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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the energy economics.

If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases... it's at least theoretically useful. At that point it's about costs.

Otherwise... Say we get to 0 emissions by 2035. There will be (is) already a troublesome amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We might have to do some carbon capture even if we're not releasing new carbon.

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> Depends on the energy economics. If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases

Not allowed by thermodynamics. Otherwise you could create free energy by continuously burning and recapturing the same carbon.

> Not allowed by thermodynamics. Otherwise you could create free energy by continuously burning and recapturing the same carbon.

That doesn't have to be the case; the carbon you capture may not be in a burnable form. E.g. if carbon dioxide were captured, additional energy would be required to split off the oxygen before the carbon could be 'burned' again.

Just capturing might be possible - it doesn't have to be in form that can be easily used to generate energy.

It would suffice to use less non-carbon-based energy to capture the CO2.

"If it gets to (for example) a point where capturing carbon uses less energy than burning the same amount of carbon fuel releases"

Sorry, that's forbidden by the laws of physics.

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