We may be saved from a seriously stupid idea because: ‘Efforts to remove CO2 directly from the air are likely to prove too expensive to be practical’
Scrubbing Carbon Dioxide from Air May Prove Too Costly – One of the seemingly ideal and direct solutions to climate change is to efficiently vacuum up greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere. But a new study finds that such a proposal is very far-fetched and tremendously expensive.
The president’s science adviser, John Holdren, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have expressed support in the past for capturing and storing pollution from the air as a measure to mitigate global temperature increases. However, in a paper published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that trying to scrub the air is much more expensive than keeping it from getting dirty in the first place.
For the scientists conducting the study, air capture was shown to be largely wishful thinking that distracts from more effective strategies for combating pollution and climate change. “We thought it was important to set the record straight because [air capture] has policy implications,” said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative and one of the report’s authors. He said that air capture is appealing because it allows people to get away with not changing anything about their energy use. (SciAm)
Thermodynamics tells us that removing a few hundred ppm of CO2 from air would lower the entropy a lot, which will cost a lot of energy. That energy has to come from *somewhere*. If not from burning carbon or carbon compounds, then from where?
Which are they removing? CO2 or pollution?
If they’re going after CO2, what’s their beef with plants?
WE in Kenosha county installed a chilling system that removed anywhere from 80-98% of carbon from emissions and was beta tested for 2 years.
Tom Davidson, I believe super chilled ammonia was used to remove the carbon dioxide from the emissions. Super chilled means offsetting a hot thermal coefficient.