Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New CO2 Harvester Could Help Scrub the Air

Posted by Soulskill on from the plantlife-now-obsolete dept.

sciencehabit sends this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of 'artificial trees' that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change."

35 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Massive farms of artificial trees... by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From TFA:

    The polymer could be useful for building massive farms of artificial trees that would aim to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But that's only if countries around the globe are willing to spend untold billions of dollars to rein in atmospheric CO2.

    It also says:

    So you have to expend a fairly large amount of energy heating the media to 85C/185F to get it to give up the CO2, (then more energy to store the CO2).
    How long it takes to saturate the polymer is not mentioned, but unless its months between regeneration, the CO2 generated while collecting the polymer media, transporting it to a facility, HEATING it, capturing the recovered CO2, could exceed the amount it could capture. And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?

    So the original purpose of this polymer, to keep C02 out of batteries seems to be a far better use for the polymer than environmental CO2 sequestration.

    While far from perfect, farming real trees seems a less energy intensive method especially when treated as a crop, harvested at the optimal time, with the wood used for long duration storage.

    --
    Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    1. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by plopez · · Score: 5, Insightful

      *CO2 floats away*

      To where? Still what hasn't been accounted for is the amount of energy required to produce the polymer. It's probably a petroleum based polymer which requires oil extraction, shipping, processing in a refinery and/or chemical plant, and manufacture. I want to see mass and energy balances. The softer approach of planting trees is probably still the best approach when compared to energy intense Engineering approaches. Trees also have the advantage of binding up water vapour, which is a green house gas much more powerful than CO2.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    2. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by tysonedwards · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yesterday, wasn't the general consensus from the scientific community that we were 1500 years off from the next ice age, and that the current concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would result in pushing that off for at least another 1000 years?

      We as a species should just decide on whether we want to live in the tropics or the arctic. This constant back and forth is getting tiring.

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
    3. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sorry mate, entropy. Having gained energy by combining Carbon with air, you must put in energy to get your carbon back. All you end up with is a huge/complicated/inefficient battery. AS there are already large amounts of carbon lying around natrually (coal) , it probably isn't worth it.

    4. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by Ichijo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We as a species should just decide on whether we want to live in the tropics or the arctic.

      Or instead of playing god, why don't we try to limit our effect on the environment and let it decide for itself?

      --
      Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
    5. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by MiniMike · · Score: 3, Interesting

      From TFA:

      It also says:

      So you have to expend a fairly large amount of energy heating the media to 85C/185F to get it to give up the CO2, (then more energy to store the CO2).
      How long it takes to saturate the polymer is not mentioned, but unless its months between regeneration, the CO2 generated while collecting the polymer media, transporting it to a facility, HEATING it, capturing the recovered CO2, could exceed the amount it could capture. And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?

      So the original purpose of this polymer, to keep C02 out of batteries seems to be a far better use for the polymer than environmental CO2 sequestration.

      While far from perfect, farming real trees seems a less energy intensive method especially when treated as a crop, harvested at the optimal time, with the wood used for long duration storage.

      With a requirement of only 85 C, they could easily be heated using low-grade waste heat from a process plant, or using a solar concentrator or similar. No additional energy expenditure required. It would also probably be done locally, so there would be little to no transport cost. There will still be some cost to recover and contain it, but it should still be an overall reduction of CO2. There are multiple uses for the CO2, that should not be a problem.

    6. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      *CO2 floats away*

      To where?

      Narnia.

    7. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by overshoot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I often wonder where people who deny pollution is having any effect on the earth think they are going to live if they are wrong.

      Well, some of them aren't real good with the concept of "I could be wrong."

      --
      Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
    8. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I often wonder where people who deny pollution is having any effect on the earth think they are going to live if they are wrong.

      On their yacht?

    9. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by GrumpySteen · · Score: 4, Informative

      No. Yesterday there was an article about one small group of scientists who claim that the next ice age should begin in 1500 years based on the frequency of ice ages in past history. One group's predictions hardly qualifies as "general consensus from the scientific community."

    10. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by macraig · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The softer approach of planting trees is probably still the best approach....

      You're overlooking one irreducibly important fact: planting trees won't make this polymer's producer any money. They don't have a patent on trees, dammit!

    11. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by icebike · · Score: 3, Informative

      Just piling on....

      Research on the net seems to suggest a tree can sequester anywhere form 21 pounds to 73 pounds of CO2 per year, depending on species and size.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    12. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by dr2chase · · Score: 3, Informative

      Someone, somewhere, made a math or transcription error. This http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 says they get 78mg/g. You need about 13 g of this stuff (the treated fumed silica) to adsorb 1 g of CO2.

    13. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The reason to harvest the CO2 is that while it's in the atmosphere at current levels (let alone another 100 years worth of emissions) it's going to cause us problems. Pull it out of the atmosphere and do something useful with it is the only solution that will turn things around.

      That said, reducing current emissions is the first step. Harvesting existing CO2 is probably step 10 or 11 down that path.

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    14. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by hawguy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Go here http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 for slightly more accurate information. It's about 13:1 adsorbent:CO2 by weight. Not pretty, but not catastrophic.

      Ahh yes, there appears to be a typo in the article linked from the summary. The article from the summary says:

      each gram of the material sopped up an average of 1.72 nanomoles of CO2

      While your article (which was linked to from the other article) says:

      1.71 mmol CO2 per g or 75 mg CO2 per g of adsorbent.

      Which makes it 1000 times better than it appears to be in my post above.

    15. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by aurispector · · Score: 4, Funny

      If only they could figure out a way to make them self replicating, then set them up to turn the CO2 into something useful, I don't know, how about (and I know it's crazy) sugar? And the whole thing could be solar powered, yeah that's the ticket...

      --
      I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
    16. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by c0lo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "he (Olah) suggests that society could harvest atmospheric CO2 and combine it with hydrogen stripped from water to generate a methanol fuel for myriad uses."

      Here's my suggestion: operate a brewery, use the CO2 resulted from fermentation to generate methanol for a myriad of uses... and sell the beer as a by-product.

      --
      Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    17. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by Time_Ngler · · Score: 4, Funny

      Since oil produces CO2, why not just cut out the middle man and turn oil into plastic and dump that in a landfill?

    18. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

      blah blah blah.

      Planting trees doesn't remove the CO2, it jsut hold it temperarly.
      Half of the CO2 gathered during the day is released at night, the other half id given up when it rots.

      They said the same thing about storing Carbon in Coal. Its just temporary.

      Forests do not all give up half the CO2 gathered at night. In fact Trees sequester about 70+ pounds per tree per year. They make it into wood.
      The tree eventually dies. 50 to 200 years later.
      The wood rots 5 to 30 years later.
      But the forest keeps growing.
      New trees feed off of the old rotting trees.
      The carbon is sequestered for as long as the Forest stands.

      You can't look at one tree and shrug it off as a zero sum game.
      The living trees, the dead trees, the leaf litter on the ground, the humus of the soil hold ton upon tons of CO2.

      Weigh the forest, living dead, and 10 feet of humus. Put it all on the scale. The whole damn thing.
      Divide by 3. That's roughly the weight of the carbon sequestered by the forest. Forever, as long as you let it grow.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    19. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ways to sequester captured CO2 as lumber:

      * Build houses and furniture out of it
      * Use pyrolysis (partial burning without enough oxygen) to create char products (essentially make charcoal). Add it to soil. It improves the nutrient holding capacity of soil and takes a long time to decay itself when buried (~200 years). The reason it holds nutrients is charred wood has lots of tiny holes in it from the plant cells. Nutrients don't get washed away as easily. Holding more nutrients allows the next generation of trees to grow faster, or feed more people, depending what you use the land for. Pyrolysis also generates a bit of energy as a side effect.
      * Store the wood in a dry or cold location where it won't rot. There are plenty of deserts and ice caps for that. If you put it on ice, wood is a good insulator, and can reduce melting of glaciers by keeping the sun off them in the summers. That won't make a difference in the middle of Antarctica, but it can help around the margins of ice caps where melting is happening.

    20. Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 4, Informative

      I used to be a tree farmer, you insensitive clod! (Really, no joke, I was). Planting trees makes plenty of money, even without carbon trading offsets. If you can get credits for CO2 removal, it is even more profitable.

      I never cut my trees down, and still made money with it, because the "standing timber" increased in size while I owned it, and therefore was worth more as an asset. You have to buy a forest which is not mature for that to work. Mine were ~20 years old when I bought them, old enough to reach peak growth. Seedlings don't build much lumber volume the first few years. After some time, the maturing trees slow down their growth and some start dying off, so at that point you can start to harvest at a steady rate, and planting replacements for the ones you harvest to maintain growth. When that happens depends on which kind of tree it is.

  2. oh noes! by alphatel · · Score: 4, Funny

    But Global Warming was going to prevent the impending ice age!

    --
    When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
  3. And once we have a few gigatonnes of CO2 by overshoot · · Score: 5, Funny
    We can launch it into space. OK, maybe not.

    How about we bury it at Yucca Mountain? Dissolve it in seawater?

    I HAVE IT! We separate the carbon and the oxygen, release the O2 into the atmosphere, and bury the carbon in abandoned coal mines!

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  4. Frayed Knot by overshoot · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sorry, but that idea only flies on Fox News. Actually, human activities cause 135 times as much CO2 emissions as volcanoes do.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  5. We produce 29 billion tons per year of CO2 by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And we're going to catch a significant fraction of it in plastic that we have to manufacture? Seriously?

    How about we use something self-replicating instead, which does the same thing and produces useful by-products, like, say, trees?

    --PM

  6. Dunno what you'd call me by Dyinobal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't think of myself as an environmentalist or anything like that. I'm all for better energy efficiency and cleaner forms of energy, but something like this strikes me as rather dumb. You have to spend energy making these things, and then energy running them, not to mention time and money all to remove a bit of CO2 out of the air. Wouldn't it make more sense to plant more trees instead, and spend the rest of your time and money on cleaner and more efficient methods of powering well everything?

    I don't deny that climate change is happening, it's always been happening and I believe that we have some impact on the way it changes, so being as responsible as we can with what we do with 'waste' like CO2 or other byproducts is always important, but things like this in the modern "green" movement just make me shake my head in disbelief.

    1. Re:Dunno what you'd call me by vlm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But how do you patent a tree and retire a millionaire after the IPO?

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  7. Will somebody think of the plant children by jader3rd · · Score: 4, Funny

    Great, now once we remove all of the CO2 out of the air, what will the plants breath?

  8. Brilliant! by ErikZ · · Score: 5, Funny

    I was going to just plant some trees, but covering my property in plastic seems like a much better idea!

    --
    Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
  9. Re:How are you going to power that? by BosstonesOwn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nothing chemically easy to break the bond ? Kind of sucks but oh well, what do we do with it once collected ? feed it to real tree's ? At that point why not just plant real tree's ?

    --
    This package Does Not Contain a Winner
  10. Re:How are you going to power that? by Inda · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Plants manage the job fine with sunlight and water.

    This is the future. Trees turned into biomass wood pellets. It's cheaper to convert coal power stations to biomass than to build new ones.

    The cycle is nearly complete.

    --
    This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  11. Re:How are you going to power that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just FYI: An apostrophe doesn't always mean Look out! An "S" is on the way!

  12. Regeneration systems by domatic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The thought of giant CO2 scrubbing plastic trees seems like hyperbole to me. Seems we could plant real trees that work about as well for that. But an obvious application jumped out at me. Undersea vehicles, labs, manned spacecraft, and any other artificially maintained environment that humans have to work in need to remove CO2 because it can be poisonous in sufficiently high concentrations even if there is enough to breathe.

    So would this material make good scrubbers for sealed environments people have to work in? If there is a way to vent the waste gases, being able to drive the CO2 off with a bit of heat and using again seems a great feature too.

  13. Simple Answer by GigG · · Score: 4, Funny

    Let's make all water and soda bottles out of it and require littering.

    --
    Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
  14. Re:too late, give up already by LifesABeach · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My conversion to Solar, and Wind isn't about Climate Change, it's about Energy Bill, it's due the first of every month.