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The physics of storing equivalent weights of gas versus solids - the volume and/or pressure containment required - make it quite impractical to store meaningful
by PeterisP 5y ago
The physics of storing equivalent weights of gas versus solids - the volume and/or pressure containment required - make it quite impractical to store meaningful amounts (on the scale of billions of tons) of it as gas; the fact that CO2 is just 28% carbon and 72% oxygen is comparably a lesser issue but doesn't help as well.
Perhaps you can avoid "unburning" it by some other chemical process (which is why I was asking this) but simply pumping the CO2 somewhere does not seem a reasonable option, the only place on Earth that can easily hold that much of CO2 gas is the general atmosphere where it already resides.
- epistasis 5y agoI agree that sequestering co2 gas is a losing game, and that's why I think all the fossil fuel companies' plans for CCS are pure bunk. Climeworks' proposal to pump it into basalt caverns, where it chemically reacts and becomes solid, is one way around that. Carbon Engineering is doing gas to liquids, and claims that they need ~2.25 kWh of electricity to convert atmospheric CO2 to 1 kWh worth of liquid hydrocarbons. We will see. We will need gigatons/year of sequestration in 2050. It's going to require a ton of innovation to get there.