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yawaworht-a-sti-sey t1_jdb6hzo wrote

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

It's proven science, it just requires space, material, manpower, and energy that makes it either unjustifiably inefficient at best or a net loss. You gotta read the fine print with optimism blindfold.

For instance, if you took all the money that went into funding this project and instead spent it planting trees you'd remove more CO2. Concrete isn't exactly carbon neutral and neither is the energy spent separating or storing CO2.

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gobblox38 t1_jddfiue wrote

Granted, in the five years since I've learned about carbon sequestration methods this might have changed. Yes, it is possible to put CO2 into a superstate and inject it into sandstone or put it in a liquid state and inject it into basalt. There's problems with both and the best possible scenarios have a 60% net carbon capture.

There's a problem with trees that most people don't consider. A tree is a carbon reservoir for less than a century. When the tree dies and decays, that trapped carbon goes right back into the atmosphere. The last time trees captured carbon on a geologic scale was the carboniferous. Fungus have been eating dead trees since then.

Another issue is that climate change is killing entire regions of trees. Even if we could plant trees fast enough and ensure each one lives, we'd never make a dent in atmospheric carbon.

The plant that stores carbon on a geologic scale is algae. The algae has to die, sink to the ocean floor, and be buried before it can be eaten/decay. The problem with this is that it's such a slow process that it only becomes noticeable on a geologic timescale.

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yawaworht-a-sti-sey t1_jddg96o wrote

I wish we had the luxury of worrying about 50 years from now.

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gobblox38 t1_jddi30f wrote

I, for one, welcome our inevitable doom. May the planet go thorough its usual end mass extinction phase and move on to a new era filled with bizarre (to us) creatures that live in dynamic equilibrium. /s

For real though, I too am worried about what the next few decades will bring.

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