Total worldwide carbon production is 38.2 billion tons per year. Cost to sequester a ton of carbon is between $30 and $150, depending on who you ask and how you do it. Let's assume a middle of the road price of $90/ton. That's $3.438 trillion a year, or about $478 per person. This is roughly equal to the US yearly federal spending, or 3% of the world GDP.
If you somehow pooled together all the world's billionaires and got them to contribute their annual income (roughly $600 billion a year, averaging the past 7 years) to the effort, you could eliminate roughly 20% of carbon produced in the world every year.
-------------------------
Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear why finding new sequestration methods is incredibly important: if you can get the cost from $160 to $10 per ton, then suddenly all you'd need would be a coalition of half the world's billionaires to stop the main cause of global warming.
Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc.
-------------------------
Mostly off-topic: when I was looking at estimates of land size, apparently the amount the US has shrunk from 2007 to 2015 (14,000 km2; went from 9,161,120 km2 to 9,147,420 km2) [0] is roughly equivalent to half the area of the Netherlands. Wow.
You also have to remember the costs of capturing CO2, which is best done at the points of emission, and transporting the CO2 to the (usually far away) storage site.
OTOH, the total cost (not just for sequestration) is about $100, maybe a bit more, in most estimates.
For reference, a gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2, so $100/ton equals $1/gallon of gasoline. That's roughly what you'd have to increase gasoline price by to fund CO2 capture, transport and storage. (This neglects that the capture part is neigh-on impossible.)
For electricity, to compensate for the average US CO2 emissions per kWh (~1.2 lbs/kWh), you'd have to increase the price by about 6 cents per kWh.
To do CCS for both gasoline and electricity consumption, the average US family would have to pay (order of magnitude) 1000 x $1 + 12000 x $0.06 = $1720. That would compensate for about half the family's CO2 emissions. The remaining half is dominated by emissions from the food we eat, the stuff we buy and from having fun.
> Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc.
You misunderstand the purpose of trees. They're basically solar powered, organic carbon sequestration devices that happen to run for free. If we ever run out of space to plant trees, we can just cut some down, reduce it down to charcoal and bury it back into the ground which conveniently leaves a readily accessible fossil fuel source for our ancestors in the case of civilizational collapse.
But we're still a long way away from running out of room to plant trees. We're still desperately trying to plant enough trees to stop the encroaching of the Sahara and there's vague, futuristic plans to try and turn the entire Sahara into a forest. Similarly, China is desperately planting trees to stop the encroachment of the Gobi.
> That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees.
Yes, that's the point. Plant trees, cut them down when mature and plant new ones. Use the harvested trees to make cross laminated timber and other engineered wood products and use these to replace concrete and steel (which also release CO2 during production). As long as the timber doesn't burn or rot the carbon is stored permanently.
They will just release their carbon content back when they are burned or transformed in any other way that only the mineral content is left. Otherwise, paper still contains carbon. Coal (buried, not burned) contains carbon. Furniture, houses, anything you make with wood will be a way of storing carbon.
You just also need to supply water and solar light. They will grow. Simple and efficient.
This is reverse process of digging coal and sucking oil out of the earth. The problem is that we are now releasing it several orders of magnitude faster than it was put down. The Carboniferous period was a 60,000,000 years long and we will use them in much less than 600 years.
Too for bad that for people in some poorer contries $478 is like many times their yearly income. But then again, their carbon footprint is most likely negligible.
Why not just let nature do it's job? If too much CO2 will kill us, then it's a self regulating system. It happened before with the Azolla event. You get fewer humans, more plants, everything else gets a chance to die off or recover, maybe a new species takes over.
The net reaction goes like this: CaSiO3 + CO2 -> CaCO3 + SiO2. Note that the products, silicon dioxide and calcium carbonate, are thermodynamically stable solids.
Crucially, the activation energy for the weathering of silicates to carbonates is low in the presence of water and carbon dioxide. Low enough that it happens spontaneously in nature on exposed rock surfaces. That means that the energy inputs required to reduce atmospheric CO2 via silicate weathering are much lower than a "combustion in reverse" process to turn gaseous CO2 into synthetic coal and bury it.
The other crucial issue is that the kinetics of silicate weathering are tremendously hindered in nature. A freshly fractured basalt surface weathers rapidly for a year or two and then develops a cation-depleted micron scale "rind" that drastically slows the weathering reactions with the rest of the bulk rock.
One way to accelerate the kinetics of silicate weathering is to use more concentrated materials, like the Iceland injection process: nearly pure CO2 plus water will react much faster than natural surface waters exposed to hundreds-of-ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. That works ok if you have a rich stream of CO2 like directly from a power plant's stacks. It won't work for dealing with CO2 already emitted to the atmosphere unless you add a complicated and energetically expensive pre-concentration stage to turn 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 into a 950,000 ppm CO2 stream you can inject.
The other way to improve the kinetics of silicate weathering is to generate a lot more surface area: crush bulk stone into particles 100 microns or finer. Then there's a lot of fast-reacting extra surface area that can react with CO2 at ambient concentrations. And even the slow weathering to the center of the particle will take maybe a century rather than multiple millennia. (If a century sounds unacceptably slow, I would venture that you have not fully internalized the vast timescales that unaided nature would take to restore the pre-industrial CO2 equilibrium.)
Putting crushed stone particles in near-shore ocean environments may further accelerate weathering by ensuring that natural wave action keeps abrading the rind from particles. Crushed stone rich in magnesium and calcium silicates can also be applied to acid sulfate soils in tropical agriculture. Raising the pH of acid soils increases agricultural productivity by preventing low-pH aluminum toxicity to plants and, unlike sweetening soil with limestone, it sequesters some carbon at the same time. The crushed stone accelerated weathering approach can offset all sorts of CO2 emissions: point or distributed sources, local or distant sources, present or past sources. Finally, it restores the historical pH balance of the oceans as well as getting rid of excess radiative forcing from CO2.
The amounts of stone required to offset historical emissions are vast, but any solution will be vast because the scale of the problem itself is vast. In terms of scalability, simplicity, energetics, and flexibility, I think that accelerated silicate weathering is the best shot at long term restoration of oceanic and atmospheric CO2 concentrations to the pre-industrial baseline.
You can see a similar reaction in action when you work with MgO. When preparing starting materials for high P high T experiments on basaltic liquids we typically make mechanical mixtures of simple oxides. MgO is the usual magnesium source, and we always have to calcine the MgO before weighing, as it always takes on CO2 whilst sitting around in the jar. If you put some freshly calcined MgO on some weighing paper on a balance, you can sit there and watch the mass increase as it reacts with CO2 from the air. Alas, too much silica on earth for periclase rocks...
It's nice that we're looking to alternative ways to capture and store atmospheric CO2, but at time it also does look like we're working too hard to replicate a system that does that already (and has for a long time): plants.
Or does it mean that the time of planting trees and preserving forests is over now and we have to do it another (most often less efficient) way?
The problem with plants is that they do not sequester CO2 permanently; plants grow, die, and decompose, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere. Trees certainly work as a buffer in the sense that carbon in plants is carbon not in the atmosphere, but the amount you could hold is tiny in comparison to the amount that must be sequestered back in order to make a meaningful change in atmospheric and oceanic CO2 composition.
Nonetheless, plants have important benefits, since they alter the local climate by changing the albedo and perspirating. Perspiration of plants in jungles helps to create clouds and regulate humidity, and would help to counteract some of the negative effects of climate change.
We pull almost all of the CO2 we burn from coal and oil, which were basically underground carbon reserves. To replace all of that CO2 with plant matter would take an immense amount of nutrients, which have to come from somewhere. Then there's the chance that the plant matter will turn to coal or oil again, meaning it may be used again. By turning the CO2 directly into carbonate, you both remove the need for nutrients and turn the CO2 into a form that is both incredibly stable and not useful for any energy purposes, lessening the chance that it will make its way back into the atmosphere.
I've been doing preliminary research on what kind of high-density trees grow reasonably fast in different climates. If the wood has a high enough density it will sink in water without treatment. Wood that has been submerged can take 100s of years to decay. Hence it might be possible to lock away a lot of carbon and give us some breathing room, by repeatedly clear-cutting and reseeding forests and sinking the logs. Even without high-density wood, it might be worth the effort to treat the timber so that it will stay sunken. I did some estimates previously that suggest the amount of land area that would have to be dedicated to this to reduce atmospheric CO2 is not unreasonable.
Plants don't usually store CO2 long term. You have to do something with them after they grow, or else they decompose and put the CO2 right back into the air.
Reforestation is good in regions that used to have forests. But using rocks might also work in ardi regions where freshwater is a limited resource (I assume they can just use salt water to pump CO2 into the rocks).
And you can't just plant forests everywhere, for example china experiences issues with its Green Wall, where the trees soak up so much water that it causes the ground water level to fall.
Its not either or at this point, you need both (as many as possible) solutions. In some regard CO2 storage solutions are better because you can make use of lower priced real estate like ocean floor vs growing plants and forests which take away real estate that can be used for human habitation and agriculture. Also CO2 storage is more stable in time. Like 100 years from now, people might just choose to cut down the forests and just release all that stored carbon back.
We have a great method of storing carbon. It is also technologically simple, very stable, and, would you believe it, completely free! It is called coal. It was already stored in the ground millions of years ago. We just have to not dig it up and burn it.
No you don't. Those were the results of millions of years. Don't dig it up? Okay, find alternate engery source which can support the way we live today. I am all for reduction (I believe in climate change), but what you said came out very aggressive and counter productive. So noz
I believe the US Navy already have pilot plants for doing this on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. It's too expensive for land use but much better than shipping across potentially hostile waters.
(Gasoline on US bases in Afghanistan ended up costing something more than $100/USgal, due to being taken overland several thousand miles through Pakistan under armed escort due to occasional Taliban attack.)
For a number of reasons that won't happen with existing plants, but the two bigs ones are that the plant economics are based on selling electricity to the grid and the operating cost of a nuclear plant today, makes for very expensive oil and gasoline (an equivalent of $125 - $150 barrel of crude oil prices). However if you built a nuclear plant that was specifically designed for F-T (so for example you used it to bring the F-T reactor up to 1300 degrees) you might be able to get the cost down to something a bit more competitive at the moment. The big advantage of course is that you could build such a plant with a 50 mile (80 km) radius (thus ensuring that even a Chernobyl style disaster would have not have long term effects on anyone outside of the safe zone) build a rail spur or a pipeline to exfiltrate the production.
Not mentioned in these comments is the actual method they cite in capturing the solid CO2. The method involves bubbling CO2 through water and hydrogen sulfide, which is incredibly toxic. Not sure if there's a better way to do it, but their current process is both economically infeasible and dangerous.
I don't think 'incredibly toxic' is the best word for a smell most people are familiar with.
Industry uses toxic chemicals all the time. It's not a big deal. This is a chemical that's relatively easy to notice and where prolonged non-acute exposure doesn't have known harms. It's better than most.
Just a reminder that the Iceland study result was unexpected, and while it is great that the media is publicizing the results, it would be nice to get additional confirmations before getting really excited.
Having said that, I'm still kind of excited. The basalt flood in Eastern Washington alone is in theory large enough to sequester hundreds of years of US emissions.
The best way to reduce emissions of CO2, is to develop sources of energy that are more economical than fossil fuels. If we had the huge surpluses of carbon emissions free energy implied by fusion, we'd be able to slash energy-related carbon emissions to a small fraction of the current level, while also drastically reducing the need to extract hydrocarbons as a chemical feedstocks. Fusion is probably even capable of providing enough energy to sequester excess carbon, beyond emissions.
Fusion energy is not free. The cost of building a reactor alone puts the price in the same range as fission. But it's safer, and we have an abundance of fuel for it. So build it to handle base loads, use wind/solar where it makes sense, and use excess production to some meaningful task.
Scaling up this technique to make it practical is going to be challenging. And it is not enough to simply compute the quantity of carbon not emitted; the full energy-life-cycle of the sequestration needs to be computed as well.
I haven't read this, but do people forget basic chemistry? We burn fossil fuels because the process is exothermic -- we extract usable energy from it.
Lithification of CO2 (to make up a word?) is, as far as I know, endothermic. It takes energy to accomplish. On the surface, tending towards counter-productive. Burn fossil fuels to lithify CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Or ramp up nuclear, with all its problems, for the same.
Fusion, sure -- but we are not there, yet.
Unless we look at the sun -- solar and wind. (The largest fusion reactor we are going to have -- up in the sky.)
"Alternative", next-generation, "renewable" energy might allow us to divert part of its potential excess supply to lithification of CO2. At the "tailpipe/smokestack" of conventional production, or even, if we can figure out effective capture, out of the sky.
You want CO2 dealt with, you're going to need to find a way to package it into a stable solid state.
By the way, we already have one worldwide, extant system for lithification of CO2. Based upon solar energy. Photosynthesizing flora.
Trouble is, we are outracing its natural counterbalance while simultaneously reducing and eliminating the flora required for it.
This process of trapping CO2 in stone is very, very different from converting CO2 to artificial coal and does not require the same magnitudes of energy (or anywhere near them).
On a very off-topic note, I wanted to know how human beings can colonize gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn assuming they somehow have access to huge amount of energy. One key problem that would be needed to solve is exactly this: converting gases like CO2 and methane to solids.
Even if you somehow converted the gasses of Saturn into solids, the mass would result in a level of gravity that would not be survivable. I don't think there's any possibility for colonizing gas giants that doesn't involve something like Bespin or Jetsons floating platforms.
The resulting carbonate minerals can't be burned because they are already completely oxidized, the same way you can't burn water (with oxygen).
Carbonate minerals are a lower energy compound than their reactants, which is good, because it means the reaction will happen spontaneously without an energy input from us (which would probably be too large to make it economical)
[+] [-] owenversteeg|9 years ago|reply
Total worldwide carbon production is 38.2 billion tons per year. Cost to sequester a ton of carbon is between $30 and $150, depending on who you ask and how you do it. Let's assume a middle of the road price of $90/ton. That's $3.438 trillion a year, or about $478 per person. This is roughly equal to the US yearly federal spending, or 3% of the world GDP.
If you somehow pooled together all the world's billionaires and got them to contribute their annual income (roughly $600 billion a year, averaging the past 7 years) to the effort, you could eliminate roughly 20% of carbon produced in the world every year.
-------------------------
Suddenly, it becomes crystal clear why finding new sequestration methods is incredibly important: if you can get the cost from $160 to $10 per ton, then suddenly all you'd need would be a coalition of half the world's billionaires to stop the main cause of global warming.
Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc.
-------------------------
Mostly off-topic: when I was looking at estimates of land size, apparently the amount the US has shrunk from 2007 to 2015 (14,000 km2; went from 9,161,120 km2 to 9,147,420 km2) [0] is roughly equivalent to half the area of the Netherlands. Wow.
[0] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.K2
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|9 years ago|reply
OTOH, the total cost (not just for sequestration) is about $100, maybe a bit more, in most estimates.
For reference, a gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2, so $100/ton equals $1/gallon of gasoline. That's roughly what you'd have to increase gasoline price by to fund CO2 capture, transport and storage. (This neglects that the capture part is neigh-on impossible.)
For electricity, to compensate for the average US CO2 emissions per kWh (~1.2 lbs/kWh), you'd have to increase the price by about 6 cents per kWh.
To do CCS for both gasoline and electricity consumption, the average US family would have to pay (order of magnitude) 1000 x $1 + 12000 x $0.06 = $1720. That would compensate for about half the family's CO2 emissions. The remaining half is dominated by emissions from the food we eat, the stuff we buy and from having fun.
[+] [-] shalmanese|9 years ago|reply
You misunderstand the purpose of trees. They're basically solar powered, organic carbon sequestration devices that happen to run for free. If we ever run out of space to plant trees, we can just cut some down, reduce it down to charcoal and bury it back into the ground which conveniently leaves a readily accessible fossil fuel source for our ancestors in the case of civilizational collapse.
But we're still a long way away from running out of room to plant trees. We're still desperately trying to plant enough trees to stop the encroaching of the Sahara and there's vague, futuristic plans to try and turn the entire Sahara into a forest. Similarly, China is desperately planting trees to stop the encroachment of the Gobi.
[+] [-] perilunar|9 years ago|reply
Yes, that's the point. Plant trees, cut them down when mature and plant new ones. Use the harvested trees to make cross laminated timber and other engineered wood products and use these to replace concrete and steel (which also release CO2 during production). As long as the timber doesn't burn or rot the carbon is stored permanently.
[+] [-] woliveirajr|9 years ago|reply
They will just release their carbon content back when they are burned or transformed in any other way that only the mineral content is left. Otherwise, paper still contains carbon. Coal (buried, not burned) contains carbon. Furniture, houses, anything you make with wood will be a way of storing carbon.
You just also need to supply water and solar light. They will grow. Simple and efficient.
[+] [-] nickhalfasleep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|9 years ago|reply
Why not just let nature do it's job? If too much CO2 will kill us, then it's a self regulating system. It happened before with the Azolla event. You get fewer humans, more plants, everything else gets a chance to die off or recover, maybe a new species takes over.
Why bother with carbon sequestration?
[+] [-] chii|9 years ago|reply
is that really true? If a tree died, i would assume the carbon is either buried, or otherwise remain solid, unless it's burnt.
[+] [-] philipkglass|9 years ago|reply
Crucially, the activation energy for the weathering of silicates to carbonates is low in the presence of water and carbon dioxide. Low enough that it happens spontaneously in nature on exposed rock surfaces. That means that the energy inputs required to reduce atmospheric CO2 via silicate weathering are much lower than a "combustion in reverse" process to turn gaseous CO2 into synthetic coal and bury it.
The other crucial issue is that the kinetics of silicate weathering are tremendously hindered in nature. A freshly fractured basalt surface weathers rapidly for a year or two and then develops a cation-depleted micron scale "rind" that drastically slows the weathering reactions with the rest of the bulk rock.
One way to accelerate the kinetics of silicate weathering is to use more concentrated materials, like the Iceland injection process: nearly pure CO2 plus water will react much faster than natural surface waters exposed to hundreds-of-ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. That works ok if you have a rich stream of CO2 like directly from a power plant's stacks. It won't work for dealing with CO2 already emitted to the atmosphere unless you add a complicated and energetically expensive pre-concentration stage to turn 400 ppm of atmospheric CO2 into a 950,000 ppm CO2 stream you can inject.
The other way to improve the kinetics of silicate weathering is to generate a lot more surface area: crush bulk stone into particles 100 microns or finer. Then there's a lot of fast-reacting extra surface area that can react with CO2 at ambient concentrations. And even the slow weathering to the center of the particle will take maybe a century rather than multiple millennia. (If a century sounds unacceptably slow, I would venture that you have not fully internalized the vast timescales that unaided nature would take to restore the pre-industrial CO2 equilibrium.)
Putting crushed stone particles in near-shore ocean environments may further accelerate weathering by ensuring that natural wave action keeps abrading the rind from particles. Crushed stone rich in magnesium and calcium silicates can also be applied to acid sulfate soils in tropical agriculture. Raising the pH of acid soils increases agricultural productivity by preventing low-pH aluminum toxicity to plants and, unlike sweetening soil with limestone, it sequesters some carbon at the same time. The crushed stone accelerated weathering approach can offset all sorts of CO2 emissions: point or distributed sources, local or distant sources, present or past sources. Finally, it restores the historical pH balance of the oceans as well as getting rid of excess radiative forcing from CO2.
The amounts of stone required to offset historical emissions are vast, but any solution will be vast because the scale of the problem itself is vast. In terms of scalability, simplicity, energetics, and flexibility, I think that accelerated silicate weathering is the best shot at long term restoration of oceanic and atmospheric CO2 concentrations to the pre-industrial baseline.
[+] [-] wycx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VeejayRampay|9 years ago|reply
Or does it mean that the time of planting trees and preserving forests is over now and we have to do it another (most often less efficient) way?
[+] [-] Daishiman|9 years ago|reply
Nonetheless, plants have important benefits, since they alter the local climate by changing the albedo and perspirating. Perspiration of plants in jungles helps to create clouds and regulate humidity, and would help to counteract some of the negative effects of climate change.
[+] [-] TheAdamAndChe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigyk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the8472|9 years ago|reply
And you can't just plant forests everywhere, for example china experiences issues with its Green Wall, where the trees soak up so much water that it causes the ground water level to fall.
[+] [-] padiyar83|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ph0rque|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnegreve|9 years ago|reply
If you want to reverse the process you need some energy, so what would be the point of burning the oil in the first place?
[+] [-] jjawssd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|9 years ago|reply
Also related: oil, peat.
[+] [-] yeukhon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjawssd|9 years ago|reply
I can't wait to see nuclear power plants selling oil and gasoline.
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
(Gasoline on US bases in Afghanistan ended up costing something more than $100/USgal, due to being taken overland several thousand miles through Pakistan under armed escort due to occasional Taliban attack.)
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyg1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|9 years ago|reply
Industry uses toxic chemicals all the time. It's not a big deal. This is a chemical that's relatively easy to notice and where prolonged non-acute exposure doesn't have known harms. It's better than most.
[+] [-] chris_va|9 years ago|reply
Having said that, I'm still kind of excited. The basalt flood in Eastern Washington alone is in theory large enough to sequester hundreds of years of US emissions.
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvidgaard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drallison|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grizzles|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batguano|9 years ago|reply
http://xkcd.com/1732/
When the world climate was 4.3 degrees Celsius colder, Boston was covered under a mile-high sheet of ice.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|9 years ago|reply
Lithification of CO2 (to make up a word?) is, as far as I know, endothermic. It takes energy to accomplish. On the surface, tending towards counter-productive. Burn fossil fuels to lithify CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Or ramp up nuclear, with all its problems, for the same.
Fusion, sure -- but we are not there, yet.
Unless we look at the sun -- solar and wind. (The largest fusion reactor we are going to have -- up in the sky.)
"Alternative", next-generation, "renewable" energy might allow us to divert part of its potential excess supply to lithification of CO2. At the "tailpipe/smokestack" of conventional production, or even, if we can figure out effective capture, out of the sky.
You want CO2 dealt with, you're going to need to find a way to package it into a stable solid state.
By the way, we already have one worldwide, extant system for lithification of CO2. Based upon solar energy. Photosynthesizing flora.
Trouble is, we are outracing its natural counterbalance while simultaneously reducing and eliminating the flora required for it.
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|9 years ago|reply
Even if you somehow converted the gasses of Saturn into solids, the mass would result in a level of gravity that would not be survivable. I don't think there's any possibility for colonizing gas giants that doesn't involve something like Bespin or Jetsons floating platforms.
[+] [-] scentoni|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SixSigma|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okonomiyaki3000|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmm|9 years ago|reply
Carbonate minerals are a lower energy compound than their reactants, which is good, because it means the reaction will happen spontaneously without an energy input from us (which would probably be too large to make it economical)
[+] [-] EGreg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mazlix|9 years ago|reply
Then it becomes 1 CO2.
http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/511natgascombust.htm...
[+] [-] Jean-Philipe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixsevenwheels1|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sixsevenwheels1|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Pocketsnakes|9 years ago|reply
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