Originally Posted by
Aero1900
I know that there's a ton of interest and excitement around carbon capture. I don't know how it works but it seems like you would need an absolutely massive amount of harvesting equipment to try and pull a not insignificant amount of carbon out of the air. But, maybe this is the golden ticket to bring able to continue motoring around the globe forever.
If we can't even build clean coal power plants, can we really make this work? if it's too difficult to capture the emissions coming out of a power plant, how the heck is this going to work?
I hope I'm wrong.
It's not hard to capture from air, and it's easy to scale up. Does use some significant energy, which is why nuclear is the way to go (or do it in places where you have a lot of hydro available, or maybe other green power).
Capture of carbon from coal is hard because it's energy-intensive, and they also want to remove particulates and other pollutants. Otherwise it's two steps forward, one step back as you have to burn more fossil fuel to capture the carbon from the fuel you just burned. Latest estimates on energy cost probably make that impractical coal.
But it's a step in the right direction to establish production-scale carbon-capture systems. That can prove the concept, and then the next obvious step if you need more capture is nuclear power. You could co-locate nuclear and carbon-capture plants, and you can probably do it in very remote areas, ie weather patterns will eventually mix and circulate the air globally.