It's talked about as a catalytic reaction, and the solvent isn't consumed - you get o2, nitrogen, and carbon flakes (which can be further sonicated in a deterge

It's talked about as a catalytic reaction, and the solvent isn't consumed - you get o2, nitrogen, and carbon flakes (which can be further sonicated in a detergent mixture to produce graphene flakes. ) They estimated $100 cost for ~500 lbs of carbon. To put things in context, there's about a trillion tons of "excess" co2 in the atmosphere. That means you're going to need to produce 280 million tons of carbon to reset to 1970 levels. $400 per ton means $1,120,000,000 , or $1.12 trillion. Assume economies of scale, improved efficiency, secondary markets, and you could reduce the effective cost by 80%, so maybe $250 billion could solve co2 climate impact. Spread that out over all vehicles, power plants, businesses, and so on, and that seems achievable over a decade. Spread over global scales on a sound 50 year plan, and people wouldn't even notice any economic impact. Now what if you can tweak the chemistry and produce methane or ethanol or propane? Pure carbon feedstock has to have more uses, so it might be a net producer of value, as opposed to a fundamental cost. Pretty exciting to think about.