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How Much Energy Would It Take to Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air?

A physicist runs the math on direct air capture and warns: This tech won't save us from climate catastrophe.

So in our box, when the gas expands to fill the whole container (we call this free expansion), the system is “more disordered,” since it is no longer separated into two compartments, and entropy is increased. Here's the cool thing: We can use the same idea about changes in entropy when separating gases to estimate the energy requirement of removing CO 2 from the air. Instead of letting a gas expand into a larger volume, we want to take a mixture of two gases and move them to opposite sides of the container.

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