4 ms·

NaOH would at least be scalable though. So if they did manage to reduce the price it could play a part.

• jandrewrogers 8y ago
  NaOH is not scalable either. It doesn't address the core industrial scaling issue at all, which is the same for sodium and potassium, nor where we will find terawatts of available power generation. There is several trillion dollars in hidden CapEx baked into the idea that we can sequester atmospheric CO2 using this method before we even get to the direct costs. It assumes infrastructure that doesn't exist being built at mindboggling scales. To actively sequester atmospheric CO2 at net negative rate on a time frame of several decades would require $10T per year by their own numbers at their current cost using potassium and assuming the industrial infrastructure already existed. Using sodium would greatly increase this price tag, making it even less probable. There is no getting around those cold hard numbers. The fundamental thermodynamics makes it impossible, even ignoring the industrial scaling problem, to reduce the cost per ton to a level that is remotely economically plausible.