Carbon capture

[bigfield]

What technical details are preventing us from doing this instead of investigating more industrial ways which themselves will create other wastes?

You have to get more energy out than you put in.

To expand on this: Algae farming requires a lot of energy, therefore any large scale microalgae farming project may require too much energy to make it practical, and if the electricity supply is not clean then microalgae farming would actually be counterproductive to the goal of CO₂ capture.

Current status and challenges on microalgae-based carbon capture
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750583612001673
Full text: http://fulltext.study/download/1743320.pdf

...several recent life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have revealed that enormous energy input is required to cultivate microalgae and also for the harvesting and drying processes. The energy required (in the form of electricity) is normally generated from burning coal or natural gas that emits substantial amount of CO2 to the atmosphere and this could entirely eliminate all the positive effect of culturing microalgae for CO2 bio-fixation and biofuel production.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Except that we CANT fix the problem on the other end. Too much plus *any positive ammount* is still going to be *too much and then some*

We need to find a way to create negative carbon, and the only way to do that is to remove it from the atmosphere.

It doesn't matter what is cheaper. Yea, we need to stop belching it out into the air. I never said we shouldn't. But we will all be bones on a scorched sterilized rock I'd we don't actually start capturing the carbon again, because the process of global warming is compounding.

We aren't even remotely close to finding a solution yet. All methods put forward so far require plenty of fossil fuels in order to execute the plan = counter productive. What we need is a purely biological solution that feeds itself, while also not destroying the planet. Any biological organism (like a bacteria) capable of removing carbon from the atmosphere won't stop removing carbon from the atmosphere just because we ask nicely.

A huge obstacle is the political will. The fact that one of the two American presidential candidates is a global warming denier is not encouraging. This is the tragedy of the commons. Any solution that isn't basically free, won't happen. And every solution will be the most expensive thing humanity has ever invested in. Paradox!

I'm sure that the political will won't exist until it's already too late to do anything about it. Plenty of researchers think that the window of opportunity has come and gone already. So I'm more into figuring out how to get on with life after the disaster is upon us. I think that's pretty inevitable.

Also, I don't think the worst case scenario will be that bad. Humans have an amazing ability to adapt and make due with what we've got.

 

[Bomb#20]

To expand on this: Algae farming requires a lot of energy, therefore any large scale microalgae farming project may require too much energy to make it practical, and if the electricity supply is not clean then microalgae farming would actually be counterproductive to the goal of CO₂ capture.

Current status and challenges on microalgae-based carbon capture
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750583612001673
Full text: http://fulltext.study/download/1743320.pdf

...several recent life cycle assessment (LCA) studies have revealed that enormous energy input is required to cultivate microalgae and also for the harvesting and drying processes. The energy required (in the form of electricity) is normally generated from burning coal or natural gas that emits substantial amount of CO2 to the atmosphere and this could entirely eliminate all the positive effect of culturing microalgae for CO2 bio-fixation and biofuel production.

We aren't even remotely close to finding a solution yet. All methods put forward so far require plenty of fossil fuels in order to execute the plan = counter productive. ...
A huge obstacle is the political will. The fact that one of the two American presidential candidates is a global warming denier is not encouraging. This is the tragedy of the commons. Any solution that isn't basically free, won't happen. And every solution will be the most expensive thing humanity has ever invested in. Paradox!

I'm sure that the political will won't exist until it's already too late to do anything about it. ...

Or as Golda Meir might have put it, climate stability will come when the environmentalists love their planet more than they hate nuclear power.

 

[barbos]

Trump is clearly AGW denier. But Clinton is not that crazy about it either. So yeah, we are doomed.
My only hope is that climatologists are somehow wrong and it's not that bad.