As for "less lossy" even if it's not always a commercial winner alone: my guess would be there's always going to be an easier way to get CO2 than "from the air", unless you're on Venus or Mars: take tree (or coal), cut up, put chips in oven, set on fire. Much higher CO2 concentration than air, likely to make most things that need CO2 much easier.
* https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-ethylene-industry-repo...
In some climate zones, grasslands do it better than forests.
https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/grasslands-mo...
Which makes it obvious that the entire idea is pretty pointless, burn fossil fuels to generate energy to then use it to unburn fossil fuels. To do it with renewable energy, we still need the same capacity as the fossil fuel capacity and when we have that - ignoring issues like fluctuations in renewable sources - it makes more sense to just use the renewable sources directly instead of using them to undo burning fossil fuels.
If you want to use the process to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, then you first have to replace all fossil fuels with renewable ones, then you can use additional renewable capacity to remove carbon. Add additional 10 % capacity to the world energy capacity to undo one year of carbon emissions every decade, at least to a first approximation.
To come back to the initial question, you essentially need an industry the same order of magnitude as the fossil fuel industry to have a meaningful impact. Not going to happen anytime soon.
You can make paper products including things like cardboard and packaging.
You can put livestock on it and produce meat.
Or if you just want to sequester carbon, you can harvest it and bury it deep in the ground.
If you use grasslands for grazing cattle you get meat, or also wool with sheep. Sequestering carbon into grassland soil (or into any soil, really) makes them better at absorbing and retaining rainwater, reducing the risks of catastrophic floods in the watershed area.
And the GP is quite wrong, because almost everything will be more efficient than trees or grass. Machines are just way more expensive, that's why nobody ever made them.
Some places can plant trees, others grasslands. Or whatever, but it seems like there is a lot of money to create an industrial process that can be commercialized instead of just doing the work naturally...
This would true if we need to re-create the original molecule with it's stored energy (plus losses of course).
However, it seems this is a misapprehension of the task. Instead of trying to recover the entire hydrocarbon molecule, we're "just" trying to extract or recombine the CO2 reactant.
Without doing the chemistry or the math, it seems likely that a variety of methods of either preferentially attracting CO2, or combining it into simpler lower-energy-dense molecules to be collected, would require less energy as was in the original hydrocarbon, often substantially less.
Seems it should be an inequality, not an equality. Or am I missing something?
Amine based carbon capture at the smokestack captures about 90% of CO2 with a 20% energy penalty. There's a new natural gas turbine design that captures 100% at no energy penalty (Allam cycle).
Synthetic hydrocarbons let you use renewable energy shifted in time, space, modality or avoid capital costs.
- applications that can't use batteries, like long distance plane flights
- applications where it's cheaper to spend 6X as much for fuel than it is to buy a new vehicle
- for storage more than a few days
etx
But that is not really carbon removal from the atmosphere, you take some out and later put it back. The article however frames the endeavor as removing carbon from the atmosphere, either the one we are currently burning or even the one we burnt in the past. Carbon removal by definition means we can not burn it later somewhere else, we have to permanently store it somewhere. There is no point in turning the carbon into some high quality product if we then just bury it somewhere, you want something cheap to make and easy to store.
As a non-fossile source for chemicals it makes sense but that is just a small fraction of our problem as we just burn most of the stuff.
If you capture the carbon dioxide, then for every supertanker full of oil you burn you need to permanently get rid of a supertanker full of liquid carbon dioxide. This is of course a project of insane scope given that we burn billions of tons every year. So in order to not have to deal with the waste, what if we just turn it into something useful that people will pay for? Because that costs a lot of energy, the energy we just extract. And now you want to put it back in? To get back what you just burned or at least something similar that you could almost certainly produce more efficiently directly from the oil?
That said, it still seems an extremely useful measure, even if we keep using only single-digit percentages for long-use plastics instead of hydrocarbon fuels.
Let's assume that for the next century or so a bunch of applications will continue to require the convenience and energy-density of liquid hydrocarbons. In order to avoid extracting more and further increasing CO2 levels, we'll have to input significant energy to reconstitute them from CO2. Obviously, inputting that energy from more fossil fuels defeats the purpose, but using renewables will work; and now they are even cheaper energy inputs.
The result would be a cycle of newly fabricated hydrocarbon fuels, which can be custom-optimised for each application. No new CO2 would enter the atmosphere and the existing levels would be reduced by the amount of hydrocarbon fuels (and plastics, etc.) fabricated and in existence throughout the entire chain of existence, fabrication, storage, distribution, transport, in-vehicle, right up to the moment it is burned. With cheaper renewable energy inputs and optimized custom fabrication, it would likely get cheaper than the existing drill/pump/transport/refine process. And, it's permanently sustainable, and as liquid hydrocarbon fuel use declines, custom production can be converted to storable materials.