David Goldberg outlines one way to pair direct air capture with wind energy in The Conversation.
- To reduce climate change’s impacts we will need to not only reduce current emissions, but also pull greenhouse gasses that have already been emitted out of the atmosphere.
- To do this, Goldberg suggests that we pair offshore wind with direct air capture.
- Excess energy produced by the turbines, which would otherwise go to waste, would be used to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere to be stored underneath our ocean floor. This would reduce pipeline construction costs and completion times.
- This system could theoretically reduce as much .5 million tons of CO2 per year, but could increase with improvements in direct air capture technology and growth in offshore wind energy.
“Replacing fossil fuel-based energy with clean energy like wind power is essential to holding off the worsening effects of climate change. But that transition isn’t happening fast enough to stop global warming. Human activities have pumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we will also have to remove carbon dioxide from the air and lock it away permanently.”
Read the full article here.
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