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 are multiple methods that capture carbon into a solid, and you’re probably imagining something that falls into the [Direct Air Capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture) category, but it’s really hard to beat plants in terms of efficiency and economy when it comes to turning atmospheric carbon into a useful solid form.
The amount of carbon we need to make carbon fiber is much, much smaller than the amount of carbon we need to take out of the atmosphere to stop global warming.
The global output of carbon fiber is about 100,000 tons per year. We emit that much CO2 every minute. Even if we transitioned the entire carbon fiber industry so that it only used carbon captured from the air AND we made sure that all carbon fiber facilities obtained 100% of the their energy and their resources from carbon neutral sources (which would be a hugely expensive project) it would not make a measurable difference in net CO2 in the atmosphere.
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.
There are multiple methods that capture carbon into a solid, and you’re probably imagining something that falls into the [Direct Air Capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture) category, but it’s really hard to beat plants in terms of efficiency and economy when it comes to turning atmospheric carbon into a useful solid form.
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.
Carbon is turned into a useful form all the time. Wood, grass, natural gas, oil, coal to name a few useful forms. Oh, you want it done quickly, and there is the problem.
The amount of carbon we need to make carbon fiber is much, much smaller than the amount of carbon we need to take out of the atmosphere to stop global warming.
The global output of carbon fiber is about 100,000 tons per year. We emit that much CO2 every minute. Even if we transitioned the entire carbon fiber industry so that it only used carbon captured from the air AND we made sure that all carbon fiber facilities obtained 100% of the their energy and their resources from carbon neutral sources (which would be a hugely expensive project) it would not make a measurable difference in net CO2 in the atmosphere.
Carbon is turned into a useful form all the time. Wood, grass, natural gas, oil, coal to name a few useful forms. Oh, you want it done quickly, and there is the problem.
The problem is CO2 is ‘ash’, already oxidized carbon. You have to put the energy it took to burn in the first place to get it back to carbon form. So you’d need a huge solar plant or other renewable energy. But then plants do a better job of it already.
The problem is CO2 is ‘ash’, already oxidized carbon. You have to put the energy it took to burn in the first place to get it back to carbon form. So you’d need a huge solar plant or other renewable energy. But then plants do a better job of it already.
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