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gothling13 t1_jdagipg wrote

Reply to comment by gobblox38 in An Arizona plant will pull CO2 from the air and trap it in concrete by captainquirk

I don’t know anything about this particular company, but I did hear about this idea about 10 years ago as a civil engineering student. The idea was meant for concrete companies and involved redirecting the exhaust through this system, not just sucking random air with a vacuum. The concept as it was explained to me was to filter the exhaust through brine. CO2 combines with calcium in the brine to create calcium bicarbonate. I think, that was 10 years ago.

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gobblox38 t1_jddb7ts wrote

It's been a few years since I've studied carbon sequestration as well. It was for my geologic thermodynamics class. And you're close, it's calcite (calcium carbonate, CaCO3), either that or you're correct, lol.

In the article, they discussed capturing exhaust, but they also talked about pulling the carbon gasses directly from the atmosphere. That's the part I'm most skeptical about.

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Tobias_Atwood t1_jddmo8v wrote

We gotta make ot work somehow, though. Even if we 100% stopped production of greenhouse gasses today we're still looming on the edge of climate disaster with the CO2 already in the atmosphere. The normal biological and geological processes that sequester CO2 move too slowly to save us.

We gotta scale that shit up.

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gobblox38 t1_jddqm67 wrote

I agree that we are facing the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced, and we're sprinting towards that cliff.

I'm all for investing into large scale production of technology that pulls carbon gasses from the air. I just want to be sure this technology works as advertised and results in a net negative of atmospheric carbon. The last time we need to do is scale up something that doesn't work.

There's a lot we can do to mitigate the upcoming climate crisis, but most of the biggest impacts we can make (such as reducing carbon emissions) gas a lot of resistance. I'm not very optimistic that humanity as we know it will survive past this great filter.

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