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by xyunknown 3479 days ago
This was debunked years ago. Making plastics from CO2 is possible, but an energy hungry process which does not suck up any relevant amount of carbondioxide from our atmosphere. It isn't going to be the climatesaver they claim it to be. This is not a manufacturing issue, but depends on basic thermodynamics.
2 comments
semi-extrinsic 3479 days ago
It's also an issue of scales. The volumes of CO2 we need to store are absolutely staggering, as in tens or even hundreds of Hoover dams every year.
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worldsayshi 3479 days ago
That's if we don't convert into other materials?
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semi-extrinsic 3479 days ago
That's for supercritical CO2 as it would be transported in pipelines, at a density about 0.6 times that of water.

IIRC we need to store many tens of Gigatonnes of CO2 per year. If you make it into plastic, you can divide by 5 (roughly). Total world plastic production is around 0.3 Gigatonnes

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worldsayshi 3479 days ago
Yeah, barely 10 Gigaton per year if you sum it all up [1]. But it's probably a fraction of that that is eligible for capture.

1 - https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions

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worldsayshi 3479 days ago
It can be feasible if we suddenly end up with an enormous abundance of energy right? Like fusion power levels of abundance.
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adwn 3479 days ago
Why would fusion power result in "enourmous abundance" of usable energy? A fusion power plant would not run on magic, it is an extremely complex, very expensive high-tech system which requires human oversight, maintainance, and fuel.
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jartelt 3479 days ago
Yep - our already built fission plants are starting to go out of business because the power they produce is too expensive. I don't think we should bank on fusion plants being incredibly inexpensive to operate.
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worldsayshi 3479 days ago
Well, yeah, I wasn't too convinced myself.

Perhaps self-replicating solar array in space level of abundance?

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xyunknown 3479 days ago
Sure but then we can just use the energy to suck all the co2 out of the atmosphere and blow it out into solar orbit or something. There are better materials to use for making plastics with infinite energy, although I'm probably not qualified to make that statement.
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