Branson’s Learning Curve Part 3

Accounting for the return on invested energy is the key to understanding the prerequisites of climate change solutions.

Removing carbon from the atmosphere and safely storing it away for millions of years is fundamentally a chemistry problem and chemistry requires energy. It takes energy to capture carbon dioxide and still more to change it from a gas to something more stable for storage. Importantly, it takes more energy to recapture the carbon from burned fossil fuels than the fuels yielded in the first place. As we’ll see in this installment, machine mediated approaches to carbon capture and storage or sequestration can certainly work in prototype but they would consume so much energy that they are fundamentally impractical on a global scale.

Energy accounting

The laws of thermodynamics make it clear that energy runs downhill meaning that whenever we convert from one form of energy to another some of the energy is lost due to inefficiencies that are just part of nature. Take a car for example. When they run, cars give off heat which is waste energy caused by friction between parts, between tires and the road, even air resistance produces a form of friction called drag. Some friction is good, for instance brakes take momentum from a car and convert it to heat so that a car can stop safely. Also, if there was no friction…