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The scaling comes for the fact that if you can make fuel from atmospheric CO2 cheaper than fossil fuels there will be high economic incentives to capture CO2.
by joak 5y ago
The scaling comes for the fact that if you can make fuel from atmospheric CO2 cheaper than fossil fuels there will be high economic incentives to capture CO2.
The kind of money that goes into oil/gas exploration, transport, refineries, etc... will be instead invested into carbon capture.
The green kerosene will soon become cheaper than the dirty fossil fuel one effectively killing the oil industry.
So carbon capture (we are not talking about storage) won't be something we have to pay for to save the planet, it will become big business and will draw costs down, not up.
- gmuslera 5y agoIf you capture the carbon to shortly after that burn it again you are not reducing the carbon in the atmosphere, you may be only reducing how much you add (maybe, if actually fossil carbon stops to be extracted). And the problem is that how much is released already is what made global average temperature rise for 1+ºC already, and knowing how much time it remains in the atmosphere, will keep increasing that temperature. So what is needed is to capture the carbon, at a rate bigger than the 50Gt a year that we are emitting it, according to the article, and not burning it again. Of course, that doesn't mean that what will be done is what is really needed.
- lambdatronics 5y agoSynthetic fuels not only displace the emissions, they simultaneously develop the technology that is needed to actually go negative. Battery tech reduces emissions too, but it can't take us negative. If synthetic fuel can be cheaper than fossil fuel, soon enough plastics can be made from carbon capture, and to the extent that those plastics go into the ground rather than being incinerated, that's a net carbon sink that could have positive economics.