It seems we might have a team eligible for the $25m Virgin Earth Challenge. An article in the Guardian reports on a group of US scientist's led by Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University in New York who have developed a device that can "suck" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, reducing the warming effect of the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas produced each year.
This news comes hot on the heels of Wallace Broecker’s proposed solution reported by the BBC that we need millions of "carbon scrubbers" - giant artificial trees to pull CO2 from the air.
Lackner and his team plan to build and demonstrate a prototype within two years that could economically capture a tonne of CO2 a day from the air.
The prototype so-called scrubber will be small enough to fit inside a shipping container. Lackner estimates it will initially cost around £100,000 to build, but the carbon cost of making each device would be "small potatoes" compared with the amount each would capture, he said.
While this may not be the magic bullet that the world is looking for it is a significant move forward. It would take millions of the devices to soak up the world's carbon emissions, and the CO2 trapped would still need to be disposed of. But Lackner and his team says the technology may be the best way to avert dangerous temperature rises, as fossil fuel use is predicted to increase sharply in coming decades despite international efforts. Climate experts at a monitoring station in Hawaii this month reported CO2 levels in the atmosphere have reached a record 387 parts per million (ppm) - 40% higher than before the industrial revolution.
You must be logged in to comment on this blog post.
