CCS powered by hydrocarbon-derived power can still carbon negative. That’s true not just for a power plant, but even for direct air capture, which is what Carbon Engineering is doing. I’m not telling you it’s a good idea, just that there isn’t some stealthy 2nd-law violation preventing it from working at some scale if someone is willing to pay for it, even if it’s not powered by low- or zero-emission sources.
Sure, if you find a way to trap the carbon in a safe (and scalable) way such that it does not leak back into the atmosphere
What do you think of the carbon capture that Iceland is now trying? They’re injecting the captured carbon into subterranean stone. Right now, I think the issue is scalability. If it works, however, I imagine scalability can be fixed.
In spite of all the comments to the contrary I still believe the nitrogen is the answer to capture a carbon and solving the global warming problem. I don’t even think sequestering the carbon or capturing it is even necessary. I was reading yesterday how the rainforest in both the Congo and the Amazon jungle are quickly becoming less efficient as carbon sinks. They recognized CO2 fertilization and initial growth spurts but then they noted that things have slowed down and they blame this on global warming. I think it is pretty clear that warning is not what caused to slow down they had a nitrogen carbon cycle going for thousands of years and when suddenly more carbon was introduced it interrupted the cycle there’s no longer enough nitrogen in the soil to support the growth. Between the Congo River basin and the Amazon jungle we have about 3 million square miles a potential carbon sink that could be far more effective than it is right now. Another big issue in both of these forests is that trees that fix carbon in the soil are now in short supply and potentially could be replanted this would be a huge undertaking but it’s also a huge problem that we’re looking at. It might require a full-time force of up to a million people working full-time year after year after year after year, I think it’s very possible to solve this problem if it’s looked at on the scale that it actually is which is huge.
Sure, why bother learning anything? Knowledge just gets in the way.
Stranger
I can’t get my quote function to work I apologize for that. I’m not trying to be a hard head or a know-it-all it’s just that everything I read seems to support that. Just trying to maintain objectivity on this topic is very difficult because it’s a very emotional topic to a lot of people including myself. The big gripe with nitrogen is that it’s a pollutant. That’s only true if it’s overused. Especially when you’re talking about adding nitrogen by simply replanting nitrogen fixing trees. It also looks like the concentration of nitrogen needed would only be a small fraction at the concentrations that they use in farming which is also encouraging. The forest will maintain its nitrogen for many generations but it might need a little kickstart as it would take a very long time for the carbon nitrogen balance cycle to get back in sync simply because the carbon was added to rapidly for the night begin to catch up. Properly managed this could be good for the environment. The animals, locals economic situation, there’s a lot of potential positive that could come out of this. If you can give me reasons why it would not work I would be more than happy to entertain them
There’s roughly a trillion tons of known coal reserves in the ground, but only half a trillion tons of carbon in active biomass. Therefore we’d have roughly triple the amount of biomass to absorb that CO2. And that’s not counting unknown reserves of coal, oil, or natural gas.
It’s not remotely feasible. The way to avoid disaster is to stop digging carbon up from the ground in the first place.
There is a startup which says it will turn the CO2 from the air into diamonds.
“The manufacturing process that we’ve developed enables us to transform harmful atmospheric CO2 into gem-grade diamonds,” says Ryan Shearman, co-founder and CEO.
To power its manufacturing process, Aether buys clean energy.
“Our goal is to make sure that every single piece of carbon emissions associated with the manufacture and distribution of our goods is completely offset by our own environmental initiatives,” Shearman says.
The company estimates that for every one-carat diamond it makes, it removes about 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s more than the average American is responsible for in a year.
No, that’s not the main difficulty. The main difficulty is that it’s not enough to just take carbon out of the atmosphere; you also need to find a way to do something with that carbon which (1) doesn’t release it back into the atmosphere, and (2) can be scaled up to a level that would be necessary to be a meaningful contribution.
The company estimates that for every one-carat diamond it makes, it removes about 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s more than the average American is responsible for in a year.
Stranger
A C atom has a mass of 12 u, an oxygen atom of 16 u. So in a CO2 molecule, the carbon accounts for 27 % of its mass. Diamonds are pure carbon, so the production of one carat (0.2 grams) of diamond takes up only about 0.75 grams of CO2. I suppose this startup tries to brush up its numbers by factoring in carbon savings from using carbon-free rather than fossil energy for its processes. But then the question remains: If we had a clean, safe, plentiful and carbon-neutral source of energy, why should we use it to produce diamonds, rather than simply use it to replace fossil energy and stop burning fossil fuels in the first place?