Carbon sucker

[Dr H]

This could solve few problems

To me, this sounds a lot like an advertisement for this guy's business, rather than a viable scientific proposal.  
I would like to have seen some details of the process:

* How much energy does the process require?  
* Where, exactly, is that energy coming from?  ("Renewable electricity" is pretty vague.)  
* What chemicals are being used, and in what quantities?  
* What is the energy/carbon cost for making, transporting, storing, and disposing of those chemicals?

There are a lot of pollyanna plans around for "solving" things like energy needs and climate change, which never look beyond the immediate process being proposed.   For example, the true impact of solar energy goes beyond simply setting up enough solar panels to replace a coal-fired power plant.   The energy, pollution, and carbon costs of manufacturing the solar panels needs to be considered, as do those factors in the costs of mining, refining, transporting, recycling, and disposing of the exotic materials required.  If your solar farm reduces carbon emissions for a given amount of electricity by 25%, but all of the infrastructure required to put that solar farm in place puts an extra 30% carbon emission into the atmosphere, you've not gained anything.
Yet this sort of detailed analysis seems to be missing from a lot of proposals.

You don't get something for nothing, and pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and converting it to high energy density fuel is an energy-intensive process by any means I can imagine.  Maybe these guys have something new -- maybe.  But it's sure not clear from the video what it might be.

As far as converting vehicles to this new fuel, that concept has been around for decades.  You can convert your gasoline engine car right now to use propane fuel, reducing greenhouse emissions by 30-50%.  People haven't exactly been flocking to this option for a lot of reasons, one of which is that a high-quality conversion will cost you anywhere from $10,000 and up, per vehicle.  
Maybe this guy can do his conversions for much cheaper -- I'd still like to see some numbers.


Most problematic for me it that this approach focuses on only one aspect of the problem, and not the major part:  transportation using internal combustion engines.  While this is not an insignificant issue, it pales beside the contribution of heavy industry, which is where the big impact needs to be made.

Reminds me of the loudly touted move away from incandescent light bulbs.  
The average residential home uses 10-15% of it's electrical demand for lighting.  CFLs reduce that by maybe a third, at best.  LEDs are better, with maybe a 50-60% reduction.  Best case scenario:  by replacing every light bulb in your home with an LED, and replacing all the electronics -- dimmers, timers, etc. -- to those that work with LEDs, you reduce your total electric load by maybe 10%.  And that does reduce carbon emissions, a bit.  

But how much extra carbon was emitted by the many more complex processes involved in making CFL and LED bulbs (compared to the relatively simple incandescents); manufacturing all the new electronics required; in mining and processing the more exotic materials required,;in the more labor intensive manufacturing processes; and in disposing of dead bulbs as hazardous waste?  Rarely mentioned, but we really need to think about these things.

And two other things come to mind:  

1) The average household could have reduced their electric load more if they kept all their incandescent bulbs, and simply set their thermostats one degree lower over the winter months.

2) There are aluminum processing plants -- smelters -- which use more electricity in a week than some small cities use in a year.

So was the major problem really addressed here?
Or was changing all the lightbulbs just a "feel good" home activity, with very limited impact?

Beware the "quick fix".