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A comment on A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19). Parent comment

Re:A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC ... by bifrost on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @06:36PM (#19792699)
At the end of the day - does it matter where it came from?

They could be like Tesla and build a solar arm, or a wind farm, or do geothermal. You could pull it out of the grid and it'd still be better for the environment than pulling it out of the ground.

TBH saying the world doesn't have a carbon problem contradicts all of the people fighting greenhouse gas emission based climate change so I'm curious as to your logic behind that statement.

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Re:A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC ... by b_tterc_p on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @07:43PM (#19793137)
The logic is that you need to power the carbon extraction, and right now we use fossil fuels for power, so you wouldn’t be able to net reduce fossil fuels because you would be burning more than you extract.

I think it’s naive though. There is a theoretical point at which it’s economical to just build excess renewable energy production and use the extra power to repair the climate.

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Re:A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC ... by joe_the_user on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @09:58PM (#19793880)
The logic is that you need to power the carbon extraction, and right now we use fossil fuels for power, so you wouldn’t be able to net reduce fossil fuels because you would be burning more than you extract.

Currently, we use a mix of hydrocarbon, hydroelectric, photovoltaic, wind and nuclear for power generation. Photovoltaic is quite economical for daylight and so using intermittent power for this process carbon capture process seems reasonable. Broadly, this could serve as a power sink to balance solar output, a way to use renewables for transportation and a way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Not all of those at once but just doing some of that seems like a win.

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Re:A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC ... by b_tterc_p on Wednesday May 01, 2019 @01:35PM (#19799547)
Sort of. It’s just that if the solar power could be used to meet energy demands or stored in batteries, that is a more efficient solution than using energy to clean the atmosphere (because otherwise the gap will be made up with fossil fuels which will be more costly in total energy) so for any economically rational environment (which are most places) where wasted energy is not being produced, we would need to invest in extra energy producing infrastructure in order to justify doing this.

And that’s ok, I think that such an investment could be profitable. It has plenty of positive externality effects too.

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Re:A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC ... by bifrost on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @08:06PM (#19793281)
I'd agree that outside of California it might be problematic, but we have so much renewable in the grid it'd be trivial to do properly. I also think using excess power to remove carbon is ultimately a good idea.
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