That’s true about flying.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think they use gasoline, diesel, or other long-chain hydrocarbons (which this process makes) to make either concrete or steel, except for the usual transportation uses. They still use coal for steel although some is made in electric furnaces. Concrete requires lime, which is made by roasting limestone, but I’m fairly sure they burn natural gas for that.
If the process truly can make petrol out of thin air and if they can commercialise this, it will make them trillions. Hydrocarbon fuels will, as the article states, become carbon-neutral. Imagine a never-ending supply of petrol.
I’ve posted a number of times wishing for this technology. Now it seems to be here. Yay!
The devil, of course, is in the detail, and I await commercialisation eagerly. The big problem will be the energy input. Will we see huge solar farms in Spain and Arizona? You know, if both were on the same site, these power plants could in fact be artificial plant plants! 
That’s actually a good and valid point that I have to concede. One might quibble that although CO2 dissolved in water is often called “carbonic acid”, carbonic acid is actually a compound (H2CO3) distinct from CO2 in solution, as are its ions, and this really does allow the ocean to hold much more CO2 than it otherwise could. But you’re quite right insofar as the H2CO3 and the ions exist in chemical equilibrium with the dissolved CO2 and the equilibrium concentrations of all of them are in theory directly proportional to the partial pressure of the atmospheric CO2 above. So I withdraw that part of my objection.
However, the matter of ocean mixing, vertical and horizontal circulation, different temperatures, etc. cannot be underestimated. Ocean CO2 uptake is extremely non-linear, so the effects of taking it out of the ocean are highly unpredictable:
Surface CO2 observations have revealed large decadal variability in the oceanic CO2 sink, with a substantial increase in ocean carbon uptake over the last decade. However, attributing this variability to specific mechanisms remains a challenge. This is because multiple factors influence ocean CO2 uptake rates, including sea surface temperature (SST) and chemistry, biological CO2 utilization, and ocean circulation patterns. Measured sea surface CO2 concentrations integrate all these factors, making it difficult to disentangle the influence of each on the changing oceanic CO2 sink.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21068
Yet another OP that links to a magazine summary instead of the actual journal article in question. Which isn’t even paywalled. Look, everyone, the actual journal article is just about concentrating CO2 from a 400 ppm input to a dry 15 MPa output. No new fuel production.
No. You even quoted the part of the Atlantic article. Pay $2.xx to capture the CO2 released by burning a gallon of gasoline.
Or pay $2.xx plus electrolysis plus reduction costs to make a gallon of fuel. Which is not the price they’re quoting.
Some of y’all are hung up on ocean
/atmosphere equilibrium. That’s the asymptote. Which we aren’t close to. CO2 exchanges relatively quickly between air and water but it diffuses slowly (on oceanic scale) and ocean mixing is slow.
A realistic initiative that would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in conjunction with a PROGRAM of CLEAN, RENEWABLE ENERGY would be great. Spending a ton of money to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere and then turning around and putting it right back into the atmosphere doesn’t accomplish very much other than to encourage us to maintain the bad energy habits that we already have.
This reminds me of the “fix it” mentality many Americans have towards their health. Give me a pill that can magically make me lose weight, this way I can keep eating the fatty, shitty stuff that made me fat in the first place.
The journal article mentions the fuel production option right at the start, the other option being carbon sequestration:
An industrial process for large-scale capture of atmospheric CO2 (DAC) serves two roles. First, as a source of CO2 for making carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels, …
It also describes the fuel-production variant that Carbon Engineering is working on:
Finally, variant “D” is optimized to provide CO2 for fuel synthesis. CE is developing air-to-fuel systems in which the hydrogen required as feedstock for the fuel synthesis step is produced by electrolysis.
As it turns out, Carbon Engineering is already doing it, albeit on a limited basis:
“This isn’t a PowerPoint presentation,” said Steve Oldham of Carbon Engineering. “It’s real.”
…
Carbon Engineering’s plant in Squamish, B.C., currently pulls about one tonne of carbon a day from the air and produces about two barrels of fuel. Since its components are off the rack, it should be easy to scale up, Oldham said.
CO2 production is a direct result of the chemical process of cement curing. Similarly, any steel made from raw iron oxide results in CO2 being produced as a part of the refining process. See here for more details.
This is not a solution to anything, and it isn’t even a part of a solution. What it is, is something that could improve some other solution (or partial solution) and make it even better. We still need the other solutions.
If we turn this machine on, it’s consuming power from the grid that wasn’t being consumed before, which means we need to add that much generation to the grid. If that new generation would be from fossil fuels, which it almost certainly would be, then the absolute best results you could get from this machine would be to just turn it off.
I see two scenarios where this could be useful: The first is where we’ve already managed to convert our entire electrical generation to clean sources, but we still need portable energy sources for things like vehicles (it’s tough to beat the energy density and safety of liquid hydrocarbons). In this case, we could use some of that green electricity to make fuel for the airplanes and so on.
The second scenario is if this process can be rapidly flexible in when it uses power (I don’t know whether that’s the case). In this case, it could be attached to a grid that includes a significant fraction of green-but-unreliable sources like wind and solar, and then only run when the green sources are on.
Hydrocarbons have a number of attractive properties. They’re still at least 2 orders of magnitude denser than batteries, they’re much easier to store, they don’t lose energy the further you transport them and they can be stockpiled strategically.
If this technology does become viable, we could, for example, have vast solar arrays in the Sahara Desert that pump liquid hydrocarbons via pipeline to Europe for fuel/electricity, or installations in the Mojave desert that could power the Eastern Seaboard.
Or, if it is flexible, it can be used in places where there are already baseline fossil fuel plants that are not flexible, and for some reason batteries and pumped storage are not feasible. For instance, in Florida, I assume pumped storage would not be workable due to the lack of elevation, so if this facility would be more feasible than a battery array, I’d think it would work.
That is not what the research is about. They are not publishing an innovation in chemical or electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to hydrocarbons. Or sequestration. The actual innovation they published is the concentration of carbon dioxide from 400 ppm and outputting a dry, 15 MPa stream.
While burning a bunch of natural gas along the way.
Liquid hydrocarbon fuels are pretty awesome. They are more energy dense in terms of volume and weight than pretty much anything else that has their ease of storage, transfer, and transport.
They play with electric jets from time to time, but I don’t know if that market will ever be viable, especially not for long haul routes. Heavy towing like semis, and even trains could use the energy density to get a practical millage per fill-up.
Passenger cars will probably all be electric at some point down the road, but much of our infrastructure will run better on hydrocarbons, rather than batteries or hydrogen.
We also already have quite a bit invested in the infrastructure of transporting and selling and dispensing liquid fuels that would need very little modification to transition to a “green” fuel, rather than what is needed to transition to electric or hydrogen based fuel.
Nuclear could be a big part of that as well. There will be more energy put into this fuel than is extracted, probably by a pretty decent margin. However, if the fuel is made using non-CO[sub]2[/sub] sources, it does come out ahead on that front.
As it is, there was far more energy put into the gasoline that we are currently using than we extract in useful form, but that energy was put in millions of years ago by natural processes that didn’t cost us anything, so we tend to ignore that part, and only look at the cost of extraction.
OTOH, having a technology of just add air, water, and electricity may encourage more development in non-CO[sub]2[/sub] emitting electricity generation.
I didn’t see where it mentioned it in the paper, but it did not seem as though the process needs to be maintained at specific temperatures or you have to start over type of thing. Varying the power input would probably be fine. Same with the Fischer-Tropsch process.
One thing I saw years and years ago, probably late 90’s, was a story about the CO[sub]2[/sub] absorbency of certain ionic exchange membranes. IIRC, when they were dry, they would absorb carbon dioxide, and when they were wet, they would give it off. I thought that was pretty interesting, and seemed to have a number of useful applications, but I’ve not heard anything since. It seems it would be very useful in greenhouses. Often, they actually burn propane or natural gas specifically to produce CO[sub]2[/sub] for the plants. A much more carbon neutral way of increasing the concentrations in the greenhouse would be to use this stuff. I envision strips of it that run outside, exposed to the sun to dry it, and the air to absorb, then it goes back into the greenhouse and is moistened.
I saw a similar article on CNN yesterday talking about this. My first thought was ‘well, at $100 per metric ton of CO2, how much would we have to scale up to break even with what we emit?’. Rough back of the envelope calculation is…$4 trillion dollars a year. So, probably not going to be a silver bullet.
That said, it’s really about using the carbon in the atmosphere to create fuel, not about solving the CO2 issue per se. The article on CNN talked about using solar and wind to generate the power to operate the plant (I suppose nuclear could also do it…if we could have more nuclear).
I was curious to see how 'dopers responded, since most seem to think that engineering solutions to these sorts of issues are automatically suspect (and, in fact, I have to concede that as a solution to global warming, full stop, this one isn’t it).
In my future, planes have long extension cords.
That’s actually pretty much irrelevant as long as the energy doesn’t come from fossil fuels and the end result is cost-effective. Petrol is one of the most energy-dense transportable fuels we have.
I could see one of these plants operating up at Dounreay where there’s a nice nuclear reactor next door and fuel processing nearby and the whole thing is out of harms’ way and - crucially - can be conveniently forgotten if it doesn’t turn out well.
We’ve already had the capability to create petrol or other arbitrary liquid fuels from various carbon stocks. Making ethanol out of crop waste is the obvious one, but we could make anything we wanted.
The only thing this does is make it slightly easier to use atmospheric carbon dioxide as the carbon source for the process. But this doesn’t make it cheap. The reason we use petrochemicals as fuel is because it’s much cheaper to pump this shit out of the ground than it is to manufacture it. It’s still going to be much cheaper than manufacturing it.
BTW I forwarded the link to my brother who is in the energy business and he sent back a few sums showing that solar power isn’t yet good enough to power this.
Hopefully economies of scale will kick in and make it sufficiently cost-effective.
Hey, remember the atmosphere processing plants from Aliens? Maybe we need a few of those?