2 ms·

After a plane burns all its jet fuel to fly where it is going, we will have to expend even more than that much energy to suck the C02 out of the air again. Fly

• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
• zamfi 3y ago
  Jet fuel is less than 25% of the cost of running an airline. Flying will cost more, but not necessarily 2x more. Plus that's only if we can't synthesize jet fuel from all that CO2 we're extracting from the air.
• topkai22 3y ago
  That assumes that price is entirely determined by energy cost, that you need to convert CO2 to a chemical with the same potential energy level as jet fuel, and that energy costs are the same and constant across sources. That’s not true. Fuel accounts 30-50% of the costs of air travel. A straight doubling of fuel costs would not double air travel costs (although it would hurt) The CO2 emitted from air travel wouldn’t necessarily need to be converted back to a very high energy molecule like jet fuel. I’m not a chemist, but I’m pretty sure there are polymers that you can bind the carbon into and not be nearly as energy intensive as recreating petroleum molecules. Finally, wind and solar electricity generation are already generally cheaper than any fossil fuel generation besides nat gas. The EIA (via Wikipedia) had that at around 2x cheaper solar versus diesel generation, and solar and wind continue to see cost improvement. All that being said, any carbon elimination scheme is going to have a cost, but the theoretical cost efficiency can be much better than if you assume energy is 1-1 with cost.