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Experts agree that Canada's climate future
is not looking good right now.
We've been seeing the impacts across the country.
I know Canadians I talked to are concerned.
There are choices ahead of us
in terms of where to place our effort.
And that's because we're warming two times faster
than the rest of the world,
and three times faster up in the north.
But there is still time, about a decade or so,
to make changes, reduce carbon emissions,
and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Hi, I'm Campbell Baron,
and today I'm going to talk to you about carbon capture.
[digital beeps]
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Mind if I turn the camera for a second?
You can actually see my project right here too.
I was actually just working on it before you were here.
Campbell:
He's a high school student from St. John's, Newfoundland.
Aaron became fascinated with carbon capture a year ago.
So fascinated that he designed a science project
to show how carbon dioxide can be captured and recycled
in soda bottles.
And that's essentially what carbon capture is.
Finding ways to remove carbon dioxide from the pollutants
that are the biggest cause of climate change.
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Aaron:
They have photosynthesis, right? That's what they do.
So they're capturing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
When algae captures carbon dioxide,
you can actually use this micro algae that you're using for
many different uses. For example, you can use it for
biofuels, aquaculture, pharmaceuticals.
As you know, a lot of kids,
their first ever science fair project,
I know mine was like this too,
you know, we make the volcano.
The baking soda and vinegar.
We put that together and boom, explosion.
So I thought, okay, baking soda and vinegar.
What does that release? Carbon dioxide.
So I need to capture carbon dioxide.
I can't have the carbon dioxide go back into the bottle,
so I clipped the pipe heading from the bottle
to this carbon dioxide holding chamber,
and then I turn on the air pump
and this air pump is connected to the algae.
So I have it going from --
I had the algae going from bottom to bottle to bottle,
and all of a sudden I just pushed on all the syringes and
all the carbon dioxide gets infused with the algae.
And turns out I ended up capturing close to just about
100 per cent of the carbon dioxide I put into it,
which is kind of cool.
This idea to me felt like this idea could one day actually
become a possibility, and if enough research was put into it,
if I can do this in my bedroom,
you know, if we work hard enough
and if we keep putting in the research, keep on grinding,
I'm like positive that one day
we can really make something out of this.
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Campbell:
to visit a company called
who's working on a way to capture carbon
directly from smokestacks.
My name is Steve Martin.
I am the CEO and founder of
What exactly is carbon capture?
Carbon capture and storage is the removal of carbon dioxide,
which we're very concerned with, and pollution,
and finding some way to store it.
Generally speaking we put it in a hole underground.
We don't do that.
In our case, the algae eat the carbon dioxide.
It's their food.
Campbell:
prevent Canada and the world from
future climate catastrophes?
Is it going to be effective long term?
There's nothing more effective
at eating carbon dioxide than algae.
If we were to install our technology on
the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in North America,
we could overnight change the carbon emissions profile.
We could overnight affect the environment.
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Welcome. We're at
Markham District Energy
Here they burn natural gas.
They turn it into heat, electricity, and CO2 emissions.
Any power plant would send their CO2 emissions up the smokestack.
What
they actually send the emissions through those pipes.
Some of it goes up the stack.
Some of it goes into our trailer.
In here we use the CO2
to feed our algae and grow algae in there.
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Basically what we have in here is algae...
Yeah, interesting.
..and light.
And you can see it's actually green, this one.
Yeah, it is.
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Campbell:
and many people think that resources would be better spent
on wind and solar as opposed to carbon capturing technologies.
What do you say to that?
Well I say that you're not going to fly an airplane on a battery,
so we're not going to -- you're going to be burning fuel.
If we want to have a realistic view
of what the world's going to look like,
we're part of a solution.
Is carbon capture technology a silver bullet?
It is not a silver bullet.
And in fact there is no one silver bullet.
Fighting climate change and curbing climate change
is going to take hard work.
However, different technologies like carbon capture and storage
are great tools that we have at our disposal.
They require different political systems
that value carbon in its stored form.
If we can achieve that,
then this will be one tool in our arsenal of tools
that will help us address climate change.
So that is carbon capture.
On its own, it won't stop climate change.
But experts agree that new technologies
have to be part of the solution.
The best and fastest way to reduce carbon
is by not using fossil fuels.
But we can only do that if we replace fossil fuels with energy
that has zero emissions, such as renewable energy.
For cbckidsnews.ca, I'm Campbell Baron.
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