Direct capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere seems a hideously difficult and expensive way to go about it, since atmospheric CO₂ is only 417 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. If you want to do carbon capture and sequestration, it is far more practical and efficient to capture at the point of emission, such as flue gas from fossil fuel power plants, cement kilns, and natural gas reforming plants for hydrogen production. But the environmental whackos don’t want to talk about that, since they want to eliminate all of those sources of CO₂ emission entirely, not reduce their impact.
Carbon dioxide is a valuable compound – useful for increasing food production in greenhouses and for food preservation, for example.
It seems really perverse to take resources & energy that could be used to build schools & hospitals for the downtrodden and instead use those scarce resources to throw away something valuable. A little like the old picture of the gangster using a $100 bill to light his cigar. Carbon Capture & Underground Storage is quite simply bad engineering – doing less with more.
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
Bader airport was owned and operated by the City of Atlantic City New Jersey. It was ONE mile from the casinos. I landed there in December 2004: it was dead—totally abandoned!!
I remarked that this was crazy! What a great location. A fellow pilot with me remarked, “No matter how absurd or irrational—SOMEONE is making money from it!!”
THAT, in a nutshell, is Climate “Change” and the “secure” southern border.
Charlie Smith, a cofounder of the DoE Energy Information Administration (& the guy who financed the second neural net summer using System Development Foundation funds) knew I was from Iowa and interested in replacing soybeans with algae biomass. When he and I found ourselves, quite by accident, one county from each other in SW Iowa circa 2008, he asked me to come up with a market for CO2 profitable enough to reengineer all fossil fuel elex in the US to burn coal in plants that capture and purify CO2 at the plant and ship the wastes back to the mine of origin.
I chose soybeans as the market to beat in hopes that the market for algae wouldn’t saturate before financing the required macroengineering. The thing that made it all work was a density-difference photobioreactor patent I found (after trying to get numbers out of a variety of algae cultivation techs and getting the cold shoulder) that reduces the CAPEX and OPEX cost per area far below other algae cultivation systems.
Of course, this doesn’t sequester – it merely offsets CO2. But a side-benefit is that it looks like it puts soybeans out of business (assuming I did the numbers correctly) while creating enough protein and oils to basically feed the world. Gates foundation wasn’t interested because, to it wasn’t “on strategy”. The strategy? Come up with tech that sub-Sharan Africans can be trained to become self-sufficient in – or at least that was my impression.
However, when I went to coal-fired ammonia synthesis to simplify the system (avoiding wind) it raised the algae supply so much that it would over-saturate the world market for food. Wind can’t be colocated with the desert southwest (I used the Dakotas for air+water electric NH3 synthesis) although a pipeline network could possibly fly.
Of course I did all this work back before the big drop in solar elex. I haven’t gone back and redone the numbers for the current generation of solar electric for NH3 synthesis. It might work that way.
PS: I had to alter the mediawiki software to act like a huge spreadsheet with one page per “cell” or quantity calculated so I could keep track of all the cites, etc.
