For many years now I have wondered why we aren’t able to turn the air captured carbon into useful things like carbon fiber or carbon nanotube batteries. surely there must be some way of doing this through the magic of chemistry.
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There‘s several uses for carbon dioxide, not all of them solid:
Large-scale and industrial uses:
– Urea production. Urea is used as a fertilizer. Naturally it‘s found in animals and plays a major role in their metabolism
– enhanced oil recovery. It‘s a method for extracting oil from an oil field that can‘t be harvested by typical methods anymore.
– carbonated drinks. Under high pressure Carbon Dioxide dissolves in water, forming carbonic acid. At normal pressure and temperature that breaks back down into water and CO_2, causing the beverage to bubble
– it‘s one of the most commonly used inert gasses. Pneumatic systems (hydraulics but with air) often use it. Many consumer products that need pressurized gas use CO2
– liquid CO2 is a good solvent for specific chemicals that were traditionally dissolved with more dangerous chemicals. Btw that‘s also how coffee is decaffeinsted
– CO2 extinguishers. If you compress a gas and cool it to room temperature and then let it decompress it‘ll cool down really fast. For CO2 it goes so far that it creates dry ice.
– for the same reason it can be used as a refrigerant
– it‘s essential for the production of dry ice. Like, dry ice literally is solid CO2
– as far as i know it‘s not done widely but it has been proposed that you could bubble CO2 in a puddle of algae to promote their growth, which could be converted to biodiesel
Lately E-Fuels have gaines a lot of attention aswell. Basically you‘re reversing combustion. Cleanly Burning a hydrocarbon (diesel and gas are mixtures of those) breaks it down into CO2 and water. E-Fuels use a lot of energy to convert water and CO2 back into a fuel, which could then be burned again.
There‘s probably other uses aswell, but i think i covered all the major ones
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