Re:So you want to build a carbon capture company
by leoedin on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @08:08AM
(#27036686)
This definitely seems the most feasible. Sure, plants aren't particularly efficient, but they're also self-reproducing and self-maintaining, which is a huge bonus.
One interesting approach with plants is to pyrolise them to make biochar - essentially turn them to charcoal. You get a bit of hydrocarbon gas out of them, which you can sell to pay the bills (this is the biggest problem with any carbon capture - there's basically no way to pay the bills), and then you bury the pure carbon that you're left with.
Essentially we'd need to devote quite large amounts of land towards this if we wanted to compensate for our current emissions - something like 66% of the world's forests would need to be periodically cut down, with around 1% cut down and pyrolised each year.
You could probably get some easy wins with existing wood and crop waste - by my estimate we could capture 3% of global emissions just by pyrolising Europe's existing biofuel feedstocks.
One interesting approach with plants is to pyrolise them to make biochar - essentially turn them to charcoal. You get a bit of hydrocarbon gas out of them, which you can sell to pay the bills (this is the biggest problem with any carbon capture - there's basically no way to pay the bills), and then you bury the pure carbon that you're left with.
I did a bit of research on this a while back and wrote up the calculations here:https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/biochar
Essentially we'd need to devote quite large amounts of land towards this if we wanted to compensate for our current emissions - something like 66% of the world's forests would need to be periodically cut down, with around 1% cut down and pyrolised each year.
You could probably get some easy wins with existing wood and crop waste - by my estimate we could capture 3% of global emissions just by pyrolising Europe's existing biofuel feedstocks.