My mind is changed and I'll use wind after all. When I thought wind was not a viable option, I cast about for alternatives. I was going to lobby for air scrubbers inside the dome that filter out methane to be used as a power source as well. I know they can separate carbon and oxygen from CO2, can they then compress the recovered carbon into coal?
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I dread to think how much energy it would take to do something like that. It would be simpler to just use vegetation that could burnt thought that's waste of oxygen too (and therfore more energy).
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To burn your coal you'll need oxygen and there is no gain in energy nor in oxygen to do that cycle.
Well, it can still be used in polymer production and other uses. But in my defense after one of the mysteries, one of the endings allows you to begin to terraform Mars.
Scrubbers filter out the air, they don't separate the components. CO2 scrubbers imply that they remove the CO2, not that they separate the CO2 into carbon and oxygen. You can take captured CO2 and reduce it down to its components, but this takes energy. A fair amount of energy even. It's usable as a way to store energy for use later, as plants do, but it's not at all a way to generate the energy in the first place.
Methane would work better as an energy source technically, as long as you have spare oxygen and readily available methane. Neither of which is really on Mars in the air, so that'd be a bad idea.
To be honest, pretty much everything is a valuable resource to be kept in the system. Methane that's allowed to escape is methane lost to the colony.