Carbon capture

A student team has built a prototype electric passenger car that removes and stores carbon dioxide from the air as it rolls down the road, with the aim of capturing more CO2 than is emitted during the full lifecycle of the vehicle.

We're seeing a growing emphasis on direct air capture technology in our efforts to combat climate change, and an interesting new take on this technology could see it put to use on railways around the world.

Swiss outfit Climeworks has today broken ground on its second direct air capture plant in Iceland, and one that marks significant progress in its ambitions of removing gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050.

Scientists have announced an interesting new means of removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from flue gas emissions, which would create a usable substance. It's a sheet of treated cotton, which converts CO2 gas into bicarbonate.

Carbon capture could be an important tool to fight climate change. Researchers have now developed a new compound that can reportedly remove carbon dioxide from ambient air with 99 percent efficiency and at least twice as fast as existing systems.

The US Department of Energy's efforts to combat climate change are set to receive a massive cash injection, with the Biden administration announcing US$3.5 billion in funding for regional direct air carbon capture hubs to help reach net-zero by 2050.

Engineers in the US and Mexico have developed a way to use soot from emissions to improve solar thermal devices. The coatings are not only cheaper to produce but more efficient than using materials like graphene, while reducing pollution.

An XPrize competition designed to develop solutions to the mounting levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has progressed to its next phase, with 15 teams from around the world each awarded US$1 million to continue developing their technologies.

Two of our biggest environmental problems are the tons of unusable plastic waste, and the tons of carbon dioxide which are released into the atmosphere in smokestack emissions. A new process is claimed to use the former to trap the latter.

"Artificial leaf" systems could play a key role in the fight against climate change, and a team of engineers has just picked up the pace with a solution that captures carbon dioxide at 100 times the rate of current technologies.

A new method quickly converts carbon dioxide into solid carbon, which can be stored indefinitely or turned into useful materials. The technology works by bubbling CO2 up through a tube of liquid metal, and could be used at the source of emissions.

Carbon dioxide may hog headlines as a climate change villain, but methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas. MIT has now demonstrated a new way to remove methane from the air, even at low concentrations, with a common clay used to make cat litter.