Name: The Biggest Lie About Carbon Capture
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T19:14:49.000Z
Duration: 8 min 37 s
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We are currently living through the years of devastating impacts of climate change from global warming.

The warming is being caused by carbon dioxide release, but what if I told you that a new breakthrough in science and physics has actually figured out how to suck carbon dioxide out of the air?

It's called carbon capture, literally sucking CO2 out of the air, and if done wrong, it could actually contribute to making climate change worse.

But if done right, around this time next year, you might be on a train that is literally cleaning the air of CO2 as it moves.

Climate change is caused by the global warming created by carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

We only really started doing this recently during the iconic industrial revolution.

And the CO2 we release is causing a greenhouse effect that warms our planet and causes devastation.

Not only because of how the heat messes with the Earth's environmental systems, but also because it's just too hot to live.

This past March and April were the hottest recorded in India, reaching 49 degrees Celsius for days in a row, killing people and having birds fall from the sky due to heat exhaustion.

And scientists think these heat waves were made 30 times more likely due to carbon dioxide release creating global warming.

Scientists are also floundering to try and save our lives here on Earth, which has led to this interesting carbon capture technology.

For example, this large carbon capture prototype in Iceland uses geothermal power to spin fans that push air through direct air capture technology, which then uses electrolysis to collect CO2 out of the air, pushing clean air out the other end.

The CO2 is then stored as a liquid and using steam, they inject the CO2 into porous basal rock nearby in Iceland.

Other prototypes use potassium hydroxide, water and heat energy to go through a series of chemical reactions that eventually release CO2 out of the air, but all of these processes require extra energy and heat in order to work.

The reason this train is so fascinating is that it doesn't require extra energy to suck the CO2 out of the air.

It has an electric motor attached to the wheels of the train that generates an electric current every time the train breaks, helping the train to not waste any energy.

Essentially every braking maneuver of a train generates enough energy to power 20 homes for a day.

There is no longer steam that's released from the train as they break, but that heat energy is now not wasted and instead is used to move an electric motor that along with solar panels on top of the train charges the whole carbon capture system.

In the future, trains can be moving people and products while cleaning the air of CO2.

The air enters the direct air capture car with these large intakes that extend up above the train, allowing the air to enter the train as the train moves, AKA no need for energy to charge fans to blow air through machines.

The electricity generated from the braking system and the solar panels is applied to a molecule called a quinone, which activates it to bind with the CO2 from the air that flows through the car.

At the back end of the train car will be an area where clean CO2 less air can leave the train.

There are pumps and compressors that are needed for this process, but as of now it's predicted they can fit inside a train car.

And these direct air capture rail cars will be installed on already existing trains, therefore they could be at the front, in the middle, at the back.

So in the future, you might be on a train that's sucking CO2 out of the air without even realizing it.

Once the CO2 is collected, when the train is stalled at a station, workers can then reverse the electric current in order to collect the carbon dioxide that has been captured.

Now with this caught CO2, they can sell it or store it, but where this caught CO2 ends up is why carbon capture is so controversial.

Some oil and gas companies love carbon capture because they can actually use the CO2 in order to extract more oil and fossil fuels from our earth.

In an oil well, when a bit of oil may be left, oil and gas companies use captured CO2 to create pressure to get the last little bits of oil out of the oil well.

This is extremely menacing because using carbon capture in order to get carbon dioxide to then get more fossil fuels out of the earth to burn to create more carbon dioxide is not going to help our issue with climate change.

There's also another reason why oil and gas companies might like carbon capture because it's another business venture for them as they can sell the holes in the ground that they create from fracking to look for oil as the places where in the future we store the CO2 that we've captured.

Essentially, these oil companies continue to frack and wherever they don't find oil or wherever the holes are that they make, they go, oh, we'll just sell them to the carbon capture companies as this is the place where they can store the captured CO2.

It's a menacing way for them to continue to look for more oil while saying that they're investing in this type of technology that might help climate change.

But there are more promising concepts that I'm interested in that we should all be interested in in order for this technology to actually help us with climate change.

For example, Kleinwerks in Iceland, which we mentioned earlier, stores the CO2 in porous rock devoid of any connection to the oil and gas industry.

This is the most ideal place for us to put carbon dioxide that we have stored so far.

Therefore, these carbon capture trains need to be regulated so the CO2 that we capture doesn't end up going to oil and gas companies to look for more fossil fuels to burn more CO2, but instead go to a place like Kleinwerks or in Iceland to actually be stored in basalt rock, again, devoid of any connection to the oil and gas industry.

There are other scientific breakthroughs figuring out how to use CO2 and other types of technology, for example, adhesives or in solar panels.

But the amount of CO2 that's needed for these industries is so little compared to the amount of carbon dioxide we're gonna need to be storing in the future.

Some people are working to turn carbon dioxide back into recycled fuel, but once the fuel is used, the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere.

Some of it can be sold to beverage companies to create carbonation, but once we burp, it's back in the atmosphere.

It can be used in food or vodka, but again, it's only small amounts that can be sold off to these companies and the CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere when we breathe it out.

For these reasons, you can start to see why storing it in a rock in Iceland makes sense.

And as I said, the amount of carbon dioxide that we're gonna be needing to store in the future is huge.

According to the IPCC, in order to keep global warming around 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius increase in the future, which is what we need in order for Earth to not become uninhabitable, it is thought by the year 2100, 25% of the energy used on Earth is going to be going towards carbon capture techniques.

That's how desperately we're gonna be needing to get carbon dioxide out of the air.

That's why these trains are so cool because the braking systems and the solar panels and these trains cleaning the air of CO2 as they move is a brilliant idea because we're not needing energy to actually create these systems.

I encourage you to share it with like friends and family and get this conversation started because carbon capture is going to be something you're gonna be living with in the future, but how we regulate this industry is really going to change whether it's gonna help or hinder us.

A lot of companies, including oil companies like Shell or even Google, say they're gonna be carbon neutral by 2035, for example.

A lot of them are saying this based on carbon capture techniques that they're investing in and hoping will work.

Most of this technology is in the prototype stage.

We don't know yet if this is gonna work on a large scale.

So those companies should not be allowed to say they're gonna be carbon neutral based on carbon capture when we don't even know if it's gonna work.

In order for a company to say that, it should be based on their investment in renewable energy and their de-investment from the oil and gas industry and the fossil fuel companies, which is why it's kind of ironic that a company like Shell would ever say they're gonna be carbon neutral by 2035.

But this carbon capture technology, you're gonna be hearing about it more and more into the future.

The IPCC does think it is necessary, but we need to regulate it.

We need to understand it so it doesn't end up in the wrong hands and make things worse.

On top of that, we can't ever forget about the best carbon dioxide capturing natural machines that we have on this earth.

We need to stop cutting down trees and we need to start planting them.

But carbon capture can be a great technology for those in-between times as we create large initiatives to plant trees and we hopefully figure out ways to stop literally cutting down trees for industry.

I'm clearly obsessed with carbon capture.

I'm so fascinated about how this is gonna work out in our future, but it is now that we need to fight for this type of technology to do good and not bad in our world.

Thank you so much for watching and listening, share with friends and family, and we'll see you soon for a new science video.

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The Biggest Lie About Carbon Capture

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