Comment by jmclnx
7 hours ago
I agree, plus were would one store the CO2 ? To get back to "1980", I really doubt puling CO2 from the atmosphere will ever work.
Another concern, who will pay for maintenance ? See this for why you cannot let CO2 escape from underground storage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster
If stored near a populated area, hundreds of thousands could be kill, including all animals and insects, in a matter of minutes if the "vault" has a catastrophic failure. I would rather live near a nuclear waste site than a CO2 Site.
Can't we just store C and let the O2 back in the air like plants do? We could store it right where it came from, in old coal mines.
Chemical reduction of CO2 is a very hard problem since it takes a lot of energy. There's an enormous amount of research in this area. Storing it costs money, so most of the research focuses on turning the C into a useful product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of_c...
> I would rather live near a nuclear waste site than a CO2 Site.
If it's between immediate death and a slow one of cancer, I'm not sure your choice is the obvious one.
A failure in containment at a nuclear waste storage site means danger for people on the site itself but it is easily detected by monitoring equipment and can be repaired, the waste is solid and can't spread easily. A failure in containment of a massive quantity of pressurized CO2 would be significantly more dangerous and probably a lot more likely to happen given the frequency of accidents
https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/prs.68...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkWeZ1YPI88
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H1rWZHNWBWo
Well as far as storing it goes, if you can capture it, turn it into a solid and stick it in the ground.
Imagine you were growing a huge biomass that you harvest, dry out, and then store. We know how the bacteria and processes that stripped co2 from the atmosphere in the past, we just need to do that in a big way. Good thing we have places on earth that are huge and flat and growing algae won't be a problem.
And then we complement that with green energy and an attempt at net zero.
As long as leading figures either claim it's a hoax or that it's not necessary to do sth about it, none of this matters anywhere.
This is less of a technogical problem than it is a political one, I'm afraid.
Not exactly less.
It's a science fiction grade engineering problem and a historically unprecedented political problem. That's a tough mix to crack.
It's worth trying to delay the end of civilization, but reversing this is literally like putting the fire back in the Molotov.