Fuel from the atmosphere

Canadian environmental startup Carbon Engineering has found an effective way to fight global warming.
As you know, the main reason of global warming on the planet is the increase in the earth’s atmosphere of the concentration of greenhouse gases the main of which is carbon dioxide. The founder of the Canadian environmental startup Carbon Engineering asked a logical question if humanity can not agree to reduce emissions into the atmosphere, why not start removing carbon directly from the air?

A pilot plant has already been created, the most visible part of which is a ventilator with a diameter of about three meters, which provides the passage of huge amounts of air through a system that allows to extract carbon dioxide from it.

Subsequently, carbon dioxide can be either buried or processed into fuel. Its cost, however, will be 1.6 times more expensive than the fuel derived by the traditional way, but the environmental damage from its combustion will be many times less, because carbon dioxide released as a result of combustion was previously present in the atmosphere. In addition, even at this price, fuel can have commercial success in the market, especially in countries such as India and Japan, which annually spend hundreds of billions of dollars on hydrocarbon imports.

Thus, the technology of direct carbon capture, developed by Carbon Engineering, is able, if not to stop global climate change, then certainly to slow them down.

To date, the startup has already attracted more than 68 million dollars of investment and the money continues to come, including from large oil and gas companies interested in improving their “green” reputation.
The funds raised went, among other things, to the development of the first commercial plant for the direct capture of carbon from the atmosphere. In comparison with the pilot plant,the plant will be several times larger. The basis of the unit will be just four ventilators with a diameter of 10 meters each. Such a facility could remove the same amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as 40 million trees within a year.

As for the market prospects of Carbon Engineering, they are great. The capacity of one industrial plant for carbon capture from the atmosphere is 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, while mankind for the same period of time emits 33 billion tons of this gas into the atmosphere. Accordingly, a minimum of 33,000 installations would be required simply to compensate the anthropogenic impact on the environment. This amount of work ensures carbon engineering specialists stable employment for the next few decades, if not for hundreds of years.