In the future, your office might have an extra appliance next to the copy machine and the refrigerator: an algae bioreactor. Designed to fit inside offices and eventually sit on the rooftops throughout cities, it can capture as much carbon from the atmosphere as an acre of trees. And there’s an initial prototype already at work. Inside the bioreactor, algae does the work. “What’s amazing about algae is it’s really cheap and it’s easy to grow—the core things it needs are sunlight, CO2, and water,” says Ben Lamm, CEO and founder of Hypergiant Industries, an AI-focused tech company that developed a prototype of the device, called the Eos Bioreactor. Because algae grows much more quickly than trees, it can also sequester carbon more quickly; the company estimates that the device, which optimizes the algae’s ability to capture CO2, can sequester around two tons of carbon out of the air each year. The company isn’t the first to envision using algae to clean city air . One German building already uses an algae-covered façade to power itself . But Hypergiant, which typically creates AI-driven technology for companies in the aviation, space exploration, and defense industries, saw an opportunity to use […]
This ‘personal carbon sequestration’ device uses algae to remove CO2 from the air

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