Reply To: Fusion Oil

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Well there a many ways you can get CO2 out of the air, you could cool the air until you get CO2 ice but that would be energy intensive (though simple). You could run a brine solution past open air then pump it through a semipermeable membrane with a vacuum on the other side, CO2 would selectively enter the vacuum, but this would be expensive to make and maintain. Thirdly you could just grow organic matter, plants already do most of the work for you by capturing the CO2, polymerizing it, and adding some hydrogen to it; all you need for it is sunlight, water and a place to grow, all of which are plentiful and cheap. Only desalination plants could compete economically because they already produce products (fresh water and mineral salts). Algae with waste CO2 or organic matter feed into them have achieved conversion efficiency many times that of normal (from .5% of the sunlight utilized to 7%!) but you have to consider the cost of building enclosed ponds. Open prairie land will do for growing energy crops, it requires almost no maintenance, re-grows rapidly, and provides natural habitats, all you have to do is collect it before every winter when it naturally dies, the disadvantage is that it does not produce much organic feed stoke, maybe a 1-2 tons per acre per year, with intensive care and monocultures maybe 10 tons per year. Waste conversion would already complete most of our oil needs, so not much extra would need to be grown. Algae farms could do the trick but their advantage is only when you pump waste CO2 in. There plenty of waste CO2 though, even when you consider the removal of all fossil fuels: concrete and cement for example produce a lot of CO2 from the thermal decomposition of limestone, aluminum and other electrolysis refined metals and minerals also release CO2 (or produce carbon residue), etc. The advantage of algae over using the waste CO2 directly is that the algae does most of the work for you with free energy (sunlight) the disadvantage is you need to make enclosed ponds, I would just assume that economically the advantages out weights the disadvantage, greatly.