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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So the problem is that we don’t *want* the carbon we capture. The planet already has a very robust carbon cycle, with CO2 floating around, getting slurped up by the biosphere into things like trees, sitting there for a while, then progressively drizzling it’s way back into the atmosphere through processes like decomposition (when the tree dies), etc. A very very small amount of carbon ends up *sequestered* and turning into chemicals like peat moss or (eventually) coal and oil, but this happens on geological timescales.
When carbon is sequestered in this fashion, it no longer participated in the carbon cycle, and thus no longer contributes to the balance of our biosphere (including warming effects). Our problem is not that we’ve added CO2 to the atmosphere. Our problem is that we got the CO2 *from the ground*. We have been taking massive amounts carbon that has been out of circulation for hundreds of millions of years and adding it all back into the system all at once.
Put another way: burning tree logs isn’t a problem (the carbon you release was already in the biosphere), but burning oil absolutely is (the carbon you release hasn’t seen oxygen since before mammals were cool).
The only useful thing we can do with captured carbon is bury it in the ground, taking it back out of circulation and ensuring it can no longer interact with the biosphere. As mentioned, there is actually a very natural process for doing this, it’s just so very very slow compared to how rapidly we’re digging up ancient hydrocarbons and lighting them on fire, so it’s not a great situation all around.
This, btw, is why you can’t “offset” carbon emissions by planting trees.
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