Synthetic Trees That Act Like the Real Thing

Ok, this is awesome. Synthetic trees that capture carbon emissions.

science/06/22/synthetic.tree.climate.change.ccs/" target="_blank">CNN reported out of London today that U.S. scientist are in the middle of creating a “synthetic tree” to collect carbon dioxide from the air.

Seriously.

"Each unit would take out a ton of CO2 a day -- which would be the amount of CO2 produced by 20 average automobiles in the U.S.A. And the cost of each unit would be about the cost of a Toyota. So that would mean if you added a five percent surcharge on automobile purchases that money could go to building units to remove the CO2 those vehicles are going to create."said Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wally Broecker of Columbia University.

They say it will be capable of collecting carbon approximately 1,000x faster than a real tree. So, how does it work, right?

The technology is along the lines of what is currently used to capture carbon from coal-fired power plant flue stacks. When wind moves through the plastic leaves a chamber traps carbon- it is then compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide. The advantage over the flue stack version is that the “sythetic tree” works anytime, anywhere.

Professor Klaus Lackner, Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University (whew, what do his business cards look like…(!) is writing a proposal for the U.S. Department of Energy to consider. He presented the concept to Steven Chu, U.S. Energy Secretary, during a climate change symposium last month in London.

The rationale for the “synthetic tree” is that around 50% of carbon emissions come from small sources where collection at the source is not feasible.

"We aim for applications like gasoline in cars or jet fuel in airplanes. We are going after CO2 that otherwise is nearly impossible to collect," he told CNN.

Lackner has been working on ambient carbon capture since 1998 when he argued that it could be done based on the theory that CO2 in the air is concentrated so the devices needed to capture it are small. He argues that carbon capture with a “synthetic tree” will be far more efficient at lowering the amount of carbon emissions in the air than windmills.

"If you give me one of those big windmills which have those big areas through which the rotor moves -- how much CO2 can I avoid? And if I had an equally sized CO2 collector -- how much CO2 can I collect? It turns out the collector is several hundred times better than the windmill,” he said. 

One concern is how much energy it would take to capture and release the carbon.

Lackner explalins, “If we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful.”

He further explained that the “synthetic trees” would be more expensive than a modern coal plant, but could be less expensive than retro-fitting older coal plants.

"We're probably not going to stop CO2 rising until it's double what it was near-1800 and maybe even more than that," he said. "I think we will find that the planet is too warm, ice is melting too fast... and we'll want to bring the CO2 back down again. The only way we can do that on a short timescale would be to pull it back out of the atmosphere."

"The bottom line is we have in this way the ability to deal with the problem at a cost which is somewhat higher than on a coal-fired power plant retro-fit, but not much higher."

Brings new meaning to Johnny Appleseed- and a new option for eco-landscaping!