3 ms·
Are we talking about carbon capture (like from the smokestack of a coal plant)? Or carbon sequestration, where we pull it out of the air? The latter probably m
by NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
Are we talking about carbon capture (like from the smokestack of a coal plant)? Or carbon sequestration, where we pull it out of the air?
The latter probably makes sense even at high energy cost... it makes a climate crisis reversible rather than just slowable. The former seems rather more suspect even with cheap fusion. What do you even do with the carbon, once captured? You can't turn it into a solid... that would be the coal you just burned. And while it might be capturable as a gas, how would one go about storing it safely?
- ummonk 3y agoCapture and sequestration go hand in hand - you first have to capture the carbon to sequester it. It will obviously always be more efficient to capture carbon at the source of the emissions (e.g. a smokestack) where it is highly concentrated than to pull it out of the air..
- ianburrell 3y agoThere are other methods of sequestration that may be better than carbon capture. Rock weathering is the main one, where dump crushed olivine rock into the oceans where it picks up the dissolved CO2. This has advantage that uses known technology and scales well. It also locks CO2 into rock instead of worrying about where to put the captured CO2.