Capturing and storing carbon dioxide is an immensely promising avenue.
A startup in Iceland is tackling a key piece of the climate change puzzle by turning carbon dioxide into rocks, allowing the greenhouse gas to be stored forever instead of escaping into the atmosphere and trapping heat.
Reykjavik-based Carbfix captures and dissolves CO2 in water, then injects it into the ground where it turns into stone in less than two years. “This is a technology that can be scaled - it’s cheap and economic and environmentally friendly,” Carbfix Chief Executive Officer Edda Sif Pind Aradottir said in an interview. “Basically we are just doing what nature has been doing for millions of years, so we are helping nature help itself.”
Once considered a pipe dream, capturing and storing CO2 has in the last few years become an area of immense interest for high-profile investors, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who are searching for solutions to avoid the worst effects of global warming, reports Bloomberg Green.
The technology can work in two ways. The first is called “carbon capture,” where the gas is trapped from the smokestacks of factories and power plants before it escapes into the atmosphere. A second, more challenging process, is “carbon removal” - withdrawing CO₂ from the air around us. Carbon capture can cut a company or government’s emissions to zero, while carbon removal can help offset its emissions, or even make its impact negative, by taking more CO2 out of the air than it produces.
Carbfix is doing both. Sounds very promising, so OGN will keep you posted.
From the rocky outcrops of Iceland to the to the sunny plains of Texas, engineers are building giant machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It sounds like science fiction, but the companies behind this technology insist it could be a secret weapon in the fight against climate change. More...