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FlattopMaker t1_je5yapj wrote

Is there an efficient and effective way to trap various greenhouse gases in manmade building structures?

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the_geth t1_je6roq1 wrote

The long answer is long, but in short: No.
Google "carbon dioxide capture via air filters" for instance, and you will see that the problem lies in efficiency: You need a huge amount of energy to make a dent into what has been released already, and that energy is likely carbon intensive in the first place.

The scale is insane too: see here how they talk about a hypothetic future plant capturing 1 million ton of CO2 per year. It would still take 32 000 of those hypothetic plants to cancel out the world's CO2 emissions for 2021 (32 billion tons), not accounting for CO2 produced by the construction of those plants and most importantly not accounting for the CO2 produced by the energy needed to capture and store this CO2.
Also, those plants requires chemicals which may be a problem in itself.

It takes about 10Giga joules per ton of CO2 to treat and store the CO2.
So, based on the 32 billion tons of CO2 figure, it would take 320 billion gigajoules to treat all the CO2 emitted by other sources.
That's about ~89 000 terawatt-hours, which is about 3 to 4 times the total consumption of electricity of the entire world in a year.

So... nope.

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atomfullerene t1_je6zurz wrote

I mean, you can build things out of wood, and as long as the wood doesn't rot that represents stored carbon. But you can't solve climate change just with wooden buildings, if that's what you mean.

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Indemnity4 t1_je8bccp wrote

Oh yeah, it's easy. If you have ever seen a gas BBQ bottle or carbonated drink cartridge, it's basically bigger versions of those.

Laughing gas is a potent greenhouse gas, but you can get a cylinder of it in your whipped cream can. A hospital can get a giant tank of it to disperse into regulators for pain relief.

However, if your question related to climate change the answer is no. The scale of the problem is mind boggling huge. You just have to picture every fuel station you see and replacing their storage tanks, but instead now they are filling a new one every few days and simply leaving it in some empty field to hold the gases, forever, with ongoing maintenance.

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