ASU researchers working on way to pull CO2 out of atmosphere
Jun 19, 2016, 1:45 PM
Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions are working on a way to pull the CO2 we’ve put back in the atmosphere.
In a video from Bloomberg, the center’s director Klaus Lackner compares the CO2 in the atmosphere to dumping garbage in the street. Their team has been working on the technology of the device for more than a decade.
Bloomberg describes the use of the device.
They discovered a commercially available resin that can grab carbon dioxide at low concentrations when the material is dry and release it when the material is moist. The CO2 it collects could be stored underground, used in greenhouses, or fed to algae for biofuel production.
“Right now, we are taking carbon out of the ground. We then convert the energy into something useful. Then there’s a third step that we ignore—namely, to clean up after ourselves,” said Klaus Lackner, the center’s director.
According to Bloomberg, the resin the device could collect is the foundation of an artificial tree they say can grab just about 1,000 times as much CO2 as a living tree of the same size.
