About This Project

Direct Air Capture is a developing nascent technology that removes CO2 directly from the atmosphere. Current operational facilities primarily exist in rural areas. We intend to evaluate an urban DAC concept that utilizes the air rights over transportation corridors to bring emissions filtering to disadvantaged communities. We are working to build a pilot module of the this concept that will show it's capacity to remove emissions within our cities.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

As a husband and father of 4 in Salt Lake City, we experience pronounced and consistent poor air quality. Salt Lake Metropolitan’s million+ residents are unwillingly smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a year and urban pollution is a growing problem around the world. Not only does air pollution reduce the lifespan of entire regions, it disproportionately affects lower economic communities due to their proximity to transportation pollution. These near infrastructure communities experience increased air and noise pollution, lower land values, and less economic opportunity. This concept is designed to cover these corridors with clear ETFE acting as a tunnel to prevent air and noise pollution. We then utilize the canopy for solar and rainwater harvesting.

What is the significance of this project?

This concept represents our strong need and desire to heal communities equitably. If we can solve pollution at near freeway communities in the most polluted cities in the world, we can help curb the injustices our infrastructures have been causing for decades. This concept is designed to provide clean air, drastically reduce freeway noise pollution, harvest rainwater, generate sustainable solar energy, and provide an abundance of clean technology jobs to these underserved and forgotten communities. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council, clean air is a basic human right. We will work with cities and these communities to identify the best locations that serve the greatest population to provide social, racial, and environmental justice.

What are the goals of the project?

This initial module has been digitally created and tested using structural and mechanical analytic software. This project will create the physical version of the module which will verify our results in-situ and be able to prove the quantity of CO2 a single module can capture. The diagram below shows the components of a single module that we will build. Validating our digital module will prepare us for a full scale pilot facility. We have backing and support from many state departments of transportation and their willingness to develop a full scale pilot location after initial prototyping. Our hope is to have the module completed by end of Q1 2023 and be in development of a whole pilot facility (100+ modules) by end of Q4 2023.