The advantage of an electricity-based system for carbon capture is that it scales linearly. homes with rooftop solar into mini-carbon capture plants.

Imagine turning the more than 2 million U.S. “That’s one of the nice aspects of this technology - is that direct linkage with renewables,” said Jennifer Wilcox, a chemical engineer at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who was not involved in the study. Rather than lose this power, these renewable plants could set up a side hustle where their excess energy is used to capture carbon. Voskian also pictures the battery being scaled to plug into power plants powered by renewables, such as wind farms and solar fields, which are known to create more energy than they can store. Relative to current technology, this electroswing adsorber could be retrofitted onto smaller, mobile sources of emissions like autos and planes, the study states.

“Many current systems, for instance, are very bulky and can only be used for large-scale power plants or industrial applications.” “I realized there was a gap in the spectrum of solutions,” said Sahag Voskian, who co-led the project with fellow MIT chemical engineer T. When electricity runs into the battery, the active layers, which are covered with quinone, collect CO2 from the surrounding air. The battery has two active (negative) electrodes on the outside and a positive (counter) electrode in the middle (red). The researchers describe this back-and-forth as electroswing adsorption.Ī cross-section of an electroswing adsorber, which is essentially an electrochemical cell - that is, a battery. The CO2 can be extracted by discharging the battery, releasing the gas, so the CO2 then can be pumped into the ground. You pump electricity into the battery, and while the device stores this charge, a chemical reaction occurs that absorbs CO2 from the surrounding atmosphere - a process known as direct air capture. Think of the invention as a quasi-battery, in terms of its shape, its construction and how it works to collect carbon dioxide. Published in October in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the project is the latest bid to directly capture CO2 emissions and keep them from accelerating and worsening future climate disasters. Humans have pumped about 2,000 gigatonnes - billions of metric tons - of carbon dioxide into the air since industrialization, and there will be more.īut what if you could have a personal-sized carbon capture machine on your car, commercial airplane or solar-powered home?Ĭhemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new device that can remove carbon dioxide from the air at any concentration. It will take years - likely decades - before the world’s hundreds of CO2-emitting industrial plants adopt capture technology. Moreover, the energy sector’s transition toward decarbonization is moving too slowly. Carbon capture can’t draw CO2 from regular open air, where the concentration of this prominent pollutant is too diffuse. But those industrial practices work because these factories produce gas pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane at high concentrations. Typically set up to collect carbon from an exhaust stream, this technology sops up greenhouse gases before they spread into Earth’s airways.

That’s why carbon capture technology is slowly being integrated into energy and industrial facilities across the globe. To make some realistic attempt at preventing a grim future, humans need to be able to physically remove carbon from the air. Despite the rapid expansion of wind, solar and other clean energy technologies, human behavior and consumption are flooding our skies with too much carbon, and simply supplanting fossil fuels won’t stop global warming. Renewable energy alone is not enough to turn the tide of the climate crisis.

Carbon capture technology