So when i saw this VOX article, i felt the need to post this here a la "told you so".
I am bullish on some kind of fuel-from-air technology gaining widespread adoption. Something to act as a sink to the increasingly glut of “free” renewable energy (assuming they can beat out the crypto miners). As far as I know, it is strictly a matter of price, there is no technological reason why it cannot work.
There is, however, a big thermodynamics reason: EROEI
It comes down to economics. Electricity is less valuable than a combustible fuel in several contexts.
And that overproduced solar is made using... petroleum.
The argument is very simple: we're basically just burning up oil with extra steps, then pretending the intermediate products can somehow undo the damage caused by burning up that oil (and now claiming that we're getting fuel back!) aka "extend and pretend"
We need to stop putting that carbon into the atmosphere, because the reality is that the process isn't reversible on human timescales. The only answer seems to be degrowth, but asking for negative GDP is basically heresy.
Not my math. Industry's math. And it's bonkers because "green products" have to sell, electric cars have to sell, etc. The economy has to keep growing. Big Line has to keep going up.
What doesn't sell, but might actually help us get out of this mess? Mass transit, dense subsidized housing, remote work, degrowth (negative GDP). None of this stuff sells, especially the last one.
>they can
I'm not arguing hypotheticals here
https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2023/7/3/solar-pa...
In fact ROI is more important to focus on, given solar panels last 20 years and the cost of installation is covered in 10 years, it will create profit for 10 (oversimplifying). Then the methane can be converted to LNG and transported by ship to Europe/US or somewhere else
Spreadsheets do not reflect the actual reality of our rapidly-heating planet and dying biosphere, though.
Alternatively some sort of world government or dictatorship would work too, but in democratic/capitalist society the problem wont get solved unless someone can make the moneys
Same energy as "yeah we got addicted to heroin, and the best way of getting out of this mess is to subsidize heroin so we can keep buying"
How about not putting that carbon into the atmosphere in the first place? Oops, that upsets The Big Line.
>democratic/capitalist
The fact that you put these words together with that symbol clearly demonstrates that you Just Don't Get It.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair, probably
Trees, bogs, and permafrost are already super efficient at carbon capture. This is more of a culture/incentives problem than a technology problem.
Plant forests, cut them down, turn them into housing or whatever. Voila: carbon captured for the next 50 or so years. People would love to pay you for cheaper abundant lumber.
> Peatlands are the largest natural terrestrial carbon store. They store more carbon than all other vegetation types in the world combined. Damaged peatlands are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for almost 5% of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/peatlands-and-cl...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-...
Also burning the stuff negates the carbon capture part.
The numbers don't work for using plants for sequestration. 1-3% of the world's land is urbanized, the rest is either already green or doesn't support extensive plant life. We can increase the green land area number, but not substantially.
We can release thousands of years worth of carbon sequestration in a peat bog in a few days by destroying the bogs. We don't have thousands of years to put it back.
The economics don't work for industrial sequestration. The numbers don't work for green sequestration. Our only choice is to stop putting the carbon into the atmosphere in the first place.
We could engineer these systems to be very aesthetically pleasing, with colorful 'leaves' and various types of cellulose layers of different colors and hardness. They'd be useful as shade structures, and they could also have other uses such as preventing soil erosion.
Might well prove to be a valuable resource for large scale energy production in a distant future!
The section titled ”Tree. You’ve invented a tree.” may be of interest to you.
Also the late David mackay has a great chapter in his book about this
I think overall it'd be cheaper to make fuels for ICE from air than to trash and rebuild every single vehicle. We probably need fusion energy to make that a reality though.