5 ms·
> and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world. ...not where I thought you were going with this argument. Aren't we lo
by jMyles 4y ago
> and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world.
...not where I thought you were going with this argument.
Aren't we looking for ways to take the CO2 out of the air? Rather than to sell it so that it gets put back in?
- anon84873628 4y agoUsing synthetic hydrocarbons for energy storage seems inevitable to me. Can we really electrify all the vehicles on the planet? How many two stroke engines are in use throughout Southeast Asia alone? Batteries and electric motor technology is just so much more complicated than the internal combustion engine. Then you have airplanes, ocean vessels, military and emergency vehicles... I'm not an expert in this. But swapping fossil fuels for synthetic petroleum made with nuclear or renewable energy seems like the cleanest refactor without rewriting the interface. If feasible. And we'd still want to optimize the whole stack and sequester carbon wherever possible.
- jMyles 4y agoOK yeah, sounds totally reasonable when you put it that way.
- fwlr 4y agoThink of the current coal power industry as essentially “digging a lot of pre-sequestered CO2 out of the ground and putting it into the air”. This plan limits the coal industry to only using what’s already in the air, while we build parallel systems to actively sequester air CO2. Building massive carbon capture plants for this purpose also brings economies of scale to other carbon sequestration projects. Finally, you can imagine making a commitment to permanently burying 5% of the output of the synthetic plants, so every round trip the CO2 makes reduces it by 5%.
- jMyles 4y agoYeah, makes sense. Burying 5% of the output... maybe that's what some civilization did 60 million years ago?