this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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It should be blatantly obvious just from basic thermodynamics that carbon capture cannot ever possibly be cheaper than not burning the fossil fuels in the first place.
Thermodynamics tells us it takes exactly as much to put the carbon back in as you got out of it by taking it out. So best case scenario we double the price of energy (which also means increasing the price of everything by a lot due to production costs increasing with higher energy costs) and capture as much carbon as we release.
However this is the real world and in the real world processes aren't 100% efficient. Even a hyper efficient combustion engine is only like 40% efficient in converting the stored energy into a usable form. Our carbon capture techniques suck hard at the moment, but say we improve the tech. That means in the real world we would need to increase energy costs by 4-6 times. Which probably means increasing the pricing of everything by a factor of 10.
That shows just how unsustainable our current consume heavy economy actually is. And that is assuming we have a way of capturing carbon out of the atmosphere in a way that's both efficient and long term. And do this in time before the processes we've set into motion spiral out of control.
And like you say, it puts into perspective how big of a win not releasing the carbon is.
There's nothing thermodynamically wrong with burning methane, releasing the water, and putting the CO2 back underground. Sequestration does not require un-oxidizing the carbon.
Though if we're going to bury harmful waste underground, nuclear power reduces the quantity of waste by a factor of a million.
Tick…tick…tick…
I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here. Carbon sequestration is unarguably a way to mitigate climate change, and sequestration of CO~2~ is probably the most reasonable way to do so. It doesn't need to be as a gas, as taking CO~2~ and exposing it to various oxides creates carbonates, which are generally very stable compounds like limestone.
The other commenter simply said carbon could be captured as CO~2~ and sequestered without being reduced, which is absolutely true and frankly makes much more sense from a physics/thermodynamics POV.