Carbon Sequestration

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.

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.

Direct air carbon capture is currently far too costly – but this London company says it can do it at enormous scale for a tenth the price, using engineered algal blooms in ponds located near desert coastlines. Oh, and it'll de-acidify the ocean, too.

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.

"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.

The largest XPrize competition ever conducted has given out its first prize money, with 23 student teams receiving cash injections to further technologies that take aim at the problem of mounting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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.

Climate change can feel inevitable, but we’ve stepped up to the challenge before. New modeling shows how bad things would be if CFCs hadn’t been banned decades ago – depleted ozone would've increased UV exposure and stopped plants capturing carbon.

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.

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.

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.

Scientists at Newcastle University have happened upon a particularly promising example if a carbon capture technology, developing a low-cost membrane that assembles one of its own key components as it absorbs CO2.