Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Lab have developed a technique that is able to pull carbon dioxide out of the exhaust flue of a power plant or factory for $39 per metric ton, the cheapest cost every reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
To construct a factory to pull carbon dioxide out of the factory exhaust flue with this technique and at this price would cost $750 million.
If we want any chance of meeting the ambitious climate goals laid out by the 2015 Paris Agreement, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ll need to find a way to actually reverse past emissions.
That’s why a team of scientists from the University of California San Diego and Texas A&M University published a call to arms, Wired reports, saying that a “wartime-like crash deployment” of carbon capture technology will play a crucial part in saving us from climate change-induced devastation.
Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.
But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming.
According to a press release from ANL, researchers at the lab, working with partners at Northern Illinois University, have discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product, and low cost. Ethanol is a particularly desirable commodity because it is an ingredient in nearly all US gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries.
University of Alberta researchers have developed techniques that save a significant amount of time in developing more efficient carbon capture technologies, which may help lower the costs to use the technologies and increase their adoption as a way to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions.
U of A engineering professor Arvind Rajendran and his team developed a two-step screening process that assesses carbon capture materials called zeolites in seconds rather than a day.
Researchers at EPFL have patented a new concept that could cut trucks’ CO2 emissions by almost 90%. It involves capturing CO2 within the exhaust system, converting it into a liquid and storing it on the vehicle. The liquid CO2 would then be delivered to a service station and where it will be turned back into fuel using renewable energy.
At gatherings of electric vehicle enthusiasts, the curious surround Rob Spreitzer and his car. Both are celebrities in these circles — he's known as "High Mileage Rob," having driven more than 115,000 kilometres in his Tesla Model 3 in a little more than a year of ownership.
No other Model 3 in Canada is believed to have reached that milestone in such a short time, and it's possible no other battery-only electric vehicle has either.
