A reader recently wanted to know why people make money when owning companies that don’t ever make a product. Some companies are scams, that’s how. Look at this post from Twitter/X:
Believing that a 3D printed filter can eliminate 74% of the CO2 emitted by a car’s tailpipe is ridiculous. The chemistry alone is impossible. Plants don’t just convert CO2 to O2. They are doing so because they need the carbon atoms to make other things, but discard the unnecessary oxygen. The carbon gets turned into other things: cellulose, fructose, proteins, and all of the other things the plant needs. In other words, the plant gains in mass by taking in this CO2. The formula is one that is known and taught in high school biology courses.
CO₂ + H₂O + light → biomass (carbohydrates) + O₂
What makes this impossible is the numbers involved. Burning gasoline produces about 8.9 kg CO₂ per gallon. So at 30 mpg, that’s about 0.30 kg CO₂ per mile. To reduce CO₂ by 74%, you’d need to remove roughly 0.22 kg CO₂ per mile. At 60 mph = 1 mile/min → you’d need to remove ~220 grams of CO₂ every minute. That doesn’t seem to be too bad, on its surface. So why is this impossible?
At a conservative microalgae fixation rate of 4 g/L/day, you’d need ~106,600 L of culture. At 1 g/L density, that’s ~107 kg dry algae. That’s not all- that dry algae would need a water bath in order to function. Once the water is added, that amount of algae would have a mass of 107,000 kg- more than 100 tons. Fit in a plastic tailpipe adaptor. Obviously not possible in any practical sense. It’s like discovering your dog eats dog poop, so there’ll be no more dog poop if you just get your dog to eat its own poop.
So these kids are not the first ones to run a scam like this. There is the company website at https://www.gogreenfilter.com/ and they have corporate sponsors, including T-Mobile. They are marketing and selling these things.
Back in 2018, there was a post I did about a Canadian company claiming to be able to make gasoline from CO2. This is what I said then:
This company is hoping that those watching don’t understand the First Law of Thermodynamics. Carbon dioxide is NOT energy. Taking CO2 and converting it into hydrocarbon fuel USES energy. Thanks to inefficiencies in ALL chemical reactions (First Law of Thermodynamics) it takes more energy to create the fuel than the fuel itself contains.
I thought it was a joke, it was so stupid. I thought — it’s junk science, junk commerce, nothing makes sense about it. But look how pretty it is.
About a dozen years ago, there was another college concept where women could paint on a drug detecting nail polish that would change colors when exposed to date rape drugs. A woman could simply stir her drink with a fingertip and make sure the polish didn’t change colors. For numerous reasons this is impossible, but there are sill tons of people out there who are wanting to buy this stuff. I could swear I did a post on this years ago, but I can’t seem to find it. They were collecting funding to get the company off the ground. In other words, scamming investors.
The point is that there are tons of scams out there, and people will happily hand over their cash without bothering to check the claims of the person making them.
If you make a product while making claims about its performance, but you don’t test to make sure the product works as you claim, that is fraud or a scam. If I tell you that I have a machine that creates gold out of lead, then sell them for $10,000 each, but I never test to see if it actually works, that’s a scam. If I collect investor cash to develop this product, it’s a scam.
On the other hand, if I convince a company to fund my development of an idea for a product, or develop some technology with possible future value, that’s R&D. Sometimes R&D leads nowhere, and that is why companies have an R&D budget. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it leads to a dead end.
It’s a line to be drawn- if I tell you up front that this is research of concept, it isn’t fraud. If I tell you that I have a working prototype that I want to bring to market and I don’t, that’s a scam.
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