As of 2018, our world has reached an all time high in greenhouse gas emissions. With that, some places won’t be inhabitable soon because of smog and heat getting too severe. We’re altering the climate so severely that we’ll soon face apocalyptic consequences. -Aylin Woodward. I don’t know about you, but this is a scary thing to think about. What we watch in movies could turn into reality if we don’t do anything to prevent it.
As researchers are looking at this topic, they see that we can’t just curb our greenhouse gases. We need to take a step towards ‘hacking’ our climate. What this means is creating technology that can modify Earth’s atmosphere. Right now in the engineering world, manipulating the atmosphere is definitely increasing. There is one type of geoengineering that could help this problem, which is capturing carbon. Carbon capture and storage (CSS) has become very popular in the US and Canada and plants are starting to use CSS to lower their emissions. In some cases, CSS can prevent carbon emissions from even entering the atmosphere. Sadly, a problem comes out of this and one of those problems is where to store the carbon dioxide after it’s captured. While this is a problem, many companies and engineers are working around it. One example of this is having carbon-dioxide-eating E. coli bacteria produce enzymes that convert the carbon dioxide into an alternative form called bicarbonate. These storage units are called bioreactors. Another example is turning carbon into useful materials. Zurich-based company Climeworks actually opened its first carbon capture plant and this compresses it and turns it into fertilizer. Others like Blue Plant are converting carbon dioxide into bicarbonate, then using it for building materials.
While these companies and engineers are trying to create ways to help our earth, they are encouraging you to also contribute and hopefully we can all solve this problem together! LET’s DO THIS!
–Colin