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DoE Considers Artificial Trees To Remove CO2
eldavojohn writes "CNN is running an article on a new angle of attack to reducing greenhouse gases. After meeting with the US Department of Energy on the concept, the researchers revealed the details that each 'tree' (really a small building structure in the concept design) would cost about as much as a Toyota and remove 1 ton of CO2 from the air per day. Don't worry, they're accounting for the energy the 'tree' uses to operate: 'By the time we make liquid C02 we have spent approximately 50 kilojoules [of electricity] per mole of C02. Compare that to the average power plant in the US, which produces one mole of C02 with every 230 kilojoules of electricity. In other words, if we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1,000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful.' Each unit would remove 20 automobiles' worth of CO2 from the air and cost about as much as a Toyota... so the plan might be a five percent surcharge on automobiles to fund these synthetic tree farms."
Just like the fact that we legislated use of compact fluorescents with NO plan on disposal,
we have a half thought out plan on liquifying CO2, but nothing on storage and disposal.
Now I hope they invent natural trees...
Seriously, what's wrong with non synthetic trees? They cost nothing to build, and are really very low maintenance indeed...
Is there something wrong with real trees?
we just need to tweak it a little, and presto! ecological dry ice generator. Oh the mischief...
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
An echo? Or a Supra?
Numbers come in handy sometimes.
..make these "trees" self-replicating, self-repairing, solar powered, self-adapting, etc. and their production as cheap as natural trees. Then I'm impressed.
C'mon, calling these things trees is ridiculous. They don't transform the "bad" CO2 into "good" O2 and H2O, they simply capture it and store it. Wow. BFD. The claim that these "trees" collect CO2 at about 1000 times faster is crap. Real trees actually transform the CO2. Lame! They should try to genetically modify trees/plants to perform more active photosynthesis in order to make them capable of pulling more CO2 out of the air in a useful manner...
The idea made a lot sense when it came to the part about these synthetic trees being more cost effective than retrofitting an old coal fire plant. It's ambitious, and sounds promising. However I do wonder what can be done with the liquid CO2 produced. Also, these aren't nearly as pretty as real trees.
Still dissolves though.
What's wrong with, you know, good old-fashioned genuine trees? I would rather see this money spent on man made forests and jungles. I've seen work on Florida mangroves that used aerial deployment of seedling "bombs." It seemed to work well. It would give me warm fuzzies to hear of a squadron of old planes dive bombing the jungle/forest with seedlings just begging to be fed tons of delicious carbon dioxide.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Can someone tell me how many bicycles in a toyota?
They need water. (Hello California.) They need sunlight. You need a place to put them. They may be mildly sensitive to environmental shock when you're putting them up. They're somewhat low-density. The roots can damage structures in the vicinity. After several decades they die, and if you don't do something with the carbon they sequestered in the wood it'll make its way back to the atmosphere.
Still great, stuff, just not perfect.
In the article, they talk about "climate control" to the fullest extent. You can't turn non-synth trees "off." They'll keep pulling that CO2. These synth trees (that are equivalent to 1,000 normal trees each) can be shut off. So we pull out so much stuff that it gets a little colder? Oh well, just shut a bank or two down for the next year ... repeat until you hit your human desired equilibrium point. No more "climate change."
My work here is dung.
There was an interesting article on Planet Gore discussing the replacement of chlorofluorocarbons with hydrofluorocarbons and the unintended consequences thereof. Basically the HFCs have less effect on the ozone but are a more potent greenhouse gas. Never a dull moment!
Planet Gore has a lot of good stuff about various green quandries, including a fair number of posts by Chris Horner (author of Red Hot Lies).
The Army reading list
plant more trees? They cost significantly less than a Toyota, require minimal maintenance, and handle the CO2 storage themselves. Oh, and stop cutting down the ones that are already there.
- And where do you put this CO2 once you catch it?
- In a storage facility.
- And would this storage facility be located on these premises?
- Yes, it would.
- And may I see this storage facility?
- No, you may not.
Trees store the carbon in the form of cellulose. When they die, the carbon goes back into the environment.
I piss off bigots.
length = one Toyota from fender to fender
mass = one Toyota
time = um - how long it takes a Toyota to go 1000 Toyotas in distance from a dead stop
electric current = the amount of current from the battery in a Toyota
thermodynamic temperature = ooh - this is a tough one...
amount of substance = one Toyota
luminous intensity = light from both front headlights of a Toyota on maximum brightness
I'm not sure how to do the temperature one, but the rest all seem to work...
Education is the silver bullet.
Yes, but can these trees be hugged?
Compact fluorescents contain mercury, which is really fun to play with. No problem.
I piss off bigots.
When I read stories like this, I combine swear words in combinations I never thought possible.
So when they build one or two of these "Farms" and find out....whoops, we underestimated their effectiveness and costs...then what?
WTF? Over?
The EPA owe me a new keyboard!!! It reminds me of using mercury at school. I recall we weren't quite as carefull as that. We used to push the stuff around with our fingers!!
So we have 800kg or C02, what the hell are we going to do with it? All I see in the article is trapping the C02 but plants still do it better because they convert it back to O2. Are they planning on doing that or just sell the liquid C02 off and have other people readmit it into the air?
A question is would you rather walk through a thousand acres of forest or an acre covered with these high-tech porta-cabins?
"Broecker told CNN the units could stand in the middle of Australia, for example, and their presence wouldn't significantly disrupt the atmospheric distribution."
Except for the minor problem of being fuck all in the middle of Australia - including massive power generation facilities require to run them
I am not sure if it is related, but sometime in the last year I saw some reality/doco TV program that was attempting to produce a proof of concept of such an artificial tree in a fixed time frame. What struck me then was the bad engineering and science that was being put forward as the implementation of this "great idea". It was like a mythbusters pretending to be real research.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
we lower the efficiency of burning fossile fuels? You know that sounds like a really good idea to me....
Thing is, although we know that we're jacking up the CO2, it does mean that we are the only ones that can jack up CO2. As a rule, we're going to find that we will need to treat the atmosphere and manage it as much as we do our water and our land.
Dare I say, too, that if you plug the sequestration into a nuclear power plant, there's less CO2...
This is my sig.
If only there was something you could just plant in the ground that would grow on it's own, powered only by water and sunlight, that would do the same thing..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Are at war against the trees. People are stupid. C02 is what trees "breath" to survive. Eliminating C02 will kill off the trees and make the planet uninhabitable. But people will never understand the truth, instead they choose to believe in a totally insane politician who believes in his cause so much that he flies his private jet all around the world spewing C02 everywhere he can.
Just another harebrained idea chasing government money.
And the carbon math is best appreciated by an auditor from Arthur Anderson: creating CO2 to harvest CO2 for a "net gain"?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
just play the game
for example, i'm going to the DOE and i'm going to get $24 million in feasibility study funding for what i call "artificial carbon dioxide"
what you do is, in power plants and automobiles where carbon dioxide is typically produced, you replace the real carbon dioxide with artificial carbon dioxide. its all automatic and costs zero energy, don't worry about the specifics
then the artificial carbon dioxide takes up the space in the air normally occupied by real carbon dioxide, FORCING it to precipitate out of the atmosphere as harmless dry ice. you could even have it precipitate out into ice cream vending machines, so it even makes kids happy!
see? stop grumbling about these hare brained schemes. its more fun to play along
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Millions of little smog reducing machines stuck under millions of cars, which have to meet stringent weight/price/space requirements to be practical - or gigantic smokestack scrubbers like algae biofuel this one?
Trying to mop up all the problems from millions of cars is the real problem here.
Instead, let's work on moving to all electric cars. This will centralize the pollution at the power generators and then you can take whatever steps are necessary to minimize it without having to worry about catalytic converters and artificial trees.
I mean really, artificial tree/plants to remove CO2? Come on. There are easier solutions out there. Here's another one: Algae biodiesel.
If you don't like electric, go diesel. Then use algae farms to press for oil. It's a closed-loop CO2 system. Car burns fuel, CO2 goes into air. Biodiesel farm collects CO2 and sunshine in photosynthesis, makes fuel. Lather rinse repeat. Closed loop to CO2, just like mother nature does in a forest.
I applaud these guys for pitching a solution that works with what we have, but if we really want a solution that speaks to the future we need to ditch what we have and try for better. Mopping up the water from the sink overflowing is a temporary solution - we should be working on turning the sink off.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
By itself this device only gives you liquid CO2 which you then have to deal with. But hook this to an algae photobioreactor tower and you can have a self-contained pod that generates use able diesel fuel with only sunlight and air as inputs.
Pairing them will let you eliminate the "compress to a liquid" step as well, which should further lower the energy requirement for CO2 reclamation.
-- The reader anything less than completely failing to not misunderstand this sig is cursed.
and synth trees create liquid CO2 that goes back into the environment in a few hours.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It would make a lot more sense to use real trees. They don't "cost as much as a Toyota," they grow by themselves from seeds, and are self-replicating. They don't extract carbon dioxide in the form of stuff that has to be liquified and then sequestered somehow; they extract CO2 and solidify it in the form of cellulose, a material that is naturally solid at room temperature and pressure.
Obviously, if the trees are then allowed to rot, the CO2 returns to the atmosphere, but that is an easy problem compared to the problem of sequestering CO2 for a few centuries. Just pile it up in the desert, where it won't rot. Or, heck, bury it and let geological forces compress it for a while, and you make new coal that our successors a few million years later can deal with. Wood is a heck of a lot easier to sequester than carbon dioxide!
In short, I can't think of anything more idiotic than designing "artificial" trees, when nature has been evolving real trees optimized to do exactly this task (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere)-- and has had a few hundred million year head start.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Algae farms which could produce fuel need large quantities of concentrated CO2 to function. They would be a perfect match with these artificial trees.
If they start conjuring up half-brained ideas I should be able to do the same.
Plant massive amounts of apple trees in apple orchards. The trees will absorb the CO2 and produce apples. Then force kids at highschools to eat apples instead of unhealthy crap and it will help to reduce the obesity problem!
Sure, this plan is flawed and won't work in practice but it stops EBIL GLOBAL WARMING and that's good enough for me.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I'm not sure what the impact of hypercarbonated deep oceans would be-- it would certainly take decades, and possibly centuries for the dense hyercarbonated water to diffuse upward to the surface, unless there are deep currents-- but I'm not sure why we think that it would be good to do this.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Could it work? Now where to put all that liquid CO2?
Program Intellivision!
Costs and pollution during:
Building, shipping, installation, maintenance, removal, replacement.
How many REAL trees could you plant for the cost of one of these stupid artificial trees? Real trees absorb carbon dioxide using NO electricity, there's no carbon storage problem they produce oxygen and beautify the surroundings to boot! This whole "artificial tree" solution sounds more like some business with a politician in their pocket.
At the end of the day we have got to do something about the "carbon-in-the-atmosphere" problem and while this idea might not be fantastic it could be a step in the right direction. I actually think this is probably just the same carbon capture technology that they are planning on fitting to coal fired power stations (good overview in tabs - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8014295.stm) in which case it would make more sense to capture it at source and not waste energy in transmission.
Personally I would like to see more research into using charcoal to capture the carbon. The idea goes like this: grow trees (fast growing trees), carbonize them into charcoal, plough them into the nations fields. Carbonizing them is messy but a self powering step and it can produce industrially useful chemicals. Ploughing the charcoal into the fields will improve the soil quality.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
This is a good idea, and it's actually something I've had in my own head for years, but I've never been able to work out the finer points of how it might function.
It's exactly what we need; come up with a sufficiently non-polluting means of mass-producing these things, and then line the streets with them. Clean air for breathing, astronomy, and as a major part of lowering global temperatures and cleaning up the environment.
I am seeing more and more, an influx of WoW forum refugees to Slashdot, as I've mentioned earlier, and they're just as anti-intellectual, brazenly sociopathic, and juvenile now as they were within the WoW forums.
Please go back there, former WoW players. Slashdot used to be a place for intelligent, often enjoyable discussion of ideas; and you're ruining it.
We could plant more trees and stop cutting down our forests.. I don't think that even takes all that much energy. And a plus is the trees even look nicer.
You know, there are trees stuck deep in the mud of the rivers that went past the old logging areas in Canada that are now being harvested for their wood. In the cold and deep, they are perfectly preserved, and they certainly don't dissolve. Maybe a better way would be to send great batches of cellulose (ie tree trunks) down into the briny deep. Maybe a few million or billion years from now, they'll be a viable energy source for an up and coming civilization.
Every fossil fuel burned in the world releases CO2 into the atmosphere. While CO2 is obviously not a particularly toxic pollutant, in overwhelmingly vast quantities it probably will eventually cause problems. No, plants don't remove CO2 - when a plant dies, the decay process re-releases most of the CO2 right back into the atmosphere. If global CO2 levels ever rise to the point that the gas is causing serious problems, the only fix will be a process like this one.
Collecting all the CO2 released when it was burned the first time will cost a lot of money - that's why it makes sense to tax fossil fuels and to invest the money in clean energy technology and save some for a cleanup program. A tax would charge uses of fossil fuels for the "negative externality" - the cost incurred by others to clean up all that CO2 and the damage resulting from it.
In any case, climate change won't be all doom and gloom, at least for high technology societies that can react to the changes. Some day, we'll have vast numbers of CO2 scrubbers like these 'trees', powered by nuclear or solar energy.
One of the big problems of windmills is that the availability does not match demand. When there is high demand, send all power to consumers. During low demand, run the artificial trees. It should not matter much if the CO2 is being removed at midnight or at noon. So you have a win (Wind power to consumers) and another win (removal of excess carbon dioxide) in a single plant.
'Artificial Tress'...? Strikes me as just another way for those in charge of energy production of avoiding facing the real issues at hand with the environment. Even if they do supposedly work, it's a completely ridiculous idea that humanity has reached the point where we need to start making fake trees to do the job that thousands of real trees could be doing if only we could stop cutting them all down and using their land to grow awful, unneeded food on. Seems to just be a further point of denial that our race is in over the horrendous point to which we have driven our environment.
Jeeze...I'm so glad that somebody used time, energy, resources and money (likely including government grant funding) to come up with a product that DOES THE SAME F-ING THING AS A NATURALLY OCCURRING, FREE TREE.
Holy hell - has the world gone mad?!? "Let's take a free, naturally sustaining object - one that provides reduced energy consumption, decreases CO2, decreases soil erosion, protects from excessive sun exposure, maintains ecosystem diversity, assists in water conservation, provides tangible resources, etc. - and use our dwindling financial and energy resources to create an imitation that doesn't do half that of the natural object...BRILLIANT!"
This may have application in places where real trees can no longer grow, but...my god...are we really that lazy that we can't plant a freakin' tree?!?
[Insert pithy line of moxie here.]
It's "hare" brained not "hair" brained.
If you have difficulty remembering, repeat this phrase each night to help you fall asleep: "Hares are stupid. Gorgons are not." Trust me, you'll remember.
There's still the question of what to do with the gathered CO2. Use it to feed plants that you grow in an airtight environment.
After all, real trees can't run linux.
Groucho not Karl.
This sounds disturbingly like my wife's argument for buying things in a sale:
W; "I just saved [x] pounds!"
H: "How did you do that?"
W: "I bought [unneeded object] for [y] pounds in the sale, it was [x + y] pounds before"
H: "But we didn't need [unneeded object]!"
[fx]Wife smashing husband over head with sabre[/fx]
Wouldn't it be better not to generate the CO2, or at least minimise its production, in the first place?
I have wondered when we would reach the point of trying atmospheric processing to correct some of our global warming issues.
I think it's great.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I don't see ethane (C2 alkane) causing any problems in the near future. CO2 on the other hand, might be troublesome!
That means we're going to burn 20% more fuel to deal with a problem that comes from burning too much fuel.
To make things worse, it doesn't even really deal with the problem, it just converts the CO2 to a liquid which has to be stored somehow, forever. There's no easy answers there. Dropping it to the bottom of the ocean won't work, at least not permanently.
The ocean is already a huge CO2 sink. why wouldn't that CO2 solidify, covering the bottom of the ocean with dry ice, if the pressure is high enough, and the temperature low enough?
Simple answer. There's not enough pressure to keep it as a solid, and at those low temperatures and high pressures, it dissolves easily into the water. So, while you don't get bubbles coming up, the problem still hasn't gone away.
It could easily be "overrated", you had an idea that at first seems good, but replies explain why it is bad, ergo no longer a good or interesting idea, therefore the interesting mods need to be undone--via "overrated" mods.
... I guess they mean the Toyota Landcruiser @ $65,000? Or the Yaris @ $12,500 ?? :)
I guess the President's in for a surprise when he signs the bill @ 100.000 Toyota's and discovers it is the first
Obama is happy. Another reason for a tax, even if the CO2 tree plan never actually gets started.
As much as a toyota manufactured heavy mining dump truck?
As much as a toyota forklift?
A prius? A corolla?
I smell more nonsense wrapped in a 'save the babies' cloak.
This is nutso. How about real trees instead, try to get some deserts back to being green. Or fast growing seasonal plants, when is the US going to allow industrial hemp growing? We can "capture carbon" ;) Of course, the tech to "grow plants and trees" is already out there in the public domain, can't really get a patented monopoly on it as easy or sell some zillion dollar "solution" to big governments.
by the cubic mile that way and have something useful from it. And just getting charcoal down into the subsurface soil area in general, plowing the extra carbon into the soil in the form of charcoalized biomass. Build up the soil tilth all over and we won't have to use as much fossil fuel fertilizers. Plants are wonderful things to use to capture carbon, and they are solar fusion powered. -See, a high tech fulla buzzwords solution, using the latest biotechnology!
I tell you when I got really suspicious of this dubious "war on carbon", and that is when they first started talking about some new trillion dollar a year carbon trading "industry", as in we don't already have enough middleman wealth skimmers and grifters out there.
they mix moles, kJ tons. When you do the math, you get that this thing will use about 47 Megawatts to pull a ton of CO2 a day. That's fine I guess... but it's hardly a little "tree" you would plant in your yard.
I can now buy my BMW M3 back!
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It costs as much as a Toyota?
Is it possible to break CO2 into O2 and C later? And user C as tonner in my printer :P
CO2 is in no way, shape or form bad for the environment. It is an essential trace gas, it is only speciously linked to previous warm periods, and humans are responsible for a small portion of the CO2 that is released in the atmosphere.
This is just disgusting. What a waste of brainpower.
... I commit to deploying one unit of the latest generation iDontPollute&trade (patent pending). The proprietary technology uses a revolutionary light-dependent reaction mediated via the thylakoid membranes of custom designed chloroplasts which use light energy to synthesize adenosine triphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (say that 10 times really fast). This technology, although in its early stages, is already enjoying wide adoption at a global level, see for example .
This story has been covered as it developed in the past on Slashdot.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/04/26/0226222/First-Successful-Demonstration-of-CO2-Capture-Technology
There are good reasons to consider this approach and the next step to sequestering the carbon may come in the formation dolomite from the metal ions available in silicate rock and CO2 collected in this way. These devices should take up less ground that trees and thus may provide a quick solution. But, the benefits of biochar may be so large that that will be the preferred method of sequestration in the end. I applaud DOE for providing support at this stage.
No, they actually mean as much as a Toyota Corporation. It's all in the sly marketing!
Yes they do, but as several other posters have noted theres not really a disposal plan for the liquid CO2 that these artificial trees generate, so they have the same problem. I'd also agree with some other posters that it would be easier to dispose of a tree trunk (bury it) than to dispose of liquid CO2.
That post is neither "Flamebait" nor "overrated"
Stop using moderation as "-1 I don't agree with you politically"
If you're incapable of doing that REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE MODERATION LOTTERY. NOW.
This is not flamebait, its offtopic maybe, but it needed to be said.
we need TREES 2.0
Where you gonna put a tree that big?
Bend over and I'll show you.
You've got a lot of nerve talking to me like that, Griswold!
I wasn't talking to you.
Seriously, it won't do any harm on Mars.
Yes, but assuming it's at all cared for, not for a very long time, and then it will only slowly release that carbon back into the air. Not to mention that when it dies you can plant more trees in it's place to "take up the slack."
I don't know. I'm kinda fond of the real ones. And last I checked, they still worked OK. We just may need a few more of them. Maybe we could plant them on the top of some of those buildings.
If God had meant us to have fibreglass boats, he would have given us fibreglass trees... Though I suspect their C02 uptake would not be quite as good as the ones with the green leafy bits. Just imagine when Artificial Grass 98 is replaced with Artificial Grass XP and is no longer compatible with Artificial Tree v 3.1. Everyone will be forced into a wholesale hardware upgrade.
The real solution is to drink more Coke and persuade Coca Cola to stockpile more Coke to meet the increasing demand, thereby developing a nice capitalist solution to the problem of carbon sequestration.
No kidding. We invented numbers so that we could use them to mean things. A "Toyota" is a wildly vague number that might mean 10k or 50k. That's just plain weird as a way to explain the cost of things.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Sweet we can power cars with liquid CO2 (much like compressed air) oh wait that puts it right back into the air LOL
Biochar
And the minerals go back down in the soil as well, they aren't lost.
And I understand about soil erosion and so forth and no till planting (I am a farmer 0_o), but as a one time per area technique, I think deep soil sequestration (especially in areas that need to be reclaimed now or that have very marginal soils to begin with, back to the greening the deserts perhaps idea...) using the biochar is a darn spiffy idea. I like it a lot better than some massive electronic artificial tree thing. Reclaimed land is good for a variety of uses, artificial trees are an expensive one trick pony that doesn't do much besides remove the co2.
Me..I prefer to work with nature and not try to "conquer" it. Man has an amazing ability to screw up when he loses track of that idea, so I'd like to more concentrate on easier and more effective solutions, and solutions that give us a lot more benefit for the tax dollar spent (or carbon tax dollar *collected* from me and you to be more precise which is where this is going talking about building millions of artificial trees at the cost of "one toyota" a piece. this on top of that insane cap and trade skimming idea) The cost of "one toyota" in most of the world would get thousands of trees planted amd/or a lot of acreage treated with biochar, said acreage later on perhaps to be used for food production, etc., plus, it holds water (in the wiki link), which also helps. Trees also help to moderate the local microclimate and provide some nice moisture and shade cooling, plus, the trees themselves coiuld be food producing trees, or perhaps biofuel producers..anything useful and dual/triple use. Once the tree is beyond that intended use, it is turned to either construction wood (stored carbon) or into biochar and deep sequestered, plowed into the ground. Once in awhile deep plowing won't hurt anything, in fact it is a good way to get some of those minerals up where plant roots can get to them easier. Every season, no, that's nuts, but once in awhile, getting some good tilth back down there un the form of the biochar, plus mixing it with the uplifted minerals in the hardpan..works. And FWIW, this is exactly how I start new garden areas around my house, get down through that nasty hard clay and mix some good mulch in with it. The resultant mixture is *very good*, and it works well for food production without needing anything else, and it allows for better water management down at the root level where it needs to be.
So I stand by my opinion so far, because I read about this proposal before, it is a rube goldberg/pt barnum thing IMO. Designed to make a select few a ton of money and do not much good for that money. It is impressive scientific/academic bling, but it *isn't practical*. Another part of the scam war on carbon.
Carbon isn't a threat, this is a carbon based lifeform planet! What we do with the carbon and where we get it and where it winds up is where the efforts should be placed, not just creating some dubious and expensive war against it. Carbon is *wealth*! Once we start treating it as wealth, in the appropriate manner and place, we'll do a lot better than trying to make some "war" against it.
We'll probably have to agree to disagree here, I just see no reason to create artificial carbon suckers when it is so easy to have just more living growing things and then be able to use them for other purposes, and try to combine that with getting away from fossil fuel use at all.
Most of the excess carbon we have today is because we released it from the ground, from coal and oil..well..putting that carbon back down into the ground everywhere-at a USEFUL place, not just some miles away in some deep mine shaft, would help relieve the excess amounts in the atmosphere PLUS be doing a variety of good simultaneously, better soil tilth, better "sponge" effect in the soil for water retention, etc. We need all that, we don't need just tanker loads of expensively collected concentrated CO2 that you still have to do something with.
...instead of solving the problem?
Store it? Lets just put it under Yucca mountain, that works for everything else, right?
Trees take it in, and biochar can them be put deep into the ground once the tree is mature and after we have used it for something else in the meantime, food, fuel, perhaps more medicines can be made from them, shade, cooling, moisture/water control, building construction, furniture, etc). See my other reply for more details on why I think a more cooperative with nature idea makes more practical and economic sense than artificial tree co2 suckers.(and this is why the inventors are calling it an artificial tree in the first place, because it takes carbon in..I just like more real trees for a wide variety of reasons)
Global Warming is caused by humans, and if it does harm in the first place. I'm not saying that it's not caused by humans and isn't harmful, but please think for yourself and read rather than taking the mainstream, approved view. This is a good read; just try to find the truth rather than assuming what you've been taught (or what that site says). Either way, Toyota is a bad measure of cost. Is that my $800 1986 Toyota Celica GT-S, or a newer luxury sedan?
Remind me again, what are we supposed to do with 1 ton of liquid CO2 per day that's captured by each one of these things?
... just plant more trees? How about that for an idea?
...the exodus of humanity out of the garden of nature. And only after the doors close behind us, do we realize we have no way to get back.
What the fuck is wrong with real trees? As a side benefit, they're MUCH prettier to look at.
Mechanical tree, mechanical tree.
What thee be, mechanical tree.
With limbs of steel; And roots of power.
You form a great mechanical tower.
(thats all i got)
It would be nice if each new development didn't use the SimCity Bulldozer on everything when building new streets/homes. Of course, those homes each get one nursery tree and a driveway with two SUVs, which I'm sure doesn't balance out.
Here's an idea to take to your local Town Meeting and propose: Each home with an SUV must have 5 trees (of a certain diameter) on the lot, 10 for two, etc. It'd stop the SimCity Bulldozer, and the random folks who suddenly get the urge to cut down all their trees.
The use of all caps on the internet usually symbolizes yelling which is intended to start arguements, often call "flamewars" on the internet. OP isn't flamebait but the OP is not Flamebait, it is "overrated" as per my previous AC post.
"LONDON, England (CNN) -- Scientists in the United States are developing.."
Wait.. where?
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
And emit lots of other crap, depending on the power generation technology. Couldn't the thing just have a big solar panel array near it?
This nothing but a short term solution. If you really want to solve the problem, cut down carbon emissions and plant more trees - that might take a while. So what you do is you spend those billions of dollars in researching photosynthesis and design machines that work in similar ways - absorb carbon dioxide from atmosphere and convert it into cellulose, oxygen and water.
If you actually read and research about photosynthesis on the internet, you'd be surprised how little we know about probably the oldest life sustaining phenomenon!
Removing CO2 is all well and good, but if these are plugged into the grid (mostly coal powered) we're basically just reducing the efficiency of our power plants by 20%. Unless the energy to power these little guys comes from renewable sources we're robbing efficiency to pay pollution.
Porquoi?