climate control and carbon sequestration via bulk air liquification

Question

When there's a stationary high pressure ridge heat domes can form that increase the air temperature and decrease precipitation. But what if one were to kinda suction the air out of the atmosphere, liquify it, removing the carbon from the air in the process, and then transport that liquified air to storm prone areas of low pressure? Once transported the liquid air could be allowed to boil away, locally increasing the air pressure, reducing the risk of storms in that area, while increasing the risk in areas that could benefit from them?

I guess some issues with this would be:

1. How much air would need to be liquified to undo the effects of a heat dome and what would the power requirements to suction all that air out of the atmosphere be?
2. What would the volume of liquified air being transported be? If a pipeline were used to transport the liquified air then what would the cfs (cubic feet per second) need to be in the pipeline, how large would that pipeline need to be and, using modern technology, what would be involved in maintaining the liquid air temperature throughout the length of the pipeline? I suppose in theory a tanker could be used to transport it over the ocean, as well, at which point, cfs wouldn't be the a useful metric.

This would be for an Earth like planet.

Answer 1

I love this concept

It's completely impractical and I can readily imagine a number of problems with implementing it — but I love the concept. Honestly, it's the best idea for weather control I've heard in a very long time. Cheers! But, you tagged your question science-based, so let's talk about some science.

Issue #1: Time

Weather is constantly changing, so I foresee this idea solving the problem of big storms, like hurricanes. The idea of using it to keep the weather happily pleasant everywhere on a planet 100% of the time would be a serious challenge as the process of receiving, liquefying, and redistributing the air would take time. If you had the ability to instantaneously (or nearly so) move the volume of air needed about, then there are simpler ways than this to solve the problem. In your second question (@Elemtilas is right, for future reference, only one question per post, please) you mention using a tanker ship. Even if the tanker were sitting around, filled with LATMO (liquefied atmospheric gases), the time it would take to move the tanker into position would mean only the largest storms would matter. The small ones would have dissipated by the time the ship arrived. You'd have this problem pretty much everywhere what wasn't right on top of a LATMO storage facility.

Issue #2: Volume

The volume of air needed to moderate even a small change in air pressure is enormous. A single liter of LATMO converted to gas is 0.7983 cubic meters. A small storm might need thousands of cubic kilometers of gaseous atmosphere. A hurricane might need a million cubic kilometers. Let's stick with 1,000 cubic kilometers. That's 1.25 trillion (yeah, with a "T") liters of LATMO .

Which is a long way of saying that you'd be hard pressed to store enough LATMO to fix one storm in a timely manner. Don't lose hope! Keep reading!

Issue #3: Acquisition

I was tempted to suggest that you import LATMO from interstellar sources, but it wouldn't take long before you increase the average atmospheric pressure and that would have serious consequences for the environment. This means you're drawing air from one location, concentrating it, and then moving it to another.

• Where do you gather it from? You'd want to work with multiple locations so that you're depleting a high pressure zone to increase a low pressure zone.

• How do you gather a lot of it? and where do you store it?

At the moment I'm imagining an Earth that looks just a little bit like Pin Head:

Pipes, which can be used to acquire or to disperse atmospheric gases, dotting the Earth in a way that makes today's wind farms look absolutely childish. That way you can draw the air away from areas where that's needed and push it to where it needs to go. The underground pipe network (the indestructible underground pipe network, which I'd advocate hand waving) has this constant ebb-and-flow of LATMO so there isn't a problem (theoretically) with supply.

Issue #4: Distribution

You'd think #3 solved the problem with #4, but here it's worth noting the problem with mountains and oceans: both of which need whomping long pipes. I mentioned in #1 that it would take too long to move LATMO via ship to a problem area over the oceans. You don't even have that option over Mt. Everest as airborne tankers are considerably smaller than ocean-borne and the cost of pushing a well-laden airplane is much greater than the cost of pushing an ocean tanker with a similar load. This underscores the need for indestructible pipes.

But distribution has another problem. Weather moves. This means the pipes pushing LATMO into the atmosphere in one area may suddenly find themselves sucking atmosphere back in just an hour or two later. Or minutes later. The world just might sound like an old turn-of-the-century carnival calliope without the positive influence of Freddie Mercury.

Issue #5: We actually need storms...

Finally, there's a purpose to storms. I've been focusing somewhat on storms. Let's assume you have an acquisition/distribution system that's fast and efficient! What happens when the world's climate is reduced to an even pressure all of the time? No wind, no storms (although you'd still have rain)...

• Many plants reseed via wind and storm.
• You can equalize the pressure, but not the temperatures, which wind stirs up. You would affect (if not remove) that natural process, which would have consequences.
• You'll confuse the snot out of birds.
• Airplanes have more trouble taking off, flying, and landing in static atmosphere. In fact, I've seen planes at Las Vegas fail to take off because the air was both hot and still. They simply didn't have enough runway to generate the extra velocity needed for the lift denied them by wind and cold.

Having said all that... I love this concept!

Frankly, if you wanted to just deal with tanker planes, trucks, trains, and ships... Cool! It would mean having a smaller impact on only the larger storms, but that leads me to my next statement.

Screw science!

I think the fad of trying to make everything "as real as possible" denies the dreamers! Just because it seems impractical or might have consequences, do it anyway! As I said before, it's the most imaginative weather control idea I've heard in a long time. Use it! And throw everybody the ubiquitous vulgar hand gesture as you take your royalty checks to the bank.

Answer 2

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emissions are about 50 gigatonnes per year; we want to eliminate at least half of that, so that we want to take out of the atmosphere about 25 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane.

25 gigatonnes is 2.5E14 kg.

Carbon dioxide is about 0.05% of the atmospheric air, so that in order to extract 2.5E14 kg of carbon dioxide from the air we will need to process 5E16 kg of air per year.

Air liquefaction is quite energy intensive; the best current industrial processes consume about 0.5 kWh per kg of liquefied air. To liquefy 5E16 kg of air per year we will need about 2.9 TW of power, about 6 times the average electric power production of the USA or about equal to average the electric power production of the entire world.

Note that the current production of liquid air is about 150 million tonnes per year, or 1.5E11 kg per year. We need to increase the air liquefaction capacity by a factor of about 300,000.

In conclusion, to suck in sufficient air to extract half the carbon dioxide released per year, we need to increase the air liquefaction capacity by a factor of 300,000, and to double the worldwide electric power production.

I would say that by comparison the issue of transporting the liquefied air is immaterial.

And after all this effort, the problem remains of what to do with the 25,000,000,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide we have extracted from the air... Which is another entirely different problem.