Might be a few years away or longer ...hard to say depending on costs and demands. Converting excess CO2 into biofuels is gaining some interest as well. The US Navy is working on methods to convert CO2 and hydrogen into jet fuels and others have methods to convert CO2 into biofuels using bacteria. Even the membranes in chicken eggs can be used to capture CO2...they hold up to 7 times their weight in CO2.
Biofuels or synthetic fuels from CO2...
http://phys.org/news/2012-10-air-fuel-sy...
http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-ener...
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/using_co2_t...
"Joule’s renewable fuel platform will best the scale, productivities and costs of any known alternative to fossil fuel today, with no reliance on biomass feedstocks or precious natural resources. Our inputs are sunlight, waste CO2 and non-potable water. Our output? Millions of gallons of clean, renewable fuel that drops into existing infrastructure. Next step: change the world."
http://www.jouleunlimited.com/
"February 23, 2009 Expensive carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are gaining momentum around the world as a way to combat greenhouse gas emissions (or is that sweep them under the carpet?), India’s Economic Times has reported that a team of Indian scientists have discovered a naturally occurring bacteria that could help fight global warming by converting CO2 into calcium carbonate (CaCO3) - a common compound found as rock all the world over."
http://www.gizmag.com/bacteria-convert-c...
"MIT engineer Angela Belcher is now taking a new approach that would not only remove carbon dioxide from the environment, but also turn it into something useful: solid carbonates that could be used for building construction.
“We want to capture carbon dioxide and not put it underground, but turn it into something that will be stable for hundreds of thousands of years,” says Belcher, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy.
By genetically engineering ordinary baker’s yeast, Belcher and two of her graduate students, Roberto Barbero and Elizabeth Wood, have created a process that can convert carbon dioxide into carbonates that could be used as building materials. Their process, which has been tested in the lab, can produce about two pounds of carbonate for every pound of carbon dioxide captured. Next, they hope to scale up the process so it could be used in a power plant or industrial factory. "
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/belch...
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues...
"Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a hot area of research in the effort to fight global warming through the process of removing carbon from the atmosphere and ferreting it away within carbon soaking materials, a team from the University of Calcutta has found an unexpected (or should that be uneggspected) material that could trap carbon from the atmosphere in the form of eggshells. The team has demonstrated that the membrane that lines an eggshell can absorb almost seven times its own weight of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, allowing the gas to be stored until environmentally friendly methods of disposing, or even using it, can be found."
http://www.gizmag.com/eggshells-to-fight...
It's already happening every day on 2/3 of the planet.
http://www.elcamino.edu/faculty/tnoyes/R...
Under the heading "Why Phytoplankton Are Important"... "In addition, phytoplankton remove carbon dioxide from ocean water to carry out photosynthesis and make their shells (e.g., calcium carbonate).".
Very easy. It is called dry ice.
Rainforest: According to Wikipedia under Carbonate:
The term is also used as a verb, to describe carbonation: the process of raising the concentrations of carbonate and bicarbonate ions in water to produce carbonated water and other carbonated beverages ― either by the addition of carbon dioxide gas under pressure, or by dissolving carbonate or bicarbonate salts into the water.
Xi Gua & Sagebrush - I know it must be hard, but get a junior high school student to explain to you what a carbonate is
It takes a lot of energy to convert waste CO2 into carbonates but how long will it be before we are able to do this on a large scale?
