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It is the word "significantly" that bugs me. It is "significant" for the individuals involved, but 4000 tons is not significant to the Earth system.

Enthusiasm for carbon storage of various kinds is driven by the desperation of our situation. You've probably seen the IPCC projections to the year 2100 -- the models did not stop in 2100, rather the IPCC chooses only to show up until that point. You might look at the IPCC charts and think "easily survivable to 2100", see the curves go exactly where the eye wants to follow to 6.5 degree C in 2200. (At that point I don't think homo sap will be burning fossil fuels 'significantly')

The economics look favorable to capture carbon from a fermentation process (think an ethanol plant in Brazil) then compress it to 1500 psi and inject it into a saline aquifer. You could capture more carbon if you burned the product and captured the CO2 there but either you have to strip the CO2 from the atmospheric nitrogen in the exhaust or remove the nitrogen before burning, say

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_looping_combustion

but the economics of the first option are all too well known (chemical engineers solve problems like that before breakfast) while the latter is largely undeveloped.

Despite all the talk, there has been very little implementation of the above BECCS technology even though the fermentation version did very well in trials.

Germany has managed to "generate enough renewables" to harm the economics of fossil fuel generation that fills in the gaps when the sun does not shine and the wind is not blowing. Fossil fuel methane from Russia with love. Capital costs of the associated gas turbines are low and helped to put steam-turbine dependent coal and nuclear power plants out of business. The trouble is that removing that last entrenched bit will be very hard in a world where they burn methane as the well-head.

(Nuclear power plants cannot win in terms of economics unless they ditch the steam turbine, that of course means developing a closed cycle gas turbine for nuclear use.)

Personal transport (cars) can be reformed when the feeling of crisis hits, but the development of sustainable fuels for aviation is decades behind that for cars, they are still trying to make "the right hydrocarbons" via the boondoggle Fischer-Tropsch process rather than productizing some reasonable molecule such as 1-butanol.

So hitting the braeks on CO2 output is not so easy, there is a case for carbon capture, my main concern is how you make the "apples and oranges" comparisons. Protecting rain forests is a great climate policy, but the economic value of CO2 captured by land use changes has to discount that the forest might get cut or burn up next year, that you can't measure it easily. Any kind of "carbon credit" will be colonized by Enron-style energy traders and directed towards things that look like they work as opposed to things that work.




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