alt Hacker Newswhat if we could capture carbon at a significant rate? I know that we can't right now, it's a hypothetical
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bgnn • yesterday at 10:38 PM
It's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.
what if we could capture carbon at a significant rate? I know that we can't right now, it's a hypothetical
It's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.
Ideally we would but that costs energy, and if we can't afford the energy to completely remove the need for fossil fuels, spending even more on capturing it again seems still far out of reach.
Part of the reason it is still far away despite the increasing prevalence of renewable sources is that not everything is a 1:1 replacement between electric power and fossil fuels, fertilizer and many of our chemical productions can be done without fossil fuels, but at 10x the energy cost that we currently use.
We like to focus on things like cars and engines, but those were always an easy win because internal combustion is only 30% efficient to start with while electric motors are 90%+. But as a source of chemical process energy not only can fossil fuel sources be more efficient than as a motor fuel, our electric energy replacement for chemical synthesis and purification is not always very efficient itself, on top of being an energy intensive product already.
I think last time I looked, which was admittedly a few years ago now, fertilizer production with fossil fuels consumed 1% of the world's electrical production, and the best anyone could hope for in synthesizing nitrogen from the air and not using any fossil fuels was at least a 10 fold increase in energy requirements. Which means clean fertilizer requires at least 10% of total world electrical production, which is obviously an ass ton. Perhaps we have slightly more efficient fertilizer synthesis now, but at the same time farmland utilization has dropped which means a higher reliance and demand for artificial fertilizer.
Of course I think this is all avoidable if we weren't complete slaves to capital markets and just built tons of nuclear reactors and solar plants even if it that means they weren't all profit makers. Energy production and availability is ultimately one of our largest bottlenecks across almost every industry and human endeavor.