Carbon capture

In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and harvest useful byproducts, scientists are increasingly investigating methods of capturing the CO2 emitted by smokestacks. A new material may make doing so easier and more efficient than ever before.

As far as fighting climate change is concerned, "one whale is worth thousands of trees," the IMF has said. But reports suggesting that trees therefore pale into insignificance compared to whales are missing the point.

Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for pulling carbon dioxide out of a chimney flue at a power plant or even just ambient air. The new device is a specialized battery that absorbs CO2 while charging, then releases it for industrial use.

Hypergiant Industries has announced an algae-fueled bioreactor that can soak up as much carbon from the atmosphere as an acre of trees.

How effective would planting new trees be to combat climate change? A new study from ETH Zurich has found that Earth has room to reforest an area the size of the US, and calculates what benefits that might bring. But of course, the story is more complicated than just planting a trillion new trees.

Fossil fuel-fired power plants will be pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for a long time to come. Now researchers at ORNL have developed a new substance that could effectively soak up carbon from coal-fired power plant emissions, using much less energy than existing methods.

Inspired by the ocean’s role as a natural carbon sink, researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and Georgia Tech have developed a new system that absorbs CO2 and produces electricity and useable hydrogen fuel.

A promising new technology developed at Canada’s University of Waterloo hinges on a special kind of powder that could be applied as a filter at power plants to gather CO2 molecules at the source, and is claimed to offer double the efficiency of the materials that are currently available.​

The soda industry is one place where you can bet there will be a massive demand for the CO2, and its about to get a little bit cleaner with Coca-Cola HBC signing a deal to use CO2 captured by Swiss startup Climeworks in its Valser mineral water.​

Climeworks is a Swiss company at the vanguard of carbon capture technology, and having just completed a year-long pilot project collecting C02 at the world’s first negative emissions power plant, is rather optimistic about the way things are headed.

It’s not enough to reduce our carbon output – we need to actively remove some from the atmosphere. On a small scale MIT engineers have developed a new material that can suck carbon out of the air and use it to get stronger or patch itself up.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have now developed “spacesuits” that wrap around bacteria to not only protect them from the elements, but turn them into biohybrids that capture carbon dioxide and turn it into useful chemicals.