Capturing Carbon in Useful Products

A very bright reader “BreathOnTheWind” (love the name!) comments on my post on carbon sequestration:

Somewhere deep in the core of my being I feel that the answer for carbon must be to find a use for it. If carbon becomes a useful consumer and/or industrial product then dumping it in the atmosphere would be to ignore a revenue stream. I am seeing some possibilities for this. Batteries and other materials are being made with the newly created material graphene. This is a pure form of carbon. Also there are recent articles that suggest carbon fiber could become a very important manufacturing material for automobiles.  But if we can replace steel and body parts with carbon fiber couldn’t we also replace concrete and steel I-beams with the same material? Perhaps you know someone who could calculate how much carbon we could potentially bury in our cars and buildings. Maybe we could also replace cardboard boxes and plastic bags with carbon created products. At least then we could also feel smug about burying our garbage in landfills.

There is no question that we can take point sources of CO2, e.g., coal and cement plants, and process the effluent into something of value: building products or carbon-neutral synthetic fuels.  The issue is economics; these processes are hard to justify, currently, at least, in the absence of a “price on carbon.”

Btw, this is the proposition WindFuels (a company that I believe to be a terrific idea as a cleantech investment opportunity) makes: give me a whole bunch of off-peak (very low-cost) energy, some water and some CO2, and I’ll make you a steady stream of high-grade diesel, high-octane gasoline, and jet fuel.  What makes WindFuels unique is that they are (as far as I can see) the only people whose understanding encompasses all the essential ingredients: a) the chemistry, the set of steps that will result in a certain specific column of useful hydrocarbon fuels, b) the thermodynamics, how much energy needs to come from external sources at each stage, and c) the economics, how much it will cost at a given scale to make all this happen, and, by extension, how this enterprise will compete against fossil fuels.