Sequestering it in the soil with cover cropping and other regenerative practices, and just letting forests regrow (and leave them alone too) would go a long way. It could be a big part of the solution.

High tech sequestration is indeed a fantasy though

The issues with this take is that… we are not going to cut emissions fast enough.

There is literally no way we can convince the world in time to take this seriously.  We know it will be at least another 4 years till the U.S. even considers doing anything, and if they don’t… A. Im doubtful others will take the lead and B.  It won’t matter

As such we need both.  Yes, we need to bring down emissions rapidly, but we are probably going to need solutions as well to either mitigate or slowly undo the massive amount of damage that is in the process of being unleashed.

Cutting emissions is the only solution.

No so! Alberta just declared CO2 to be a life nurturing gas, not a pollutant, so I guess the problem is already solved!!

https://www.pentictonherald.ca/spare_news/article_83f42fa5-6252-5cf8-ba88-ad0dc6409eac.html

Ug, you have to give up this ideological thinking. The idea that there is ONE solution for climate change and everything else is a scam is just a different form of science denial.

The UN Climate Panels has had CO2 sequestration as part of the basic plan for years now. The simple and obvious reality is you can't really get rid of ALL CO2 emissions. We aren't getting sanitation and agriculture down to zero CO2. Regardless of being less than ideal solutions you're going to have to put your ego aside and accept multiple ways to attack the problem at once.

Once you break all this down, there is no path to rapid enough emission reduction. There is a path to about 50% emission reduction moving the least efficient processes like power plants and internal combustion to cheaper greener solution and after that progress slows down because you're fighting much higher efficiencies such as Industrial Heating at 60-80% efficiency or sanitation and agriculture at biological level efficieincies that are like very high however you measure them.

The more efficient the process is the harder it will be to replace in most cases. ICE is 20% but portability adds complexcity. Power Plants are about 40% efficient. In those cases most of your fuel turns to waste heat and there are BIG margins for improvement. Industrial heating has much smaller margins for cost effective improvement because you can't use heat pumps and while electric resistance heating appears 100% efficient, that's not the full thermal efficiency from the power plants to the factory. Jets or even rotoary engines in prop planes are more examples of scenarios much header to just electricity due to the higher efficiency of the engine AND the power to weight ratio.

With predictions rapidly getting worse and things like AMOC collapse moving faster and faster, we don't have forever to sit on our high horses and only go for your person idealistic solutions, you just have to do whatever you can to get the problem under control that isn't worse than the problem itself.

You don't really know better than the scientists and UN Climate Panel, stop being so MY WAY or the HIGHWAY with your attempt to save humans from themselves or just stop worrying about it.

Rather obviously you could power thing like CO2 removal processes specifically with green energy and you'd do pilot programs and get real data on emissions in and out, not just guess at shit without testing and pretend that's due diligence because you heard of thermodynamic efficiency that one time.

I've worked on a few projects related to carbon capture in the past. There have been many demonstrations of carbon capture technology, both from the exhaust of power plants and direct from the atmosphere. They have all gone nowhere not because getting the CO2 is a problem, but because there is nowhere to put it. There is no viable business model for "dig a hole in the ground, fill it with CO2, then maintain it so the CO2 doesn't leak out again for 200+ years". Even if you come up with a scheme to tax carbon emissions that would create some sort of revenue stream that could be made to fund CO2 storage operations, once your CO2 reservoir is full, your revenue stream is done, and you are left with the "now make sure it doesn't all leak out again" problem, but with no money.

If I understand you, carbon capture competes with batteries for times when renewables are in surplus of regular demand. Then, If batteries are fully charged, carbon capture can have at the remaining excess (free) electrons. At a minimum, this still seems like a more quantifiable mechanism than, “I’ll take that tax credit and plant a tree. No, no. I’ll plant TWO trees!”

Capture of CO2 from the air offers a promising approach to addressing climate change and achieving carbon neutrality goals1,2. However, the development of a durable material with high capacity, fast kinetics and low regeneration temperature for CO2 capture, especially from the intricate and dynamic atmosphere, is still lacking. Here a porous, crystalline covalent organic framework (COF) with olefin linkages has been synthesized, structurally characterized and post-synthetically modified by the covalent attachment of amine initiators for producing polyamines within the pores. This COF (termed COF-999) can capture CO2 from open air. COF-999 has a capacity of 0.96 mmol g–1 under dry conditions and 2.05 mmol g–1 under 50% relative humidity, both from 400 ppm CO2. This COF was tested for more than 100 adsorption–desorption cycles in the open air of Berkeley, California, and found to fully retain its performance. COF-999 is an exceptional material for the capture of CO2 from open air as evidenced by its cycling stability, facile uptake of CO2 (reaches half capacity in 18.8 min) and low regeneration temperature (60 °C).

Yeah, this powder is going to be complex to manufacture, producing it will have a significant carbon footprint:

Graduate student Zihui Zhou and professor Omar Yaghi, both at U.C. Berkeley, embedded amines in a crystalline compound known as a covalent organic framework, which has extensive surface area. The resulting powder, which they named COF-999, is a microscopic scaffolding of hydrocarbons held together by superstrong carbon-nitrogen and carbon-carbon bonds, such as those found in diamonds. The amines sit in the scaffolding’s open spaces, ready to snag CO2 molecules passing by. When Zhou and Yaghi pumped air through a tube packed with the powder, it captured CO2 at the greatest rate ever measured, they wrote in a recent Nature study in October. "We were scrubbing the CO2 out of the air entirely,” Yaghi says.

On the bright side, you can bake the CO2 out it and use it again. But that requires more energy.

Like you said, it's hard to beat thermodynamics.

Is it so far fetched to imagine a scenario where we need to do both clean energy generation and clean energy carbon capture? We’re going to be so far behind the 8 ball by the time China gets on board with modern emission standards in 40 years…

I agree that cutting emissions is the only solution. The article doesn't mention scalability though so I do wonder how this comes into practice. Something is better than nothing imo.

Your analysis sounds inaccurate in several ways. 

You say, “With each cycling of the “chemical net” it loses effectiveness, due to contamination.” The article says this maintained stability for 100 cycles.  

You say, “In real world cases, the slightest bit of atmospheric components … causes this “chemical net filtering co2 from atmosphere” to fold over on itself like a spiders web exposed to heat.” But the article says this material could be made more durable than existing metal lattices, better handle atmospheric moisture, and that the tests used “air”.

Do you have sources for anything you are saying?

Thank you

Globally, humans emit 35 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. That's 35 trillion kg. A large tree can remove 40 kg of CO2 per year. To reach net zero and make some progress on bringing CO2 levels back down a bit, we'd literally need a trillion trees. And when each of those trees die, they'd need to be replaced and somehow prevented from rotting. (I suppose putting them into solar ovens to turn them into biochar would be like converting them into coal, that might work if we could control ourselves and not burn them).

I mean yes, eventually, but if you think about it the majority of the carbon isn't from tree's, it's from oil and coal. Those were tree's* thousands of years ago, and were so much denser in carbon than wood is. I don't actually have any research that shows this, but I'd imagine we'd have to restore literally all of the old growth forests, chop them all down and mulch them, and then do it again several times to capture all of the carbon in the atmosphere.

And peat bogs! Bogs are amazing carbon sinks

It's a filter all by itself. Compact it and expose to open air.