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After opening the world's first commercial Direct Air Capture plant（直接空气捕集工厂）designed to pull CO2 out of the air, Swiss company Climeworks is now trying to create the world's first “negative emission（负排放）” power plant.
An international team of scientists has been working on a way to turn captured CO2 into minerals. The project is called CarFix. Experts capture the gas, put it into water and send it to more than 700 meters underground. There the CO2 on contact with a special kind of rock forms into a mineral.
“Our results show that between 95 and 98 percent of the CO2, sent underground was mineralized over the period of less than two years, which is amazingly fast,” says lead author of the CarFix project, Dr. Juerg Matter. Before this discovery it was thought that this mineralization could take hundreds to thousands of years.
The DAC technology can collect CO2 from the atmosphere and then store it underground or sell it to business needing the gas. For example, customers can use it in drinks. And the first plant in Zurich is supplying the captured CO2 to a nearby greenhouse to “feed” vegetables. By using the company's CO2 the customers can reduce their carbon mission as well as lower their dependence on energy.
A 2015 study suggested that before the CarFix project, experts could collect CO2, but they didn't have a large-scale（大规模的）method to safely treat it.
Combining Climeworks' DAC technology with the CarFix mineralization process they will be able to create a system. This system doesn't put additional carbon back into the atmosphere. Actually it is carbon negative.
“The economic cost of applying this kind of carbon capture technology on a large-scale is not particularly practical now, but for the first time we are seeing a realistic and effective system,” says Christoph Gebald CEO of Climeworks.
