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Scientist Discover How to Convert CO2 into Powder That Can Be Stored for Decades
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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The question to always ask with these articles is: Is this process prohibitively expensive, or does the process output more CO2 overall than you input? It's always one of the two.
A third question is, can it scale up to what's needed to begin to make a dent in the problem. The answer will unfortunately always be no, not even close. That's how much we've put in the air and oceans, the numbers are huge.
Okay, then let's just give up then.
We can't plant enough plants to fix the problem because the plants will eventually decompose, re-releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere and environment. We need some form of carbon capture if we ever want a chance of restoring the environment to how it was. Even if we quit deforestation and fossil fuels overnight, we'll still have all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, warming our planet.
Quitting fossil fuels isn't enough to fix the problem, and quite honestly, the amount of cynicism around carbon capture on lemmy reeks of fossil fuel propaganda. If carbon capture doesn't work then why bother pushing oil and gas companies to invest in carbon capture? Why spend the money when it could be spent on another oil well or transitioning to solar and wind? I know the latter sounds like a good idea, but again even if we switch overnight, the world will still be warming. Why don't we make them pay for the damage they've done and transition to solar and wind instead of letting them off the hook?
"Oh no, it's probably too expensive!!! Where do we put it!?!? It probably won't scale enough!!!! Well, might as well not spend the money, we can use it to enrich ourselves instead."
Storing carbon as sodium formate has the same problem as storing it as trees - bacteria will eat it and release CO2. Its also not useful as portable fuel - its energy density is an order of magnitude less than kerosene.
Its potential use as a battery is interesting though. I can imagine a system where a long lasting catalyst is used to fill a tank of sodium formate using waste CO2 from industrial processes and excess electrical generation capacity from renewable sources like wind and solar, and the machines that use sodium formate to generate electricity at times of low wind and solar generation could potentially be less polluting overall compared to mining lithium for new batteries and recycling worn out lithium batteries.
See, here's an actual reason why this doesn't work for sequestering carbon. Like, it frustrates me to no end that lemmy, as supposedly environmentally conscious as it is, immediately throws out any man-made attempts at carbon capture and insists that plants are the only solution.
If there's a real reason why it wouldn't work, then okay! I get that! Just... We're already burning up here and we need all the help we can get. We're already suffering the consequences of climate change and it's only going to get worse, why is everyone so excited to discount any attempts to improve the capture process? Do you really wanna live with 2023's weather (or the weather for whatever year we finally start decreasing CO2 output) for however long it takes for the environment to fix itself, or would you rather researchers were trying to find newer, faster ways of capturing it so we don't have to keep having extreme weather well into the 2060s or later? Even if we switch to all renewables overnight, If you just sit back and let trees do the job, we'll probably still be experiencing the effects of climate change for the rest of our lives.