A floating platform is being developed that can produce low-carbon synthetic fuels from a combination of wind energy, seawater and ambient air.
Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have installed a modular plant on a barge designed to act as a testbed for larger floating platforms that could eventually sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Climate experts believe that preventing additional global warming will require both slashing the use of fossil fuels and permanently removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere that have already been emitted. But technologies for carbon removal remain costly, energy-intensive – or both – and unproven at large scale.
The test platform is equipped with a direct air capture plant (DAC) for recovering CO2 from the air, a facility for the desalination of seawater, and a high-temperature electrolysis unit that generates hydrogenous synthesis gas.
The latter will be used as source material for the Fischer-Tropsch...