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Cheap carbon trap cleans up power station emissions

One way to combat global warming is by sequestering the carbon dioxide belched out by power stations, locking it away in buried vaults. A big problem, though, is that only about a tenth of the gas produced by burning fossil fuels is CO2. Most of the rest is nitrogen, which is not a greenhouse gas and would needlessly take up space in the vault. But separating the two gases can be a costly affair. Now a team led by Maciej Radosz at the University of Wyoming in Laramie say they have designed a cheap filter that could capture 90 per cent or more of the CO2 emitted by power stations.