The roughly two-hectare facility, still under construction, is hosting what could be called a carbon removal Olympics. It will pilot eight different versions of a similar technology using various machines that will suck in air, remove the carbon dioxide and send it to a central plant where it will be compressed and liquified for storage deep underground.
The winner of this initiative wouldn’t get a medal on a podium. Instead, Deep Sky, the Montreal-based project developer behind it, plans to take the best versions of the direct air capture technology that prove most effective in Canada’s climate and deploy them on a commercial scale all over the country.
We already have that nanotech, photosynthesis. A process perfected over billions of years to be as efficient as possible. It works so well that gigatons of carbon was captured and then trapped in underground.
The problem is that capturing carbon is literally un-burning it, by plant or by nanobot you have to rip the oxygen off of carbon and make sure they stay that way. That process consumes energy, it is working up hill against entropy. Burning carbon to form CO2 is downhill all the way, you give it a push and it’s self sustaining.
Unless you have a power source that exceeds all fossil fuel burning processes, by like 10x, you can never capture carbon at a meaningful rate. (And if you DO have that 10x clean energy source, you already don’t need to burn more carbon)
I don’t mean biological process, I mean actual nano science, like fuel cell membrane that strips hydrogen on its own
Evolution doesn’t necessitate something to be “as efficient as possible”.