Editor's Note: (This feature is part of Tomorrow's Hero, a series profiling young innovators transforming the world for a brighter future. Discover their stories here.)
(CNN) "You can't achieve the Paris accord values unless you have some form of carbon capture," says Ethan Novek.
The 19-year-old founder of Innovator Energy is keen to stress the urgency of the problem. The majority of energy is still sourced by burning fossil fuels, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Continuing to do so at current rates will make it impossible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
That is, unless the act of burning fossil fuels can be cleaned up -- and Novek is in the business of making that happen.
An age-old problem
Carbon capture is not a new idea. One method, oxy-combustion, was pioneered in the late 19th century, while another, using chemical absorption, was patented in the 1930s.
"These key technology elements have a very long history at a very substantial industrial scale," explains Niall Mac Dowell, senior lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College, London.
In West Texas, the oil industry has used carbon dioxide in enhanced oil recovery since the 1960s and '70s, he adds. It remains the most popular use for captured CO2. More recently, intrepid startups have sought to turn carbon dioxide in to gasoline and ethanol, a liquid alcohol.
The effects of climate change on the world
Fossil fuels still comprise the largest source of energy consumed worldwide, coal being the worst CO2-emitter of all. Carbon dioxide emissions are closely tied to climate change, and its effects are already at our doorstep.
Scroll through the gallery to see how communities around the world are being affected
A flooded street in Miami Beach in September 2015. The flood was caused by a combination of seasonal high tides and what many believe is a rise in sea levels due to climate change. Miami Beach has already built
miles of seawalls and has embarked on a five-year, $400 million stormwater pump program to keep the ocean waters from inundating the city.
Sea water collects in front of a home in Tangier, Virginia, in May 2017. Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay has lost two-thirds of its landmass since 1850. Now, the 1.2 square mile island is suffering from floods and erosion and is slowly sinking. A
paper published in the journal Scientific Reports states that "the citizens of Tangier may become among the first climate change refugees in the continental USA."
The Pasterze glacier is Austria's largest and it's shrinking rapidly: the sign on the trail indicates where the foot of the glacier reached in 2015, a year before this photo was taken. The European Environmental Agency
predicts the volume of European glaciers will decline by between 22 percent and 89 percent by 2100, depending on the future intensity of greenhouse gases.
A NASA research aircraft flies over retreating glaciers on the Upper Baffin Bay coast of Greenland. Scientists say the Arctic is one of the regions hit hardest by climate change.
A wooden pole that had been driven into the ice the year before now stands exposed as the Aletsch glacier melts and sinks at a rate of about 10-13 meters per year near Bettmeralp, Switzerland.
In the Mississippi Delta, trees are withering away because of rising saltwater, creating "
Ghost Forests."
A street is flooded in Sun Valley, Southern California in February 2017. Powerful storms have swept Southern California after years of severe drought, in a "drought-to-deluge" cycle that some
believe is consistent with the consequences of global warming.
The carcass of a dead cow lies in the Black Umfolozi River, dry from the effects of a severe drought, in Nongoma district north west from Durban, in November 2015. South Africa ranks as the 30th driest country in the world and is considered a water-scarce region. A highly variable climate causes uneven distribution of rainfall, making droughts even more extreme.
A gigantic cloud of dust known as "Haboob" advances over Sudan's capital, Khartoum. Moving like a thick wall, it carries sand and dust burying homes, while increasing evaporation in a region that's struggling to preserve water supplies.
Experts say that without quick intervention, parts of the African country -- one of the most vulnerable in the world -- could become uninhabitable as a result of climate change.
Low tide reveals the extent of accelerated erosion shown by the amount of exposed beach rocks on Maafushi beach in the Maldives. This is the world's lowest-lying country, with no part lying more than six feet above sea level. The island nation's future is under threat from anticipated global sea level rise, with many of its islands already suffering from coastal erosion.
Los Glaciares National Park, part of the third largest ice field in the world, on November 27, 2015 in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. The majority of the almost 50 large glaciers in the park have been retreating during the past 50 years due to warming temperatures, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
A boy from the remote Turkana tribe in Northern Kenya walks across a dried up river near Lodwar, Kenya. Millions of people across Africa are facing a critical shortage of water and food, a situation made worse by climate change.
An Indian farmer in a dried up cotton field in the southern Indian state of Telangana, in April 2016. Much of India is
reeling from a heat wave and severe drought conditions that have decimated crops, killed livestock and left at least 330 million people without enough water for their daily needs.
Strawberries lost due to a fungus that experts report is caused by climate change in La Tigra, Honduras, in September 2016. According to Germanwatch's Global Climate Risk Index, Honduras ranks among the countries most affected by climate change.
Novek, a Connecticut native, is blunt in his assessment of current methods.
"Present technologies for capturing CO2, or separating emissions into pure CO2, are fundamentally flawed," he argues. They are prohibitively expensive, Novek says, and due to being energy-intensive, somewhat counterproductive.
He claims his solution can capture over 90% of CO2 emitted by coal or natural gas power plants while operating at $5-8 per ton of carbon dioxide -- substantially cheaper than other carbon capture technologies, he argues.
"I've discovered a very different approach that enables the technology to be entirely powered by waste heat from a power plant -- not just any waste heat, but the ultra-low temperature, worthless waste heat," he says, referring to the thermal pollution we see evaporating from cooling towers.
Novek's method pumps flue gas emissions through a mixture of water and aqueous ammonia. CO2 in the flue gas binds to the ammonia forming a salt, while inert gases are released. The salt is then separated with a solvent and the carbon dioxide is captured. Finally, the mixture is separated using waste heat from the power plant to render the two components insoluble, allowing the ammonia and the solvent to be decanted for re-use.
"The entire process uses non-toxic, non-volatile reagents," Novek adds. "They're all commodity chemicals, so very inexpensive."
"It's fantastic that people are innovating in this space," says Mac Dowell, but offers the caveat that while low operating costs are a positive, any method "would need to be very quantitatively demonstrated that (it) also significantly reduces the capital cost of the CCS (carbon capture and storage) process."
Nonetheless, he describes the work as "a small but important contribution" in the field.
Heading to market
Novek's idea has won prizes at state and national science competitions. As a research fellow at the Elimelech Lab at Yale University, his method was peer-reviewed in 2016 and a US patent granted in April 2017. Now it's the cornerstone of Novek's company Innovator Energy.
The global demand for CO2 was estimated at 80 million metric tons in 2011, rising to a predicted 140 million metric tons in 2020 according to the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. It's a tiny fraction of the 36 billion metric tons emitted in 2016, per the Global Carbon Project. Many academics, including Mac Dowell, advocate pumping captured carbon dioxide underground into saline aquifers; the best way, he says, to ensure it is "locked away from the climate forever."
Solving the carbon problem
Boundary Dam Carbon Capture and Storage Project in Estevan, Saskatchewan, captures approximately one million tons of CO2 per year according to the
Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI). The Canadian facility uses CO2 in enhanced oil recovery, a process where gas is injected underground to flush out residual oil from rock formations between oil wells.
Sleipner gas platform, 155 miles off the coast of Norway. Its carbon storage facility captures and injects carbon dioxide deep under the North Sea into a
sandstone reservoir. StatoilHydro, who operate the rig, has sequestered
16 million metric tons of CO2 since 1996, say the company.
Coal mounds NRG Energy Inc. WA Parish generating station in Thompsons, Texas. The plant, home to the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project, injects
1.6 million metric tons of CO2 every year in its enhanced oil recovery operation -- equivalent to
90% of its CO2 emissions, say NRG. It's the largest project of its kind in terms of capture volume currently operating in the US, per the
GCCSI.
Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant outside Reykjavik, Iceland. Carbon dioxide emissions from the plant are dissolved in water and
re-injected into basaltic bedrock and locked in mineral form. Reykjavik Energy's CarbFix2 program aims to make the site carbon neutral, and at present
60% of gases are now turned into minerals underground, with the long-term objective to make the site's operation "traceless" in terms of gas emissions.
In Decatur, Illinois, the Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. plant processes corn and turns it into ethanol. The factory produces
350 million gallons of ethanol each year, and in 2017 announced it plans to inject approximately
1.1 million metric tons of CO2 per annum emitted during manufacture into a nearby saline aquifer 7,000 feet underground.
Quest's hydrogen production plant outside Edmonton launched its CCS initiative in
November 2015, transporting captured CO2 to a separate site for geological storage. Shell, who operate the site, reported it had stored its first 2 million metric tons ahead of schedule, and also made the argument that if they built the site again, it would cost
20-30% percent less to construct and operate.
However, if we're not going to lock away all captured CO2, finding valuable uses for it is imperative. Innovator Energy, for one, has proposed converting carbon dioxide into commodity chemicals.
Scaling-up his carbon capture technology has taken the student to Norway, where he is conducting more research and testing. Novek expects to have a commercial product in two-to-three years-time, and in five anticipates greater growth of Innovator Energy's other pursuits. To the layman the chemical engineering may sound complex, but behind the work there's a simple intention:
"Increasing the standard of living typically involves increasing resource consumption. All my work surrounds the concept of decoupling the two," says Novek. "I think that's essential to making people successful in life."