At solar-powered campus, science takes on quest for ‘negative emissions’
TEMPE, Arizona: From the rooftop of Klaus Lackner’s seven-storey building on the Arizona State University campus, photovoltaic panels seemed to glisten in every direction. The school claims to have more solar capacity installed than any other university in America - part of a plan to offset the carbon emissions of this institution of more than 80,000 students.
But the odd little box Lackner had come to check might someday take things a big step further. If it works on a larger scale, what’s in the box could make the university a negative emitter – more than offsetting the amount of carbon it releases into the air.
“If you want to balance the books at this point,” Lackner said, “I don’t think you have a choice but to pull CO2 back that has already made it out, or is about to make it out, because we are not overnight shutting down all the coal plants.”
The device that Lackner is using to capture carbon dioxide is a transparent box containing two stacks of something that resembles pasta.
The “pasta” actually contains a sorbent, or absorptive material, that has been crushed into tiny pieces and embedded in strips of softer plastic. Lackner has shown that, in the open air, the sorbent binds with carbon dioxide.
With the planet already about 1 degree C warmer than in preindustrial times, scientists have estimated the amount of carbon we can emit and still stay below a 2-degree increase. There is no shortage of ideas on how to do that, but “all of them face significant challenges,” said Noah Deich, executive director of the Centre for Carbon Removal at the University of California at Berkeley.
“There’s no silver bullet. There’s no clear winner.” — Washington Post