This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.Air-conditioning and fans account for a full 10 percent of the world's electricity usage.Or put another way, "It's a lot of air you pump around."Roland Dittmeyer, a chemical engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.Another thing that takes a lot of pumping air around, he says?Carbon capture, "because the concentration of the CO2 in air is evidently quite low."Even though it’s enough to cause climate change, it's only 400 parts per million.So, he says, why not retrofit air conditioners with modules that capture carbon?Several companies already make materials that strip carbon dioxide from the air.You'd then need to convert that captured CO2 into hydrocarbons―that's an energy-intensive process.But Dittmeyer's vision is that we'd use clean, carbon-free renewable energy to power that step.Do this on a large enough scale and you produce significant amounts of this synthetic, renewable oil.Dittmeyer and his colleagues calculated thatif you outfitted the AC system of the Fair Tower, a large skyscraper in Frankfurt, with these carbon-capture devices,the building’s units alone could produce an estimated 15,000 barrels of synthetic oil a year.The full write-up, in the journal Nature Communications, is called "Crowd oil, not crude oil."If the idea gets traction, it could transform the devices that cool our homes and offices into machines that help cool the planet―or at least stop warming it up while chilling us down.
这里是科学美国人――60秒科学系列，我是克里斯托弗・因塔格里塔。空调和风扇的用电量在全球用电量的占比足有整整10%。或者换句话说，“这就是你从周围抽取了大量的空气。”德国卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院的化学工程师罗兰・迪特梅尔说到。他说，另外一件需要抽取大量周围空气的事情是什么？答案是碳捕获。“因为空气中的二氧化碳浓度明显很低。”尽管这足以引起气候变化，但其浓度仅有百万分之四百。因此，他说，为什么不用可捕捉碳的模块来改装空调呢？多家公司已经制造出可从空气中吸除二氧化碳的材料。之后你需要将捕获的二氧化碳转化成碳氢化合物――这是个需要消耗大量能源的过程。但迪特梅尔的构想是，我们可以用清洁、无碳的可再生能源来为这一过程供能。如果规模足够大，就能生产出大量这种合成的可再生石油。迪特梅尔和同事进行了计算，如果为法兰克福的大型摩天大楼费尔塔的空调系统配备这些碳捕获设备，仅这座大楼的单元每年就能生产出大约1.5万桶合成石油。完整文章发表在《自然通讯》期刊上，标题是《大众石油，而非原油》。如果这一想法得到支持，那可能会将为我们家庭和办公室降温的设备变成帮助地球降温的机器――或者至少让我们在保持凉爽时不让地球升温。
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