You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.)

Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and terraform Mars.

Yes, ignoring economic incentives, they could just bury it. (Due to similar incentives, Chevron and BP aren't leaving oil sequestered in the ground.)

Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.

You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it. Carbon offsets already exist anyway. You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.

I'm only being half-facetious about shipping the stuff to Mars; eventually, we're going to want to terraform Mars, and creating a greenhouse effect is going to be part of that.

Or you could make lubricants, plastics, vaseline...

> You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it.

It isn't sufficient to punt the cost onto a small group with shared political bent (environmentalists). There simply aren't enough of them to bear the costs, and it creates perverse incentives for carbon consumption for everyone else.

Yes, I think environmentalists have been trying to encourage governments to pay for carbon sequestration etc for quite some time. Mandated emissions reductions and increased fuel efficiency, carbon offset taxes, and funding carbon sequestration (burying) are all sides of the same coin.

> You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.

Potato, potato. It's still additional funding, and good luck getting a conservative-majority senate to pass funding for anything other than the military and social security.

Yes, there is some use for carbon products, assuming people dispose of them by recycling or burying rather than burning. But I don't think it comes close to the volume needed to really restore pre-20th century atmospheric carbon levels.