This is one of the strangest gizmos we’ve seen.
Zzzzap!
Can weird doodads solve the climate crisis? We don’t know. But one of the most head-turning examples of climate tech we’ve seen so far comes from a startup called SpiralWave: a tall, translucent column that lights up with spooky-looking orbs of plasma.
Highlighted by TechCrunch after being presented at its TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 event, it definitely ticks all the boxes in the Downright Strange department. But it’s supposed to serve a very practical purpose.
As the plasma spirals its way up the column, it yanks carbon dioxide out of the air. In the process, it converts the gas into green methanol, a fuel source that can be made renewably and which produces 95 percent fewer carbon emissions, its proponents claim.
“You can see the plasma here in very quick pulses,” CEO and cofounder Abed Bukhari told TechCrunch. “With every pulse, it breaks down CO2.”
Keeping Cool
Bukhari said he came up with the idea when working at his previous startup, where he had to use what’s known as cold plasma, a cooler form of plasma commonly used in fluorescent lights, to build his own equipment.
“I needed to build something that can stall the biggest challenge we have on Earth these days, which is removing a huge quantity of CO2,” Bukhari told TechCrunch.
With SpiralWave, he built two prototypes: a smaller Nanobeam, and an over six feet tall Microbeam, which is the one seen in the footage. The way they work is pretty ingenious: the plasma waves are actually the result of three separate pulses of microwaves at different frequencies, which break apart specific molecular bonds, according to TechCrunch.
“The first one breaks down CO2 into CO, the second one breaks down H2O into H and OH, and the third one is to join them into methanol,” Bukhari said.
The process transforms about 75 percent of the electrical energy used by the device into methanol when targeting CO2, and 90 percent for flue gas, or gas that’s exhausted from pipes and smokestacks, a chief example being power plant emissions produced by burning fossil fuels.
Bigger Is Better
Right now, the devices can create a metric ton of methanol from CO2 pulled from ambient air using about 10,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. But with higher concentrations of the greenhouse gas, they can achieve that yield with as little as 7,000 kWh. That’s no inconsequential amount of energy — but bear in mind that CO2 is being removed in the process, while creating a renewable fuel, and that the system can be powered by off-peak renewable electricity.
Of course, how effective this will be in aggregate remains to be seen. But Bukhari is dreaming big: his goal is to create a colossal, over-300-foot version of the device that could extract about a gigaton of CO2 per year.
“To fight climate change, we need to remove 10 gigatons of CO2 per year,” Bukhari told TechCrunch.
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