Eddy's Good News: Lithium out of waste water and Scientists attempt to convert methane to C02!

Virgin Radio

24 May 2022, 09:18

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Tuesday 24th May 2022

Good news from the USA as more amazing battery boffins invent a new way to get lithium without mining it, they’re pulling it out of waste water!

With the world now so dependent on Lithium batteries, and with mining being the CO2 nightmare it generally is, an invention by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has caught the eye of scientists worldwide as they’ve found an incredibly clever way to pull Lithium out of the water by products of industry, using magnetic nano-particles which cling onto the lithium and other precious metals. I suppose you could call it smart mining and one of the most interesting applications is using the water from geo-thermal electric plants, which will make geo-thermal energy even more attractive. There are loads of industries that use water in their process and pulling lithium from that will make mines completely redundant if this method is scaled up. If we can extract even a small fraction of the lithium from just the power industries that would be more than all the mined lithium production in the world!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

If I told you that global warming scientists were celebrating making a lot of CO2 you’d probably think I was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic but that’s exactly what’s happened -bear with me!

Say hello to the very clever scientists at MIT who’ve been looking at how to convert methane to CO2 using a dirt-cheap process that involves the minerals they use to make cat litter! Now before you say, but CO2 is really bad, why make more of it? Let me remind you than methane is 80 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, so whatever methane we can convert would be a massive win. Put simply, if we were to convert even half of the atmosphere’s methane to carbon dioxide then we’d increase CO2 levels by less than 1 part per million (about 0.2 percent of today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide) but we’d simultaneously save about 16 percent of total radiative warming. It’s such a good idea say the US government that the team have been given a grant of $2 million to develop the idea to make it work on the huge scale we need it to.

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org