Trains of the future could be scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide rather than belching it out of their smokestacks, proposes new research, and that could go a long way to helping mitigate the climate change crisis.
In a paper published Wednesday in the energy research journal Joule, researchers from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. said that modified rail cars, placed within trains already on the rails today, could help alleviate climate change by removing CO2 from the air as the train rumbles along.
By 2050 — based on a projection that assumes 400,000 of those DAC rail cars will be in service — researchers estimate they could remove 2.9 gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. The other reason that 2050 is significant is because of a late June decision by rail industry leaders in Europe to triple current usage of high-speed rail by 2050, a proposal that would certainly require the construction of tens of thousands of kilometres of new railroad lines as well as cars to ride them.
The CO2-scrubbing technology involved is, as a concept, not particularly new. But the idea of making it mobile, energy-independent, scalable and modular — you could attach several of the cars to one train — is.Collecting and removing carbon dioxide from the air is a relatively simple process. But to concentrate it into a liquid form in order to store it or repurpose it takes a large amount of energy.
So it’s currently being wasted, but Bachman estimates the energy being produced by the world’s train brakes is 105 times that being produced by the Hoover Dam over a given period.
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