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This begs the question, with all the hoopla about CO2 on Earth... can this be used at scale to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere here? Or add a couple steps to cre

• gpm 4y ago
  Can it be used here? Yes, of course, though you need to concentrate the CO2 in the atmosphere first. Is it useful? Almost certainly not, just don't burn the hydrocarbons in the first place and use that nice concentrated source of carbon (and atmospheric O2), instead of burning oil and O2 to produce CO2, extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere, and then unburning it. Will someone do it here? Probably, SpaceX is saying that they will as a way to develop the technology and claim they're carbon neutral.
• politician 4y ago
  Yes, but (1) the atmosphere is a lot thicker here, and (2) we would need to power it with green energy. The combination of 1 and 2 means that we would have to build a lot of renewable energy infrastructure dedicated to doing this instead of using that infrastructure to replace fossil fuel generation. If it makes sense at all, I think that it would make more sense to deploy a solution like MOXIE-at-scale *after* we have replaced fossil fuel power generation. There's an argument that says that the planet itself could clean up the excess CO2 reasonably quickly once we stop adding more.