Absorption - Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration - page 206

most beautiful chemistry. The accountant on your team wants the one
with the lowest price. Who is right? And, more importantly, how do you
reconcile these two points of view?
From a research standpoint, it's natural that we want to look for
beautiful chemistry. Only beautiful chemistry gets published in Science or
Nature , right? However, from an accountant's point of view, new chem-
istry and new solvents are suspicious; the chemicals look expensive, and
might require new technology to implement. Therein lies the problem: if
we use cost as a guiding criterion for research, we may never do anything
new. If we use scientifi c “coolness,” we may not ever be able to imple-
ment the novel technology in the real world.
There's no doubt that costs are a big part of this challenge, but
they're far from the only factor. One also has to consider issues of safety,
environmental impact, effi ciency, sustainability, and scale. The scale we
must work with is enormous. If the entire world were to function like
CostCo, one would expect that the axiom “the larger the scale, the lower
the price” would hold true, almost by defi nition. However, if the scale is
very large, one might reach the limits of global supplies. This will cause
the price to rise. For example, a chemist may discover exciting chemistry
about a promising solvent based on tellurium, but as this is a very rare
metal, the potential large-scale employment of such a material is
extremely limited. This important factor of the scale and scalability of the
chemistry distinguishes energy-related research from other fi elds of sci-
ence. One of the aims of this topic is to create an awareness of the
importance of scale, in particular as much of the exciting new chemistry
starts at the nano scale. Eventually, our new materials will need to pro-
cess gigatonnes of carbon.
Section 6
Energy of absorption
As discussed earlier in this chapter, it is incumbent upon researchers to
provide rational estimates for costs associated with the deployment of