Sweden’s national energy company Vattenfall has come up with an ingenious process for reducing air pollution, which recently won a prestigious award for one of the best technology projects of 2008 by a US magazine.  Vattenfall’s project is a way to supercharge a process known as “carbon capturing.”  What is carbon capturing you ask?  Well it’s kind of like putting a big balloon over the tailpipe of your car.

But instead of letting all of that exhaust into the atmosphere, it stays in the balloon.  Then, when the balloon is full, put it somewhere safe, maybe deep underground or in the ocean.  But don’t try this at home, you’ll look like a weirdo and the balloon will probably pop.  Typically carbon capturing is done in fossil fuel (oil and coal) power plants.  And they don’t use balloons, they use something tough, made out of metal – sort of like a big industrial sized propane tank.  Vattenfall’s process improves carbon capturing for coal – which is great news for the U.S. where coal burning power plants produce about 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, according to the article, and debates have sparked about coal’s health effects over recent years.