Carbon as a Method to Mitigate Climate Change

According to this article”Carbon Capture and Storage as a Method to Mitigate Climate Change”, climate warming and greenhouse effect have become serious challenges for global environment. Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing us today. It involves many science, economics, society, politics and moral and ethical questions and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will be around for decades and centuries to come.(nasa ,no date). Especially in some special fields, such as power plants, chemical factories, mining plants, the issue of carbon dioxide emission has become the focus of people's attention. Through the analysis of the geochemical cycle of carbon, it can be clearly known that carbon is exchanged and recycled in the natural cycle, including long-term and short-term processes. In order to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions, this article deeply discusses the methods of carbon capture and separation and comprehensive analyze the way of carbon storage. The first is the capture and storage of carbon, which involves different processes including the pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxyfuel combustion(Leung et al., 2014). Pre-combustion capture usually occurs in coal or natural gas, and post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) technology is a relatively mature technology in power plant systems.Oxygen fuel combustion is also used in various power plants. In order to store carbon, the carbon is separated after capture.The main methods are absorption, adsorption and membrane separation. The commonly used solvent for absorption is the monoethanolamine (MEA). Adsorption are usually attached to the surface of adsorbent during Carbon dioxide adsorption process. The last way to separate carbon is to use membrane adsorption with high carbon dioxide permeability and selectivity.

The separated carbon is stored in physical and biological ways. Physical carbon storage methods and technologies usually store carbon dioxide in different geological structures, such as abandoned oil and gas reservoirs, deep-sea storage, and saline aquifers.Photosynthesis plays a key role in the carbon cycle, so afforestation not only stores carbon but also increases its capacity to sequester it. Ocean carbon sequestration is also a Giant container to storage the carbon basing on photosynthesis. At present, there are pilot experiments to test whether this method is effective. Microalgae and cyanobacteria have high carbon sequestration capacity also basing on photosynthesis, both of which cost too much.

In conclusion, each carbon capture and storage method shows promise for climate mitigation, but there are many limitations, such as cost and immature technology and so on. Physical methods are relatively immaturity and play a small role in some industries. Lack of government incentive mechanism, high cost operation. Blue bacteria and algae are also being studied. Carbon sequestrationg are the advantage methods in order to mitigate climate change and reduce greenhouse gases emissions, although the limitations of technology now.

Evaluation

The Purpose for Selecting the Text

I choose this article as my reading journal, I think that the main reason is related to my major and the worrying environment in my hometown. My undergraduate major is environmental engineering, so I want to know more about the relevant knowledge of my major. When I saw the topic, I thought that I will be very interested in this topic. As for the environment of my hometown, I remember when I was a child, my hometown was all green mountains and waters of nature, with beautiful scenery and fresh air. Nowadays, people waste all the natural resources and build a large number of factories, power plants and the environment becomes worse. Every day, we can see the haze and we could no longer see the blue sky and white clouds as a child. So, I think the environment problem is a very serious topic, it is related to people's living environment and global climate warming, I eagerly hope to have a reliable and effective method or technology to mitigate climate problem. That's why I chose this article.

An Indication and Evaluation of the Author’s Position

In this article, the authors are informing a large amount of references and seriously studied various imformation. By comparing the advantages and disadvantages of various carbon capture and storage methods, author have clearly shown the current effective method for mitigating climate change. The article is meant for those who are interesting in global climate change issues and the students who are major in environment and the environmental scientists or professors and some governmental staffs.

The author is a Bachelor of Science, specializing in chemical materials, and has some research in this area. Due to the fact that the article is based on collected studies there are hardly any opinions in it. The authors present a balanced attitude in summary of the physical and biological methods of carbon storage, and respectively compare the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods. This article is very convincing to me, although there are many limitations and technical immaturities in these methods to mitigate climate change, these efforts are all aimed at mitigating global climate change. It is no doult that the carbon capture and storage would be a valid way to mitigate climate change. In my opinion if the government and relevant departments can pay attention to this aspect of research, encourage and invest in some scientific institutions, I believe that there will be greater progress in this regard.

Reference to Additional Research (Optional)

In the report of the UN Strategy Group, the UN's climate panel has published the third part of its long-awaited report- on strategies for mitigation. The organization propose that we should alleviate the problem of climate warming and require us to use new technologies, new energy sources, and change people's behaviors to achieve energy conservation. In the case of new energy, it generally refers to renewable energy, including wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric or nuclear. But there are many limitations to these technologies. However, fossil fuels still account for 80% of all energy. Faced with serious challenges, this article also mentions carbon sequestration capture technology, which can help alleviate some of the pressure. Although CCS theoretically limits the amount of carbon that enters the atmosphere, the amount of carbon dioxide does not decrease, but only in one form. Therefore, renewable energy such as solar energy is the key to solving this challenge.