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Re:Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017) by john567 on Thursday March 10, 2022 @06:56AM (#30625924)
Elon Musk once pointed to the low energi state of CO2 as a problem meaning it doesn't react with other things without additional energy added. This makes carbon capture fundamentally hard and anyone claiming otherwise is either in possession of some infinite power supply or we live in a post scarcity society.

Either way, planting trees appears to be a good mechanism for carbon capture. So go do that instead!

Re:Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017) by JoeAltmaier on Thursday March 10, 2022 @07:34AM (#30626197)
One step better: don't create it to begin with. Use electric devices instead.
Re:Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017) by gbear605 on Thursday March 10, 2022 @08:00AM (#30626409)
Some activities are much more difficult to do with electricity because of the weight of batteries or because the environment is cold, flying planes or existing in Arctic climates being the most notable. So if we want a totally carbon-neutral world while still being able to do everything we can today, some carbon capture is important.

Hopefully we’ll have a huge innovation in batteries, but oil is very energy dense and some burning seems likely for a long time. We also will probably want to reduce CO2 levels from wherever we peak, even assuming we’re not burning any more oil, so carbon capture is important for that too.

Now some of that carbon capture can be in the form of well managed trees, but they take up a lot of land and you have to chop them down and store the wood somewhere that it won’t break down, and that becomes its own storage problem.