Could Carbon Save The Planet?
By: Will Lockett
Tags: Environment, Climate Change, Science, Technology, Future

Could Carbon Save The Planet?

A new miracle material could turn the tides on global warming.

The world faces a crisis, one propagated by a single element, carbon. Humanity is pumping out record levels of carbon dioxide, methane, plastics and pollutants, all of which use carbon chemistry at their core. These chemicals are heating the planet, destroying our oceans and wrecking the land. But could a revolutionary new use for carbon help us turn the tides on the environmental catastrophe we have created?

We basically have two problems here, our waste polluting the environment and our means of generating energy. Our modern comfortable lives depend on the use of a vast amount of energy and the cheap supply of mass-produced goods. Both of which pump out carbon-based pollutants. So we need a way of reducing the carbon waste in the environment all-the-while keeping our sources of energy high enough to fuel our modern lives.

Recent innovations like electric cars that are actually useful, vast wind farms, solar power stations, recycling and biodegradable products have taken us closer and closer to climate nirvana. But these have two big flaws, the batteries needed to hold the energy are massively damaging to the environment (though an electric car is still better than a petrol one) and none of this actually reduces the carbon already out there in the wide world.

But a new battery technology could change all of that. Imagine if you could recycle plastic or pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into a battery that would outperform anything in use today. This is the future promised by Graphene.

Digram of graphene — Pixabay

Graphene is simply carbon arranged in a flat honeycomb lattice a single atom thick. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? In fact, Graphite is lots of fragmented layers of Graphene on top of each other. So you will have some of this wonder material in your pencil case.

But Graphene has some rather amazing properties that mean it can create a battery revolution. It is a zero-gap semiconductor; this basically means it conducts electricity incredibly well, better than any metal. But it also ‘hangs onto’ the Electrons very well, the Electrons can leave the edge of the sheet and form a circuit, but they find it hard to leave the middle of the sheet.

We can use these properties to enhance our current battery technology (still storing the energy in chemical bonds), but if we could make enough Graphene, we could build supercapacitors out of Graphene (storing energy in pure electromagnetic potential).

A capacitor is just two plates of very electrically conductive material sandwiched either side of a thin insulator. This means you can pass a change between the two plates, one becomes electrically positive, and the other negative as one gets Electron-rich and the other Electron-poor. Once the maximum charge has been built up, you can use it just like a battery.

Normal capacitors are great for dumping small amounts of energy very quickly. The flash on a camera tends to use a capacitor to generate a short bright flash, but it couldn’t power a light for any decent period of time.

Bring in Graphene supercapacitors, just like normal capacitors they can dump all their electrical energy very quickly, but they have a much higher capacity. One of these could power a light for a very long time. Even better they only take a few seconds to charge fully!

So while a Graphene doped Li-ion battery can now be found in the highest performing commercially available batteries, it is these supercapacitors that will bring along a revolution.

Imagine an electric car powered by Graphene supercapacitors. It would be able to charge in a minute or two, power the car for 500 miles or dump all of its energy at once, delivering several thousand horsepower. All while the battery pack weighs less and the batteries don’t degrade over time. How brilliant!

But this quick charging and high power doesn’t just mean insanely good cars. One of the big issues we have with renewable energy is capturing it for later. We have very efficient solar and wind power, but our current range of batteries can’t charge quick enough to make the most of the peak power moments. This means loads of the energy generated actually goes to waste. On the contrast, Graphene supercapacitors would be able to keep up with the charging and power demands that we have become accustomed to.

Using Graphene supercapacitors to store renewable energy means that we can switch to 100% renewables quicker, with less wind farms and solar power plants.

Solar power plant — Pixabay

Oh, and on the subject of solar and wind power. Graphene can be used to make ultra-efficient solar panels and generators. So having wide-spread use will also mean that these power plants can produce even more power!

It is important to remember that Graphene is non-toxic. We could dump thousands of tonnes of it in the ocean and we wouldn’t see many negative effects — certainly not to the scale that our current technology does.

All of the current technology that it could replace (like Li-Ion batteries) require toxic, rare Earth metals. These are killing the environment, are hard to come by and the mines used to extract them have questionable human rights records.

Graphene could be made in a way no other rare Earth metal can be, atmospheric extraction. There is currently too much CO² in the atmosphere and too much plastic in the water. We can extract the carbon from these sources, releasing oxygen from CO² and Hydrogen from plastics (which we could also use as fuel). This would mean that the Graphene produced could be massively carbon negative, reducing the amount of carbon in the environment, turning the tides on climate change and pollution!

So, why don’t we have Graphene powered smartphones or cars yet? If this technology is so amazing shouldn’t we be pushing for it?!

Well, Graphene is a little harder to produce than I have lead on. Our technology to make it right now can produce small flakes of Graphene that can be used to enhance metals, fabrics and sensors at a relatively cheap price. However, making large sheets of graphene, as you would need for superconductors, is not currently possible. After all, this is a single atom thick sheet; we are talking about engineering that is on the molecular scale here.

However, there is no reason to say that these advances are impossible. After all, scientists in 2015 discovered a way to make Graphene for 100 times less and just a few days ago NanoTech got $27.5 million in funding to create Graphene batteries. Jumps in technology like this means that your devices may be powered by pure carbon in the not too distant future.

So, can carbon save the planet? Theoretically yes it can! There is a way in which we can use the carbon compounds that we have polluted the world with to produce technology far more powerful than we currently have whilst reducing the global levels of carbon. We just need to figure out the logistics of getting these atoms in the right order.