How Much Energy Would It Take to Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air?

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Climate Change News

Thermodynamics,Physics

A physicist runs the math on direct air capture and warns: This tech won't save us from climate catastrophe.

Climate change. It's bad and it's getting worse. The main cause is burning fossil fuels, which spews CO2 into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, as we all know too well by now, is a greenhouse gas, meaning it absorbs heat radiation from the Earth, preventing it from escaping out into space. A certain amount of this is good—without CO2 the Earth would be so cold, the oceans would freeze. But in preindustrial times the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 280 parts per million .

We could then use two magical moving walls. One wall lets only blue balls through, the other lets only red balls through. After moving these walls, we would have a gas separation. Basically, we're compressing both of these gases from their original space into separate, orderly compartments, like socks and shorts in different drawers. Let's say we start with a volume V; now there are N1 red balls in a new volume V1, and N2 blue balls in the volume V2.

 

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