Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know the world needs to urgently cut the amount of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere. One way to make a serious dent is carbon capture – a group of technologies that has been gaining momentum lately, and has been cited by the United Nations as an important tool in keeping the rise in global temperatures below catastrophic levels.
One of the latest and what may prove to be the biggest deployment of such technologies comes from a Dublin-based company that plans to plant “mechanical trees” in the United States that will suck carbon dioxide from the air. The company, called Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH), will build 1,200 carbon-cleansing metal columns within a year with which it hopes to capture CO2 more cheaply than other methods. That is enough to suck up nearly 8,000 cars worth of CO2 emissions per year.
While the high price of direct air capture has long been viewed as an impediment to scaling up the technologies, SKH’s costs are less than $100 per metric ton for pure CO2, making it one of the most efficient carbon capture tech available.
