Massive Diamonds to Store Massive Emissions

Understanding the scale of global greenhouse gas emissions is difficult.  The most common greenhouse gases have no smell and are invisible to the human eye.  Articles on the climate crisis aren’t very helpful, as they will either talk about concentrations of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, or they will talk about how many Gigatons* of greenhouse gases human activity has produced this year.  For reference this year humans are on track to contribute 43.1 billion metric tons (95 trillion lbs.) of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  How do we visualize 43.1 billion metric tons?  We could write down how many grams that is.

 43,100,000,000,000,000 or in words 43.1 quadrillion grams

This means nothing, these are play numbers

What about size?  How big is all that carbon dioxide?

First let’s imagine this carbon dioxide as a massive chunk of dry ice.  Dry ice has a density of about 1.5 grams/cubic cm.  That means in 2019 humans made enough carbon dioxide to make a block of dry ice with a volume of 28.7 cubic kilometers or the equivalent of almost 12,000* copies of the Great Pyramid of Gyza.  Now this sounds super cool and would probably let us all have a really crazy party, but storing carbon dioxide in the form of dry ice means that it would return to our atmosphere pretty quickly, which is no good.  What we need is a way to store carbon for millennia.

According to marketing “A diamond is forever”, so what would it look like if we store all of that carbon dioxide as a giant diamond.  The first thing we need to do is separate the carbon out from the carbon dioxide.  Carbon dioxide has an atomic mass of 44.1 grams/mol, while pure carbon has an atomic mass of 12.01 grams/mol.  We won’t try to think about how we convert all that CO2 into pure diamond.  What is important is that now that the oxygen has been removed, we have 11.7 billion metric tons of carbon.  A 1 carat diamond weighs .2 grams, our super diamond would measure 58.5 quadrillion carats.  With a density of 3.5 grams/cm^3**aka denser than concrete, our super diamond would have a volume of 3.34 cubic kilometers.  To put that in perspective if the diamond were as tall as the Empire State Building in New York it would be almost 2 miles on each side. If we wanted to make our diamonds into giant pyramids, we could make almost 1400*** solid diamond pyramids as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Next time you hear that humans have emitted X billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, try to imagine 32**** solid diamond pyramids for every billion metric tons.

*11,822 for reference https://www.bluebulbprojects.com/MeasureOfThings/results.php?amt=1&comp=volume&unit=ckm&searchTerm=1+cubic+kilometers+%28km3%29%2C+a+measure+of+volume

**https://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/KatrinaJones.shtml

***1375 Great Pyramids of Giza

****I mean technically 31.96 (but c’mon it’s only a 2% error)

(a gigaton is a billion metric tons or 2.2 trillion lbs (see not helpful))

** a mol is a