Goodbye Global Warming!...Hello Terraforming?

silance writes "Here is an article from Science Daily detailing a new method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale and at normal concentrations. Previous systems require placement near high concentration centers such as power plants, and do not address low-concentration sources (such as internal combustion engines) which are responsible for half of the world's carbon dioxide pollution. The article descibes the technology as scalable to the point of repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels! Next stop, Mars..." I seem to remember something like this in SimEarth ^? - but I'm not going to hold my breath (Ha! I pun!) waiting for this.

Comments

What about trees?

[evilviper]

When did trees go out of fashion?

Why invest so much money trying to replicate what just about all plants do naturally? I mean, geez, perhaps we will surpass plants' abilities to process Carbon Dioxide, but do you think it will run on water, Carbon Dioxide & dirt?

The figures are extremely optimistic

[arivanov]

As a chemist I can say that the idea of capturing CO2 with CaO on an industrial scale is extremely optimistic.

It will consume huge amounts of energy to convert back and the efficiency will be very low. The figures come out so optimistic only if you forget about the fact that CaO gets covered by Ca carbonate quickly and in the absence of water the diffusion of CO2 to the remaining CaO will slow to a crawl.

Only alternative to this is to disperse the CaO to micron sizes which means emitting insane amounts of dust into the atmosphere. Same is valid for extracting back. Unless you make the CaCO3 granules of micron or less size the energy efficiency in recovering CaO is very low.In either case you either need huge amounts of water or you will pepper with CaCO3 dust everything several thousands miles windward.

This reeks of "reaserch" sponsored by specific global warming villains. Just the mentioning of "there is enough fossil fuels" about says it all. No names mentioned... We know them all...

other solutions?

[Apps]

For 20 cents per gallon, you could subsidise a better fuel such as Biodiesel which absorbs more carbon while growing than it emits while being used as fuel.

Also you could plant a lot of trees!!