Car Science: r u havin a giggle m8
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Hey,
I have a grovelling edition apologising for why I haven't sent one for ages and going on a lot about being depressed to send at some point but firstly, not sure anyone needs to read that and secondly, I had a different thing to say.
Useless pretender to being in any way qualified to hold a position more important than the kid so bad at sports they get to blow the whistle in PE Rishi Sunak has announced another thing he's doing. In the UK things like the 30% rate of child poverty might seem like things worth addressing but instead, it's time to put in a ban (something that definitely works to control substances and anti-social behaviour related to them) on kids huffing laughing gas in parks.
I hate seeing those cannisters lying around as much as anyone and there should clearly be a deposit and collection scheme to recycle them. I don't know if huffing N₂O has any long or short term health negatives and I'm not going to pretend I'm in a position to be in any way informed about that but it does create a lot of waste (those tiny silver, bullet-sized cannisters you see congregated on corners where teens hang out) and a lot of that gets into water systems.
So: not lessening the impact that leaving loads of metallic waste around, as well as the carbon consequences of single-use packaging that doesn't get recycled but the amount of nitrous oxide being consumed by British teenagers for small town boredom offset is actually, by volume, pretty low.
Especially compared to the amount being produced by the nylon industry. That probably makes you think of tights but actually nylon covers a vast number of applications, especially in engines because polyamide 6/6 is extremely resistant to hydrocarbons and heat.
And that's not the only place nylon appears in cars; polyamides are used for air intake manifolds, glass-reinforced plastics, airbag systems, rocker valve and engine covers... Nylon is lighter and much easier to mould and extrude than metal, lighter and unsurprisingly has found a lot of uses in making cars.
The automotive industry uses so much nylon that the beating car manufacturing took during 2020 and 2021, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, slowed down the whole global nylon market. 95% of nylon made is 6 and 6/6, so this isn't talking about obscure forms.
What's that got to do with anything? Well, there are two big sources for the production of nitrous oxide, which is an incredibly potent greenhouse that lasts in the atmosphere 200 times longer than carbon dioxide. The first is nitric acid to make nitrogen-based fertilisers for farming, which it's slightly hard to argue against because of the potentially catastrophic food loss with no currently obvious alternative.
The other is adipic acid, which is used to make nylon, accounting for 10% of global nitrous oxide emissions. And the good news is it is easy and affordable to use existing methods that abate nitrous oxide emissions from that process.
In fact the same week Rishi Sunak's been vowing to prevent teenagers with no economic future having a fucking giggle there's been research published by the University of Maryland centre for environmental sciences that points out we could easily and effectively legislate to prevent that 10% of nitrous oxide making it into the air, which is a meaningful improvement.
In the straight-to-the-point paper "Urgent abatement of industrial sources of nitrous oxide" the authors point out that there are existing ways to, cheaply and without exhaustive processes, prevent nitrous oxide being released in the process of creating adipic acid. And that legislative approaches work on this. If you force automakers to remove nitrous oxide emissions from their supply chain then they surprisingly quickly can.
Abatement technology isn't complicated and doesn't demand lots of power or resource. Slurry in the flue or selective catalytic reduction are effective, cost-efficient methods to not belch harmful gases out and while lying about NOx emissions is a full-time hobby for the automotive industry, this one is relatively easy to fix.
Even if that wasn't an easy solution to nitrous oxide emissions from nylon then the good news is it's possible to make adipic acid without digging up gross fossil fuels, fucking with 'em and making even worse things.
Yes, to return to the perpetual topic on a carbon-based planet of rearranging hydrocarbons we can just get those hydrocarbons out of pretty much anything. In this case, lignin. Which is a catch-all term for a whole bunch of biological stuff in an irritating way (industrial runoff from paper making, for instance) but in this case refers to its original meaning of Stuff Inside Of All Plants that's a natural polymer and basically holds them together.
Getting a load of old plants, getting the lignin out and then using an electrosynthesis process to transform it to adipic acid is a viable-looking alternative to fossil fuel-derived cyclohexanol.
I know I moan a lot about the efficiencies of electrolysis in eg: cracking hydrogen from water but as a process this looks a lot better. Getting a 68% yield of cyclohexanol (one of the building blocks for adipic acid) from phenol at a 69% coulombic efficiency (nice) is numbers good enough to be persuasive.
(coulombic efficiency is how fast the charge is moving into a thing)
So that's a promising note to end this on. Not only could we slash nitrous oxide emissions worldwide by 10% but there's better ways to make a thermoplastic that, bluntly, we are quite dependent on to do a lot of stuff.
Meanwhile people with legislative powers are having a laugh. But at least you know, now.
Hazel
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