Company that sucks CO2 from air announces a new methane-producing plant

Enlarge / Air capture at Climeworks’ Troia, Italy, plant. (credit: Climeworks)

It’s been a banner week for hydrocarbons made from waste gases. Earlier this week, a company announced that it had delivered 4,000 gallons of jet fuel made from steel-plant waste gases to Virgin Atlantic. Now, Swiss company Climeworks has announced the opening of a new plant in Italy that will collect carbon dioxide (CO₂) from ambient air and pair it with renewably made hydrogen (H₂) to make methane fuel that would add little or no CO₂ to the atmosphere.

The plant in Troia, Italy, was completed in July and went into operation this week as part of a research program funded by the European Union.

This will be Climeworks’ third carbon-capture plant. The first captured carbon out of ambient air using a filter of base amines that would bind with more acidic CO₂. The captured carbon was sent to a greenhouse to speed plant growth. The second was based in Iceland at a geothermal plant that released some volcanic CO_2. Climeworks’ small plant captures that carbon and injects it back into the ground, where mineral reactions help the CO₂ bind with basalt, essentially storing the gas as a rock.