Carbon Sequestration using Coca-Cola

                                              Would you like a slice of lemon with your carbon sequestration?


Advocates of carbon capture (CC) and carbon sequestration (CS) have demonstrated that it is possible to capture carbon from the smokestacks of fossil fuel power plants. A more intractable problem is figuring out to store or sequester the CO2 so that it doesn't reach the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. The ongoing work on CC and CS is of great interest to folks interested in geoengineering the planet to mitigate global warming, as techniques that can successfully remove CO2 from power plant exhausts and store it might also be applicable to the larger problem of removing excess CO2 from the earth's atmosphere in order to geoengineer earth's climate.

Thus it was with some interest that I read about a new proposal to divert CO2 captured from power plant exhaust stacks into normal industrial uses, including the carbonation of fizzy drinks like coca cola, pepsi, ginger ale, soda water, beer, Moscato, etc. So far Australia is taking the lead on this particular problem:

'Australia has worked closely with other countries which rely heavily on fossil fuels to investigate opportunities to utilise CO2 in products such as carbonated drinks and plastics.....’

I can understand how you might "sequester" captured CO2 in plastics, because plastics are inert and almost indestructible if they aren't burned, but I'm not sure the people thinking of storing CO2 in plastics have actually thought through just how much .....plastic.....they would have to make and sequester to really make a dent in the amount of CO2 released by fossil fuel use. The combustion of fossil fuels currently releases about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, and if you could capture it all then after 25 years you'd have something over a trillion tons (1,000,000,000 tons) of CO2 to store in plastic.  For comparison, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt weighs something like 6.5 million tons, so after 25 years of CC and CS by converting CO2 into plastic you'd have created something like 153,846 full size plastic replicas of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which you'd have to guard forever to prevent them from catching fire and returning all that CO2 to the atmosphere.

And trying to sequester CO2 by adding it to Coca Cola and other fizzy drinks is even more problematical. When people drink Coca-Cola much of the CO2 that makes the drink fizzy is quickly released back to the atmosphere through various kinds of human gaseous emissions. Even worse, some of it is converted into methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful then CO2.  I suppose someone could devise additional carbon capture systems that you could strap on to various human orifices to absorb the CO2 and methane emitted from people who drink Coca-Cola, but if that CO2 is in turn going to be sequestered by reintroducing it into Coca Cola again, as the Australians are suggesting, then there is hardly any point to the entire carbon capture and carbon sequestration process.