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myrmidon 17 hours ago

Sure. But thats still very much a lower bound, and it makes a bunch of idealizing assumptions that are hopelessly overoptimistic (assuming your intake gets the full 400ppm of CO2, and you manage to extract all of it in one go).

Even from those numbers, you already get up to a football stadium of processed air per hour for every small town. For a big city, you need to process that football stadium worth of air every second.

Building infrastructure of that magnitude is a major commitment, and if most nations can not be arsed to replace a small number of fossil power plants per country, I honestly don't see us building large air processing plants in every single town in a timely manner (that are extremely likely to be less profitable than replacing the power plants).

themaninthedark 14 hours ago | parent [-]

What is the size of these process units?

Can it be coupled with current air processes?

Every house, office building and factory has air handling units.

Factories and other industrial sites also use compressors.

gus_massa 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It converts CO2 and H2O into ethane and ethylene, oversimplifying the output is natural gas. What do you do with the natural gas?

You can put it in pipes and send it to a central location, but you need pumps and the pipes are a nightmare.

You can store it in a local tank but you need a pump again, and burn it but it release the CO2 again. Using a solar panel and a battery is easier and more efficient.

(Do they need also some water pipes?)

For a distributed production, solar panels are much better.

Pipes and pumps may work in a centralized setup, but I'm still not convinced it's better that biodiesel or ethanol.

Photosynthesis is very inefficient, so there is a lot of room for improvement. But plants are like self building robots and they store the output in grains that are easy to transport.

teamonkey 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right now they’re a fantasy so they can be as large or small as your imagination permits.