A company wants to build a facility to suck millions of tonnes of climate pollution out of the air by 2030.
But skeptics say it is prohibitively expensive and we instead need to stop putting pollution up there in the first place. Direct air capture technology is in its infancy, but it is gaining momentum.
Capture6 co-founder Luke Shors said his firm had developed a simple, scaleable model and that New Zealand could play a cutting-edge role in the industry.
“What’s novel is not the equipment itself, it’s the sequence of equipment that’s used to capture carbon. That’s why we’re really confident in the approach, because this technology is [already being] used in all sorts of industries.”
The technology utilises seawater and uses renewable energy to suck CO2 from the air turning it into chalk. Aotearoa emits about eighty million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.
Read the full article written by Hamish Cardwell for RNZ.