Two Companies are Now Selling Diamonds Made From Airborne CO2

"Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth," reports Scientific American:

The sales pitch can be stunning. As Ryan Shearman, the founder and CEO of a New York-based company called Aether, recently explained to a reporter for Vogue magazine: Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year.

With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, "you're essentially offsetting 2 and a half years of your life."

It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks. Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power. Or, as Shearman sometimes puts it, "we're committed to the unprecedented modern alchemy of turning air pollution into precious stones." Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements.

Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond...

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