What Color is your Buckyball?

                                           Can you make those C60 nanotubes in a different color?

What color are your buckyballs?  What color are your fullerene nanotubes?   Can I have some C60 in puce?

I've previously suggested that buckyballs could be used to geoengineer the climate by pumping down CO2 from the atmosphere.  Recent research at Rice University has shown that buckyballs (fullerene C60) combined with amine-rich compounds comprise an environmentally friendly way to capture atmospheric CO2.   I've proposed utilizing this process over Antarctica to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.  Then, as the buckyballs loaded with CO2 rained out over the Antarcic, they would naturally be buried by snow and incorporated into the Antarctic Ice Sheet.   

Of course this idea is just a concept and many obstacles exist in its application.  I can think of two basic problems right off the bat:

(1) Buckyballs are currently expensive.  You can buy buckyballs and nanotubes from a fullerene manufacturer through a chemical supply house, but 100 grams of buckyballs currently costs between $60-100.   This isn't too bad if you are doing small-scale laboratory experiments on C60 fullerene, but the cost would be prohibitive to use fullerenes to pump down thousands and thousands of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.  No way is the idea to use fullerene to geoengineer climate practical if you have to pay $100/gm for tiny allotments of buckyballs.   

To use buckyballs in geoengineering, we either have to get one heck of a bulk discount on buckyballs, or we have to set up dedicated facilities to make tons buckyballs specifically for geoengineering.  There is some hope the price will come way down as according to some folks, its actually pretty darn easy to make buckyballs.

(2)  Another basic problem has to do with the color of the buckyballs.  Thousands of tons of buckyballs loaded with CO2 falling from the sky onto the surface of the Antarctic Ice Sheet would temporarily blanket the ice before being buried by snow.  But, if the buckyballs are dark in color and have a low albedo (i.e. low solar reflectivity) then they will absorb solar energy and perhaps even cause local melting.  This would be a bad thing since the goal of the CO2 Antarctic Pumpdown is to bury everything in snow to store the buckyballs and CO2 in the ice sheet.  

This problem is easily solved by creating buckyballs with high albedos (i.e. high reflectivity).  The buckyballs currently being manufactured are silver to grey in color, looking much like graphite---another carbon compound.  But it shouldn't be too difficult to create buckyballs in different colors, including lighter colors that can efficiently reflect solar energy.   Anyone else want their buckyballs colored in puce?