In a new study, researchers have developed a method for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, powered by clean and relatively inexpensive geothermal energy.
In a new study, researchers have developed a method for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, powered by clean and relatively inexpensive geothermal energy.
Their findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reveal that by combining direct air carbon dioxide capture technologies (DACC) and geothermal energy, large-scale carbon dioxide (CO2) removal systems could potentially be supplied with enough energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and safely store it underground.
Emitted when humans burn fossil fuels for things like heat, electricity and transportation, carbon dioxide accounts for the majority of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities in the atmosphere. Because this accumulation is one of the main drivers of climate change, efforts to address the excess have focused on methods for extracting carbon dioxide, either at the original source of emission or directly from the air.
“Carbon removal technologies are especially helpful in mitigating climate change because we can capture types of emissions that would be hard to cap in other ways,” said Martina Leveni, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “So we thought, could we combine technologies that could be beneficial to one another to meet this goal more efficiently?”
Read more at Ohio State University
Photo Credit: Kanenori via Pixabay
