Entropy? Never heard of it.

I've heard there's a practical green solution to carbon capture. The units are practically maintenance free and power themselves with solar energy. This allows to deploy them on many small patches of land. The captured carbon is stored in solid organic compounds that may be used as building materials. It may sound to sci-fi to be true, but it's actually just trees.

Yeah, it's different. I think the machine on the left is an infinite energy machine. Those will never work.

The machine on the right is a carbon capture machine which does work. But not well enough. Are fast enough to solve any of the problems that we have.

I'm fine with playing around with a carbon capture machine and seeing if we can improve it, but I would never want to rely solely on it.

I want to try a thousand solutions to the global warming problem. Including societal and government changes. Cuz you know otherwise we all die.

This is wrong, or perhaps I misundertand.

Entropy is a different concept from economic viability.

The rule of non-decreasing entropy applies to closed systems.

A carbon capture system running on solar energy on Earth (note: wind energy is converted solar energy) is not a closed system from the Earth perspective - its energy arrives from outside. It can decrease entropy on Earth. Whether it's economically viable - totally different issue.

...and I don't think the Sun gets any worse from us capturing some rays.

Just checked the numbers, for those interested.

A gas power plant produces around. 200-300kWh per tonne of CO2.

Capture costs 300-900kWh per tonne captured.

So this is basically non viable using fossil fuel as the power. If you aren't, then storage of that power is likely a lot better.

It's also worth noting that it is still CO2 gas. Long term containment of a gas is far harder than a liquid or solid.

That small red bulb counteracts the entropy argument because you bring energy (and quite a lot of I recall) into the system.

Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.

There are plenty of arguments to be made against direct air capture, but entropy isn't one of them. Nobody ever claimed this is some kind of perpetuum mobile.

Even if we went to zero emissions soon, we'd still want to decrease CO2 over time to reverse the effects of climate change. Capturing co2 is always going to be much more energy intensive than not emitting it in the first place, but sometimes you don't have another choice.

The point is to use a low carbon power source to power it.

The problem isn't a missing technology. it's our political and economic system.

I'm all for advancing tech but nothing is going to work until we fix our behavior. We use fossil fuels because they're profitable and allow or growth-at-all-cost economy. There's nothing for which they're the only option. Only a few things for which they're the best option; the power grid and transit aren't on that list.

Yes but no. The two actual uses of carbon capture is to remove the co2 from the air before it would happen naturally and the other is making fuel sustainable for retro or novelty vehicles. You dont have to stop selling gas cars if all the fuel they use is made with carbon capture. This makes the fuel more expensive but more sustainable. Once you have driven a 911 or skyline you will understand why someone would want to drive a gas car ;) Also, technically you are going from a higher energy fuel to lower energy so as long as you can do something with the co2 it abides by thermodynamics but the problems arise when you consider real world losses.

TLDR: carbon capture is a technology we should use after we stopped polluting to fix the earth.

Carbon capture is problematic. If I remember the area required to reduce C02 would be the size of Georgia and the air intake would be pulling in hurricane force winds. The numbers could be off but it would be a massive project that would require to be built by probably CO2 dumping infrastructure like factories.

Personally I'd say it would be better to colonize the Pacific Ocean so algae goes in deep ocean to be a carbon sink

the picture on the right isn't demonstrating an engine. They simply use renewable energy to power the fans that suck in the air.

Doesn't change the fact that industrial carbon capture is a scam, and most of that captured CO2 is later released back into the environment to help extract oil from old wells.

https://www.aogr.com/magazine/sneak-peek-preview/carbon-capture-boosting-oil-recovery

That's essentially how many gases are made from mixtures, like notrogen or oxygen. Showing this as something new tells a lot about author's uderstanding. Carbon capture is not about making entirely new tech, it's optimization, and that's where startups suck at everything except for getting and then wasting cash.

Where are we putting all this CO2?

Just wait until they figure out how much carbon is captured by planting a tree.

AI will develop a reaction to turn atmospheric CO2 into electricity and oxygen and then we’ll have nothing to worry about in our future except for the constant threat of combustion.