Indeed. Because there is an enormous task ahead of us: We have been clogging up the atmosphere with CO₂ for more than 200 years. Now we have to clean it up. This is anything but trivial with a trace gas as diluted as carbon dioxide; the current (record-high) concentration is just 420 ppm, a little more than one particle of CO₂ per 2,500 "air molecules". So our CO₂ vacuum cleaner has to "filter" quite a lot of air in order to extract the 1,500 billion tons of CO₂ that we need to remove from the atmosphere altogether.

And then? What to do with the CO₂ rubbish? Just put it in some kind of underground landfill? The raw material is actually too good for that. It would be better to use the carbon it contains to manufacture innovative, value-adding products. After all, the whole endeavor has to be financed somehow. This is the idea behind the new Empa research initiative, Mining the Atmosphere. The idea behind it is simple, yet in technical terms extremely challenging: Instead of extracting the carbon for polymers, medicines, fibers, fuels and the like from crude oil, we use atmospheric CO₂ – and thus counteract further global warming.

Hence a classical win-win situation. However, there is still a lot of work to be done before we can pop the corks. The current issue of EmpaQuarterly provides an initial insight into the numerous approaches that we want to implement in future. After all, we can only master this massive challenge if innovative ideas are actually turned into practical solutions. This is what we are working on every day with our partners from research and industry.

Michael Hagmann
Head of Empa communication