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 technically can, but in practice it’s just doesn’t make economical sense. Take carbon fiber for example, we know of several ways to synthetize it. But not all method are equal, the one we use the most is the cheapest method.
Now we want to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, then transform that CO2 into carbon fiber. What are the chances that this specific method will be cheaper than the cheapest method we developed so far or that we will develop in the future? Chance are, creating carbon fiber that way will always be more expensive.
Then there is the problem of scale. We produce around 140,000 tons of carbon fiber each year worldwide. This seem a lot, but we emit 37,000,000 tons of CO2 each year, around 27% of that mass is carbon so about 10 billions of carbon each year, which is more than 70 times more than our current production of carbon fiber. My point here is that even if 100% of our production of carbon fiber was made from atmospheric CO2, this would remove about 1% of the CO2 we emit into the atmosphere each year. It wouldn’t help, it would only make carbon fiber more expensive.
This is also the problem with most things we can or want to make out atmospheric carbon. We just don’t need most of those material in large enough quantity to make a dent in the massive emission of CO2.
Even plastic we only produce 380 millions tons each year. Even if we could create a replacement for plastic made exclusively of carbon and that 100% of all the plastic we do would be done this way, it would only represent less than 4% of our emission.
Material we used to make stuff, we typically don’t use a lot of it on the grand scheme of things. Don’t get me wrong, 380 millions tons each year is massive, but not comparatively to the scale of CO2 emission.
Something that we consume would be closer in scale. Plastic we build something with it, it usually last at least a couple of years. But something like gasoline we consume on a regular basis. The world consume about 366 millions of tons of gasoline per year. Now we are getting closer to the scale of CO2 emission.
Obviously, removing CO2 from the atmosphere to create gasoline which gonna release CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t the ideal situation. But it’s not like we can stop using gasoline all together, so at least this way we wouldn’t be adding new CO2 into the atmosphere.
The question is can we produce gasoline cheap enough? Right now no, but as the technology improve and the price of gasoline keep increasing we might reach a point where it become a lot closer in price, but it could take a long time.
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