OK, yes, we have cut the emissions from the gasoline we would otherwise have used but the CO2 from the industrial process still ends up in the atmosphere.
Unconventional oil production (whether from shale or oil sands) is an energy-intensive process, and emits more CO2 than conventional extractive methods do.
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That said, if the process really can be made to work, CO2 would go from being a polluting waste product to a valuable raw material, and it might even become worthwhile building systems to capture it and pipelines to ship it around.
Most plants use an enzyme called rubisco to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugars containing three carbon atoms a process known as C3 photosynthesis.
We would need atmospheric CO2 levels of around 500 parts per million (ppm) to kill off the process of calcification completely, reports Mother Jones.
The process will not be truly carbon-neutral (for that, the CO2 would have to come out of the atmosphere, and if the algae could use only the limited amount of the gas in natural air, they would not grow fast enough) but each carbon atom will have been made to do double duty in a fuel before it finally escapes.
Hydrogen is conventionally produced by steam reforming natural gas, a process that wastes some of the energy stored in the gas while releasing large amounts of CO2.
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This process of combining of water, cement paste, sand and rock creates an awful lot of CO2 gases - which are linked by some scientists to global warming - about five to 10% of the world's total emissions.
In particular aviation planners are focusing on ways of cutting the amount of time planes spend queuing to take off and land, in the process burning large and unnecessary amounts of fuel (IATA estimates that airlines could cut their annual CO2 emissions by 12 percent if air-traffic control operations were more efficient).
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