With big tech companies like Meta and Google investing nearly one billion USD in carbon removal strategies and technologies, it is clear that one of the big focuses of big corporations is reducing the carbon footprint that burdens the planet.
According to NPR, the world didn't put enough effort in the past 40 years in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and we are now at a point where cutting the use of fossil-fuels may not be enough to improve the situation.
With climate change causing more and more destructive weather phenomena that is affecting even our food supply, some scientist say that we might need to think about pulling the heat-trapping gases from the atmosphere.
In a recent report made pulbic by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists noted that it is crucial for countries to start developing technologies that will allow for carbon capture if they want temperatures to stay within the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit.
While the technologies that will allow us to sequester carbon emissions are still very much in development, one of them being the use of algae to capture carbon dioxide, there are climate activists who suggest that focusing on those technologies would be a distraction so that fossil-fuel industries would have a free pass of operating.
Still, other experts strongly support the idea of removing carbon from the atmosphere, as it would be a critical part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 43% until the next decade and to get them to net-zero by 2050, which is needed to limit the global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Despite renewable energy sources being fairly widespread and the auto market moving fairly quickly towards EVs, some industries are far from taking the required action to be part of the climate change tacklers.
Farming, for example, produces emissions both from disturbing the soil and from using fertilizers, which in return release heat-trapping gases, not to mention the fossil-fuel powered machinery required for the farming process.
Aircraft and ships are still quite far from being equipped with non-polluting power sources, as they contribute to the release of climate change emissions as well, and also industries, such as steelmaking, requires fuels that generate very high temperatures for the production process.
While by the half of this century all those industries might still be releasing emissions, it is important that the level of heat-trapping gases will at least remain as it is.
Katherine Calvin, NASA's chief scientist and senior climate adviser and an author on the IPCC report, compared this to how a bathtub is kept from overflowing, saying that "if you want to stop the water level from going up, you either need to turn off the faucet or scoop out as much water as you put in. The same is true of climate. If you want to stop temperature from rising, you either need to stop carbon dioxide from going into the system or scoop out as much as you put in."
How we can capture carbon emissions
The idea of capturing carbon isn't bad, since by keeping it stored underground, we could prevent it from coming back into the atmosphere and cause heating once more.
The tricky part comes from capturing it, as it is present everywhere, making up less than 1% of the atmosphere.
Nature is our best friend
One of the easiest and effortless ways for us to remove carbon is through letting nature do its part, which fights carbon emissions through forests, wetlands or mangroves. By encouraging agricultural practices that keep the carbon in the soil and restoring ecosystems like forests and wetlands, we have a good chance to fight climate change, although the key part here is to protect these areas from development, as this is their biggest threat.
If they get destroyed, carbon will escape into atmosphere once again.
Algae cultures on the shores of the oceans are also another way we could capture some of the carbon from the atmosphere, as stated in the beginning, but these technologies are still in their infancy and they need to be adopted on a wide scale in order to work properly.
Biomass is another solution when it comes to sequestering carbon, since leftover plants are already being used in order to produce electricity in biomass power plants, and while those release the carbon stored in the plant through its lifetime, they do so by producing energy.
To improve with regards to sustainability, some biomass power plants work on capturing the carbon and storing it underground in geological formations, process known as "bioenergy with carbon capture and storage".
Capturing carbon with machinery
Last year, one of the largest carbon removal projects was started in Iceland, through the Orca plant, which is run by the Swiss company Climeworks, and it works essentially as a vacuum.
Other projects of this kind are being developed in the US, but they are expensive to implement and require large quantities of energy.
Capturing carbon from fossil fuels isn't a solution
Some power plants that make use of fossil-fuels work on projects that would sequester carbon emissions using the same principle of storing it underground, but this wouldn't be of much help, since fossil fuels have large quantities of carbon stored inside them, and by capturing the emissions coming from these plants, we would only neutralize them, instead of offsetting.
The downside of capturing carbon
Perhaps the biggest issue when it comes to capturing carbon is related to cost, as the Biden administration aims to get the price of captured carbon at under 100 USD per ton within a decade.
Currently, the price or removing carbon from the atmosphere using technology can cost six to seven times more than that, which is why we need to invest in nature as well in order to fight emissions as best as possible.
Oliver Geden, senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and an author of the recent IPCC report, says that "there is a certain newness factor from carbon dioxide removal and it gets a lot of attention. But still, it should not be the priority of what we're doing. It should not be the thing we're focusing on. The focus needs to be on reducing emissions and carbon dioxide removal is only a complement to that."
Any thoughts?