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His scheme seems to be, "We can pay for sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere by selling the CO2." Okay, reasonable enough, but just a quick question: doesn't the

His scheme seems to be, "We can pay for sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere by selling the CO2." Okay, reasonable enough, but just a quick question: doesn't the sold CO2 just get dumped back in the atmosphere? He suggests that industrial CO2 is used to rejuvenate oil wells, carbonate beverages, and juice up commercial greenhouses. Of those, carbonated beverages CERTAINLY release all their CO2 back into the atmosphere in a time-frame of at most years and probably weeks. I assume that some percentage of the CO2 used in commercial greenhouses is turned into, well, plants (though most plants pretty quickly decay and release their CO2 back into the atmosphere, with the exception perhaps of some woods), but I'd guess that 90%+ of it goes back into the atmosphere. I'm not sure how much of the gas stays underground for decades in the case of pumping CO2 into an oil well.

LanceH 12y ago
Where does the CO2 in carbonated beverages come from currently? Is it something produced which would now be displaced resulting in a net reduction? If we're producing CO2 as the product, we could lower that amount by recycling already produced CO2.
- aetherson 12y ago
  No idea at all. But even if it is, this is more in the line of mitigating current CO2 increases than "taking CO2 out of the atmosphere." And if you grow the market for carbonated beverages by having cheaper CO2, that market growth will be CO2-positive, not CO2-reducing.
- yongjik 12y ago
  Carbonated beverages are a red herring. This page[1] says a can of soda has 2.2g of CO2. If every single person in the world (population 7.125B) drinks 10 cans of coke every day for a year, we will be using 63 Mt of CO2. Mankind emitted 33615 Mt of CO2 in 2010[2]. [1] http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-the-carbon-dioxide-content-of-a-soda-can-or-bottle http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-th... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio... (Edit: sorry I at first miscalculated the result to be 6.3 Mt.)
  - LanceH 12y ago
    I only intended to point out it is possible to reduce CO2 emissions by recycling it, even it the end product releases the same amount of CO2. I don't know that we produce CO2 for CO2, or where the numbers lie. Just that the prior post said it gets released anyway, so how can it be an improvement?
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  Most of the commercial CO2 in the US is captured from natural gas 'sweetening' or from fertilizer production. It's transported from the plants/refineries in a rather substantial pipeline network mostly in the South. Companies like Air Products and Praxair typically buy CO2 off of these pipelines and then clean it up to whatever specification is required (Industrial, Food & Beverage, Pharmaceutical, etc) then sell it to the end users. I wouldn't be surprised if the major beverage companies had their own connections to the pipeline and did their own processing, but they're only a small portion of the commercial CO2 market.
SilasX 12y ago
I suppose the idea is that "the CO2 has to be bought and used anyway" and so this atmosphere-extracted CO2 would displace it, thereby substituting for CO2 that would otherwise be a net addition. That is, instead of [other source] -> [atmosphere] it would be [atmosphere] -> [atmosphere] OTOH, there could be a sort of "reverse Jevons effect" here, where this simply bids down the price of CO2 and leads people to simply put it to more uses, so this new source is simply in addition to all those other traditional CO2 sources.
- aetherson 12y ago
  But the premise of this technology is not simply that it mitigates carbon gain in the atmosphere, but that it can actually sink away some of the carbon produced by the (vastly more significant than direct industrial uses of CO2) fossil fuel industry. If all it can do is mitigate the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by greenhouses and beverages, then that seems so unimportant that it can't possibly be worth bothering with.
  - bdamm 12y ago
    What you're describing is the end game. The CO2 for beverages is only one example of a mid-game strategy to get to the end game.
    - aetherson 12y ago
      I can't think of any real industrial uses that seem like they scale up and do not release the used CO2 into the atmosphere.
dwc 12y ago
> though most plants pretty quickly decay and release their CO2 back into the atmosphere, with the exception perhaps of some woods There are ways to keep a fair amount of the carbon. Old plant material should be composted and thus recycled. An alternative is to create biochar and amend soil with it, which has potential to sequester the carbon for millennia. Some farms use a no-till method to add the organic matter into the soil. Basically, if the commercial greenhouses do anything with their plant waste apart from putting it in a landfill then it's back in the growth cycle of some other plant.

LanceH 12y ago

Where does the CO2 in carbonated beverages come from currently? Is it something produced which would now be displaced resulting in a net reduction? If we're producing CO2 as the product, we could lower that amount by recycling already produced CO2.

aetherson 12y ago
No idea at all. But even if it is, this is more in the line of mitigating current CO2 increases than "taking CO2 out of the atmosphere." And if you grow the market for carbonated beverages by having cheaper CO2, that market growth will be CO2-positive, not CO2-reducing.
yongjik 12y ago
Carbonated beverages are a red herring. This page[1] says a can of soda has 2.2g of CO2. If every single person in the world (population 7.125B) drinks 10 cans of coke every day for a year, we will be using 63 Mt of CO2. Mankind emitted 33615 Mt of CO2 in 2010[2]. [1] http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-the-carbon-dioxide-content-of-a-soda-can-or-bottle http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/9067/what-is-th... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio... (Edit: sorry I at first miscalculated the result to be 6.3 Mt.)
- LanceH 12y ago
  I only intended to point out it is possible to reduce CO2 emissions by recycling it, even it the end product releases the same amount of CO2. I don't know that we produce CO2 for CO2, or where the numbers lie. Just that the prior post said it gets released anyway, so how can it be an improvement?
mikeyouse 12y ago
Most of the commercial CO2 in the US is captured from natural gas 'sweetening' or from fertilizer production. It's transported from the plants/refineries in a rather substantial pipeline network mostly in the South. Companies like Air Products and Praxair typically buy CO2 off of these pipelines and then clean it up to whatever specification is required (Industrial, Food & Beverage, Pharmaceutical, etc) then sell it to the end users. I wouldn't be surprised if the major beverage companies had their own connections to the pipeline and did their own processing, but they're only a small portion of the commercial CO2 market.

SilasX 12y ago

I suppose the idea is that "the CO2 has to be bought and used anyway" and so this atmosphere-extracted CO2 would displace it, thereby substituting for CO2 that would otherwise be a net addition. That is, instead of [other source] -> [atmosphere] it would be [atmosphere] -> [atmosphere] OTOH, there could be a sort of "reverse Jevons effect" here, where this simply bids down the price of CO2 and leads people to simply put it to more uses, so this new source is simply in addition to all those other traditional CO2 sources.

aetherson 12y ago
But the premise of this technology is not simply that it mitigates carbon gain in the atmosphere, but that it can actually sink away some of the carbon produced by the (vastly more significant than direct industrial uses of CO2) fossil fuel industry. If all it can do is mitigate the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by greenhouses and beverages, then that seems so unimportant that it can't possibly be worth bothering with.
- bdamm 12y ago
  What you're describing is the end game. The CO2 for beverages is only one example of a mid-game strategy to get to the end game.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    I can't think of any real industrial uses that seem like they scale up and do not release the used CO2 into the atmosphere.

dwc 12y ago

> though most plants pretty quickly decay and release their CO2 back into the atmosphere, with the exception perhaps of some woods There are ways to keep a fair amount of the carbon. Old plant material should be composted and thus recycled. An alternative is to create biochar and amend soil with it, which has potential to sequester the carbon for millennia. Some farms use a no-till method to add the organic matter into the soil. Basically, if the commercial greenhouses do anything with their plant waste apart from putting it in a landfill then it's back in the growth cycle of some other plant.