[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.