A new way of sucking carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in the sea has been outlined by scientists.
While the world has struggled to limit and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in recent decades, several companies have instead focused on developing technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The authors say that this novel approach captures CO2 from the atmosphere up to three times more efficiently than current methods and is significantly cheaper.
"I am happy to see this paper in the published literature, it is very exciting, and it stands a good chance of transforming the CO2 capture efforts," said Prof Catherine Peters from Princeton University, an expert in geological engineering. "What is clever about this is that the starting point was a technology previously designed for applications in water. This advance applies this technology to the gas phase - a new idea."
One of the big challenges in capturing CO2 is what to do with the trapped gas. Storing it under the ground or sea in former oil wells is one widely used approach. But the new paper suggests that with the addition of some chemicals the captured CO2 can be transformed into bicarbonate of soda and stored simply and safely in sea water.
The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.