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OSLO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - On a barren hillside in southwest Iceland, workers are installing huge fans to suck carbon dioxide from the air and turn it to stone deep below ground, in a radical - but expensive - way to fight global warming.
Engineering fixes for climate change are gaining attention and investments in 2021 as companies such as Microsoft and leaders from China, the United States and the European Union work on long-term plans to achieve “net zero” emissions goals.
Elon Musk, chief of Tesla Inc and a billionaire entrepreneur, said in January he would give a $100 million prize for the best “technology for capturing carbon”.
Microsoft turns to Climeworks to deliver carbon capture techology
Microsoft has turned to Climeworks carbon dioxide removal technology as one of the key measures that will help with a mission to reach negative emissions by 2030 and remove the company s historic emissions by 2050.
Microsoft met and surpassed a target to secure the removal of one million metric tonnes of carbon
Swiss company Climeworks specialises in carbon dioxide air capture technology. The process sees CO
2 captured from air in Hellisheiði, Iceland through direct air capture technology. The CO2 is then mixed with water, pumped underground where it is stored permanently once a mineralisation process is completed.
In The News 29 Jan 2021
EIT Climate-KIC supported Climeworks, a carbon capture technology, is now part of Microsoft’s carbon removal portfolio and its plan to reach negative emissions by 2030 and remove its historic emissions by 2050.
Humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by over a third since the Industrial Revolution began. These emissions have already increased global temperatures by around 1°C since pre-industrial times. According to the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C: “Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net-zero around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.”