Dear friends,

I am excited to read this news, so thought of sharing with all of you about the first commercial carbon capture plant which went live few months ago in Switzerland.

A Swiss company "Climeworks" has become the world's first to commercially remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and turn it into a useful product.

Climeworks is compressing the CO2 it captures and using it as fertilizer to grow crops in greenhouses. The company wants to dramatically scale its technology over the next decade, and its long-term goal is to capture 1% of global annual carbon dioxide emissions by 2025. 

Along with cutting fossil fuel use to zero, removing carbon dioxide from the air is increasingly seen as one way to stop the long-term buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon removal and storage coupled with drawing down fossil fuel use is called NEGATIVE EMISSIONS.

Highly scalable negative emission technologies are crucial if we are to stay below the 2 degrees C target of the international community. The DAC (direct-air capture) technology provides distinct advantages to achieve this aim and is perfectly suitable to be combined with underground storage.

Time is running out to perfect the various methods of capturing carbon dioxide and permanently storing it. Research shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will increase to the point that 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of global warming will be inevitable within the next 22 years. Scientists consider that level of global warming dangerous, and the goal of the Paris climate agreement is to stop global warming before that limit is reached.

It is certain that global warming can only be addressed if global carbon dioxide emissions drop to zero.

The technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including planting new forests and building facilities that directly remove and capture climate pollution from the air, is in its infancy. It has never been tried at a large scale, and nobody knows if it can be used worldwide to remove enough carbon dioxide to slow warming.

The Climeworks plant represents the beginning of an industry that is attempting to perfect the technology. Other companies, such as British Columbia–based Carbon Engineering, are also working on direct-air capture plants that will commercially suck carbon dioxide from the air.

Climeworks carbon capture plant can be used for carbon sequestration. It has installed 18 carbon dioxide collectors on the roof of a garbage incineration plant outside Zurich. Powered by wasted heat from the incinerator, the collectors use fans to suck ambient air into filters, which absorb carbon dioxide. The filters are heated and the carbon dioxide is removed and piped into nearby greenhouses, which will use 900 metric tons of captured carbon to grow crops each year. The captured carbon dioxide could also be used to manufacture transportation fuel, carbonated soft drinks, and other products.

The company understands that in order to meet the goal of removing the equivalent of 1% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, 250,000 similar direct-air capture plants would have to be built. Isn't it impressive if the company can meet its goal to capture 1% of global carbon emissions.

Both getting rid of fossil fuels and directly capturing carbon dioxide from the air are necessary to solve climate change.

Sources:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/carbon-capture-co2-plant-2017-6?r=UK&IR=T&utm_content=buffer9262a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://grist.org/article/first-commercial-carbon-capture-plant-is-going-live-in-switzerland/