> the fully burdened cost of sequestering CO2 via industrial processes is never going to be viable due to industrial chemistry economics.

To this I fully agree. This problem isn't going to be solved by industry. I'm not sure why people are putting that on the table. There is no incentive for them (unless you put huge carbon taxes on as well). This is really a thing where we have to cut our losses and say "It is cheaper to build these now than the cost of the damage of what happens if we don't." There's no industry incentive for that. But there is huge public and governmental incentive.

I don't think you understood what was meant by "industrial chemistry", it is a type of science and engineering (basically doing chemistry at mass scale) not an interest group. The government is bound by the same laws of physics as everyone else. The industrial processes outlined in these articles are fundamentally non-scalable to the problem of meaningfully reducing atmospheric CO2, it doesn't matter who implements them. The fully burdened cost per ton of CO2 adds up to more resources than humanity has available in its entirety as a practical matter.

It would be great if it could feasibly scale but there is no science that supports that notion. Any chemical engineer worth a damn can figure that out on the back of a napkin.

Scaling is hard for industrial chemistry, same as with software, and it is only weakly parallelizable. The idea that we will take one of these prototypes and scale it a million-fold (literally) while increasing efficiency by 1-2 orders of magnitude is completely implausible for well understood boring engineering reasons. And even if we could do this, the economics are barely within the realm of plausibility.

Biomass, on the other hand, has math that works out (still expensive though).

> The fully burdened cost per ton of CO2 adds up to more resources than humanity has available in its entirety as a practical matter.

What are you basing that math on?

At $100 per ton it's about 4 trillion dollars a year to capture all current emissions.

That's five percent of world GPD. And that's ignoring any attempt to reduce emissions, or to more efficiently capture carbon at power plants.

Even at the current price of $600 if we reduced emissions by half we could afford that.

And for land use, 40 billion / 1 million * 300 acres is 19k square miles, or one sixth of Nevada.

Would there be material shortages? Are all those prices fake?

The other poster is correct. The prices are complete fiction at any scale that has any impact at global levels.

The price is literally infinite at that scale as the resources do not exist.

Which resources?

Money can buy employees and manufacturing capacity. What are the things that would cost more per unit the more you buy?

Energy and raw chemicals. I think few people appreciate what the implied scales are for anything remotely resembling fast sequestration (read: this century) of atmospheric CO2.

There are finite supplies of everything. We've only every been able to do gigaton industrial chemistry when it was strongly thermodynamically favored; in this case we are trying to run it backward up a steep gradient. The chemical processes described would also require globally depleting mined chemicals that we also use to produce food.

We would need to manufacture several orders of magnitude more raw materials, including the entire upstream supply chain, than exists today. The actual scale is comparable to current global GDP for many of the proposed industrial plant solutions when scaled up. We simply don't produce the required chemicals, nor have the underlying resources to produce said chemicals, at anything remotely resembling those scales. No amount of wishful thinking will change that. I trained as a chemical engineer, I can do the math.

It isn't a problem of employees. We literally have no capacity to produce the upstream resources to feed these industrial designs at the required scale. The inputs to their process are not produced by magic. This is a fairly technical point but literally no one has offered a proposal for how the chemistry would scale to a level that would solve atmospheric CO2 this century.

It is a really hard problem. We are trying to run planetary scale thermodynamics backward. The amount of energy required is mind-boggling even in the most optimistic scenarios.

Mostly power generation. Don't quote me but I recall reading we'd need approximately a million times more power than currently produced to capture current emissions with current technologies.

Grab a factor of ten from reduced emissions and another factor of 100 from tech improvements and it's still way out of reach

We emit about 40 billion tons a year, so that would imply we need the entire world's electricity supply to capture 40 thousand tons.

This single tiny test plant is capturing 4 thousand tons.

The number you read is wrong by miles.

If we look at $100 a ton and guess that half of that is power at 10 cents a kWh, we would need 20 petawatt hours per year. Current world production is 25 petawatt hours per year.

The prototype uses the excess capacity of existing industrial infrastructures which is many, many orders of magnitude smaller than is required to meaningfully reduce atmospheric CO2. It uses chemicals that are extremely energy intensive to produce from mined minerals. Scaling the raw inputs would require massive scaling mining, energy production, logistics, etc far beyond anything that has ever been done before by a very large margin.

Their $100 per ton is extremely optimistic because it doesn't require building the upstream supply chain that can feed their processes at the required scale. It isn't like this is something that already exists, it all has to be built from scratch, is amortized into the cost per ton, and has much worse than linear scalability. I'm not sure how to accurately convey just how qualitatively inaccurate your perception of our capacity to do this at scale is.

Constructively, I'd like to see the argument that we can manufacture the potassium hydroxide at the scale required to sequester all 20th century CO2 in 20 years. The math, inputs, and capacity for the entire supply chain are public. There is much opportunity for rigor but even cursory analysis shows that it is not remotely feasible to effect CO2 sequestration this way even with heroic efforts. And that is under the most ideal of circumstances.

CURRENT emissions. You're forgetting the century of built up emissions.

So add an extra 50%, still affordable, cleans things up in about 35 years. If we're actively backing up in CO2 levels that rate should be acceptable.

> Biomass sequesters CO2 from the atmosphere with almost perfect scalability because it has a built-in energy source and the sequestration "factory" largely builds itself.

Wait, what? Biomass uses solar.

Yes, that was my point. Humans are not required to build vast power generation infrastructure for biomass to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere, we get it for free.

The industrial chemistry for sequestering CO2 is not that expensive in terms of mass ingredients (nothing rare or exotic), considering the scale, but it is extremely energy intensive and that is where most of the cost of sequestration comes from. If almost all of the sequestration cost is the cost of putting energy into the system then biomass has a massive cost advantage, literally orders of magnitude.

Oh, it's your mention of internal energy source that confused me, as biomass depends on external energy, just as any industrial process. And we know that an industrial process can be potentially at least just as efficient as biomass, by the virtue of same physics/chemistry.