Re:Some progress on CO2 sequestration technologies
by jandrewrogers on Sunday July 28, 2019 @01:45AM
(#20546040)
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.
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.