MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical

The writer appears to be under the impression that CO2 is not a valuable commodity.

In fact, it is, so long as it's under enough pressure, and in the right place. In Montezuma County, Colorado, sits the McElmo dome, an ancient underground CO2 well. They pump it out, down a 500 mile pipeline, to Denver City, Texas, where it gooses oil wells into pumping more crude out. Other than making more oil and making it cheaper, not really much in terms of greenhouse gas contributions- the CO2 starts underground and ends up underground.

Kinder Morgan won't just let you back up your truck and buy some (it's already spoken for), and even if they would, they'd expect you to pay a pretty penny for what we widely consider to be waste gas.

I think MIT is doing some good work. Just wanted everyone to be mindful of the massive scale under which CO2 is already getting bought and sold.

It's not that CO2 isn't valuable on its own, but that other carbon-containing molecules are even more valuable (especially when factoring in transportation costs). This helps prove out the technoeconomics of carbon capture.

Plus, if we wind down oil extraction, we'll need new processes to produce all the precursors we use for plastics. A cheap pathway to ethylene from captured CO2 and water would be huge.

But that point drives right into this one: compressed CO2 is valuable. So the value of your carbon capture process is already very substantial after you've extracted the CO2 from the atmosphere. I mean I have a cylinder of CO2 under my kitchen counter right now for this reason.

So the question is, is this so valuable that it outweighs just selling that CO2 once you've pulled it out of the atmosphere?