DoE Considers Artificial Trees To Remove CO2 418
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."
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:5, Informative)
Return them to HomeDepot. There your problem is solved.
We have had places that take waste like cfls and half used paint for ages.
Unintended consequences (Score:2, Informative)
There was an interesting article on Planet Gore [nationalreview.com] discussing the replacement of chlorofluorocarbons with hydrofluorocarbons [nationalreview.com] and the unintended consequences thereof. Basically the HFCs have less effect on the ozone but are a more potent greenhouse gas. Never a dull moment!
Planet Gore has a lot of good stuff about various green quandries, including a fair number of posts by Chris Horner (author of Red Hot Lies [amazon.com]).
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:5, Informative)
If CO2 COULD be a solid in the ocean, it WOULD be a solid in the ocean and there would be huge piles of the stuff down there.
A few hundred feet down, the pressure is still less than 10 atmospheres and temp is obviously above 0ÂC (273K). CO2 under those conditions is still very much a gas. It won't stay solid at 0ÂC unless you're above about 5,000 atmospheres. Even at the bottom of Challenger Deep, you're barely 1100 atm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_dioxide_pressure-temperature_phase_diagram.svg
Tree Huggers (Score:1, Informative)
Are at war against the trees. People are stupid. C02 is what trees "breath" to survive. Eliminating C02 will kill off the trees and make the planet uninhabitable. But people will never understand the truth, instead they choose to believe in a totally insane politician who believes in his cause so much that he flies his private jet all around the world spewing C02 everywhere he can.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:5, Informative)
i'm not wrong, this has been demonstrated. proven. it's simple university physics.
there is a reason why triple points of substances are given at temperature AND pressure.
Re:Unintended consequences (Score:3, Informative)
This is one reason why countries have been phasing out Hydrofluorocarbons since the mid-1990s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluorocarbons#Phase_out [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
CO2 is water soluble (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, injecting CO2 into oil wells to enhance recovery has been used for some time, limited primarily by supplies of CO2. Injection into empty gas wells is doable as well, and somewhat more exotic approaches(like bubbling the stuff through algae farms) aren't too far outside the realm of the currently possible.
You're making it sound awfully easy. There are a number of approaches, but AFAIK the tech is not there yet for long-term storage of huge amounts of CO2. There was a huge hoopla about a law passed in Germany about carbon sequestration for coal power plants; companies are experimenting with the technology, but they aren't willing to guarantee the stuff actually stays "down" for more than a couple of decades. After that, it's the governments problem. So, yes, my first reaction to TFA was that it didn't even mention what the hell they were planning to do with all the liquid CO2 they're recovering from the atmosphere.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
Every Homedepot takes them, another problem solved.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
It would stop sublimating into gas (fizzing and producing bubbles), but did they demonstrate that a year later the dry ice was still there?
It might not be producing bubbles, but might slowly transition to dissolved gas in the water.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
interesting factoids that get my down modded by political hacks aside, that is actually a very good idea.
if you close the carbon cycle by making all combustion fuels biofuels then then all the carbon our cars emit will have been first taken out of the atmosphere. this will allow natural carbon sinks to start removing the excess from the atmopshere and bring us back down to pre-industrial equilibrium.
not saying we couldn't help speed up the process of removing the excess carbon.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't sublimate at the increased pressure.
It DOES dissolve into the liquid, and it DOES become a gas.
It does it slowly, and yes, it does so even when buried.
(Reposting this here to make sure people see it.)
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:4, Informative)
Only hemoglobin transports oxygen to the tissues, it does not transport CO2 in any way shape or form. CO2 will influence the affinity oxygen has for hemoglobin, and in the presence of higher concentrations of carbonic acid, hemoglobin more readily releases oxygen to the surrounding tissues.
Not true. A hemoglobin can carry a single CO2 molecule (as opposed to the 4 molecules of O2 it can carry). However, since cellular respiration has a 1:1 ratio of O2 and CO2, the other 75% of the CO2 is carried as carbonic acid / bicarbonate. Anyway, the bonding of protons and a CO2 to hemoglobin decrease its affinity for O2, causing it to release the O2 in the capillaries near body cells where the pH will be lower due to the constant production of CO2 from respiration. A.K.A. the Bohr Effect. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why not real trees? (Score:5, Informative)
The artificial "tree" is projected to remove as much CO2 per day as 25194 real trees.
Buying things in a sale (Score:3, Informative)
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?
What the hell is C02? (Score:1, Informative)
I don't see ethane (C2 alkane) causing any problems in the near future. CO2 on the other hand, might be troublesome!
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:4, Informative)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the "in your face" refers to dental fillings. Any of us that have silver fillings have a fair bit of mercury in our mouths with little or no harm (depending upon whom you believe.) Unless of course you were born in the 80s and your dentist never used amalgam fillings.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. ~5g per amalgam filling, versus ~5mg on the top-end for a CFL with "modern" ones down to 1-1.5mg.
Confusing units (Score:1, Informative)
they mix moles, kJ tons. When you do the math, you get that this thing will use about 47 Megawatts to pull a ton of CO2 a day. That's fine I guess... but it's hardly a little "tree" you would plant in your yard.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
Can I get a source on that claim?
From what I have seen, a CFL's mercury is measured in milligrams and a can of tuna's mercury is measured in micrograms.
Re:How about 'non synth'? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Informative)
Apples, meet oranges.
You can (which is distinct from saying "I recommend") drink small amounts of elemental mercury. Its high surface tension tends to cause it to just pass right through the digestive tract.
Inhaling mercury fumes however, tends to get it into the blood stream. Bad if you happen to be a hatter who works with it every day.
Fish on the other hand doesn't contain much elemental mercury. Mostly because nobody hires them to make hats, and the lack of mercury fumes under water. However, methyl mercury is a compound that happens to be absorbed more readily by us dirty bags of mostly water (and the fish).
Methyl Mercury also doesn't leave the body (human or fish) as easily as it enters, so it tends to build up and "stick around".
Eating a fish with some methyl mercury isn't so bad, its making it a staple of your diet that turns it into a problem.
So essentially, comparing one form of mercury to another isn't really very relevant. You may as well be comparing ricin and sucrose to determine the toxicity of carbon.
-Steve
Re:Why not real trees? (Score:3, Informative)
Again, in places where trees work, they work. But Atlanta has a far differnt climate then say, Phoneix, Las Vegas, LA, or even NYC. Places where space or water are premiums are going to not be the best environments, nor are places that are too hot or too cold. Yes, different climates call for different types of trees, and in theory you could get something 'green' growing almost everywhere. But at that point, aren't you putting in as much effort just to go 'green' than you would if you just plopped a couple of these deals down in the middle of a park or under an interchange?
I'm not saying trees can't be part of the answer, but they are not a universally 'easy' solution even if they were capable of dealing the same level of reductions per square foot.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2009/06/12/how-toxic-is-a-busted-compact-florescent-bulb/ [kqed.org]
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:4, Informative)
Also don't connect them to dimmer switches (even if you leave the dimmers at 100% all the time)
Many dimmers designed for incandescents work by rapidly turning the light on and off. This is a very bad thing for inductive loads such as fluorescent starter coils, and will destroy the device in no time flat.
But, yeah... avoiding the cheap ones seems to work pretty well. I'm sure there are also name-brands that are also crap, and cheap ones that are good, so I suppose you're best off switching brands until you find one that works well for you.