In the aforementioned way that too much dressing ruins a salad, too much carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere ruins the air. This is one of the main drivers of today'south environmental crunch.

Climate scientists agree that in add-on to preventing further damage to our atmosphere we must isolate and remove excess carbon dioxide to reverse existing damage.

Only this chore is like trying to scrape the dressing off a tossed salad.

Which is why a new arroyo from Israel – capturing CO2 when it'due south frozen at high altitude, using high-tech materials carried past balloons – could totally disrupt the carbon-capture engineering science globe.

"Humanity generates l billion tons of CO2 each year from electricity generation, deforestation, heating, transportation and industry. Effectually one-half of it stays in the atmosphere, causing floods, fires and climate change," says Nadav Mansdorf, cofounder and CEO of Ramat Gan-based High Hopes Labs.

"At that place are a lot of resource being allocated to capturing CO2 from the air because if we don't, we are facing a ending," says Mansdorf, a high-tech serial entrepreneur with high hopes for improving the earth.

The problem is that electric current carbon-capture technologies are removing no more than a few chiliad tons annually out of that 25 billion.

A wakeup telephone call

About 2 years ago, scientist Eran Oren phoned Mansdorf in the wee hours of the morn to share an ingenious idea.

"Eran called me at 4am and said he institute a solution for the world'due south biggest problem. I call back we haven't slept since then," Mansdorf jokes.

Eran Oren, CTO of High Hopes Labs. Photograph courtesy of High Hopes

Oren, a veteran of the IDF'south Talpiot program for promising immature physicists, had pored over every climate-modify report he could find. His research moved him from initial skepticism to all-out alarm.

"It'due south far worse than generally presented to the public," he tells ISRAEL21c.

Scaling up CO2 capture seemed critical, and he drew on his noesis in chemical science and avant-garde materials to propose how to do this amend.

The key, Oren believed, was ultralow temperatures. At high altitudes, CO2 freezes and becomes easier to remove from the atmospheric salad. Advanced materials that work as sponges and filters also piece of work better at lower temperatures.

"Nosotros use these phenomena to make the task of carbon capture from the mixture much more efficient in cost and time, making carbon capture an actual valid solution for climate change," says Oren.

The 4am phone telephone call came after a sleepless night of figuring how to use balloons to do the job, and confirming that nobody else had tried it.

"The field of high-altitude ballooning has undergone a leap in technology over the last decade," says Oren, explaining that Google, Amazon and NASA take developed means to drive balloons up and downward in a highly controlled manner.

Up, up and away

Mylar balloons are potent, cheap and lightweight. Filled with helium or hydrogen, they can lift a payload way upwards high, in this case a storage vessel for CO2.

Loftier Hopes proposes using fleets of such balloons to extract the frozen gas from the air 10 miles higher up ground in stages. Stiff winds blow the CO2 through the vessel and information technology sticks to the high-tech filter textile inside.

The CO2 is held under pressure at loftier concentrations and brought downward to exist sequestered safely underground. (Oren explains that scientists are still working out how to use captured carbon; for at present, it must be sequestered.)

"Nadav and I were developing the engineering for a yr before nosotros were satisfied with its feasibility. We performed proof-of-concept experiments and that was our launching point to the next phase," says Oren, who is now in Germany running optimization experiments at High Hopes' subsidiary there.

The project was at starting time bootstrapped considering "information technology seemed too crazy to ask anyone else to fund it," says Mansdorf.

"When nosotros did our calculations and understood it's possible and scalable and makes sense, we raised money from angels in less than a month, about a twelvemonth ago. At present nosotros are raising a major seed round."

Whereas the Swiss company Climeworks reports that information technology tin can capture carbon at a cost of $1,000 or more per ton, Loftier Hopes plans to start pricing around $100 per ton and reduce it by half as they scale up.

And instead of capturing one,000 tons of CO2 per twelvemonth, High Hopes aims to capture at least 1 ton per day per balloon. A armada of such balloons could capture billions of tons, Mansdorf says.

Coming out of stealth mode on Earth Day last April, High Hopes receives daily inquiries from governments, free energy companies and big corporations across the world.

"It is a very humbling experience. We are modest and new, not famous or rich, but there are weeks in which each evening we have Zoom meetings with Fortune 500 companies," says Mansdorf.

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