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As you mentioned, I'd love to see the carbon that's captured from the air turned into something valuable like building materials. Or do something wild and have

As you mentioned, I'd love to see the carbon that's captured from the air turned into something valuable like building materials. Or do something wild and have a worldwide monument building contest where captured carbon is used to make incredible sculptures and artworks. Injecting it underground is just turning waste into waste, which depends entirely on regulatory controls to become sustainable; though of course, developing an efficient process for capture is a hugely important step. I'm curious what the latest developments are on finding a use case for captured CO2?

markcyffka 5y ago
Right now we're focused on getting our capture/removal process working at scale, but we are keeping a close eye on the use cases since that is a big part of the conversation. There are many great teams working on the usage problem right now & are excited to see where they take things.
krisoft 5y ago
> Or do something wild and have a worldwide monument building contest where captured carbon is used to make incredible sculptures and artworks. I wondered about the scale here. In 2020 we emitted 34.81 billion tons of CO2 from fossil fuels[1]. Now that's much more than what I can lift, or even imagine. So let's say we want to build Pyramid of Giza sized monuments out of that. The Pyramid of Giza weigh about 5.75 million tons[2]. That means that if we want to soak all the yearly emission into monuments we need to find place for about 6000 Pyramid of Giza sized ones. That's a lot of monuments to go around. And then next year we repeat again. I'm not sure this will scale. > Injecting it underground is just turning waste into waste, [...] Yes? That's where the carbon was stored for hundreds of millions of years and it was fine there until one day humans figured out a way to get it out and spread it into the atmosphere. The problem is not that we have a moral objection to CO2 on principle. The problem is that it's screwing up the atmosphere. 1: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions 2: https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-weigh/ https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-...

markcyffka 5y ago

Right now we're focused on getting our capture/removal process working at scale, but we are keeping a close eye on the use cases since that is a big part of the conversation. There are many great teams working on the usage problem right now & are excited to see where they take things.

krisoft 5y ago

> Or do something wild and have a worldwide monument building contest where captured carbon is used to make incredible sculptures and artworks. I wondered about the scale here. In 2020 we emitted 34.81 billion tons of CO2 from fossil fuels[1]. Now that's much more than what I can lift, or even imagine. So let's say we want to build Pyramid of Giza sized monuments out of that. The Pyramid of Giza weigh about 5.75 million tons[2]. That means that if we want to soak all the yearly emission into monuments we need to find place for about 6000 Pyramid of Giza sized ones. That's a lot of monuments to go around. And then next year we repeat again. I'm not sure this will scale. > Injecting it underground is just turning waste into waste, [...] Yes? That's where the carbon was stored for hundreds of millions of years and it was fine there until one day humans figured out a way to get it out and spread it into the atmosphere. The problem is not that we have a moral objection to CO2 on principle. The problem is that it's screwing up the atmosphere. 1: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions 2: https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-weigh/ https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-...