No. of Recommendations: 3
The NetPower process has been demonstrated in a large pilot plant in LaPorte Texas and the first commercial scale unit is being built at an OXY facility in Big Spring Texas.
I have always wondered how would "we" store all the CO2 that needs to be sequestered to have this be meaningful?
Burning fossil fuels produces about 40 billion tons a year of CO2. The CO2 actually weighs more than the fossil fuels did since C weighs 14 and each oxygen weighs 16 so more than 2/3 of the weight of CO2 comes from the oxygen in the air attached to it.
So you have some idea about the infrastructure required to get something like 40 billion tons a year of fossil fuel to burn, the 5 million oil wells in the US alone, the coal mines moving mountains to get the coal etc. To put back just the carbon just at a rate that we would negate further increase in CO2 from our yearly fossil fuel usage seems like an incredibly massive undertaking.
Now you may have noticed that if CO2 weighs more than 2X as much as C without the O2, that we could conceivably remove the O2 from the CO2 and have nice dense blocks of Carbon, and could probably sequester them by, say, digging holes in the ground and burying the carbon. There is one problem that makes this approach INCONCEIVABLE. And that is the entire way we got useful energy from the carbon in fossil fuels was by oxidizing it. It would cost us AS MUCH ENERGY AS WE HAD GOTTEN from the carbon in the fossil fuels to pull the O2 off the carbon in order to drastically simplify the sequestration challenge.
Indeed, if we were to sequester by taking the O2 off C and buring the C, we would have invented the inverse-coal-mine. It would be cheaper to just buy coal mines and shut them down, leaving the black carbon in them already buried, then to suck CO2 out of the air and apply massive amounts of energy to pull the O2 off it and then spend energy burying the C (Carbon) underground. Don't take it out in the first place and save everybody a lot of time, money, and trouble.
But if any of you reading this thread have some idea how we are planning to sequester an amount of CO2 which is larger than the mass of fossil fuels we removed from the ground in the first place, I'd be interested in knowing.
This would seem to be an essential piece of information in taking CO2 sequestration even a little bit seriously, and not just performative "interpretive climate dance" with which oil companies can entertain the hoi polloi.
Cheers,
R:)
