Why don't cars use carbon capture?

The technology to remove CO2 from exhaust fumes is currently a factory-sized undertaking, but new research could lead to more portable devices.


Asked by: Anonymous

Carbon capture means stripping the CO2 out of the exhaust gases of power stations and stashing it underground. But the notion of bringing the process to cars is still pretty way out. The obvious problem is that cars move around so any carbon harnessed from the exhaust must be stored in the vehicle and somehow transferred to a processing facility. Even then, a chemical plant lightweight enough to be built into a car seems like a pretty tall order.

However, in 2009, a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology revealed plans for an onboard device that would separate fuel into hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen would power the car with zero emissions and the carbon would be captured in liquid form. Periodically the liquid carbon would be transferred to processing plants to be recycled back into fuel.

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