Other companies around the world are experimenting with air capture, but Corless said Carbon Engineering's design is unique because it can be quickly and affordably scaled up to industrial size. There are plans to use the carbon pellets alongside hydrogen to make environmentally friendly fuel, as described in this diagram: 
 
 www.carbonengineering.com 
 
 “It’s not something that we were the first to think about it,” chief executive Adrian Corless told Canadian Press. “I think we’re just the first to be in position with that key piece of technology — which is the scalable source of atmospheric CO2 — that allows you to think about making a larger scale fuel synthesis plant.” 
 
 Harvard University climate scientist David Keith founded the company, Carbon Engineering, in 2009, and plans to sharply increase the scale of the work.
– Visit a town north of Vancouver and you may notice a long, blue building that appears ordinary—but it just may be leading the way in climate-change technology. Run by the Canadian company Carbon Engineering, the plant is busy capturing carbon dioxide from the Earth's atmosphere. It's also designed to process the greenhouse gas into carbon pellets that can help make fuel or just be buried underground, AFP reports. "It's now possible to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, and use it ... to produce net zero emission fuels," says company CEO Adrian Corless. "You don't have to re-tool the $30 trillion in (global) infrastructure now used to deliver fossil fuels." And he's not alone: Billionaires including Bill Gates and oil sands financier Murray Edwards are already investing, the Toronto Star reports. Running since May, the pilot plant should grab about a ton of CO2 daily—about the same as removing 100 cars from the road, the CBC reports. It works by running air through equipment that absorbs CO2 in a liquid solution and turns it into calcium-carbonate pellets (see a diagram at Quartz). The pellets are then heated in order to free pure carbon. "There's no real magic to it," says Corless. "The pieces of equipment already exist today in very large scale." Indeed, companies in California and Switzerland are also aiming to capture airborne CO2. Carbon Engineering isn't commercially viable just yet, but carbon pricing varies and could eventually hit $100 per ton. Would that be enough? "That’s getting pretty damn close," says company founder David Keith. (One study found that "global cooling" isn't such a far-fetched theory.)