[Amorymeltzer]

I particularly liked his point about bringing processes with a high electricity demand to those areas and cutting down on cost across the board. He gives aluminum, ammonia, and desalination as examples, which could do a lot for reducing costs of production while still overall "greening" the process. If they can take advantage of the cycling in prices, I can see regions like the American Southwest selling this as a business incentive.

[ThrustVectoring]

The transportation fuels example is even more exciting, IMO. Transportation fuels are basically simple hydrocarbons that burn with oxygen to turn into CO2 and H2O. There's only engineering, capital, and energy costs that need to be overcome - then we can run that process in reverse and turning our current transportation infrastructure carbon-neutral.

[yeureka]

There is a German startup working on this.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3045743/a-german-startup-has-crea...

[afarrell]

> run the process in reverse

Does the fact that CO2 makes up a very small portion of the atmosphere make this hard?

[semi-extrinsic]

One of the big financial problems for CCS (carbon capture and storage) is that CO2 is essentially worthless. If a market would suddenly arise for concentrated CO2, I do not think we would have much of a problem to fill demand.

[swsieber]

So, really, if one wanted to fix CCS, you would just need to find a good application for CO2, like with peanuts and peanut butter.

[dougmany]

I like the idea of making carbon fibers from CO2.

http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/201...

[semi-extrinsic]

Sure, there are many interesting things you can make from CO2. The problem is the sheer amount of CO2 we need to capture and store, which utterly dwarfs the production volumes of basically anything you can think of.

We're talking hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2 that have to be stored over a century of CCS. At high temperatures and pressures, when the CO2 is in a dense (supercritical) state, as in geological storage formations, this corresponds to hundreds of billions of cubic meters.

It's a thousand Hoover dams each year full of dense phase CO2. It's truly mindboggling.

[qbrass]

It would have to be something that favors scrubbing CO2 over generating more of it.

[ThrustVectoring]

As far as my brief research into it goes, it looks like atmospheric CO2 extraction is currently in R&D stages. With current bulk CO2 costs, it could become economically competitive.

So yes, it's difficult to do cheaply.

[beat]

Cities like Buffalo NY exist due to proximity to enough water power to have an aluminum industry. I live in Minneapolis, a city that exists largely because of water power (although it's used little these days). So picking up and moving entire industries is viable.

[fovc]

It's not a novel idea. E.g., Dubai produces a lot of aluminum, since importing ore and exporting Al is cheaper than exporting natural gas.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubal

[ZeroGravitas]

Hydro power and aluminium are a traditional combo too.