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| ball-and-stick model of CO2: carbon dioxide (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Negatives emissions feel
counter intuitive. Why not capture the
carbon right where it is emitted? Would that not be cheaper?
Can Sucking CO2 Out of the Atmosphere Really Work?
air capture, which means, essentially, scrubbing it from the sky. ..... As emissions have accelerated—they’re now rising at 2 percent per year, twice as rapidly as they did in the last three decades of the 20th century—scientists have begun to recognize the urgency of achieving so-called “negative emissions.” ..... “Once capturing carbon from the air is profitable, people acting in their own self-interest will make it happen” ...... In the winter of 2008 Eisenberger sequestered himself in a quiet house with big glass windows overlooking the ocean in Mendocino County, California. There he studied existing literature on capturing carbon and made a key decision. ...... a 40-foot-high tower of fans, steel, and silver tubes ..“It’s doing exactly what the tree is doing,” says Eisenberger. But then he corrects himself. “Well, actually, it’s doing it a lot better.” ....... “There’s really little chance that you could capture CO2 from ambient air more cheaply than from a coal plant, where the flue gas is 300 times more concentrated” ...... deriving fuels from biomass—which removes CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows. As that feedstock is fermented in a reactor to create ethanol, it produces a stream of pure carbon dioxide that can be captured and stored underground ...... scientific advances made in air capture will eventually be used primarily on coal and gas power plants.
