H LV <hveeder...@gmail.com> wrote: The article on Carbon Engineering I posted in thread called Carbon Capture > and Renewable Fuels makes it clear that they are not hiding the fact that > they need an outside energy source. >
Of course they do! It is not a perpetual motion machine. As you say, the authors make this clear. If the source of energy were solar, nuclear, wind or cold fusion, this might be a viable way to pull significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. However, if it were cold fusion, we would not need the carbon for synthetic chemical fuel, so the only purpose would be to reduce CO2 and the threat of global warming. I think you could accomplish that more readily by planting millions of trees and then, when they grow old and start to die, by making charcoal out of them and burying it in the ground. That would take decades but it could be done on a massive scale, and having all those trees would be a great benefit in other ways. I hope that we will not need the land because I hope agriculture will be done indoors, and meat grown *in vitro*. This might be a good way to make synthetic fuel from wind electricity, but I suppose electrolysis and some sort of hydrogen-based fuel would be better. It does not take much water. You can even do it in arid places such as North & South Dakota, where they have astounding amounts of potential wind energy. I have read that if their potential wind energy were used to make synthetic liquid fuel, it would produce more fuel than all of the oil coming out of Middle East. (The potential energy when built up; not present-day wind energy.) - Jed
