Thank you very much for finding this Konigstein and Fork article! I am very glad to have read it. I encourage everyone else to do so, too; it's only 7 pages, and much of that is consumed by giant pie charts, so really only about 3 pages of content. Even if it doesn't meet the standards of a research paper, it's extremely informative!

Reality has changed significantly since 02014, though. Konigstein and Fork's article is framed by and based on Google's 02011 failure to make "RE<C", renewable energy cheaper than coal. But renewable energy is (and I'm aware that I'm arguably stating the obvious here) now much cheaper than coal and continues to decline in cost. (It has been much cheaper than coal for several years now in some places, though only in small parts of China, Northern Europe, and North America.) This violates the assumptions the article relies on; renewable energy is already vastly exceeding what the researchers considered "the most extraordinary success possible".

In 02014 PV panels cost 0.55 euros per peak watt (data from http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx-spot-market-price-ind... visited 2016-02-18) and now the low-cost ones cost 0.060 euros per peak watt, and the mainstream ones (with warranties) cost 0.100 euros per peak watt. This implies the availability of intermittent energy for carbon-capture schemes at about an order of magnitude lower cost than was feasible when the paper came out; that changes the economics of carbon capture in favor of systems with lower capital equipment and materials costs and higher energy intensity

(The price in the US is still much higher due to a series of punitive tariffs against Chinese solar panels, presumably as a subsidy to the US's faltering fossil-fuel industries, but it's important to use unsubsidized prices for these calculations.)

Solar panel manufacturing can probably scale up to build many times current world marketed energy production, but only a small fraction of current world marketed energy production would be needed for atmospheric carbon capture, even with lower-energy-efficiency methods.

I previously did a ballpark number on atmospheric carbon capture via lime burning, but can't find it at the moment. But, essentially, the idea is that, if energy is free, you use it to heat limestone up to 900 degrees in a low-pressure sealed retort, driving the carbon dioxide out of it and making lime cement. You capture the nearly pure carbon dioxide thus produced, passively cool it, liquefy it, and inject it down gas wells into olivine rock formations, where it is permanently sequestered by serpentinization. Then you use the lime cement for building, at which point it reabsorbs an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air.

Due to the disruptive innovation in PV, no "disruptive technologies in carbon storage" are needed, just the Paleolithic technology of lime burning and the well-proven technologies of drilling gas wells.

The feedstocks and capital investment required for this approach are relatively small, a few times larger than the existing global cement industry, which is only 400 billion dollars a year, 0.4% of the global economy. What has made it uneconomical historically is the cost of energy, which is now in free fall thanks to solar panel manufacturers in the People's Republic of China achieving what Google failed at.

(This is not the only possible way to use superabundant solar energy to capture carbon cheaply; for example, the chloralkali process produces NaOH from salt water, and by reacting a slight excess of NaOH with magnesium chloride brine derived from seawater desalination, you get a magnesium analogue of the soda-lime used in scuba rebreathers, which rapidly absorbs carbon dioxide from air and sequesters it permanently as hydromagnesite.)

Consequently the majority of new power generation capacity in China is now solar and wind, even after correcting for their lower capacity factors, and China's carbon emissions seem to have peaked in February and are now in decline. China is especially important here not just because they consume the majority of the world's coal and a quarter of its marketed energy (5.5 terawatts out of 20) but because they produce 80% of the world's solar panels and because, unlike any other energy-intensive country, they are rapidly expanding their energy infrastructure.

The Google paper from 02014 says, "With exponential growth in deployment, businesses could be replacing 30 gigawatts of installed capacity annually by 2040." China's PV generation capacity stands at about 800 gigawatts (ac, peak) and is growing about 3% per month, which is to say, 25 gigawatts per month. What the paper's authors dared to hope might be happening yearly 26 years from now is happening monthly, already. (Except that it's mostly not replacing fossil-fuel generation yet, but augmenting it, because China's energy consumption is growing rapidly.)

The other articles you cite are similarly premised on the now-obsolete assumption that energy will remain expensive and therefore require energy-efficient carbon capture processes. Harvey is quoted as saying, "You'd have to build way more renewables than we need to stop burning fossil fuels altogether," apparently unaware that this is in fact already happening.

The Potsdam paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2729) isn't about global warming at all except incidentally; it's about what happens with ocean acidification under the assumption that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue rising for 200 years to five times their current level. It doesn't investigate the feasibility of carbon capture, but rather what happens if atmospheric carbon dioxide rises to deadly levels far in excess of current levels and stays there for centuries before carbon capture is attempted.

There's still the question of what system of incentives would motivate spending on the order of a trillion dollars a year on carbon capture and sequestration, since nobody is buying the serpentine at the bottom of the gas injection wells, and the market price of synthetic hydromagnesite is likely to be minimal. Since it's only about 1% of world GDP, it's plausible that international diplomacy could find a solution, as with nuclear weapons reduction and the ozone hole.

But it might turn out not to be necessary; it's plausible that abundant energy will make carbon-neutral extraction of lime from seawater a cheaper way of making cement, including portland cement, than the conventional approach hard-rock mining. Then the cement will absorb carbon dioxide from the air as it cures, though less than lime cement. And it's plausible that it will make carbon dioxide extracted from air a cheaper source of plastic feedstocks than increasingly scarce coal or oil. Perhaps 30 or 100 years from now the pressing environmental problem will be how to halt the depletion of the atmospheric carbon reserves necessary for plant life.