The capture of carbon dioxide, CO2, directly from the air has been successfully demonstrated by scientists at Columbia University and Global Research Technologies, LLC, a technology research and development company based in Tucson, Arizona.

It has been too expensive to re-outfit many of the world's existing power plants to make them more eco-friendly, although they emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Building new technologies is easier and cheaper than adding retrofits to existing infrastructure, the scientists said. The new GRT device captures the emissions from existing power plants without imposing retrofit costs.

The technology company began development of the device in 2004 and has recently successfully demonstrated its effectiveness. The technology shows, for the first time, that carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles on the streets of Bangkok could be removed from the atmosphere by devices located in Iceland.

This could present a solution to three problems that until now have posed intractable obstacles for advocates of greenhouse gas reduction - how to deal with the millions of vehicles that together represent over 20 percent of global CO2 emissions, how to manage the emissions from existing infrastructure, and how to connect the sources of carbon to the sites of carbon disposal.

A device with an opening of one square meter can extract about 10 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. If a single device were to measure 10 meters by 10 meters it could extract 1,000 tons each year. On this scale, one million devices would be required to remove one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to the U.K. Treasury's Stern Review on climate change, the world will need to reduce carbon emissions by 11 billion tons by 2025 in order to maintain a concentration of carbon dioxide at twice pre-industrial levels.