Gallium helps convert CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen
So let's do some math. Let's consider natural gas. According to the US government [1], natural gas produced 1.358x10^12 kWh of power and 5.6x10^8 metric tons of CO2 so 1 metric ton of CO2 equates to ~2400 kWh of produced power.This post suggests the energy cost is ~230kWh/ton.This is an important sanity check because it means that (capital costs aside) and if it scales you could technically remain carbon neutral for a net output of energy.While this is of course only in a lab and they mention "battery" one should remain skeptical (since pretty much every battery "breakthrough" is nothing more than marketing for research funding).This may be in the paper but in this summary I didn't see anything about how the CO2 needs to be delivered. Does it need to be in a relatively pure form? What sort of preprocessing is required?As for the capital costs, it's hard to say anything concrete here other than if silver and Gallium are catalysts, they're both relatively cheap at that scale (Gallium seems to be It's also not clear how much of each material is required.Not to be a broken record on HN, but I've often said--and I'll repeat here--that I don't believe altruism will solve greenhouse gas emissions and global warming: it'll only be solved when it becomes economic to do so.Another way of putting that is when the cost of carbon capture and/or non-greenhouse gas emitting energy sources is profitable, that's when you'll see change.[1]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11