Why capture CO2 from the atmosphere?

Abstract

Air capture is an industrial process for capturing CO2 from ambient air; it is one of an emerging set of technologies for CO2 removal that includes geological storage of biotic carbon and the acceleration of geochemical weathering. Although air capture will cost more than capture from power plants when both are operated under the same economic conditions, air capture allows one to apply industrial economies of scale to small and mobile emission sources and enables a partial decoupling of carbon capture from the energy infrastructure, advantages that may compensate for the intrinsic difficulty of capturing carbon from the air.