Plants will begin to die....followed by us.
“Plants will begin to die....followed by us.”
Easy trigger...The oceans are at equilibrium with the atmosphere via the carbonate,bicarbonate cycle. All of our food plants are C4 plants, corn,rice,wheat,barley,rye are all.grasses and every one evolved between glacial.cycles in CO2 of 150ppm to 180ppm we are at 400 ppm plus today. The oceans will compensate for any drawdown of CO2 until they release the amount absorbed over the last 500 years or so it will take equivalent time to release all that extra CO2 so the ppm of the atmosphere regardless of how much humans could take out will not drop for centuries time tables.
CO2 is a valuable chemical if you have CO2 water and electricity in surplus you can make all kinds of liquid or gas hydrocarbons with it, some are edible such as glucose, or ethanol. Both have been made with 70+% electricity to product faraday efficiency. The wind is always blowing somewhere on the great plains at night when grid demand is low where you would normally curtail that power send it to electrolytic cells and make ethanol with it. then drive a clean burning MCCI engine on that ethanol cleaner and cheaper then diesel fuel ask Clearflame to mod your diesel engine they have the peer reviewed results to show their modified engines are so clean they meet the most strict gasoline engine standards not in effect yet no diesel fueled engine comes close to being as clean. Cummins has zero,zero,zero.engines that run on ethanol or synthetic natural gas as well. Zero NOx,zero SOx ,zero particulate matter emissions. No need to change anything but the fuel system and the heads on either mod. If you have access to 2 to 4 cents per kWh power and $50 a tonne of CO2 you can beat the cost per mile of fuel for diesel at $4 per gallon.
It’s foolish to throw away perfectly good CO2 when it’s valuable to a number of industries. Colorado is a pot growing state greenhouses are in the 1000ppm levels for maximum growth rates. Truck some over for them. The Raton basin is ripe for tertiary oil recovery with CO2 flood also next door in Colorado.
Anyone who comes up with a way to get CO2 by the tonne at anything less than $50 is going to make billions just from the chemicals industry alone. Long term only synthetic fuels and nuclear,solar,wind electricity will fill where resource depletion leaves voids. Having a economic means of getting the carbon molecules needed to make synthetic hydrocarbons is a win for the species. This group using wind and gravity to drive the capture process is promising. Seawater holds 150 times the CO2 than air so if someone comes up with ocean current balls the recover rates could huge and more important cheap.