Climate Change: My Challenge to the Engineering Industry

[Chris Bennett]

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Warning: Off Topic Thread!
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CLIMATE CHANGE: AN ENGINEERED SOLUTION.

Construction Site: Potentially, any area of land 100 metres x 100m

Project Brief: To install two and a half thousand sustainably constructed units, each engineered to provide:

· Neutralisation of greenhouse gases

· Carbon capture

· Diversion of flood water

· Improvements to air quality

· Atmospheric cooling

Each UK manufactured unit shall be entirely solar powered, with a huge array of micro-solar panels able to automatically align themselves to the optimum angle to capture any available solar energy.

The solar panels must also have a function of absorbing harmful greenhouse gases, breaking them down into their constituent parts. These are scrubbed of their damaging constituents and the useful parts are converted into raw materials used for the self-expansion of the unit. Each unit must be capable of removing a minimum of 0.5 tonnes of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere during its service life.

The structure must be designed to intercept rainfall, dispersing it and slowing its passage to flood zones. It must also be installed with a system which extracts water from the soil, further reducing the impacts of flooding. It shall combine this with naturally produced chemicals freely available on-site to produce a non-polluting fuel. A powerful pump must charge the unit with the fuel which is used to silently and efficiently power the entire system.

Exhaust emissions must take the form of an atmospheric coolant and pure oxygen which can be used to sustain all forms of life.

Structures must be capable of reaching up to 35 metres in height. The support system or foundations for each unit (including piling if that option is selected) may not be more than 1.5 metres in depth. Excavations during construction phase shall be no deeper than 300mm.

Budget: Capital expenditure - £2 per unit

Revenue Expenditure - £2 per unit total for the first five years after installation. Maximum £1 per unit total for the remainder of full service life.

Service life: Units must have a maximum useful service life of over 200 years.

Decommissioning: At the end of its service life, each unit is used in the production of raw materials which may be used in the construction of other engineering projects, ensuring prolonged storage of the captured carbon, potentially for hundreds more years. The waste can be utilised in the production of sustainable energy.

Replacement: Before each unit is decommissioned, it must be capable of cloning itself with replacement units at no extra cost.

 

[Chris Bennett]

If engineers could design and build such a system, we would be building them everywhere.

So, why is it that at the beginning of my career, still wet behind the ears in my first job out of college, I was responsible for the planning and management of the planting of just under a quarter of a million trees and this year, thirty years later, during a time when the world needs trees more than ever, I managed less than two thousand?

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Good luck with that! Sounds a good concept to me.

Remember "Plant a Tree in '73" ? We school kids all planted a tree each, all over the UK. The school grounds that we planted them in is now houses, with not a tree in sight.

 

[Pete Askew]

Chris, I share your frustration. I guess the current rate of loss way exceeds the rate of new planting at the moment on a global basis, and even increasing the rate of planting probably suffers a decade long lag before 'carbon capture' catches up. Utter madness.

 

[Dave Farnes]

I fear you are correct Pete. New forests are being planted, but the rate of destruction must be far greater. Insanity.