Why can't Carbon Dioxide be commercially extracted from the air surrounding this planet?

Question

We use Carbon Dioxide for refidgeration purposes, the oil industry uses it to assist with the extraction of oil from wells and ther must be dozens of other applications -- so why manufacture the gas when it could be extracted from the air? I understand that the oceans can absorb Carbon Dioxide so why not extract it from the air and pump it into the sea. If all of this is possible then would it not help to lower if not alleviate the growing Carbon Dioxide problem in the earth's atmosrhere?problem

Answer 1

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is only a few hundred parts per million, making it impractical to extract it from the air. Scrubbing CO2 from the air to reduce its concentration would require the processing of a significant fraction of the entire atmosphere to make any difference - again, impractical.

The best way to slow the growth of CO2 is by reducing consumption of carbon fuels. Scrubbing CO2 from exhaust would help, too, but is economically or technically infeasible in most applications.

Answer 2

That's exactly what is being suggested. There are several commercial companies working on it RIGHT NOW.

(it's called 'carbon sequestration')

There are a couple of problems, though.

Firstly, the carbon dioxide was distributed by the ENTIRE POPULATION of several industrialised nations over several generations.

To collect it all, you'd either need a mind-bogglingly big machine to process the whole atmosphere (a bit like dialysis), which would need to be built somehow (using resources and making CO2), or EVERYBODY would need to have a small one, running round the clock, using energy, and built in factories, delivered by trucks & trains...

The other problem is, it's not necessarily CO2 that's causing the problem. Industry, transport, power stations, all make a lot of the stuff, but so does the compost heap, and all the microbes in the soil that digest dead leaves & clean the water.

You and me and the other people and animals breathe the stuff out, and if you fart, well, methane has even more 'greenhouse' effect than CO2 does! And there are plenty of other substances that are even more 'greenhousey' than methane.

(Even the idea that plants soak up CO2 is wrong - they only breathe it in when they're photosynthesising, and the rest of the time (when they're most active, in the dark) they breathe oxygen IN and CO2 OUT!)

The CO2 idea has caught on so quickly because commercial organisations can benefit from 'trading permits', where everybody gets an allowed limit, and polluters can buy up the limit from somebody who's not polluting.

There is a different idea, called the Entropy Theory, which blames the amount of energy that is used by human society. All of this energy, used for heating and lighting and cooling and transport and manufacturing etcetera, eventually leaks into the environment as heat.

According to the theory, it's actually all this heat that's warming the planet, rather than the CO2 that's released by most of the processes that produce the heat.

Answer 3

Firstly, Oceans absorb carbon dioxide for several reasons:
(1) The microscopic plant life, e.g. algae, etc. and other forms of plant life that live in the oceans, e.g. seaweed,etc.

(2) Because carbon dioxide can dissolve in water.

Carbon dioxide is not used in the refridgeration process. To my knowledge refridgerants such as freon are used. They belong to a class of agents called CFCs that damage the ozone layer.

Secondly, air contains many gas elements, not just oxygen and carbon dioxide - there are other gas elements such as argon, etc,. but most of all nitrogen. In fact nitrogen makes up a huge percentage of the earth's atmosphere. I t would not make any commercial or economic sense to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and into the oceans. No matter how huge the volume of CO2 you absorb into the ocean, that same amount will find its way back into the earth's atmosphere through many intricate cycles. The problem is there is too much in the earth's atmosphere.

It is in planting forests where the solution to the atmosphere problem lies. We are cutting down too many trees every year, and we are not regrowing enough. Forests will control and adjust the carbon dioxide balance.

Answer 4

Over abundance of Carbon Dioxide produces The Red Tide a Poisonous Red Algae which Kills off Fish and Shellfish Stocks as well as destroying Coral Reef Habitatations and Environs to a Multitude of Species.

Answer 5

Cost. It takes more energy cost to extract the stuff from the atmosphere than the resulting gas is worth. Also, there is the question of scale: global CO2 emissions run on the order of ten billion metric tons per year, and there is simply no use for that much gas. Furthermore, it wouldn't really reduce the atmospheric CO2 level to do this, as most of the industrial CO2 usage ultimately gets back into the atmosphere. Although there is widespread belief that atmospheric CO2 is related to the demonstrated increase in global temperature, there isn't proof of that -- the belief is based on computer simulations, which are notoriously problematic.

Answer 6

a) It takes huge amounts of energy to do extract CO2.
b) Once it's extracted, it takes even more energy to pump it to the bottom of the ocean.

If you were to burn fossil fuels to generate energy for the extraction, ,you would create a lot more CO2 than you would remove.

You could use solar energy to extract the CO2, but that's exactly what plants do. One proposed solution is to grow a large amount of plant matter (such as plankton) and keep dumping it at the bottom of the ocean.

Answer 7

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Answer 8

We shouldn't need to, we just need to stop cutting forrests down and overfishing the seas and we would be OK.

This makes more sense than people making money from damaging our environment, and then probably us tax payers paying lots more money to fix it.

Answer 9

m

Answer 10

more trees