By Rafi Schwartz
Good Magazine
Unchecked carbon emissions are some of the worst culprits when it comes to damaging our planet’s fragile ecosystem. Unfortunately, carbon emissions are also something of an unavoidable fact of life in our highly-mechanized, industrial-driven world. Of course, great strides have been made in regulating and reducing the overall amount of CO2 released into our atmosphere, but we have yet to bring about the sort of holistic sea change necessary to fully reverse the decades of harmful impact carbon has had on our environment. That could change, though, with the introduction of new carbon-capturing technology able to suck CO2 out of thin air, on a massive, industrial scale.
Canadian start-up Carbon Engineering has created what it claims is a modular series of carbon capture filters which can extract ambient carbon out of the air, separate it from its accompanying oxygen molecules, purify and distill it, and perhaps someday even re-sell the newly reclaimed carbon as fuel.
The video above is from 2012, and while since that time no carbon-extracting mega-walls have been erected, Carbon Engineering has made serious headway on an equally impressive engineering feat: A carbon extracting “demo” plant, located in Squamish, British Colombia. Although neither modular, nor boundlessly deployable, as the company’s proposed capture filter system is, the demo plant is designed to demonstrate the technology’s large-scale viability, and pave the way for a subsequent commercial plant.
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