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By available, do you mean 'It exists on the planet crust', or 'It can be accessed at a significantly lower cost than the forward (breakdown, e.g. the cost of eq
by darkmighty 7y ago
By available, do you mean 'It exists on the planet crust', or 'It can be accessed at a significantly lower cost than the forward (breakdown, e.g. the cost of equivalent oil) energy cost?'[1], and if so, do you have sources to back that up?
[1] If it costs more, or even not significantly (an order of magnitude at least) less than the cost of oil for equivalent emissions, than the economic proposition is dire. Solutions so far have those economic difficulties afaik, and we're still at a stage where we have easily available capture resources (i.e. we haven't depleted or saturated a number of them) -- we're talking about a planetary scale solution here
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoThe first definitely, the second remains to be proven. You can find most of the relevant scientific articles by searching for 'carbfix' on sciencedirect. The current results are promising, but there are still challenges to overcome. Notably, the system they run in Iceland absolutely guzzled fresh water, and while this is not a problem in Iceland, it would prevent the scaling up of this project to a true planetary-scale solution. Work is ongoing for figuring out if saltwater would clog up the wells too badly, and how this can be mitigated. Also, as the carbfix project took in CO2 and H2S as highly concentrated gases, as the direct problem was to get rid of the emissions of a geothermal plant. To scale up to carbon capture from the atmosphere, they'd have to either set up their system to use less concentrated input gases, or figure out a cost-effective method of separating and concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere. Not saying this is necessarily a silver bullet for all our emissions, just saying that the original concern of the poster I replied to about where the energy to split CO2 it going to come from is not actually as big of a deal as it seems.