Really? I'd say there's nothing like a "perpetual motion" claim in just saying you're capturing CO2 from a coal stack.
Ish. I said "perpetual motion
ish"... All awkward losses from the process (here CO
2, not friction losses) apparently zeroed out, and claiming it is a zero carbon solution when ambiguous external inputs of power (perhaps not directly, but effectively) are probably necessary to buff the process. One could
very loosely liken it to a hypothetical hydrogen-powered car that is supposed to electrolise its own 2H
2O->2H
2+O
2, on the move... There'd be a missing part to that process, in the form of energy and/or feedstock, either/both of which need to be considered but the description handwaves it away...
Not
actual PM, of course, but the claim of 'zero emissions' just needs a bit more consideration. Material/energy supplies from truly carbon-neutral sources via truly carbon-neutral transportation methods, can count, probably after sufficient construction emissions (including that of the multi-level supply chain, both prerequisites and ongoing elements) have been offset by sequestering non-zero emissions in some carbon-negative scheme.
The point is that it's making stuff we need anyway, that would normally have a process that took energy to complete.
Still gonna need energy. The savings are that instead of using clean energy (from that solar plant 100km away?) to extract ?400?ppm of CO
2 from the air to obviate the need of carbon compounds being delivered, they import the coal, burn
it to create the steam steam the plant apparently needs, then make additional efforts and use additional energy (give or take that this includes a token amount of waste energy from the steam process) to extract from the comparitively carbon-rich flue gases some (or most, but probably not all) of its pre-used carbon so that it isn't just chucking away carbon that it had previously caused/encouraged to be desequestered from the original coal seams...
What would be usefully novel is to develop a device that stuck up into the air and used the power of the sun to extract carbon straight from the atmosphere and channelled it into use as both raw chemical feedstock
and perhaps also burnable brickettes for various brute-force storing-and-heating needs. Looking not unlike the undersea device used in
The Diamond Age to molecularly extract and microrefine all kinds of materials from seawater to serve the nano-tech fabrication society in Neal Stevenson's book, I suspect that the term 'dendritic' woyld describe my proposed device over
multiple semantic levels...
But I don't deny that, in principle, that factory may well have some merit in leading the way to the
better future. Much like my 'methane-filled condom' party-balloon analogy, but with a subtly different set of flaws at its heart...