The Fight Against Climate Change

“Using Artificial Intelligence to Reduce CO2“

Climate change is driven by the excess release of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat and causes the planet’s overall warming. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased dramatically in recent decades – more than at any other point in human history – driven by industrialization and fossil fuel burning for power and transportation.

IBM researchers are developing a cloud-based knowledge repository of existing methods and materials. It will utilize IBM’s technology for annotation and natural language processing to mine information in patents and papers before applying AI to digest the data and present the findings, for example, by ranking the best-known materials for carbon dioxide separation.

AI can define the desired properties of materials and predict which molecules would be most suitable as building blocks for more effecting polymer membranes for carbon dioxide separation. Once captured and separated, the carbon dioxide can be used as a feedstock or raw material for monomers and polymers such as plastic, designed to focus on recyclability that allows recovery and reuse.
Scientists predict that they will be able to capture carbon dioxide more efficiently within the next five years and transform it into something useful. They aim to make the process efficient enough to scale globally, reducing carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and slowing down climate change.

Some current projects being worked on:

A macroscope (a system of software and algorithms that unite data and analyze it by space and time for meaning) named PAIRS, which was utilized to achieve a macroscopic view of the impact of and response to COVID-19.

An AI-powered robot microscope that continually monitors the conditions of the oceans to provide up-to-date data.

Anti-counterfeiting crypto-anchors and blockchain technology to ensure a product’s authenticity.