Carbon Sequestration

"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.

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.

Capturing carbon from the air and sequestering it is emerging as a viable strategy, and now scientists have developed a new method to turn CO2 gas back into solid coal, that can then be buried, or even used for electronic components.

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.​