Please excuse my ignorance – I’m not a scientist but always wonder: there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere. There have been successful trials with extracting it from there. CO2 goes into drinks. And yet it is artificially created for that specific purpose. I even heard claims that beer manufacturers have been running short on CO2 due to supply issues and Covid and what not. Can you explain?
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There’s a set of technologies called “carbon capture and storage”.
These do what you’re thinking about: they “capture” CO2 from the air (or directly from power plant emissions) and then “store” it in some way. For example, CO2 might be pumped into the same kind of underground reservoirs that shale gas gets extracted from. Of course, whatever that storage is needs to be pretty reliable – you don’t want all that CO2 to just start leaking back out again.
This isn’t easy or cheap to do at the scale necessary to make a difference. To take the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere half way down to pre-industrial levels means capturing and storing 50 gigatonnes of CO2. That’s fifty billion tonnes, all of which has to both be captured and stored.
At the moment the technology just isn’t there to make it feasible.
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