Scalable carbon capture

What makes this fascinating

• Pulling CO₂ from thin air — Direct air capture works — but the gas is so dilute that it's energy-hungry and costly.

• Cost is everything — To matter for the climate, capture must get dramatically cheaper per ton, at gigaton scale.

• Then what? — Captured carbon must be stored permanently or put to use — itself an unsolved logistics challenge.

Frequently asked questions

What is carbon capture?

Removing carbon dioxide either from industrial exhaust or directly from the air, then storing or using it — a tool for cutting emissions and potentially reversing some past ones.

Why isn't carbon capture widely used yet?

Capturing CO₂, especially the dilute amount in open air, is energy-intensive and expensive, and doing it at a scale large enough to affect the climate — billions of tons a year — is far beyond today's capacity.

Can carbon capture solve climate change?

Most experts see it as a necessary complement to cutting emissions, not a substitute; the hard open problem is making it cheap and scalable enough to matter.

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