The crank stations? Or their users?

At this point, you just seem obscenely delusional to me.

This does not surprise me. I mean, you suggested spraying carbon-rich “fertilizer” within the biosphere as a valid approach toward reducing atmospheric carbon.

Your basic understanding of the concept of “sequestration” is irreparably flawed.

Biomass is something different… Do it right and you can just use it as fertilizer. Just grow a bunch of algae and spray it over dry land… It’s that easy. It’ll feed the soil, which locks up a lot of carbon back into the food chain. Stack wood in a desert, who cares. There’s so many better ways to do this

You fail to comprehend the concept or need for “sequestering”. What you are talking about perpetuates the atmospheric carbon cycle. It does not decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide. The mass biodegrades, re-releasing the carbon. “Sequestration” locks that carbon out of the biosphere. You are not talking about sequestration.

You keep jumping back and forth between biofuel and biomass.

Biomass is the raw substance. Biofuel is processed biomass. Processing it into a solid fuel is relatively trivial by little more than compressing it under relatively low pressure. Processing into liquid fuels is far more complicated and energy intensive than CO2 capture after combustion. For sequestration purposes, biomass would not be processed into liquid fuel. Liquid biofuels would only be used for transportation purposes.

And CO2 is a fucking gas

Not at the depths and pressures we’re talking about.

But it does not stay that way! We live in Earth, and most cavities aren’t able to stay pressurized without leaking

I think you need to revisit that misconception. The cavities we’re talking about certainly are.

You can bury solid biofuel,

Not in the volumes necessary for atmospheric carbon capture, no, we cannot. Furthermore, solid biofuels are not stable, certainly not as stable as CO2.

Sequestering a fluid is far simpler, safer, and more stable than attempting the same with a solid.

Your arguments seem to assume that what you’re putting back into the ground is a fluid of some sort, either oil or gas.

Biomass is not typically handled as a fluid. Biomass is generally a solid. Picture “wood mulch”, or “corn stalks”. While the specific materials will vary, the most common format for these biofuels is as a pelletized commodity: The source material is physically pressed into small lumps and handled like coal, not oil or gas.

Conveying liquified CO2 through a pipe and into a reservoir is a trivial exercise. Conveying pelletized biomass into a suitable storage facility in quantities necessary to have a practical effect is not feasible.

What methods are you using to convert pelletized biomass into liquid hydrocarbons, suitable for pumping back into the ground? How is that method superior to pumping compressed CO2 instead?

My old PC locks up every 4 to 48 hours. It would make a terrible NAS.

Hydrocsrbon chains are the most efficient way to store carbo

Volumetric efficiency is not the relevant metric. Energy efficiency is much more important. The process you describe requires far greater energy input to complete the sequestration.

Furthermore, the physical properties are a problem. Biomass appropriate to this process is conveyed as a flammable, pelletized solid; CO2 is an inert fluid. One of these can be pumped via pipeline into empty subterranean reservoirs; the other cannot.

You’re right about biofuel… Except that biofuel is already refined biomass. The water is already removed, usually to become as close to pure hydrocarbons as possible.

Hydrocarbons.

Chains of hydrogen and carbon.

Your comment demonstrates you’re not fully understanding the chemistry of the combustion. If you remove the “water” I am talking about, you wouldn’t have a hydrocarbon. You would have only carbon.

The “water” I am talking about is the “hydro” part of the “hydrocarbon”. That “hydro” does not become CO2 when it burns. That “hydro” becomes H2O.

When burning lighter hydrocarbons, the majority of the exhaust in the stack is actually water vapor rather than CO2. Putting that hydrogen into the ground, unburnt, provides no additional benefit over putting just the CO2 into the ground. It merely fills up the reservoir faster, and requires even more energy for the same amount of carbon sequestration. Burning that biomass, it is (theoretically) possible for the energy recovered (after powering sequestration operations) to be a net positive.

Sequestering the unburned biofuel without recovering that energy, the operation must be a net negative.

If you’re pulling CO2 out of the air, why in the world would you turn around and burn it???

Because the CO2 we pull out of the air is not in a form that we can feasibly sequester. It’s padded with excessive hydrogen and oxygen into carbohydrate chains. When we burn that vegetation, we convert it to primarily to H2O, along with some CO2. Targeting the CO2 alone, we can sequester a lot more for the same energy and same volume.

The structure of the rock is destroyed by the process, it’ll just leak out.

That rock sequestered hydrocarbons from the biosphere for millions of years. It’s not destroyed by the process. We use comparable methods for the strategic petroleum reserve and the national helium reserve.

This whole scheme is a fever dream designed to continue burning fossil fuels

That may be true. And yet, when used with non-fossil fuel sources, it does, indeed, serve to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than simply reducing the emission of CO2.

Ok… Come on now, I know you’ve been propagandized, and propaganda works, but let’s think this through

Please read what I wrote, not what you think I said.

If you capture CO2 out of smokestacks, what have you done?

It depends on where that carbon came from. If it came from petroleum or coal feedstocks, you’ve slightly reduced emissions. But, the carbon from biofuels originated from the atmosphere. Vegetation captured that CO2 directly from the atmosphere, and incorporated it into the biomass. Burning it converted the biomass into concentrated CO2 and H2O; we’re capturing the concentrated CO2 out of that stream.

Again: this does not replace the need to suspend fossil fuels. But the specific process I described does, indeed, extract CO2 from the biosphere.

If we plow the vegetation under, we are burying the hydrogen and excess oxygen as well as the carbon. Burning it, we release the hydrogen (as water), but still bury the carbon.

And all of the aside, this doesn’t math even if it worked. It takes too much energy to pull CO2 out of the air

They aren’t taking it out of the air. They are taking it out of smoke stacks. It’s far easier to pull it out of highly concentrated sources like smoke stacks than to try to pull it directly out of the atmosphere.

we’d have to put up CO2 condensers on a percentage of earths surface…

You’re describing biofuels. Vegetation “condenses” the CO2 out of the atmosphere, incorporating it into carbohydrates.

Burning biofuels, we produce H2O and CO2 in the smoke stacks. Every pound of CO2 pulled from the smoke stack is a pound removed from the atmosphere.

Any introduction of fossil fuels into the process defeats the purpose, but the underlying technology is theoretically feasible with biofuel carbon sources.

Your own fault for living west of your workplace.

They can’t have them coming home and sharing what they learned abroad.

That sure musta been something. I can only imagine.

Nah, “dividends” are easy to understand, as are “investment”, “shareholder”, etc. That’s all capitalist language. You are getting paid because you are allowing another entity to use something that belongs to you. You’re “renting” something out. You are entitled to compensation for another’s use of your property.

Under capitalism, a robot performing labor means that the owner of that robot is entitled to the compensation for that labor. That robot is owned by a businessman, but the compensation you’re talking about isn’t being paid to that businessman. It’s being paid to a citizen who has no ownership interest in the robot.

That’s consistent with their understanding of “socialism” or “communism”.

They will hate it, as it makes it sound like they aren’t “rugged individualists” who can survive on their own. It makes it sound like they can’t adapt to the free market, and need to rely on charity.

Frame it as a “Citizenship Dividend”.

We “invest” our political authority in the government: Political authority is conveyed from the people to the government. We are entitled to a return on that investment.

I prefer to consider it a “citizenship dividend”.

In the US, political power is (ostensibly) derived from We The People. We convey our political authority to government. The government uses that authority to provide the service of “law and order” to taxpayers. But the government does not (currently) compensate We The People for the use of our political authority.

That can change. We can, and should, receive dividends on our investment.

The IRS is going to take a big-ass chunk of your $1 million.

They’re not going to get nearly as much from the pans.

Not if those distracting screens were prohibited.

That could have been the mandate. They could have mandated that be the only allowable screen. It shows what’s behind you, and that’s it. No distractions tolerated. No pop-up logos or other advertising. No driving controls on that screen. Touch screen disabled while in motion, with all essential functions actuated by physical controls.

But they didn’t. They mandated a rearview and monitor, but didn’t restrict its use. And that failure has probably caused more injuries and deaths than it has prevented.

Unless they only permitted that screen to show a rear view. They could have prohibited any other use, or prohibited non-tactile controls that required ocular attention while driving. They could have required that touchscreen controls be disabled while driving. But they didn’t.

They mandated the distracting screen, and probably killed more people than they saved.