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Comment by seizethecheese | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of crazy. Presumably industry will use liquid CO2 for the foreseeable future. Pulling it from the atmosphere instead of ground is a huge net benefit.

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Most of the gasses we pull from the ground are byproducts of oil and natural gas production. We don't pull them from the ground because we want them on their own, we just go ahead and capture them because they are coming up with the stuff we want for fuel - they'll still continue to be captured (or worse vented to the atmosphere) as long as we're pulling those fuel sources from the ground.

Industrial CO2 also mostly comes not from the ground but from other industrial processes.

We use so much CO2 (on beverages, inert atmospheres, cooling devices, fire extinguishers, etc). Does all of it come as side-product of some industrial process? Or do we burn extra fuels to get it?

Most all of it comes as a side product. The amount of CO2 used for the applications listed pales in comparison to the amount used for urea (fertilizer) production.

What is different is that urea requires a power source that creates more CO2 than the chemical process uses. So you will certainly (as long as you are using fossil fuels) have a source available.

Those things I mentioned buy their CO2 on the market. I have no idea where it comes from.

Urea production requires ammonia, and the production of ammonia produces co2 in large quantities. It's not without reason the two are almost always loacted closely

Great point & not so often talked about. Something like 230Mton of CO2 are used each year, a little more than half goes straight to urea production. By contrast only about 10% goes to the food/bev, medical, and other applications we are more familiar with on a day-to-day basis.

plot showing the breakdown with some gov't sources. --> https://www.iea.org/reports/putting-co2-to-use

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