Drop in a bucket
Impressive achievement. Now, let's take a look at the scale of the problem atmospheric carbon capture is attempting to solve. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has emitted trillions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Some of this has been absorbed by various natural carbon sinks, but about 1,140 billion metric tons of excess CO2 are suspended in the atmosphere. [1] To absorb that using this compound, assuming it can be used 100 times with an average 75% efficiency, we'd have to create:
1.14*10^18 (mass of excess CO2 in milligrams)/11,700 (lifetime CO2 absorption of 1 gram of TBN-BA in milligrams)=~97.5 million metric tons of TBN-BA
Creating that much is a colossal effort in and of itself, much less the infrastructure required to actually utilize it and sequester the CO2.
Carbon capture projects are frequently used to greenwash the creation of new fossil fuel burning power plants, but I've never seen a credible proposal to deploy it at the scale necessary to put a dent in the problem.
Humanity does have limited industrial capacity, and it takes less effort to replace emission sources with clean power generation than it does to pull the emitted carbon back out of the atmosphere.
Carbon capture will be part of the long-term solution (i.e centuries), but it shouldn't be used as an excuse to create new fossil fuel power generation.
P.S: Those numbers are quite rough, but are accurate enough to convey the magnitude of the problem.
[1]: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-staggering-scale-of-human-co2
Biting the hand that feeds IT
