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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."

16 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.

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    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 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.

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

      *CO2 floats away*

      To where?

      Narnia.

    4. 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."

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      Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
    5. 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?

    6. 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!

    7. 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
    8. 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.

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      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  2. 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."
  3. 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.

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    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  4. 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

  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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    This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
  7. 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!

  8. 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.