New carbon capture tech could save us from datacenter doom

Researchers in Finland have found a new way to capture carbon dioxide from ambient air that they say is more efficient than existing methods, cheap to produce, reusable, and allows for easy recycling of captured CO₂.  The team, led by University of Helsinki post-doctoral researcher Zahra Eshaghi Gorji, published the findings …

[Autonomous Mallard]

Drop in a bucket

Impressive achievement. Now, let's take a look at the scale of the problem atmospheric carbon capture is attempting to solve. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has emitted trillions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Some of this has been absorbed by various natural carbon sinks, but about 1,140 billion metric tons of excess CO2 are suspended in the atmosphere. [1] To absorb that using this compound, assuming it can be used 100 times with an average 75% efficiency, we'd have to create:

1.14*10^18 (mass of excess CO2 in milligrams)/11,700 (lifetime CO2 absorption of 1 gram of TBN-BA in milligrams)=~97.5 million metric tons of TBN-BA

Creating that much is a colossal effort in and of itself, much less the infrastructure required to actually utilize it and sequester the CO2.

Carbon capture projects are frequently used to greenwash the creation of new fossil fuel burning power plants, but I've never seen a credible proposal to deploy it at the scale necessary to put a dent in the problem.

Humanity does have limited industrial capacity, and it takes less effort to replace emission sources with clean power generation than it does to pull the emitted carbon back out of the atmosphere.

Carbon capture will be part of the long-term solution (i.e centuries), but it shouldn't be used as an excuse to create new fossil fuel power generation.

P.S: Those numbers are quite rough, but are accurate enough to convey the magnitude of the problem.

[1]: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-staggering-scale-of-human-co2

[DS999]

I don't see how this can ever be viable

You'd have to move a lot of air through such an ambient air capture device and still won't capture very much since CO2 concentration in air is only .04%. In order to be practical you either need source capture (i.e. put it on top of smokestacks and exhaust pipes) or you need ambient capture surfaces - building materials or coatings that remove CO2 from the air without power or external heat sources. If buildings were painted with paint or roofs were covered with shingles that sucked CO2 out of the air over their entire service life, just from the heat provided by the sun hitting them and wind blowing air across them then you'd have something.

[cyberdemon]

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

CO2-absorbing paints do exist. Unfortunately they are not very effective.

e.g. A British company, Graphenstone, has produced carbon dioxide absorbing paints. Each square meter of the paint can absorb 120 g of carbon dioxide"

By my calculation, if we coated the entire globe (all 510 trillion square metres of it, including ocean area) in this paint, it would absorb 61 billion tonnes of CO2 i.e. almost 2 whole years worth of our current annual CO2 emissions before we would have to re-paint the earth again.

So, literally greenwash-in-a-tin.

[FistVSCloud]

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

It isn't and won't be.

The best case thermodynamic limit to capture CO2 from air is about 0.45GJ/tonne of CO2, while current state of capture tech is at 7-11GJ/tonne. That's just to get it to 100% concentration. You then need to do something with it. Compress it? that's another 20-40% energy cost. Now what do you do with that? Some industrial processes can use it, but almost all of it will need to be stored if this is to be a long term solution.

All of this is predicated on unlimited free green energy which... solves the CO2 problem.

My money is on humanity developing fusion power long before we get carbon capture viable. The best solution is not to make the CO2 in the first place.

[cyberdemon]

> My money is on humanity developing fusion power long before we get carbon capture viable.

Fusion? Sadly as someone who worked in that industry for several years, I can't put my money on it. If you thought the physics of fusion is difficult, the engineering is even harder.

The core of the Sun has a power density of a few hundred Watts per cubic metre (i.e. a compost heap - a really really big one) which is why we need temperatures and pressures even higher than those found in the Sun for fusion that produces useful energy on Earth. And those pressures have to exist in a vacuum somehow, in order to contain the temperatures. That part we have pretty much solved with magnetic confinement, through decades of trying.

But the problem comes when you try to capture the energy. Most of it is delivered to the walls of your vacuum vessel through sheer intensity of Neutron radiation. They are not re-absorbed by the fuel as they are in a fission reactor. And neutrons are a bugger, because they make non-radioactive elements like Cobalt (59) into radioactive ones like Cobalt-60. So, your machine for producing clean energy becomes very radioactive and suddenly falls foul of the same regulations that make Fission power expensive and impractical.

What is cheaper: Storing a few tonnes of high-level waste for 10,000 years, or storing a few thousand tonnes of waste (which starts as high-level and then cools off over the course of decades) for 100 years? In terms of size, fusion reactors are MUCH bigger than fission reactors for the same power. EFDA's "DEMO" design for example would use about a hundred tonnes of liquid lithium-lead as a neutron-absorbing coolant in *each* of its 16 sectors. In total it would produce tens of thousands of tonnes of intermediate-level waste*. And it's only 300-500MW, and it probably wouldn't even work.

* https://scientific-publications.ukaea.uk/wp-content/uploads/UKAEA-CCFE-CP2322.PDF

Fission on the other hand, is nice and compact, dead simple (relatively speaking), and it works. Yes its fuel on Earth is finite, but a small amount produces so much energy that we needn't be worried. Yes it produces some long-lived waste, but that is nice and compact too, and may even be able to be burned up as fuel by future reactor designs (such as molten salt, or my personal favourite: Accelerator-driven subcritical reactors) well before its 10,000 year lifespan is up.

[FistVSCloud]

Re: > My money is on humanity developing fusion power long before we get carbon capture viable.

Heh, my comment was mostly satirical. Carbon capture is just 50 years away ;-)

I spent a few years designing equipment for co2 capture startups including the tech that regenerates at 900c. The thermodynamics are just short of perpetual motion, the industrial scale up challenges are massive and the long term vision of how to power this tech and what to do with the output is problematic.

The promise that AI will solve global warming is also erm... optimistic. It's another hand waving promise that we can maybe find a band-aid. It serves as an excuse to do nothing. Tech can't fix climate change, but efficiency gains can help. Policy and grass roots change need to part of the fix too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

Carbon capture - use natures field tested at scale solutions which once established are largely self-managing as long as people stop cutting them down, draining them, building on them.

Trees, wetlands, mangrove forests and other natural sinks/

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

Nope. Plants aren't carbon sinks. They're short term stores. After death their carbon is back in circulation.

[Spherical Cow]

Re: I don't see how this can ever be viable

A forest does store CO2. Individual trees die and release CO2, new trees grow in their place and absorb CO2. So long as the forest continues to be a forest its overall CO2 continues to be stored. Deforestation adds to overall atmospheric CO2, planting new forests has the opposite effect.

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a related Open Access paper (also 2025) using solid beads functionalized with TBN in J. Chem. Eng. (aka ChEJ) that's probably worth a gander (esp. Fig. 2).

And for this new article in TFA, the Supplementary Information PDF is open access too, with some nice plots of Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy results in Fig. S9, for CO₂ sorption and desorption (most visible near 1278 cm⁻¹).

Cool tech if it can scrape CO₂ from "dirty" power plant exhaust imho!

[bigtreeman]

Hasn't done the job yet

C.C. has been an expensive failure so far using a variety of technologies.

Don't produce the CO2 in the first place.

But all the various claims have been effective in stalling the transition to green energy.

[codejunky]

Re: Hasn't done the job yet

@bigtreeman

"Don't produce the CO2 in the first place."

If the proponents of this idea would live and die by it we would have none of them.

"But all the various claims have been effective in stalling the transition to green energy."

Unfortunately green is a tough to define idea. Drax is green apparently and of course nuclear. But unfortunately the fear of nukes has stopped that from being deployed more.

[Pulled Tea]

So what you're telling me is that the same technologies that were used to hype "clean" coal…

…is now being used to hype AI data centres?

That's… that's a look, I guess?

[Flocke Kroes]

Capture and then what?

Turn to plastics: it is cheaper / less wasteful to turn oil into plastics without burning it first.

Making fuel: requires more energy than the amount released by burning the oil in the first place.

In some distant dream future I can imagine turning CO2 into plastics because there is no oil industry. Likewise I can imagine using nuclear/solar/wind to turn CO2 into aircraft fuel because that might be easier than flying batteries or nuclear reactors.

[Jimmy2Cows]

We is solid form so essential?

Liquid form could be piped/transported away to some centralised processing facility to bulk-recover and recycle the CO2. Solid form seems to imply recovery in-place is needed, which seems way, way less efficient.

Or is solid form more effective at capture? I guess the aforementioned functionalised beads could be a decent middle ground. Still transportable.

[cyberdemon]

Re: We is solid form so essential?

Solid form is considered better because it is less likely to leak back into the environment..

They say that this 1,5,7-triazabicyclo [4.3.0] non-6-ene (TBN) and benzyl alcohol mix is "non-toxic", but don't be surprised if it kills all the fish if when it leaks, or later turns out to be highly carcinogenic

The problem with all carbon capture (besides natural, self-replicating trees) is scale. You'd need to make millions of gallons of this stuff to make the smallest dent in global CO2 emissions.. Is that even feasible? What are the (energy/carbon) costs of making it? How many times would it need to be re-used to "pay" that back? What are the byproducts? How do you dispose of them?

[GraXXoR]

The US has said that they are leaving a whole bunch of UN treaties today including the UNFCCC which means that they’re certainly not going to spend money on stuff like this and will leave it to the rest of the world to struggle with the climate…

Without the US being involved it seems there’s little point since China will likely just point to the US as an example and follow suit.

2026 is already fucked and it’s just the 8th of Jan.

[Thought About IT]

China is already suffering badly from climate change so it's in their interest to stick with the programme, regardless of what Trump does. While they are investing to dominate in technologies of the future which they are selling to the rest of the world, the US is doing the opposite. When the US finally wakes up, it will be too late to catch up. I just hope they don't then lash out, as is their wont, and blame everybody but themselves.

[Richard 12]

China is all-in on green technology, their leaders understand that their future depends on it, and unlike Trump they plan more than ten seconds ahead. They are getting very good at manufacturing solar PV and wind turbines.

Which they will of course sell to the rest of the world - the vast majority of PV panels are made in China.

[codejunky]

@Richard 12

"China is all-in on green technology"

And their coal plants prove it!

"They are getting very good at manufacturing solar PV and wind turbines."

To sell to us fools who try to rely on what we know absolutely is not reliable sources of energy. The way China does this is by generating enough energy to manufacture these things cheaply to sell to us.

They do make good use of hydro. The unreliable forms of energy generation providing a much smaller percentage. Probably because they plan more than ten seconds ahead.

[Art Slartibartfast]

Wrong premise

All of the above assumes that CO2, a trace gas, is a problem. It is not. The problem is devastating climate policy costing societies around the world a lot of wealth, pushing low income households into energy poverty, with zero measurable effect.

If you disagree, show me where CO2 reduction has had a measurable effect. Even during the covid lockdowns where economic activity was strongly reduced, no effect in temperature was to be seen.

[ComicalEngineer]

Re: Wrong premise

From my modelling experience, large systems take a lot of time to turn around. Even if we went net zero immediately and also China, USA, India, Germany etc it would take hundreds of years before the CO2 that has been released since the industrial revolution could be removed and captured.

China, USA, Germany & Poland continue to dig out millions of tons of coal every year to feed their power stations.

Note also that billions of tons of CO2 are held in oceans and are in equilibrium with CO2 in the atmosphere hence reduction of CO2 will be slow as the CO2 in the sea will start to be released.

The best way of carbon capture is trees, followed by aquatic plants such as sea grass, plus peat bogs etc.

CO2 capture is like trying to put out a forest fire with a bucket of water and IMHO is another greenwash.

Climate change will not be reversed in my lifetime nor my children's.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: Wrong premise

The best, cheapest, and fastest way to carbon capture is trees.

Plant. A lot. More. Trees.

Grow, manage, harvest, repeat. Pretty simple.

That's it. Also gives us a useable byproduct for construction. But that's a practical and pragmatic solution that doesn't create any climate-emergency fear factor.

All these technological solutions are scientifically interesting a great for our overall knowledge advancement, but they are all dancing at the edges and cannot make any realistic dent.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: Wrong premise

I appreciate it's bad form to reply to my own post, but it reminded me of a local problem.

Our council is putting in cycle routes everywhere, in the vain hope that more people will cycle instead of drive. Never mind the myriad reasons why this won't work, but here's the kicker...

They have cut down all the large, long-established trees along the route to do it. Dozens of trees, gone.

Hardly a good look for what is ostensibly about reducing pollution.

Meanwhile traffic has been heavily disrupted all around the area, causing vastly increased congestion and the associated pollution that goes with it. Excess wear on the surrounding roads. How much additional pollution has this exercise generated, that will never be negated by these cycle routes once they eventually finish them? Never mind reversing the pollution, which the trees would have helped with. All this extra pollution won't even be offset.

Again, bad optics for what they say is the goal.

They're doing it all over the city and these routes have maybe one or two cyclists per hour at best, in the summer. Rest of the year it's maybe a handul of people per day. In winter, forget it. Millions of taxpayer pounds wasted.

[Richard 12]

Re: Wrong premise

To be fair, a mature tree doesn't absorb as much carbon as a young tree, as it is growing much slower.

However, the really important questions are what did they do with the wood, and did they plant new saplings?

[tip pc]

Re: Wrong premise

To be fair, a mature tree doesn't absorb as much carbon as a young tree, as it is growing much slower.

However, the really important questions are what did they do with the wood, and did they plant new saplings?

all the leaves i have to pick up falling from neighbours trees into my garden disagree.

CO2 is not only stored in the wood you see in a tree.

All vegetation that photosynthesises use the CO2 to form the leaves as well as the trunks etc. a mature oak can have ~ more than 120kg* of Carbon stored in the leaves it drops.

*different sources will say differing amounts.

leaves from 10 oak tree's is a tonne of Carbon captured and sitting there for disposal, provides shade in summer, a home for animals and the acorns provide food for squirrels amongst many other benefits.

I'd take a million mature oak trees over this carbon capture nonsense!

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: Wrong premise

Couple of corrections to above thread ..

1. Trees are temp carbon stores - they are NOT carbon sinks. Plant long lived species and the carbon is locked up for a few hundred years at best. After death the carbon is back in circulation.

2. Mature trees do not grow more slowly than young trees. A young english oak might double it's height in a season which looks impressive but it's increase in dry biomass might be just 1kg. Whereas a mature english oak can add 500kg of dry biomass every year.

So planting trees is only a short term temp way to store carbon.

Always assuming of course that increased CO2 is something we should be doing something about.

[Roger Greenwood]

Re: Wrong premise

Re:- Cycle routes

I can only agree.

On my commute during the summer I usually see several cycling to work, maybe even up to 1 cycle per 50 cars. Today none, but the 2" of snow last night may not have helped.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wrong premise

There was a video on the BBC (take that for what you will) that the trees cannot absorb anymore carbon. Situation normal, more useless drivel from the BBC.

[Art Slartibartfast]

Re: Wrong premise

All of this assumes that CO2 is the thermostat knob for our planet. I do not see sufficient evidence for that conclusion. Decades and billions of dollars of research have not narrowed down the climate sensitivity to CO2. IPCC 's latest climate report AR6 still does not narrow it down further than 2 to 5 °C per doubling of CO2 concentration. What that says to me is that there are other factors at play that are not taken into account.

Climate scientist can't even agree whether clouds provide a net positive or net negative feedback on temperature. Climate science is definitely not fit for policy making.

[ComicalEngineer]

Dangers of CO2 capture

I was involved in a lot of gas dispersion modelling for underground gas storage a few years ago. As part of this one of the plans was for transmission of liquid CO2 via a pipeline to underground storage in a depleted gas field. This fell under the UK Control of Major Accident Hazard Regulations (COMAH) and thus we had to look at potential accident hazards including guillotine failure of a pipeline e.g. someone putting a JCB bucket through the line.

CO2 is an asphyxiant and is also toxic. When released as a liquid it forms a heavier than air cloud which takes a considerable time to disperse. The hazard ranges for a failure of a 12" pipeline were frightening. In contrast, natural gas is lighter than air and disperses readily.

I await the first accident involving a large release of liquid CO2.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dangers of CO2 capture

... like the 1986 Lake Nyos Cameroon massive release of magmatic CO₂ disaster ... a silent killer in a lush valley ...

[cyberdemon]

Re: Dangers of CO2 capture

and more recently in Mississippi

[Meeker Morgan]

Direct air capture of carbon dioxide ...

Like What green plants do?

Or am I missing something?

[MrAptronym]

I don't get it.

Carbon capture as a way to offset increased burning of fossil fuels is an insane idea to me. We burn these fuels because they are cheap and effective and it is extremely easy for companies to externalize the costs of the harmful emissions. (Climate change and more direct health effects.) Asking corporations to pay the cost for those current externalities won't work because the whole reason they are doing this is that it is cheap. Other people paying for it is basically subsidizing the bad actors, and you are going to be competing with your capture rate (that costs money) against the fuel consumption rate (that generates money). The idea that you can use the captured CO2 for plastics sounds untenable while we are still using fossil fuels because the natural gas industry produces the raw materials for common plastics as a byproduct. We need to stop burning fossil fuels.

It isn't like these data centers are in places where renewables are totally impractical. They need something as fast and cheap as possible and fossil fuels are the best option in those respects. If we attach these complicated carbon capture processes then what is the point? Why would they take an added cost? Even if the capture is in a separate location, are they going to commit to building out those facilities out of kindness? If we have some massive coalition willing to pay for massive carbon capture / storage infrastructure... why can't that coalition push to reduce current consumption or subsize renewable options?

Corporations do not want to pay any avoidable costs and they hold all the power. People do not want to consume less. Heck, even if you want to consume less, many of us are having energy intensive AI forced into the things we use.

[tip pc]

Re: I don't get it.

most UK homes use far less energy (in all its forms) than we did in the 1980's.

Even this chart showing from 2000 to 2024 shows a decrease from ~ 400 Twh to under 300Twh

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=United+Kingdom

despite population growing

per capita we are ~ 4000Kwh per person in 2024 as opoosed to over 6000kwh in 2000.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doing my own bit

I only drink carbonated drinks!

Joking aside, carbon capture is IMHO very important so anything that improves it is welcome.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Doing my own bit

Er.. No.

Carbon capture (especially direct air capture) is an utterly pointless, counterproductive waste of time. It only serves to allow carbon emitters to greenwash their operations, e.g. Drax being awarded massive public subsidies on the completely bunk promise of "negative emissions" via so-called BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture & Storage)

It doesn't work, their own staff & execs KNOW it doesn't work (see Private Eyes ad nauseam), it's just a con trick to keep the subsidies flowing. Allowing them to continue doing the complete polar opposite of "Carbon Capture" by burning trees and causing deforestation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Doing my own bit

It depends on your perspective. I'm looking at this from the angle of not having to write off the gazillion tonnes of CO₂ we spent building ICE cars that now somehow have to be written off. If we can keep them running on reconstituted fules we at least have a return on that CO₂ without pumping more into the air (at least with cars, getting ships off fossil fuels would have a far larger impact, but I digress - and AFAIK that's also being looked at).

And yes, I'm aware that would still require substantial improvements in how we capture CO₂ and generate hydrogen (the other part needed) because at present it's not good or efficient enough although there appears to be some good news on the horizon for hydrogen, but at least it would not require we write off all ICE machines that are still perfectly serviceable.

It's all very well demanding everyone buys new, expensive cars, but the existing vehicles are not going to magically disappear, and keeping them in use whilst reducing their CO₂ output would offer more time to switch over. I have an EV, and I am not convinced they are the solution, especially not for longer distances.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Doing my own bit

agreed - except I'm not sure what capturing CO2 has got to do with generating Hydrogen.. As there is no Hydrogen in CO2, I don't see why CCS could ever assist Hydrogen production, unless you are talking about using the Hydrogen to create synthetic hydrocarbons rather than H2 gas.. But even then, I don't think there is a shortage of CO2 for that industry.

There was an interesting development in Hydrogen production recently.. https://www.energylivenews.com/2026/01/09/platinum-free-solar-hydrogen-offers-cheaper-cleaner-path-to-zero-carbon-fuels/

I don't know if that is what you are referring to - but it does not use CO2.. Sunlight and water. But the efficiency of these hydrogen-producing solar panels is not mentioned in the article. And of course even if it were a major breakthrough, it's still in the lab stage and it would take a decade to pivot from silicon photovoltaics to "magic plastic hydrogen-making solar panels"

I would buy an EV, if it weren't for the creepytech that applies equally to all "new" cars. But the main problem with "electrify everything" i.e. EVs and Heat Pumps for All, is that of infrastructure capacity and resilience. Rolling three energy-distribution systems (gas, oil and electricity) into one, which happens to be the most overloaded, volatile and vulnerable of them all.

The idea of electric HGVs makes me cringe, too.. 1MW EV chargers.. each one requiring the same sort of transformer that powers several residential postcodes, just sitting around waiting for an electric lorry to turn up. This amid a global copper shortage. It's never going to be viable for the mainstream.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Doing my own bit

Yes, sorry, I was referring to synthetic hydrocarbons. As for EV's, I 100% agree with the 'creepytech' tag. The company car I have needs three separate accounts to work. One for the phone link (where I live by law mandatory associated with a person, and yes, the police has direct access to that which they'll use, for instance, to verify a 112 call), one for the car manufacturer so you can remote control the thing and one for Google which it has never had and thus its GPS is only half functional - something that wasn't in the brochure. Oh, and that phoen link also transmits anytime it thinks I'm speeding to somewhere as that is now mandatory in Europe too. Which is interesting because it gets it wrong so often it's pretty much pointless.

As for HGV, they actually surprised me. I don't know about the ones doing long range transport because charging takes it offline for quite a time, but one of the companies I know has one for picking up cars in the city and that has (much to my surprise) just a standard 250kW charger like for cars. I liked the German idea where they electrified a chunk of motorway with overhead wires so HGVs would basically become the equivalent of a trolleybus for that stretch - that could work, but is a very localised solution.

The biggest chqallenge, however, is that EVs are now competing with AI tech bros for power, and the tech bros have the money to buy, sorry, lobby for the laws to prioritise them. Which means we may end up back with ICE vehicles anyway..