3 ms·

It may work but it's probably hard to scale because you have to manufacture something. I think with Australia's vast flat lands we could probably farm algae on

It may work but it's probably hard to scale because you have to manufacture something. I think with Australia's vast flat lands we could probably farm algae on seawater and sunlight at scale as a way of scrubbing the atmosphere. Whilst this chemistry is exciting it seems like it would be of most use in ICE engines and coal fire plants where point source pollution is present. It may not have the impact people dream of like constructing a filter building and hoping all the CO2 floats past.

boulos 6y ago
Yeah, before reading one of the carbon capture from the atmosphere papers, I hadn’t thought deeply about the challenge. Then I realized “oh, we’re talking about 350-450 ppm” which is less than 1 in 2000. Even though that CO2 is there and it’s damaging, you have to be really good at filtering to focus your energy on anything at a 1/2000 rate. By contrast, the tailpipe folks (like [1]) or the smokestack ones have >10% of the emissions as CO2! (Figure 3 in the paper, also directly here [2]). It’s literally “1 in 10” versus nearly “1 in 500”. You can be a lot less fancy when the density of your target is nearly 50x higher. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2019.00143/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2019.0014... [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/465010/fenrg-07-00143-HTML/image_m/fenrg-07-00143-g003.jpg https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/465010/fenrg-07-0...
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