> We're going to need a lot of surplus energy to sequester all of the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere over the last 100+ years.
There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense. Until the day that we burn zero CO2 whatsoever, you're better off using the electricity as electricity and thereby burning less carbon than burning it and then trying to get it back.
And even at that point, we already have a thing that converts sunlight and CO2 into solid form. Plants.
In theory what you could probably do is cultivate algae in the ocean and then scoop it up in a net, bury it in the ground and repeat. But the scale needed to make a dent is harrowing.
> There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense.
Of course there will be. Even burning a small fraction of the Thorium lying in spill heaps today will achieve that. In February 2019, when Tsinghua Uni demos the worlds first commercially viable fusion reactor, everything will change.
We will:
- convert cubic kilometres of seawater into potable water per day and irrigate the Sahara and the Outback.
- convert atmospheric C02 to carbohydrate fuels (while there are still need for them)
- extract cubic killometers of C out of the atmosphere and oceans for construction material.
- Drop the excess blocks of diamond into the mariana trench, those that we don't use for road base.
- etc
People really do not appreciate what superabundance of energy would mean for man and our current planet.
It will literally be the demarcation point between the age of want, and the ages of plenty.
> There is no point at which sequestering CO2 by use of electricity is going to make sense.
> Until the day that we burn zero CO2 whatsoever
That day will come. And we'll then be at the point where its time to use cheap renewables to pull CO2 back out of the air and store it in a stable state where it can't be burned again.
My bet is some sort of synthetic bio-augmented photosynthesis process (if you think about it - that's exactly what plants do - sequester carbon dioxide in carbohydrates). If we are super lucky that process will also generate edible byproducts.
The weird part about sequestering is that if it's really going to work, people will need incentive to simply put all that energy in to the ground with no immediate benefit for them. You either need heavy government regulation or for everyone involved to be thinking about the larger picture.
I wonder if anti aging technology would push people to start seeing climate problems in its larger context.
Carbon sequestration doesn't necessarily mean driving combustion in reverse to get oxygen and hydrocarbons again. Accelerated silicate weathering could remove a lot more atmospheric CO2 per unit of energy invested and it generates carbonate minerals rather than fuel that people would be tempted to burn again. Like this, "Enhanced weathering strategies for stabilizing climate and averting ocean acidification": http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/cont...
That's pretty cool! Non fuel forms of sequestered carbon hadn't occurred to me, though you would still need to fund the process. Using a carbon tax to fund it as a government function seem likes the obvious solution if it were to be implemented at scale.
We're going to need a lot of surplus energy to sequester all of the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere over the last 100+ years.