And the coolant needed to keep things ticking over is, just like the carbon dioxide, filtered out of the atmosphere by the plant itself. 80 per cent of the energy used to run the filters is drawn from the surplus heat that comes from below. The location was chosen specifically to ensure that the running of the filters is sustainable too – the roof of a waste incineration plant. The collectors are carefully aligned with one another so that the individual filters are constantly in different stages of the process. It can then be stored temporarily as a pure gas. Once a filter has been completely saturated with CO 2 it’s heated in a vacuum to 100 degrees, which causes the CO 2 molecules to be released from the material. The Zurich plant is made up of 18 CO 2 collectors stacked on top of each other, that suck in air and using a special chemical filter, separate off the CO 2 and store it. The process used in Climeworks’ plant is called “direct air capture” (DAC) and is said to be able to remove far more CO 2 per acre of land used than trees and plants – in this case up to 900 tons each year. The plant is strategically located right next to greenhouse, where the CO 2 collected is used to fertilise plants (which of course, thrive when given a generous supply of carbon dioxide). Consisting of a wall of jumbo-sized air filters, it capture and stores CO 2 as a pure gas, meaning that at as well as successfully removing it from the atmosphere, it can then be sold off for use in a variety of different industries, including, in this case, agriculture. Last month, Swiss company Climeworks inaugurated a new air capture plant that could help. One important new aspect of climate change mitigation is therefore so-called “negative emissions” technologies (NETs), a range of different techniques that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Not even the most ambitious efforts at avoiding CO 2 emissions will be enough. (It’s currently estimated that 10 gigatones of CO2 have to be removed from the atmosphere every year). Climate change demands that we reduce the concentration of greenhous gases in the atmosphere – and that we do it as quickly as possible. If the level continues to rise unabated, it’s pretty much inevitable that we’ll fail to meet the crucial international 2 degree Celsius target. The breakthrough method was a result of a collaboration between scientists from EPFL, China University of Petroleum, University of California, Berkeley and Beijing University of Chemical Technology and is published in the scientific journal Nature Communications External link.All around the world, climate change experts and politicans are busy coming up with action plans and strategies to reduce the amount of CO 2 being released into the atmosphere. “With these new materials like ZIFs we can now have crystalline materials where the pores are sufficiently large for CO2 to enter but too small for the solvent to enter,” Smit explained. This was not attempted before because if a solid absorbent is used in conjunction with a solvent, the liquid would fill up the pores meant for CO2. To overcome this problem, the researchers have come up with the best of both worlds by creating a slurry that consists of a solid part called ZIF-8, which is suspended in a liquid mixture of 2-methylimidazole glycol.īecause it combines the low cost and efficiency of nano-porous materials with the ease of a liquid-based separation process, the slurry successfully addresses these two main obstacles to the implementation of carbon capture in the real world. You cannot pump it as it goes everywhere,” Berend Smit, one of the co-authors of the paper and director of the Energy Center External link at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), told swissinfo.ch. They are very energy efficient but are not very practical because of the nature of the substance. The solid materials, known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), are made up of metal atoms with nano-size pores that collect CO2. However, it is very energy consuming to release the CO2 from the liquid as it requires a lot of heat. The most common approach to carbon capture uses liquid amine solutions, which can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. However, there are many obstacles that prevent it from being scaled up to the extent necessary to be a really effective solution. Carbon capture has been touted as a solution to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by collecting the CO2 released from factories and power plants and storing it.
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