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First Successful Demonstration of CO2 Capture Technology
An anonymous coward writes "Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT), a technology research and development company, and Klaus Lackner from Columbia University have achieved the
successful demonstration of a bold new technology to capture carbon from the air. The "air extraction" prototype has successfully demonstrated that indeed carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured from the atmosphere. This is GRT's first step toward a commercially viable air capture device."
We have this thing commonly known as "dry ice" ; otherwise as "carbon dioxide ice". They don't mine it, you know.
It comes from AIR. *gasp*. It's also been around for a very long time.
The article does not mention how much carbon needs to be burned to power the device.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/07041 8091932.htm
There's some work going on at UC San Diego to use solar power to convert CO2 into CO (carbon monoxide) and O. Apparently, CO is useful in industrial chemical processes like making plastic. There's also some talk of using it as a fuel.
"Actually the more people need paper the more trees get planted to supply that demand"
I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests, eg: Indonesia, Malaysia, S.America and even here in Australia. Some wealthy countries replant and/or carefully manage the natural regrowth, most just hack it down leaving large areas of barren hills. In Australia we plant non-native pine trees for timber resulting in vast areas of land covered with a pine tree monoculture that is largely devoid of any other lifeforms (even the bugs refuse to live in those forests).
Speaking of cost, how much do you think it costs to cut a ton of timber, turn it into chips, ship it from Australia to Japan and then turn it into paper that is shipped all over the planet. I will wager those costs are far more than the cost of an extra garbage run to collect a ton of used paper that is ready for pulping. Having worked at a sawmill many moons ago the waste timber that was chipped on site was collected by a truck and driven ~200miles to a sea port.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> And couldn't we sequester CO2 from the atmosphere by converting trees into an inert substance--such as paper--then burying it into landfills?
Yes we can.
But instead of trees, use fast-growing plants like switchgrass or elephant grass. Instead of making them into paper you can pyrolize them into a gas with high energy content and charcoal. Burn the gas to make electricity. Bury the charcoal.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Why not use algae instead? Drop a little iron into the ocean and you get a megagrowth of algae. Then scoop them up, dry them out, and bury them in a hole someplace cold. The amount of CO2 you could reclaim would be immense.
Before reading the comments, I took a moment to RTFM. (Yeah, yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, but we all slip up once in a while.) In the second paragraph, they mention "...an esteemed array of global experts -- including former Vice President Al Gore..." What did Al Gore do to deserve being called a "global expert?" I mean, besides producing a heavily-slanted "documentary" filled with questionable "facts" and spending more each month on his electric bill than I earn?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The best way to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere still is and always will be to not emit it in the first place. Any other ways will just lead to the global reduction of Oxygen.
That hard to get?
All this recycling and tree replanting should be avoided in the first place. We should be planting hemp everywhere. It has many more benefits than growing pine, for instance. Less to no chemicals needed. It's a nitrogen fixer (in the soil). Grows quickly. Hemp is the answer. Leave the forests to become old growth again.
and once you capture the CO2, you can use it to make gasoline.
;-)
"but please let's not spread BS about paper production"
If you look at my post I was not attacking US forestry, as I said most wealthy countries look after whatever they have left. But lets not kid ourselves that the bulk of the worlds woodchips come from from wealthy countries. High quality hardwood chips from the places I mentioned are extremely cheap when compared to what the original resource is really worth.
"It is not people sneaking in to the rain forest and cutting down huge, thousand year old trees"
Not sure about 1kyrs but the mill I worked at (early 80's) used 350yro mountain ash (Australian version is a huge tree) for house frames and bridge timber, the substantial amount of waste was chipped, the "hearts" are full of red dirt and are burned. The area is now a national park but the practice continues in other areas. Even in the eighties that was small scale and highly regulated compared to the modern day practices in the other places I mentioned, look it up - these people aren't "sneaking" they are large companies with the type of political clout the *IAA has wet dreams over.
And if bulldozing eveything in sight is not bad enough, take a look at the Shell's practices in Nigeria or Texaco in Ecuador, or any of the countless number of times that western society has shat on it's neighbours veggie garden.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Think about your logic. If it was true that they were planting trees, then we would have LOTS more, not less. The reality is that the lumber companies who take from federal/state lands do NOT replant. Their argument is that other trees will do the seeding. OTH, when they take from private lands esp their own, then they are forced by contracts to re-seed. More expensive, but better results. Here in American, we WERE moving to trees being taken for private lands, but W. re-opened the forests and now allow them to take a great deal more (including LOTS of clear cutting). EU currently does that (they developed their woods long ago). But a number of nations still have loads of national forests so they allow the timber industries to nicely cut through them. A good example is Canada and Russia.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sure the capacity of the geological formations is limited, but so is the amount of oil or coal that can be recovered from any particular place. While I agree that carbon sequestration have long-term sustainability issues, they are perhaps more managable than the alternative -- simply using the sky as a garbage dump.
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Modding that post as 5, Informative doesn't make any sense unless it was to illustrate popular misconceptions and propaganda.
Lumber companies, like any other farmers, would prefer to plant in places where the crops will grow and can be harvested for a profit and new crops grown. Rain forests are particularly POOR places to grow trees. The primary reason the U.S. imports so much lumber is because of Clinton-era restrictions on tree harvesting.
The myth of clear-cutting as a lumbering practice is also crazy. Think about it, the infrastructure needed to process and move the crop would have to be continually rebuilt. How many farmers do that? They will rotate the harvest areas as a way to let the soil regenerate but they don't strip the surface and continually move on.
The idea that only one species of tree is planted by lumber companies is pure propaganda and incredibly naive. Like any other plant, different types of trees have different types of fibers. Different types of fibers are used to make different types of papers. It would no more be feasible to plant only one type of tree than it would to plant only one type of any other crop because the soil would become depleted. Paper companies are lumber companies. Are all the boards at a lumber store the same type of wood? Of course not.
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Misconceptions? WTF? I disagree, however I can only speak for what I have seen in the Midwest US.
I don't know where you live, but in our area the lumber companies do not own the land they are deforesting. They talk land owners into allowing their trees to be harvested, they strip the land down to a point that it doesn't recover for 30-50 years, and they move on. If they replant, it will be whatever tree saplings they have on hand, and surely will be a single species.
The land is hilly here, so even after 50 years, the bluffs and hills are still scarred and will never recover their beauty. Erosion is nearly uncontrollable for at least a decade after the deforestation. Sure, they only take the "big trees", but the remaining trees die from injury, or loss of topsoil. Those that do live are sickly and unhealthy, usually falling down during storms. The forest undergrowth doesn't even come back because of the topsoil washing down into the valleys and streams.
In our area of the Midwest US, lumber companies are NOT farmers. It is the farmers that they screw over.
Some 10 years ago wasn't Engellhard (now a part of BASF) producing a compound which was painted onto Ford radiators. The idea was it would take CO2 out of the atmosphere?
I think when you look at it closely, you will find that "more" is a more subtle and complex concept than it first appears to be.
In terms of simple counting, the "tree growing company" and others like it do plant more seedlings than the count of mature trees harvested. So if I pick up four pebbles while a backhoe picks up a single boulder, I'm holding more rock than the backhoe is. Yeah.
In context with air scrubbers, an appropriate kind of "moreness" would be the volume of air swept by needles. In a 10 acre stand of mature douglas fir, that volume begins about 20 feet above the ground and extends upward for another 80 feet. The stand has an active scrubbing volume of 60 acre-feet. Transpiration and the temperature differential caused by its shade assure that there is a constant flow of air through the canopy, even when there is no external wind.
In a freshly replanted 10 acre plot, the volume of effective scrubbing starts a couple of inches above the ground and is about 6 inches deep, at most. Even if all other factors were equal, the scrubbing volume is no more than 8% of the mature forest it has replaced. Considering other factors, like density of needles and the loss of "churn" on still air days, the effective scrubbing volume is much less than 1% of a mature stand.
On reflection, it seems we need to know much more about "more" than the forest products industry will willingly tell us.
Speaking of electricity generation... Where does Alberta get off burning coal to product electricity with B.C. and Manitoba very close neighbours who produce more hydro electricity than than they can possibly use? That would be a great start if they just bought our excess hydro instead of burning fossil fuels. But they won't do that because coal is probably cheaper for them (at least in the short term). This is why we need Kyoto, to bump the cost of doing business with fossil fuels, and make the more environmentally friendly means of production more attractive.
Actually, the first couple sentences of the abstract of the PSU paper I linked previously say, "Old-growth forests are often assumed to exhibit no net carbon assimilation over time periods of several years. This generalization has not been typically supported by the few whole-ecosystem, stand-scale eddy-covariance measurements of carbon dioxide exchange in old-growth forests."
Again, I don't know where that carbon goes, but research seems to indicate that the carbon-absorption of old-growth forests may never really drop to totally insignificant levels. However, I'll grant that at some point, it would be more efficient to cut the trees down and and plant new ones, taking the short-term hit to CO2 absorption. However, the ideal time to chop down the trees (in terms of ecosystem carbon absorption) is much later than what intuition would suggest based on the growing cycle of the trees -- I would assume "mature" trees are past peak growth (or else we wouldn't use that term to describe them), and yet that is when the ecosystem is doing the most carbon storing. Based on the numbers given earlier, I would estimate those trees should be cut down no earlier than 150 years after planting, maybe closer to 200. I don't have enough data to calculate the actual optimal age, but I don't expect to be too far off.
I more-or-less agree with you in principal, but there must be better ways to store carbon than growing trees and throwing them in the ocean (where they'll still rot and release carbon unless we do something to seal them up). If tree stands did most of their carbon storing in the first 20-50 years of their life, then it would be a much better idea. But the reality is that it takes a long time (50-100 years, according to one of the linked papers) just to break even from planting new trees, much less to have a significant net carbon store. Maybe there are better trees for doing this, but I still bet we can come up with something (in terms of carbon capture technology) that would be better than those trees.