If you can figure out how to get the carbon feedstock from the atmosphere at scale, why would anyone bother with refining a mixed muck coming out of the ground? What we call 'petrochemistry' today will be called 'aero-hydro-chemistry' tomorrow.
So, whatever capture system you use, you'd need to move a lot of air through in order to produce a small amount of something like liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
It will require thousands of times more air, by mass. Since the output fuel product is hundreds of times more dense, it would require a crazy large volume of air to extract the carbon necessary to fill a fuel tank.
A corn field combined with a methanol fermentation and distillation facility is an example of a machine that does that. Very large.
The reason this cycle doesn't exhaust the atmospheric pool, of course, is that animals and fungi (more the latter) break down biomass into CO2 and release it back into the atmosphere.
That's not what I'd call 'very very little carbon'.
Literally .0441%
Getting anything at that concentration out is… generally not easy.
Doable! But not easy.
That it’s chemically low reactivity makes it even harder.
Plants have spent billions of years evolving to do it, and from an energy perspective aren’t very efficient at it.
Unless we want to burn even more oil trying to power the process or just make a tiny dent in it, we’ll need to not only figure out a somewhat efficient way to do it, but also figure out how to generate a massive amount of power without burning oil to power it.
441 ppm can be "a lot" depending on the gas and the expected effect. You don't want to breathe in 441 ppm of chlorine gas. But CO2 being fairly non-reactive makes 441 ppm of it relatively minuscule in contrast to the other predominant atmospheric gases. It's also nowhere near enough to cause outright catastrophe.
Pretty sure global minimum temperatures above 100F would also count as ‘outright’.
In many more places, crops are failing.
People necessarily leaving these places will need to go where other people already are.
The discussion is about avoiding it becoming one, and relative impacts. Humanity isn’t going to be dead tomorrow because of this, but may be in more pain in a decade or two, and longer term even more so.
If it happens, it will be much earlier than you hope, as millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions force their way across borders, and fascist governments ride that into power and then start a global thermonuclear war. The refugees will only be fleeing crop failure and increasingly murderous kleptocratic government.
It is already starting. Lots of governments are flirting with dictatorship, and many have got there already. US and Brazil have drawn back a hairsbreadth from the brink, but for how long?
I'm just asking you to slow down a bit, and take care of how you are now.
Otherwise, you'll never get to the point of any of the other stuff mattering anyway - and likely make it a lot worse for yourself in the meantime.
We've already figured out that last part, it's called putting a few tens of square km of solar panels and heliostats (don't need it all to be electricity) in egypt or bolivia. A square metre nets you enough energy for a few tonnes per year in realistic current tech. This will never stem the tide if we don't go to net zero first, but reversing the damage in a century is doable by covering one medium sized desert.
There are lots of potential avenues for stuffing the genie back in the bottle with a small fraction of the energy we got out of releasing it. All that's lacking is the political will to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, stop them doing more damage, and confiscate the proceeds of their crimes to start undoing the damage.
This last part isn't helped by reactionaries constantly screaming 'big number mean impossible' and 'der entropy'. Almost as if the goal of such discourse is to prevent solutions.
I never said anything of the sort, nor did anyone else near as I can tell?
Then you sullenly implied I was saying it was trivial when I contextualised the actual scale involved.
This is part of the standard reactionary fud playbook.
Now you're playing the victim and trying to imply that's never what you meant.
You might want to re-read the thread and actually follow the site rules this time?
Feel free to read my prior comments if you want to see how completely false your perception seems to be of my motivations too.
My point is this takes time and treasure, and it isn’t yet solved - and incremental improvement helps, because if we were to try to actually do things at scale with our current level of knowledge, we lack the infrastructure to do so without burning more oil.
Which will slowly change over the next couple decades and centuries, but not without a lot of fallout first due to the speed of change.
Most of the time when someone mentions CO2 air concentration it's as a prelude to pushing CCS or some vague idea about producing 100s of kW of energy per person using nuclear abundanceand I pattern matched a little preemptively.
This doesn't excuse your rhetoric about it not being urgent though. The damage may take effect later, but it is being done right now.
You might want to recheck again though on that urgency claim. I never said that either.
To recap some discussions in other threads, what I’m pointing out is due to the sheer size of the problem, this will take decades to centuries to get under control (if the models are right, barring some truly revolutionary technology), no matter what.
Depending on the level of force used, it can and likely will lead to large scale war, which burns even more oil based on the way military operations are run now (and for the foreseeable future).
Even if we did things at the urgency level of the Manhattan project with infinite resources - unless we burned more oil. Even then, probably.
This is a heavily overloaded train that has been building up speed for 150+ years.
As to if any individual should be panicking or calm about this is up to them, but I personally find panic to put someone in a place where they are easily misled and results in bad and poorly thought out decisions which can often make it worse.
Which tends to be why folks go to fascism when they’re overloaded and scared, IMO.
As to if this discussion is useful or not? I don’t know. But I figured I’d throw it out there.
That aside, yes, plant biomass to alcohol is a carbon-neutral tech that has already existed for a really long time. Let plants take carbon out of the atmosphere, ferment the starches and sugars into fuel alcohol, feed the remaining cellulose to animals, burn the fuel, eat the animals, and return most (but not all!) of the carbon back to where it came from. It's really an incredible process, but obviously its existence is a threat to the oil industry. If you've ever noticed the propaganda that ethanol is bad for engines and worse for the environment, well, just follow the money.
Brazil's sugar cane operations seem to produce more fuel than the process consumes.
Capturing carbon from a jet engine will remain problematic, or slow. Maybe we should just grow more trees, extract solid carbon from them (by burning or otherwise), and bury it in old coal mines.
not pulling the carbon out of the ground and burning it to begin with
It makes zero sense economically to expend a huge amount of energy to pull the carbon out of power plant exhaust and do something with it, when we can generate the energy without releasing the co2 in the first place.
Certain things produce CO₂ as a part of non-power-generating chemical processes, like steelmaking, or producing cement for concrete. If the CO₂ can be captured economically, it would be a great win; there are few known remotely viable alternatives.
It kind of makes sense, if energy is cheap enough. If we have surplus energy, we can remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to stop or even revert climate change. If we can desalinate water with that surplus energy, we can even use that extracted carbon to increase the amount of biomass on the surface.
Both climate change and fresh water supply are solvable with abundant cheap energy.
If we are so lucky as to have to worry about overcorrection, I'm confident we'll be able to find the 'off' switch to whatever solution in time.
For instance you are going to get CO2 as a waste product and you will not throw it away because it is precious so you will add energy to recycle it. You might just get O2 from processing of metals and stones, burn the carbon and feed the CO2 into some system for further processing. The difference with earth is you have 24 hour sunlight and the anility to concentrate it with weightless mirrors.