I should be clear by carbon capture I dont mean planting trees (which is clearly an excellent idea) but the commercial co2 -> liquid/solid process.
Firstly it can only be applied to large stationary emitters of co2 so stuff like refineries and gas/coal power stations but that makes up if i remember only 25% of our total emissions so the bigger stuff like transport and agriculture is missed.
Secondly its quite challenging to implement. think about how few plants can be retrofitted with the process, and even so you need a bunch more energy to convert it to a liquid form for long term storage so you need excess power generation in the first place (even more if you want to convert into a sort of brick). Even once its in liquid form thats an enormous volume of liquid we need to store somewhere and just think how much people hate living next to powerstations right now - so people are going to be okay living under like a billion cubic meters of Co2 gas that can start seeping into air in a few years time. So ok we have to start piping this gas far away into giant underground storage containers but even so thats a lot of infrastructure and there arent many places that have these big caverns we can pipe it into. And the volumes must be immense. Like absolutely immense if we want to do it on a large scale. And right now oil is worth like 30-40 USD per barrel? Pumping that Co2 back into the ground who wants to pay for that? It seems crazy to me. Planting trees and stopping the amazon from burning seems like a much more sensible investment
safgasCVS|6 years ago
Firstly it can only be applied to large stationary emitters of co2 so stuff like refineries and gas/coal power stations but that makes up if i remember only 25% of our total emissions so the bigger stuff like transport and agriculture is missed.
Secondly its quite challenging to implement. think about how few plants can be retrofitted with the process, and even so you need a bunch more energy to convert it to a liquid form for long term storage so you need excess power generation in the first place (even more if you want to convert into a sort of brick). Even once its in liquid form thats an enormous volume of liquid we need to store somewhere and just think how much people hate living next to powerstations right now - so people are going to be okay living under like a billion cubic meters of Co2 gas that can start seeping into air in a few years time. So ok we have to start piping this gas far away into giant underground storage containers but even so thats a lot of infrastructure and there arent many places that have these big caverns we can pipe it into. And the volumes must be immense. Like absolutely immense if we want to do it on a large scale. And right now oil is worth like 30-40 USD per barrel? Pumping that Co2 back into the ground who wants to pay for that? It seems crazy to me. Planting trees and stopping the amazon from burning seems like a much more sensible investment
unpwn|6 years ago