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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?
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...
Still great, stuff, just not perfect.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
susceptible to disease, they have to grow, people will try to put tree houses in them, they try to kill hobbits - the list goes on and on.
Can someone tell me how many bicycles in a toyota?
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.
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.
I don't know where to begin.
Do you know how many species of trees are native to the more arid parts of California? The problem with most of Los Angeles, is exactly what you propose. A decades-long successful but misguided effort to cut down trees in order to save a few dollars in maintenance costs. Dunno about you, but the endless miles sun-bleached concrete and asphalt is hardly a hospitable environment, to say nothing of the problem with everyone needing an airconditioner to get through the summer because no one's thought to actually plant a frigging tree.
Seriously, you have a problem with trees? I'd suggest that if everyone started planting new ones and did so for the next decade, we (and our planet) would be better off.
This is one reason why countries have been phasing out Hydrofluorocarbons since the mid-1990s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluorocarbons#Phase_out
But of course, yesterday's article in the National Review makes it seem like nobody ever thought of this problem before until now. In reality, this problem has been widely discussed.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Charcoal is very stable and won't re-enter the atmosphere for millions of years.
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!
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.]
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?
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.
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.
As someone mentioned elsewhere: "The artificial "tree" is projected to remove as much CO2 per day as 25194 real trees."
we need TREES 2.0
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.
"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.