OSLO: High costs of extracting greenhouse gases from thin air could tumble with new technologies that can help to combat climate change, scientists said on Thursday.
Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based clean energy company, outlined the design of a large industrial plant that it said could capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost of between $94 and $232 a tonne.
That is well below past estimates of about $600 a tonne by the American Physical Society, said David Keith, a Harvard University physics professor and the founder of Carbon Engineering who led the research.
“I hope to show that this as a viable energy industrial technology, not something that is a magic bullet... but something that is completely doable,” he said of the peer-reviewed study published in the journal Joule.
Carbon Engineering, which has about 40 employees and produces about a tonne of carbon dioxide a day from an experimental plant.
The technology makes synthetic fuels using only air, water and renewable power.
Keith said an industrial-scale plant could make fuel at a dollar a litre. — AFP
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