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Comment by LargeWu | Hacker News Reader

> The new paper says it can remove the same ton for as little as $94, and for no more than $232. At those rates, it would cost between $1 and $2.50 to remove the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a modern car.

If those numbers are true, that's actually a pretty achievable cost to absorb that could be added directly as a tax on gasoline.

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Carbon capture by weathering Olivine rocks is estimated to be $11.81 per metric ton of CO2.

http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...

Rock weathering is a natural process, so there is no need to mess with transporting hydrogen or limestone to make some complicated chemical reaction. We just need to dig up olivine, crush it and spread it out over the ocean which will also fix ocean acidification. If we're going to geoengineer, weathering still seems like the least expensive option.

The problem is that we want to not only put back in our future use of gasoline, but also our PAST use of gasoline.

That's going to be..not cheap.

I'd be very very happy to only break even asap.

The article mentions this method can also be used to sequester the carbon. So if we can extract more than we consume as fuel we could theoretically solve that problem as well.

There's no reason to take the extra step of turning it into fuel for the portion we would just sequester underground.

No it isn't going to be cheap but it will be worth it. The more options we have, the more competition, the cheaper it'll get to capture atmospheric carbon. Hopefully our children and grandchildren will be able to start pumping billions of tonnes of carbon back into the ground.

And hopefully that tax would eventually offset by the increase in gas supply

I doubt most americans would support a 50%+ price hike at the pumps.

Well they must be convinced one way or another.

That's one of the reasons for government - to make unpopular decisions for the good of the people it governs. A 50% price hike would also have the knock on effect of making more economical cars increasingly desirable and maybe encouraging people to use public transport.

"Unfortunately" we live in a democracy. Car makers will probably bet on being able to get the "gas tax" repealed in four years time.

More like 100% from these figures. Then again, Europeans already pay something like 100% more than we do, per-gal, at the pump.

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