Diamonds in the sky with carbon

What if you could get diamonds from the sky?

Green-tech company - skymining - says they're doing just that.

By using excess carbon dioxide to make a fully certified diamond, according to inventor Dale Vince.

“It seems like a perfect 21st-century industry to me, one that takes something we have too much of, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and turns it into something that we like to have, diamonds, and we can avoid the pollution and the impact of digging the ground for those."

Courtesy: Skymining Company

Their technology does not even add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

By using wind and solar energy to capture rainwater, they manage to produce the hydrogen needed to make methane.

This creates what they call the world’s first truly carbon-negative fuel.

So what does that really mean?

Essentially, it's a profitable way to remove CO2 emissions from the atmosphere - and recycle the carbon inside that CO2 to make sustainable diamonds.

"We aren’t creating planetary-scale changes to the environment. We’re just using machines to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. If you like it’s the flip side of the industry today which used machines to put carbon into the atmosphere."

And what does the industry look like today?

As carbon emissions increase and warm the planet, the environmental impact of the traditional mined diamonds industry has come under pressure.

There are growing calls for the miners to use more renewable energy.

“The amount of carbon in a stone, in a carat of diamond, is actually relatively small but the amount of carbon emitted to dig that same carat out of the ground is relatively huge actually and so although we set out down this path to see if it was possible to make good out of something bad, excess carbon into diamonds and use it as a way of absorbing carbon, that kind of stuff, what we’ve found is it’s got a bigger role to play in the avoided emission of carbon by making stones a different way.”