The buildings have stacks.
I'd suggest calculating the volume of gas produced by the combustion of 3750 MTOe of coal, the amount presently extracted and consumed annually.[1]
It is significant.
1. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
> In the United Kingdom, spent fuel is reprocessed at the Sellafield facility in Cumbria on the North West coast of England. Waste generated at the site comprises a wide range of radionuclides including radiocarbon (14C) which is disposed of in various forms including highly soluble inorganic carbon within the low level liquid radioactive effluent, via pipelines into the Irish Sea. This 14C is rapidly incorporated into the dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) reservoir and marine calcifying organisms, e.g. molluscs, readily utilise DIC for shell formation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X1...
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-iceland-carbon-dioxide-cleaner...
Capture it and convert it to fuel https://phys.org/news/2018-10-catalyst-door-carbon-dioxide-c...
Capture it and convert it to plastics https://phys.org/news/2018-11-co2-ingredients-fuel-plastics-...
etc...
I personally believe that in addition to pricing carbon governments are going to have to self fund massive sequestration projects as well to avoid catastrophic change.
The best way to sequester carbon is to turn it into coal or oil and bury it deep underground where it will remain for hundreds of millions of years.
It's insane to dig up coal and oil, burn it for energy, then spend MORE energy capturing all that CO2, converting it back into a long-term storage formfactor, and burying it again.
Much simpler to leave the coal/oil buried and get your energy from other sources.
Carbon sequestration makes way less sense than simply not digging up the carbon and burning it in the first place.
This is false. There are several tests of capture underway, where it's working at least within other parameters. [1]
As for economic viability, that may or may not come with scale and integration.
The bigger question is obviously the long term implications of storing CO2 (i.e. will it leak) etc..
"It's insane to dig up coal and oil, burn it for energy, then spend MORE energy capturing all that CO"
No, if sequestration can be viable, it would be 'insane' to ignore it.
If it increased the cost of burning natural gas by 2x, it'd still be cheaper than anything else.
It'd be irresponsible to ignore possible vectors of innovation.
Why would you build solar equipment with unreliable output at 7 cents kww instead a reliable natural gas / sequestered operation with 3 cents kwh?
"Much simpler to leave the coal/oil buried and get your energy from other sources."
There is no plan to going to get all of our energy needs from wind and solar, so I don't know what you mean by 'simpler'.
Carbon fuels are by far our best source of power, if we can capture CO2 efficiently, than we should.
The apparent 'anti sequestration' attitude that seems to prevailing here in HN is naive.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-carbon-storage/japa...
Imagine if nuclear reactors were allowed to dump waste in air/river.