Would using carbon dioxide as fuel work to reduce the greenhouse effect?
I'm trying to find a plausible way to reduce global warming in a world past the tipping point.
I recently read this article : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171127173225.htm. It suggests that we may be able to use carbon dioxide as a fuel.
Would that work to reduce the greenhouse effect?
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Yes, but not from the link in the question.
According to the link in the question, Carbon Dioxide can be used to produce an energy storage medium in a rudimentary way, a bit like the chemical production of alcohol out of sugars by yeast or even sugars out of CO2 sunlight and water. In all these cases the net energy output is less than the energy put into the system.
Carbon can (theoretically) be used to power a nuclear fusion reaction, as can oxygen. This is what happens in massive stars in their old age. It requires temperatures of upwards of 500 Mega Kelvin (about 3000 times hotter than the center of the sun as modeled by NASA. Oxygen requires greater than three times the temperature. The pressures are equally enormous and beyond our current capabilities to sustain. The CNO reaction cycle can be found detailed in a straightforward way in this wiki article, and is common in stars slightly larger than the sun.
Carbon and Oxygen fusion proper need more high pressures than this. We'd need to be able to mimic the conditions supposed to exist in the center of stars at least 8 times more massive than the sun. I can't help but feel that the development of force-field technology would facilitate this. We're not there yet.
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