Global Warming Gas Can Now Be Extracted from Air and Resold

The world's first commercial facility that can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

and resell it for commercial purposes opened today (May 31) in Switzerland. This technology could help cut 1 percent of global fossil fuel emissions by 2025, according to the company that developed the new system. Climeworks — a spin-off company from the Swiss science, technology, engineering and mathematics university ETH Zurich — built the plant near the village of Hinwil, at a site between a waste incineration plant and a large greenhouse.Agricultural firm Gebrüder Meier Primanatura, which runs the greenhouse, will use the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to enhance the growth of lettuce, the company said. The waste incineration plant will provide the heat and renewable electricity needed to run the facility, the company added. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas] "The plant will capture 900 tons of CO2 per year," said Valentin Gutknecht, a business development manager at Climeworks. "The plant consists of several CO2 collectors, which are large boxes with filters inside. We blow air through these boxes for several hours, and after the filter is saturated, we heat the box up to 100 degrees [Celsius, or 212 degrees Fahrenheit] to extract the pure CO2 and regenerate the filters." Carbon dioxide emissions are a main driver of climate change, and current levels of atmospheric CO2 are unprecedented in human history. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization created by the United Nations to evaluate and report on the entire body of climate change science, 10 gigatons of CO2 need to be removed from Earth's atmosphere every year to halt the pace of global warming. Climeworks founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher first developed the so-called Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology during their studies at ETH Zurich in the late 2000s. At that time, the researchers were able to extract only tiny amounts of CO2, and no one thought the system would ever be commercially viable. "CO2 capture from air has been a very controversial topic in research for a long time," Gutknecht told Live Science. "There was a belief that the cost can't get down below $600 per ton of CO2 even at the mass scale. But we have managed to break this barrier."                https://www.livescience.com/59308-facility-captures-carbon-dioxide-from-atmosphere.html