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To be fair, this sort of on-its-face won’t work. It’s just basic high school thermodynamics.
The carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere is increasing precisely because creating that carbon dioxide produced usable energy for us. You can’t un-make that carbon dioxide without spending at least as much energy as you put in (and in fact, substantially more).
So either you’re going to produce even more CO2 than you’re eradicating, or you’re simply pursuing non-fossil-fuel energy sources entirely—which would simply have not produced the CO2 in the first place if you’d just done that from the start.
The only way any of this makes any "sense" is if you get the government to write you a check to perform what ultimately amounts to fake work, in the most fundamental sense. Which probably means that’s exactly what will happen.
Yes, but, hypothetically this could let us burn fuel in ships and planes and land vehicles and then remove the carbon with large facilities that don't burn fossil fuels. Not that a coal burning power plant next to a decarbonization facility makes any thermodynamic sense.
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Isn't it pretty straightforward that it's hard to turn things from diffuse to concentrated? We've done the energy-releasing transformation turning oil into gas, now it's diffuse and a pain to turn back into oil or any other substance?
With cheap fusion I guess you could brute force it and drain the skies. I guess there's some technical level where he might not be totally right but it seems substantively right.
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In theory you're not backing all the way down the entropy graph to create a synthetic fossil fuel, you only want to go as far as some compound where carbon can exist as a solid. But yeah, in practical terms with realistic losses it's obviously not energy positive to burn gasoline to run a generator that pulls the carbon back out of the air.
One potential use is if they could do it at very low capital cost (but high energy cost) would be sucking up all the waste electricity from solar and wind. You could site it anywhere, so putting them at key interchanges where you can exploit transmission bottlenecks for cheap electricity would make them free to run much of the time.
Of course, the actual economic benefit of reducing atmospheric carbon is anywhere between "low" and "negative." And ocean fertilization would do the same thing for free. But when has that ever stopped a subsidy program.
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