Interesting! It’s always good to see more pathways for CO2 consumption being made feasible. I’m generally skeptical of carbon capture and storage’s short term u

Interesting! It’s always good to see more pathways for CO2 consumption being made feasible. I’m generally skeptical of carbon capture and storage’s short term utility in mitigating anthropogenic climate change due to the present challenge of finding viable sequestering pathways - but every publication like this at least potentially opens up one more such route. For context, post-combustion capture at a point source (eg a natural gas power plant) is actually quite effective (80% of the emissions being captured is comfortably within our technological capabilities) but what you do with the carbon afterwards is the tricky question. Some of the main options are using it for enhanced oil and gas recovery (yuck), injecting it deep underground to then mineralize (which sounds great but requires fairly specific geological formations), or consuming it as part of a variety of chemical processes for creating value added products (as discussed in the linked post). One of the main challenges with the electrochemical synthesis of value-added products is that… well, they require electricity! So depending on the energy conversion efficiency of the process and how clean the source grid is, you may actually end up with even more emissions! Ethylene has a much larger global market than other targets (formic acid, ethanol, CO), but is much harder to actually end up with net negative emissions due to the higher energy requirements. See De Luna et al., Science 364, 350 (2019) for more info. Still, if we can get ethylene synthesis from CO2 more efficient, it becomes a much more promising sequestering pathway, so this is a cool post! Even if we reach sufficient carbon-free grid capacity to meet all demand and can then start turning to direct air capture to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere using incredibly energy intensive direct air capture, we will still need somewhere to put that CO2!