This will be an evolving article based on a Reuters article with the headline "Ideal carbon capture solution years off: study"
This is puzzling, I would say we already have several viable methods it is mentioned in the article.
"A dream climate change cure to turn planet-warming greenhouse gases into useful products from jet fuel to plastics will take years
to develop from the lab and pilot projects, a report found on Thursday."
Says who? There is no link between normal carbon capture and storage, the method that tries to take the CO2 and compress it and store it in underground wells, and the utilization of CO2 to make solid materials, a very good idea also mentioned in this blog.
"Converting the trapped CO2 into useful products and minerals would avoid the cost of burying it underground in empty oil wells"
Not only that, it would mean production of usefull products and minerals wouldn’t it. According to the article "At the moment it’s a relatively new technology in the shadows of CCS" which links CCS and any technology that utilized CO2. It is in a way a public discourse power grab and (for the fossil industry) needed reorientation of thinking about CCS (carbon capture ands torage). In face all technologies to reutilize CO2 and turn it into things that are usefull have been around for years, one of the primary ones (because it creates a versatile base material) is the conversion of CO2 into Methanol and Metane.
The sabatier process turns CO2 and water into Methane and Oxygen. It is ready to go!
The only real problem with this way of using CO2 is that it makes fossil fuels an obsolete source. This is the Genie they don’t want to let escape. Just like heat storage solutions would decimate gas sales. You have to be crazy not to turn CO2 from the air or exhausts into usefull material that you can sell, especially if you can do it using sunlight, solar thermal energy. The Sabatier process is a thermal process, ideally usefull for use on Earth. These processes do not require expensive rare earth cathalists, although to ensure patentability (wich allows banks to leverage the potential value) often requires a ‘reinvention’ based on rare metals like Cerium, like with the zinc driven direct solar water splitter reactor.
You see a basic sorting of innovations into "Already being done" and "Too complex/space age" depending on it’s desirability by the fossil fuel industry
You can dream, but you can’t touch the centralized power of the oil/credit system. A high tech company that says it has no solutions is either failing (because they could earn a lot trying) or lying (because their invention touches vested interests). The public may not want to live in a world where life and death is the result of a ROI estimation, but the fact it does.
"Bayer earlier this year launched a pilot plant to produce plastics using CO2 from a power plant, under the company’s "Dream Production" program."
The next logical news item would be "Bayer plans to build immens plastic production facility on Mauritanian coast."
All the fields that need to remain unattended magically have a name including the word ‘dream’…
Technologies that are too competitive will be branded "uneconomic", like algae biofuels. The truth is that when the energy comes from the sun the cost of a process trends to zero as long as there is demand for what it produces. We need to aknowledge the barreir presented by the desire to maintain the oil/credit monopoly (if you don’t use oil, you won’t get any money!) and simply break it. Equality in the energy market so no lobby of banks or energy companies and no propaganda. Mankind is threatened by it’s inability to bring moral sense into the economic process that was intended to keep it alive and prosperous.
Glencore should be dismantled.