Why is carbon capture technology so hard to scale up so we could use fissile fuels while we bridge the gap to clean energy dependency?
In: Engineering
Because we don’t have a way to capture carbon that’s energy-efficient enough to make it worth it. It takes energy to capture (isolate) and sequester (store in a way it won’t come back out) carbon. And since we get most of our energy *from* carbon-based fuels, the mere act of capturing it causes us to emit more carbon. If we can trap enough we could come out net-ahead but, right now, it doesn’t make economic or technical sense.
Most of the carbon we care about is running around as CO2. We have relatively good ways to isolate that if we do it at the source, which makes some technical sense for very large point sources like power plants, but is much harder to do at the tiny point-source, like every individual car engine. You can strip it right out of the atmosphere but the CO2 concentration is very low so that’s a slow/difficult/inefficient process.
Once you have the CO2, you can’t just convert it back to carbon, that takes more energy that you got out in the first place. You can have plants do it for you (photosynthesis) but we don’t have enough plants. So you’re mostly stuck using the CO2 as-is, and CO2 really doesn’t like being anything other than a gas at our conditions. You can liquify or freeze it, but that takes tons of energy to do and maintain.
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