...when one has refined it.
In the post above, I referred to Dr. Alissa Park's lecture; I've had the pleasure of reading some of her papers as well as the pleasure of attending that lecture at Princeton. In fairness to her, she made a clear distinction between CCS, carbon capture and storage and CCU, carbon capture and use. From my perspective CCS should read CCD, carbon capture and dump.
It is an economic negative to dump. Unless one is acting illegally, one has to pay to dump anything and everything, except, in current times, dangerous fossil fuel waste which is being dumped for free by us, whereas our dumping will be at great cost to future generations.
However, carbon capture and use is a different story, since the product it is used to make will have value.
That is the real distinction.
As for the means to capture carbon dioxide, if one has sufficient cheap energy, sustainable energy, the situation is less problematic.
There has been a great deal written and researched about algae. The chief cost is essentially involved with the energy cost drying it. Theoretically, of course, it could be dried using waste heat currently rejected to the atmosphere or to bodies of water. This is an aspect of process intensification, about which I've been thinking and writing for some time. I think algae can indeed be made a viable tool for carbon capture, although its utility will never approach being a panacea.
I'm a big fan of supercritical water oxidation and supercritical carbon dioxide gasification. In a process intensive system, the cost of drying algae, sewage sludge, wet straw, etc, etc, etc becomes less onerous. I think it possible to see thermodynamic efficiencies, or better put exergy, approaching 70% or even 80%.
Nevertheless the real key to carbon removal to my mind will lie with the processing of seawater, where carbon dioxide in various forms (carbonates, biomass, and solvated carbon dioxide) is much higher than it is in air. Impressive and intriguing work is already being done in this area.
In theory, there are no components of dangerous petroleum that cannot be replaced by syn gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon oxides, most often carbon monoxide but in many cases carbon dioxide as well. We can in fact make many products that are superior to those we currently use that are made from dangerous petroleum, dangerous coal and dangerous natural gas.
I think any credible environmentalist is concerned with the polymer pollution of the seas, the fresh water bodies of water, and the land.
Not so long ago I wrote a post on this topic which got me to thinking, however: Distribution & Type of Marine Debris Polymers on Hawaiian Island Beaches, Sea Surface, and Seafloor.
Here is a table from that post, from the paper under consideration there, Jennifer M. Lynch et al. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2019, 53, 21, 12218-12226:
I think we need to make a distinction between single use plastic, wrappers, cartons, plastic plates, plastic utensils, plastic bottles, etc, etc, and long use polymers, those utilized in things like furniture, structures, protective coatings, insulation, machinery, etc.
There are also a whole slew of other carbon materials, carbon fibers, refractory metal and silicon carbides, electrolytic carbon, etc.
It occurred to me while writing the post I just referenced, and looking at the table just reproduced here, that the heavier than water polymers are of lower risk than those that either float on water or remain suspended in it. For example, those off the coast of Hawaii on the seafloor, along with those on probably every continental shelf on this planet, even including the Antarctic shelf, will ultimately be buried by the continuing flux of sinking materials, some of which are in fact biocarbons. In this way they will be far less noxious than a carbon dump. Over a geological timescale, these materials will almost certainly revert to something rather like coal, which is, afterall, simply sequestered carbon, sequestered by life forms from billions of years ago.
I have convinced myself that it is technically feasible to completely phase out the use of fossil fuels for anything for which they are currently supplied if we have energy. It's no secret that I believe that the only form of energy that is environmentally acceptable and sustainable is nuclear energy. It may not be politically or socially acceptable to do this, but it is technically feasible, albeit at great initial costs, to phase out dangerous fossil fuels.
Between 1970 and 1990, using technology developed without much access to in silico tools in the 1950's and 1960's, the nuclear energy field grew from almost zero to around 28 exajoules per year in average continuous power. The growth was restrained by FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering) and public resistance driven by poor thinkers, myself included in those years. Nevertheless this made it the largest, by far, scalable form of energy on the planet ever since 1990, by which time it was under prolonged attack by poor thinking, uneducated, dogmatic fools suffering from the intellectually disastrous practice of selective attention. It is still the largest source. Half a century of mindless wild cheering for so called "renewable energy" while bashing nuclear energy has not caused the output of so called "renewable energy has not resulted in it producing even half of what nuclear has continuously provided with an extraordinary low loss of life and environmental destruction. Nuclear plants that can operate for the bulk of a century are now possible. If we had taken the accumulated knowledge and insight and lessons learned to accelerate that pace by a mere factor of three, we could have stopped the growth of dangerous fossil fuel use, an increase of about 150 exajoules per year since the year 2000, we could have stopped dangerous fossil fuel use dead in its tracks.
It's all carbon dioxide out of the smokestacks and exhaust pipes now, coulda, woulda, shoulda.
It is, I think, on the edge of feasibility to remove carbon dioxide from the air on a scale of hundreds of billions of tons. This is not to say it would be easy. On the contrary, it would be difficult.
My estimation is that the necessary amount of carbon dioxide that needs to be removed to achieve pre-industrial levels is a trillion tons.
If it is to be done, however, dumps, whether they involve rock formations or deep welling, simply won't cut it.
I apologize if this post is somewhat long winded. I have a passion for these things.
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