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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.
Is there something wrong with real trees?
Still great, stuff, just not perfect.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It depends on the bicycle and Toyota that are involved, but I think you could rely on it being at least 25-30 smugs worth.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.]
I cannot imagine that it would take decades or centuries for dissolved CO2 to diffuse a few miles through water, even with a pressure gradient. I'd imagine months at most, more likely days.
As an added disadvantage, the resulting carbonic acid would only speed up ocean acidification.
Um, is it just me or has everybody forgotten the rule of the conservation of matter especially the global warming chumps. Matter is never truly created, nor is it ever truly destroyed, it only changes state. We have as much CO2 as we ever had, and will ever have. The same is true for all "greenhouse" gasses. The issues are, where is it and in what form. The best idea would be to learn how to reverse the process of the internal combustion engine and turn the greenhouse gasses back into fuel.
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.
CO2 is currently making the oceans PH out of whack and killing corral reefs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on