This summer at the University of Calgary in Canada, great strides were made in  an air capture system, built to filter CO2 emissions from diffuse sources.

Professor David Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy’s (ISEEE) at the University of Calgary, and his team, captured CO2 directly from the air using less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per ton of CO2.

Their custom-built tower captured the equivalent of about 20 tons per year of CO2 on a single square meter of scrubbing material.  To put this in context:  It’s about the average amount of emissions that one person would produce in a year in North America.  The team’s hope and belief is that this technology can easily be perfected and made more efficient.

The air capture technology being researched at the University of Calgary, is significant, as it is said to be the only way to capture CO2 emissions from polluters such as cars and airplanes.  These CO2 sources are referred to as “diffuse” sources, and make up about half of the greenhouse gases emitted on earth.

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