Cloud-sourced diamonds
Everything we need to create a Skydiamond comes from the sky. The carbon it’s made from is taken from the atmosphere, wind and sun provide all our energy, and the water we use is captured rain. The only thing we put back into the world is cleaner air than we took out.
We want to be clear – Skydiamonds only lock away a modest amount of carbon. But by using carbon from the atmosphere to create diamonds, our technology turns a negative into a positive.
More importantly, by avoiding mining the Earth, each Skydiamond has avoided a considerably larger carbon footprint. And it’s not just carbon emissions that are avoided, but pollution of the land and water too – these impacts are inherent in the process of mining the Earth for diamonds. Along with negative social and ethical impacts. And wildlife impacts. Mining for diamonds has it all.
From the start, Skydiamond’s objective has been to work in harmony with nature. We hope that our approach will inspire others to come up with inventive ways of addressing the climate crisis, helping create another way to live.
Everything used to make a Skydiamond comes from the sky – including something we have too much of, CO2
We extract CO₂ from the atmosphere, which we liquify and purify – an important step in ensuring the quality of our diamonds. With the CO₂ removed, the air released back into the atmosphere is cleaner than we found it.
The amount of CO₂ in a carat of diamond is relatively small – we use just a couple of grammes in our process – the carbon avoided by not mining the earth is significant. Each carat of mined diamond has a footprint of over 100kg of carbon dioxide and over 500kg of greenhouse gases in total. In contrast, a one-carat Skydiamond has a footprint of minus 1g of CO₂. We take rain water and split it into oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis – powered by the wind and sun of course. We then combine these gases to create methane, which we feed into our Diamond Mills.
Inside these Diamond Mills we grow our Skydiamonds on tiny seeds (which we also make) in a ball of plasma running at about 1,000 degrees Celsius – roughly the temperature of the outer layer of the sun.
We power our Sky Mine and entire process with energy made from the wind and sun. Each carat of sky mined diamond takes just over 80kWh of energy to produce – about the same as an average UK home uses in four days. It's also less than the energy typically required to mine a stone using fossil fuels.
Everything takes place at our Sky Mining facility in England.