In Austria, a newly developed pilot plant, the size of a truck container, extracts 50 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year – and does so with a record low energy requirement of under 2.000 kilowatt-hours per ton. This new pilot plant, the Austrian Pilot Unit 1 (APU1), has been commissioned recently and is now being successively developed and scaled up.
The idea of filtering harmful CO2 from the surrounding air is not new. However, this new technological approach to extract CO2 directly from the air focuses on minimizing the plant’s energy consumption. A compact module was created, which can be flexibly used in the future: individual units can be used by smaller companies or private initiatives, while larger companies could combine multiple modules into a large-scale plant. The next step is to establish a 1,000-ton facility, which could evolve into commercial-scale modules.
