Whoa! Big Fly Swatters Can Also Capture CO2

Written by emma

Like many people today, the race to solve the climate change problem is as challenging as they come.

Klaus Lackner, a professor of Geophysics at Columbia University, is working on an interesting concept to solve this problem: "synthetic trees".

The idea is to reproduce the process of photosynthesis to capture and store massive amounts of CO2 gas. Nearly 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year – roughly the amount emitted annually by 15,000 cars – could be captured by the structure. Paired with a windmill, the carbon-capture tree would generate about 3 megawatts of power, Lackner calculates, making the operation self-sufficient in energy.

It would stand roughly 1,000 feet tall with a footprint a little bigger than a football field, and be crisscrossed with scaffolding holding liquid sodium hydroxide, which is best known as lye. For in addition to cleaning drains, sodium hydroxide has a chemical property that promises to be in great demand if, as seems likely, the nations of the world fall short of stabilising the atmosphere's load of greenhouse gases: it sucks carbon dioxide out of the air.

Klaus Lackner said;

"The carbon-capture efficiency is better than a [living] tree. We can, with such a system, collect a significant fraction of the carbon from the air."

Carbon capture from the air has the advantage of removing this pollutant no matter where it came from—cars, planes, factories, power plants. No other carbon-capture technology now on the drawing boards would work on moving sources, such as cars and planes.

If you want to find out all the latest climate change news, why not subcribe to our RSS feed, we'll even throw in a free album.

License:

Attribution-Share Alike

5 comments

could this system be turned into segments that install to the sides of office buildings? similar to cladding. There is enough vertical surface area inside city cores to absorb allot of emissions before it has a chance to disperse.
Anyhow cool idea, hope it gets some serious attention.

Brilliant!!! But why just 1000" feet tall? Why not a MILE HIGH and REALLY BIG vanes full of corrosive lye? And be sure to put it out in the deserts where the pollution is mostly concentrated (per the Photoshop example). Maybe we could stick one on top of each skyscraper to be built all over the world ...no engineering problems there! I'm sure the energy used to manufacture and install these wonders of "greeness" would be negligible. I know, we could use bamboo and hemp for the towers and vanes. Much better than bad old steel, aluminum and c****n fiber.

Oh, and by the way, environmentalists have ALREADY stopped the windmills because they "might" hurt birds.

Good luck with all that.

sheesh

It is inaccurate, misleading and downright dishonest to call carbon dioxide a 'pollutant' as the writer of the above article does. Carbon dioxide is, in fact more of a nutrient than anything else.
This type of dishonesty is typical of the general dishonesty that pervades the whole 'green' movement these days.
JD.

Hi Shelton, I presume you've time travelled here from the 1980's?

"Oh, and by the way, environmentalists have ALREADY stopped the windmills because they “might” hurt birds."

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.

Enviromentalists are usually in favour of wind power.

Your dated view of "The Environmentalists" position is based on ONE set of research at a very early wind site that used lots of guy wires and a now extinct turbine design that had lots of small fast turning blades. That then got blown up into a general anti-wind excuse for decades by those NIMBYs who are against wind power.

There are very occasionally objections where sites are in direct migration paths of certain bird species. This is a very very rare percentage of sites.

Stop accusing people of holding positions they do not. Nowadays the only people really using the argument you claim are the NIMBYs, not the environmentalists.

Shelton's commentary is a wonderful iconic example of the underlying philosophical bottleneck that has brought us to the environmental apocalypse we now face. He is but one of millions who dismiss anything that does not fit into "their" perfect vision of how things should be done in "their" perfect world. And if it does not comply or conform to "their" flawless view, then one is obliged to mock, belittle, attack, slander, criticize, defame, and humiliate on the public stage the errors as "they" see them. It seems a bit myopic. An yes that is my opinion. It seems, we are swimming in an ocean of red herrings these days. Distractions at every turn. This is not to say that Shelton's analysis is inaccurate, for all I know he may have the perfect plan up his sleeve, though it was not offered for us to observe and critically analyze so we could assail and disembowel it for it's weakness of reasoning. In the mean time, the rest of us frogs do not have his luxury of time for debate, as the ocean around us continues to heat up. Our time is very quickly running out. Something needs to be done on a massive, global scale, on many fronts, using many different technologies, immediately!

Are the CO2 sequestration trees the best solution? If history is any indicator, probably not. But it is "a" viable solution that IS available NOW.

Consensus is not easy Shelton. I've been challenged by it most of my 56 years of life. Compromise is not easy. Working as a solution-oriented thinker and avoiding the temptation of being a sardonic, talking head is also not easy. But compromise, working for a consensus on solution-oriented thinking is indeed in very high demand these days.

There are many paths that lead to the visionary future of a society with technologies that work synergistically with the environment...many paths indeed. Applaud the solutions, support their realization, promote their actualization. They will not be perfect, nothing is, but they can be improved upon in time, made better in time or eventually replaced with something that is better still. But Shelton, we're out of time. Debate and waxing philosophic for the perfect solution is something we can not afford anymore.

Please, find a solution that you do strongly agree with and pour all of your wonderful critical thinking into assisting its realization. Now that WILL help us all. Use your intellectual gifts for constructive ends not destructive. Please, look for the solutions, not the problems, there are far too many of the latter in this world already.

As for me, BRAVO to Klaus Lackner and his wonderful invention of the CO2 sequestration tree! Thank you Professor Lackner for your great work and attempt to help us all! And thank you Columbia University for your support of his research! Good luck to us all.