Carbon capture

A company at the cutting edge of carbon capture technology has outlined its vision to use Australia's vast, open spaces and abundant sunlight to power millions of modular systems that would collect millions of tons of CO2 each year.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere attracts most of the attention in environmental concerns, but much of that ends up in oceans, making them more acidic. Now scientists have created nanojars that can easily capture this and other pollutants from water.

Researchers have proposed a fascinating way to eliminate CO2 in the notoriously hard-to-abate shipping sector. The ships would use existing marine fuels, run through solid oxide fuel cells, and all CO2 would be stored back in a partitioned fuel tank.

Blue hydrogen isn't a step forward for the climate, says a new report out of Cornell and Stanford Universities. Indeed, it's worse than simply burning gas or coal in many applications – so it's not an acceptable transition phase in the race to zero.

An ambitious Israeli startup claims it can pull carbon dioxide out of the air vastly cheaper than anyone else, using massive high-altitude balloons to take advantage of stratospheric temperatures and freeze CO2 out of the air with minimal energy.

A new study out of the University of Sheffield makes a case for a geoengineering technique known as enhanced rock weathering, which essentially involves supercharging soil’s ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by sprinkling it with rock dust.

Carbon dioxide is an all too common waste product of industry, belched into the air from smokestacks. Now, researchers have developed a new type of fluorinated membrane that can selectively filter CO2 out of flue gas at the point of release.

Scientists in Australia are claiming to have developed a new technique that converts waste carbon dioxide into simple chemical building blocks that they liken to Lego, which can then be turned into useful products such as synthetic fuels and plastics.

One area where metal organic frameworks have real potential is in the field of carbon capture, which a team of researchers has demonstrated with a sponge-like device that adsorbs CO2 using just a third of the energy required by other methods.

The world’s oceans play an important role in regulating the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere, but a new study suggests we may have been greatly underestimating the effectiveness of this vast carbon sink.

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.