would release more co2 because less snow means more rain to dissolve rock. or something like that. don't recall the vid tho

Of course, we have to get the CO2 there.

To quote one of my favorite headlines from the newspapers in SimCity 2000, [font face="serif"][font size=5]“Naysayers Say Nay.”[/font][/font]

A number of rather loud voices have suggested that if CO₂ were sequestered underground as a gas, it would not stay there.

it means it is possible to burn coal and natural gas without contributing to greenhouse gases. but it is not realistic to deal with all the co2 that is released into the atmosphere to hope to then recapture it with giant screens and put it in the ground - there's too much air. For that co2, the best option is not to reduce the amount that is ever released into the atmosphere.

There’s already too much CO₂ in the air.

If we would like to maintain a climate like the one we are accustomed to, we need to get atmospheric CO₂ levels below 350 ppm in rather short order.

just because co2 will stay in the ground if we put it there, doesn't mean we can take ambient co2 out of the air and put it there.

if we want to decrease atmospheric co2 by 1/8 (from 400ppm to 350ppm) by capturing the co2, that would require, for example, passing either all of the air in the world through a filter that captures 1/8 of the co2 or else passing 1/8th of the air in the world through a filter that captures all the co2. that would be a very big filter.

a lot of the articles are of the typical excited about a new tech variety, so their descriptions of the tech are fine but their discussion of its potential use we have to take with a grain of salt. however, the aps article here and the pnas article in your comment below especially give some sense of the practicality / challenges of making a dent in co2 levels this way. more possible than i realized to reach adequate volumes as air just circulates a lot so a good capturing system will be able to do a lot of work and industrial scale would then make a dent, with the question being whether the costs can ever get low enough. imo, this would be a good reason to have carbon credits / carbon tax to incentivize development attempts - maybe we can get there after all. more worth a try than i realized. thanks for all the good links!

> A number of rather loud voices have suggested that if CO₂ were
> sequestered underground as a gas, it would not stay there.

... I would like to point out that the OP article does not counter my argument.

> Study of natural-occurring 100,000 year-old CO2 reservoirs shows no significant
> corroding of ‘cap rock’, suggesting the greenhouse gas hasn’t leaked back out - one
> of the main concerns with greenhouse gas reduction proposal of carbon capture and storage.

Those naturally occurring CO2 reservoirs do not have any man-made pipes
breaking through the layers of cap rock through which the CO2 would be inserted.

One would have hoped that the myriad instances of leakage from oil & gas wells
(of which the biggest example was Deepwater Horizon but there are thousands of
other, smaller cases) would have led a sensible person to understand that the
guaranteed weak point in any such "sequestration" project is the path by which
the CO2 is forcibly pumped through all of the overlying strata into what was
previously a secure, sealed anticline.

I hold by my "naysaying" thank you.

While I may not care for deep water drilling, I don’t believe that every deep water well becomes a “Deepwater Horizon.”

By the same token, we might expect that while some CO₂ sequestration wells may fail catastrophically, not all would, and that (as a result) CO₂ would be successfully sequestered.

https://www.epa.gov/uic/class-vi-wells-used-geologic-sequestration-co2

Which no one has figured out yet.....

My problem with carbon sequestration is that it is something that adds cost to every unit of energy created by burning coal and natural gas. Plus there is the cost required for R&D to brings this technology on line.

Using those funds instead to buy solar, wind and energy storage reduces for decades the need to burn fossil fuels...

That, of course, provides an incentive to switch to other sources.

There also is this: We need to do something with CO₂ which is already in the atmosphere. We need to get CO₂ levels below 350 ppm in fairly short order (like decades) and even if we switched to 100% “solar, wind and energy storage” tomorrow (which we won’t) that will not lower atmospheric levels of CO₂.

Neither will carbon sequestration. That only deals with new input of CO2 into the atmosphere. Current levels will take decades to dissipate.

It pretty much has to…
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/33/13156.full