Comment by sfn42
5 hours ago
The thing people don't think about with regards to CO2 capture is that you have to get the atmosphere in order to capture CO2 from it. You essentially have to suck the entire atmosphere into these carbon capture facilities.
Using something like this to capture carbon from an exhaust pipe might be viable, but scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere is not even remotely viable. There's just too much air out there.
Gasses diffuse through the air very quickly. Having a few high-volume extraction points would be enough long-term.
Yeah except the highest volume facility in the world is called mammoth and in order to offset our current emissions we would need a million mammoths.
Even if you could make it a thousand times more efficient it would be a stretch.
You can actually capture CO2 from sea water thereby reducing ocean acidification and improving its capability to continue as our planets biggest CO2 sink.
there's also lots of water to wash then.
The problem is the same, the relative concentration of oxygen in air is less than 0.05% (~450pars per million). In water much less.
Well here's the thing - there's quite a lot of water out there too.
How long and how many terawatts of power do you think it'll take to suck a significant fraction of the earth's seawater through a capture facility?
You're right, it's expensive and hard, so it's better to not do anything and... migrate all humanity onto space stations so we don't die with the earth, I guess is the alternative you're suggesting?
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