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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We can mine gold from seawater. We don’t do it because it’s not economically feasible.
We can desalinate seawater into fresh water, but there are very few places in the world where it isn’t cheaper to just pipe in fresh water. The hope is that as more and more people get desperate enough to do it, the technology will get both more efficient and cheaper.
Carbon, though, is a bit different. We don’t actually do much directly with carbon. It’s a very cheap material, and mostly the commercial value of carbon is the added value that plants create while they grow, and in very expensive processes that create very very fancy organic (carbon-containing) molecules. It’s cheaper and more practical for captured carbon to just be stored as bricks or in barrels, and for existing industrial carbon users to continue working with known suppliers and known process chains.
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