So let's do some math. Let's consider natural gas. According to the US government [1], natural gas produced 1.358x10^12 kWh of power and 5.6x10^8 metric tons of CO2 so 1 metric ton of CO2 equates to ~2400 kWh of produced power.

This post suggests the energy cost is ~230kWh/ton.

This is an important sanity check because it means that (capital costs aside) and if it scales you could technically remain carbon neutral for a net output of energy.

While this is of course only in a lab and they mention "battery" one should remain skeptical (since pretty much every battery "breakthrough" is nothing more than marketing for research funding).

This may be in the paper but in this summary I didn't see anything about how the CO2 needs to be delivered. Does it need to be in a relatively pure form? What sort of preprocessing is required?

As for the capital costs, it's hard to say anything concrete here other than if silver and Gallium are catalysts, they're both relatively cheap at that scale (Gallium seems to be <$250/kg according to some quick Googling). Catalysts tend to have a lifespan so those aren't one-time costs generally but still.

It's also not clear how much of each material is required.

Not to be a broken record on HN, but I've often said--and I'll repeat here--that I don't believe altruism will solve greenhouse gas emissions and global warming: it'll only be solved when it becomes economic to do so.

Another way of putting that is when the cost of carbon capture and/or non-greenhouse gas emitting energy sources is profitable, that's when you'll see change.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

If we would charge the fossil fuel industry for the cost of destroying the environment, the millions of lives lost due to pollution, it would become infeasible to pump or mine more stuff out of the ground.

We don't need technological solutions, we need political solutions. Now

So, for $4.3 trillion dollars / year we can turn the 43 billion tonnes of CO2 we emit per year into oxygen and carbon crust. Which is twice the annual revenue for the global oil industry.

How can they capture 92% of the CO2 generated by burning coal for less energy created by burning it, creating steam, running the steam through a turbine which then runs a generator, through a switching yard, and out to the world? The Carnot limit is far less than half, and yet this can get most of the Carbon back, with a balance of almost half of the energy? I did the math on this in the thread about this last week, and it seems like over-unity, a big red flag.

The need for the worlds supply of gallium and a lot of silver and other chemicals signals more red flags.

HN Story 8 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28873458

My response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28874831

This is great. That said, to put things into perspective, the CO2 surplus we have to offset is 20 giga tonnes of CO2 every year.

I’m actually interested in using this for terraforming Venus. We’ve got plenty of energy from sunlight and very concentrated co2. To keep them at the right temperature We could build floating blimps with these machines on board.

A preprint of the paper mentioned in the post is available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347609399_Mechanica...

A tangential thought.

Since the last crash of oil prices there was a radical move toward rare earth material mining. Every minining and exploration company tried look into ways to mine and find better uses of rare earth minerals that would generate the same pre-crash oli and gas profits.

But reviewing half a decades stock research or DD of these newly pivoted mining companies I find nothing to be radical and it is often the same repackaged environmental well being rhetoric from the industry.

There is no pioneering business, leader or technology in rare earth mining. And I am often very skeptical of mining industry talking about positive environmental consequences of mining.

Even though we are divided on Musk's contribution in revolution in EV industry but he didn't push an environmental agenda IMO but he pushed for providing better consumer utility while minimzing negative environmental consequences. If rare earth industry as a whole quite non-inuitivetly provide or promise of enhanced utility (in the economic sense) without mentioning positive environmental consequences as a headline then I will believe.

Would this method be able to grow single crystal grahite crystals if it were controlled tightly? A single of crystal graphite would have a lot of useful properties much like silicon. Because of its anisotropic strength it can be much stronger and more flexible than composites. Things like turbine blades could be carved from single crystal graphite.

I would be remiss not to post the amazing LockPickingLawyer videos using Gallium to pwn locks:

https://www.youtube.com/c/lockpickinglawyer/search?query=Gal...

Having a legitimately feasible way to do carbon capture is a Good Thing as we phase out coal fired generation.

If it can be retrofitted to existing generators, then at least they stop generating CO2 into the atmosphere.

There's been a lot of nonsensical "CCS" (Carbon Capture and Storage) where the "storage" is "somehow pump it back underground where it screws the water table".

At least this mechanism captures the CO2 into a form where not only is it potentially useful, but is also easy to re-store in a stable way, potentially back to the same coal mines the original fossil fuel came from.

So you can separate it to oxygen and carbon at a 92% efficiency for €30 max or something? If you could now burn the newly donned carbon again and maybe enhance the burning with the harvested oxygen then how much is that worth as energy produced monetarily? Maybe not the eternal mover but just saying this might just be how this will play out in real life in the end (once again).

I’m not sure: is the Gallium a catalyst?

How much of the cost is the energy? Would hooking it up to a wind turbine help?

> 92% efficiency in converting a tonne of CO2, using just 230kWh of energy. They estimate this equates to a cost of around $100 per tonne of CO2.

Not sure if this is really competitive enough. Just read recently[1][2] that EEMPA based solution can capture at a cost of $47

[1] http://netl.doe.gov/projects/files/CostAndPerformanceBaselin... [2] https://scitechdaily.com/cheaper-carbon-capture-is-on-the-wa...

Will this result in an increase in O2 levels? If yes, what risk does that bring?

Buy Silver

A noble discovery...

However, even if this was an economically viable solution to the perceived problem of CO2 in the atmosphere, this doesn't help with the goal of setting up a global government and global tax, so it would be ignored.

Anthropogenic global warming, as a studied issue, is not about solving the world's problems; it's about setting up a global government with a global tax. It always has been; it hasn't even pretended to be anything else. The motivations have always been ostensibly about solving global warming, but the plans have always been very public; set up a global tax and a global government to implement this tax. That could not be more clear.

Ask yourself, if you were planning on taxing the entire planet, even if it was only .1% of their GDP (~80 billion), would you rather have that money or have some random scientist discover the solution to the problem that leads to you getting 80 billion dollars?