Africans make greenhouse gases safe

A specialist South African energy company, Sasol, is claiming to have launched the world’s first project that converts greenhouse gas nitrous oxide into harmless individual gases nitrogen and oxygen.

The company expects to remove the equivalent of a million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the project each year (every ton of nitrous oxide has the impact of about 310 tons of carbon dioxide). It will also net a tidy sum by selling its carbon credits on the international markets.

Sasol did not say how much it expected to earn from the carbon credit sale, but [Head of the Sasol project Fred Groen] said credit for a ton of converted greenhouse gas was worth $10 on the climate exchanges.