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In principle, with extreme heroic effort, we could sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year, but we should be clear on just how extreme “extreme” is. Remember, every single part of the logistical supply chain would need to be scalable a million-fold the same way that the actual sequestration plant would need to be. There are two big practical engineering problems that have to be solved first, that have not been realistically addressed. First, we would need to double global electricity generation to a first approximation. The laws of thermodynamics make this non-negotiable. Very few power generation technologies not based on fossil fuels can scale like that. Nuclear power plants, realistically, and thousands of them in very short order. Second, the chemicals used in industrial sequestration produce hazardous byproducts on a scale similar to the CO2 being sequestered, byproducts like hydrochloric acid. Today, this is easy to handle because we produce truly trivial quantities of the chemicals required for sequestration. Not only is there no industrial capacity to produce the required chemicals, nor an obvious way to scale them, there is also no plan for disposing of the billions of tons of caustic chemicals that would be thrown off as a side-effect of their manufacture. It doesn’t do us any good to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere if we end up turning the planet into a superfund site. Nobody accounts for hazardous byproducts of the proposed technology supply chains, which will be produced on similar scales. As I’ve noted previously, we can reduce this to a much simpler sub-problem that is easy to reason about: what would be required to produce enough potassium hydroxide to sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year? All the required facts and figures are public knowledge and relatively basic science. The amount of electricity required per ton is widely documented, as are the chemical inputs and byproducts. And then, once you’ve realized the extent to which that asymptotically approaches impossible, do the same kinds of calculations on the upstream supply chain for the inputs to that process, which is also public information. It falls apart very, very quickly. |