thrive in 4 to 5 times that concentration.

(CO₂ is one of the primary raw ingredients for photosynthesis.)

Do it in a closed room and give workers air breathing equipment. Draw gas from room and recompress it.

hi KC

You can recycle the gas by using fume hoods or glove boxes. The recirculation of the gas and purification plant will be an initial cost but on long run the recovery shall help you.

You have to work out the size of the glove box and circuitry for the same.

gsk

Gsk,

Thanks for your feed back. You wouldn't have any names for the purification plants would you?

KC

Why are you worried about releasing CO2 into the atmosphere? CO2 does for plants what O2 does for us, the more CO2, the more O2... MORE life.

All serious real scientist that are NOT paid off will tell you that global warming is NOT man made, it's just propaganda to allow the government to further TAX you.

The sun has been at peak output in it's cycle and ALL of the planets are warming! The ice caps are melting on Mars. Quit buying into the bull. Man is not causing global warming.

Go Google video The Great Global Warming Swindle and learn the truth.

Release the CO2 into the atmosphere and help the planet create more life.

Hi Guest. Here is an exert from one of our national newspapers here in the UK. The government is hiring a private cinema to show Al Gore's film "Inconvenient Truth" to 500 civil servants in the interest of combating global warming. The government also said that their green policies are working as we the government have raised £29 billion ($50.000.000.000) so far in so-called green taxes. Talk about a skam! Spencer.

Did the poster refer to environmental concerns? I think CR4 users may be getting a little one-track minded! I assumed this to be a commercial enterprise whose concern was process running costs.

You must ask Gordon Brown about that. Spencer.

More CO2, more life???? So stop cutting down trees that keep the balance. Nobody in this country wants a tree within 200 yds of his house any more. What in Gods name does he/she think we breathe???

Gentelman

What is wrong with you???

Somebody had a question about recycling CO2 and you jumped on him about Global warming. Lets wait another sometime and we will see if we are the cause and we do not do anything then we are scred, and if we are not the cause and we do something then we have not lost any thing. May be just push development forward. Some times we just behave like a bunch of rednecks.

Cheers

If you're worried about environmental impact of CO2, why not just chill things with liquid nitrogen? You can have a compressor that pulls it out of the atmosphere, and if it goes back into the atmosphere the net change is zero. Nitrogen in that state is colder then CO2, you could probably get away with using less of it. And because CO2 is already dangerous to touch with bare skin, I'm guessing you already have proceedures/safety standards in place to prevent such things, so any changes in your handeling processes may be minimal. Who knows, going to N2 will probably cool things faster and improve your work line output. And since you're currently paying to have CO2 delivered, the total cost you pay for that encompasses the vendors cost to produce plus thier markup and delivery fees, so compressing your own nitrogen may be cheaper (No markup, no delivery). I can't imagine that any compressor equipment used for nitrogen is substantially more expensive then equipment to compress CO2, which you would need to recycle it anyway. And you'll never be able to recycle 100% of it, meaning you'll still need periodic recharges. With N2, who cares? You're pulling it out of the air anyway!

We are talking of liquid N₂(means, it is available).

We are talking of Solid CO2 to do the actual work- freezing meat.

We are talking of warmed up CO2 GAS.

What are we waiting for?

Just recompess CO2 gas,cool it in water,then throgh liquid N2 and get back Dry Ice!!

CO2 like water and every other naturally occuring molecule is recycled. They don't make the CO2 they pull it out of the air, your just returning it to its natural state.

Without getting into the "global warming" debate which I am sure will follow, one option for using the CO2 is to compress it and make "dry ice", which can be used for meat packaging.

Several of the gas manufacturing/bottling companies sell filters that can be used to isolate the gaseous CO2. Once isolated it can be re-compressed and reused. I applaud your attempt to increase profits and reduce waste at your company. In the long run recycling CO2 will increase profits. In the short run the filters and compressor will be spendy.

There is not much commercial value in the exhausted CO2 gas. The value is in the refrigeration and cooling that you have extracted. Once you have transferred the cooling from the CO2 to the meat, the exhausted CO2 is worthless. The people who supplied the cooled CO2 did not get it from the atmosphere because that is an expensive process due to the very small amount in the atmosphere. They get their CO2 by chemical treatments of carbon ores, and they would not pay you very much if you tried to sell your CO2 back to them.

You can recover your carbon dioxide by exhausting it into a small chamber where you have an inexpensive aquarium pump. Let the pump push compressed CO2 through a plastic tube into an inexpensive aquarium. Fill the aquarium with water and dissolve calcium oxide which is also known as lime or pickling powder. When calcium oxide is dissolved in water it is calcium hydroxide. The CO2 bubbles rising through the calcium hydroxide solution, will create calcium carbonate in the form of a white powder that settles to the bottom of the aquarium. Your CO2 is now trapped in the calcium carbonate powder. Collect the calcium carbonate, press it into brick shapes, and dry it. This entire process is completely safe and environmentally friendly, but it will take a long, long time to collect enough CO2 to be worthwhile.

If the company where you purchased your cooled CO2 does not want to buy the bricks from you at a reasonable price, you can use them for energy credits that you can sell to power companies.

Here the Capex is Aquarium, water, calcium salt, collection of carbonate and making it brick or marbel sculptures.

Opex is also tolerable.

Now, the community's projects and capacity funding based on requirements for carbon foot print recovery.

What do you mean?

I've seen the Dry Ice used in Meat Processing plants and in most cases it is in mobile bins that are routinely moved around in close quarters. This makes efficient collection very difficult. The most likely recovery process would take advantage of the fact that CO2 is heavier than air AND that many of these processing locations have a network of channels below the floor which are used to collect scrap product for "rendering" elsewhere. Perhaps a compressor sunk into these channels could efficiently gather sufficient CO2 to reform into Dry Ice. There would be a potential contamination problem to consider.

In reply to all those Global Warming doubters:

1) Did you ever notice that the direction of many studies in different disciplines predominantly point in the SAME DIRECTION? The trend is obvious. It must be getting increasingly difficult for you to shut your minds to the evidence.

2) Did you ever hear of the Precautionary Principle? Only a fool sails through the shoals when there are safer options.

I don't believe there are many Global Warming doubters in this crowd, just scientists/engineers that are not arrogant enough to believe that the relatively small amounts of CO2 generated by mankind truly impact our planet as much as the natural processes going on around us.

Answer a question if you will:
Would you be willing to "go off half cocked" spending multiplied billions of dollars annually chasing after something that can't even be accurately measured, just because a half-witted politician (who claims to have single-handedly invented the Internet and everything else) comes out with a statement of support for a cause? I hope not. I believe that if the science truly supports that mankind is an important source of GW AND that GW is actually bad for the planet, the doubters will be the first to embrace the cause. Also, these same scientists will in fact be the leaders of the charge. Lets be honest. There are many ways to address the man-made CO2 emissions issues and they can be implemented rather quickly if need be. All it takes is $$$$$; not a lot of research, etc.. If it gets hot enough and massive loss of life occurs you WILL see a lot of changes and new regulations VERY quickly. If it doesn't get hot enough, then the GW controversy was just a CHicken Little game.

How much CO2 (amongst other things) will be produced to supply the electricity to capture the lost CO2????

Will it be worthwhile to do this? I seriously doubt it!!

Perhaps meat packing should be done only inside the arctic/antarctic, then we'd only have o worry about the CO2 generated by shipment. :)