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173 points rbanffy | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.337s | source
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VyseofArcadia ◴[] No.42127346[source]
Time scale is also something I want to know about. "Can I remove CO2 from the air and turn it into something valuable in a way that is cost effective?" is one question. Another question is, "Can I remove CO2 from the air and turn it into something valuable faster than a tree?"
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ben_w ◴[] No.42127397[source]
As this is more of "can we make carbon sequestering commercially viable, or at least less lossy", I'm less worried about that and would be more concerned about the global market for ethylene being "316.8 Million Tonnes in the year 2023"*, compared to the tens of gigatons of CO2 emissions — though on the plus side, I'm optimistic about removing most of those emissions and this kind of thing is still fine for the last 10%.

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...

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1. r-bryan ◴[] No.42131204[source]
A little stoichometry suggests that, ignoring oxygen, hydrogen, and energy input, the cited worldwide market for C2H4 would be satisfied by just about 1 gigaton of CO2. So if "we need to process gigatons of CO2 annually", that ethylene's gonna pile up.