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by ThrustVectoring 3695 days ago
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.
2 comments
yeureka 3695 days ago
There is a German startup working on this.

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

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afarrell 3695 days ago
> run the process in reverse

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

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semi-extrinsic 3695 days ago
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.
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swsieber 3695 days ago
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.
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dougmany 3695 days ago
I like the idea of making carbon fibers from CO2.

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

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semi-extrinsic 3695 days ago
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.

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qbrass 3695 days ago
It would have to be something that favors scrubbing CO2 over generating more of it.
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ThrustVectoring 3695 days ago
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.

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