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Comment by tomerico | Hacker News Reader

This might be a naive question, but given that plastic is made of oil, and that it doesn’t decompose, isn’t it a great way to perform carbon sequestration?

In other words, isn’t the use of plastics replaces potential carbon emission via burning of oil?

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This is backwards. First, plastic is something like 1% of all oil production. Secondly, oil is the the best way to do sequestration by keeping it in the ground.

Unless you mean turning co2 into oil to make plastic or something? Which is itself weird for the energy requirement.

Slightly higher, about 4% worldwide, though some of that is NG.

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Much-Crude-Oi...

But you assume that the oil saved by a reduction in plastic use will be kept in the ground. Isn't a fairer assumption that it would be repurposed and burnt?

I think he just generally meant stop using oil for all uses for maximum carbon sequestration

Plastic does break down, it is just really slow. But since the oil was extracted from thousands of feet down and was already sequestered before we decided to manufacture stuff with it, it can only at best be carbon neutral, assuming the plastic lasts as long as the original oil would have.

You could make it carbon negative if you converted CO2 gas into plastic, but the energy requirements to do so are enormous. It is the same problem with fertilizer production. We could make synthetic fertilizer from the air, but it requires so much more energy to the already immensely energy intensive production process that you don't actually gain anything.

If the energy needed was all clean energy, and we had enough of it, we could make carbon negative plastics. But that is like ridiculously cheap electricity to the point where residential power costs would be measured in like 50 cents per year, minus power line upkeep.

Its already sequestered as oil just leave it in the ground. Given how little of the plastic can be recycled and it doesn't really decompose and pollutes the water and our food we tends to burn it for energy to get rid of it.

Great way to sequester it right into a whale's stomach.

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