DoE Considers Artificial Trees To Remove CO2 418
Posted
by
timothy
from the putting-the-artifice-in-artificial dept.
from the putting-the-artifice-in-artificial dept.
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."
More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like the fact that we legislated use of compact fluorescents with NO plan on disposal,
we have a half thought out plan on liquifying CO2, but nothing on storage and disposal.
Trees (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there something wrong with real trees?
Re:How about 'non synth'? (Score:4, Insightful)
Still great, stuff, just not perfect.
Re:Unit of cost (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends on the bicycle and Toyota that are involved, but I think you could rely on it being at least 25-30 smugs worth.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Insightful)
Those are mostly what to do for each different instance. Read the steps, it is air it out and pick up the glass. Then wipe up with a towel. Oh noes teh end of the world.
The same stuff you would do with any broken glass object. The biggest danger from a broken cfl is the glass.
Did you object when businesses switched to long style florescent lights?
The simple fact is that this is just political grandstanding. No one cared until fox news thought they could get some rating by bitching about it.
Idea chasing funding (Score:1, Insightful)
Just another harebrained idea chasing government money.
And the carbon math is best appreciated by an auditor from Arthur Anderson: creating CO2 to harvest CO2 for a "net gain"?
Why not real trees? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would make a lot more sense to use real trees. They don't "cost as much as a Toyota," they grow by themselves from seeds, and are self-replicating. They don't extract carbon dioxide in the form of stuff that has to be liquified and then sequestered somehow; they extract CO2 and solidify it in the form of cellulose, a material that is naturally solid at room temperature and pressure.
Obviously, if the trees are then allowed to rot, the CO2 returns to the atmosphere, but that is an easy problem compared to the problem of sequestering CO2 for a few centuries. Just pile it up in the desert, where it won't rot. Or, heck, bury it and let geological forces compress it for a while, and you make new coal that our successors a few million years later can deal with. Wood is a heck of a lot easier to sequester than carbon dioxide!
In short, I can't think of anything more idiotic than designing "artificial" trees, when nature has been evolving real trees optimized to do exactly this task (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere)-- and has had a few hundred million year head start.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:5, Insightful)
Two objections:
1. The CO2 would be released into the air again
2. I really doubt that if this plan is implemented on a massive scale(which is the only way it would be remotely useful) there would be enough demand from the carb-soda industry for the product
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Insightful)
the amount of mercury in a CFL is less than the amuont of mercury you get when you eat tuna.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:5, Insightful)
Why so narrow minded, Slashdot? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a good idea, and it's actually something I've had in my own head for years, but I've never been able to work out the finer points of how it might function.
It's exactly what we need; come up with a sufficiently non-polluting means of mass-producing these things, and then line the streets with them. Clean air for breathing, astronomy, and as a major part of lowering global temperatures and cleaning up the environment.
I am seeing more and more, an influx of WoW forum refugees to Slashdot, as I've mentioned earlier, and they're just as anti-intellectual, brazenly sociopathic, and juvenile now as they were within the WoW forums.
Please go back there, former WoW players. Slashdot used to be a place for intelligent, often enjoyable discussion of ideas; and you're ruining it.
Combine the artifical trees and windmills (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the big problems of windmills is that the availability does not match demand. When there is high demand, send all power to consumers. During low demand, run the artificial trees. It should not matter much if the CO2 is being removed at midnight or at noon. So you have a win (Wind power to consumers) and another win (removal of excess carbon dioxide) in a single plant.
Obviously stating the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Jeeze...I'm so glad that somebody used time, energy, resources and money (likely including government grant funding) to come up with a product that DOES THE SAME F-ING THING AS A NATURALLY OCCURRING, FREE TREE.
Holy hell - has the world gone mad?!? "Let's take a free, naturally sustaining object - one that provides reduced energy consumption, decreases CO2, decreases soil erosion, protects from excessive sun exposure, maintains ecosystem diversity, assists in water conservation, provides tangible resources, etc. - and use our dwindling financial and energy resources to create an imitation that doesn't do half that of the natural object...BRILLIANT!"
This may have application in places where real trees can no longer grow, but...my god...are we really that lazy that we can't plant a freakin' tree?!?
Re:CO2 is water soluble (Score:4, Insightful)
As an added disadvantage, the resulting carbonic acid would only speed up ocean acidification.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Rube Goldberg and PT Barnum would be proud (Score:2, Insightful)
This is nutso. How about real trees instead, try to get some deserts back to being green. Or fast growing seasonal plants, when is the US going to allow industrial hemp growing? We can "capture carbon" ;) Of course, the tech to "grow plants and trees" is already out there in the public domain, can't really get a patented monopoly on it as easy or sell some zillion dollar "solution" to big governments.
by the cubic mile that way and have something useful from it. And just getting charcoal down into the subsurface soil area in general, plowing the extra carbon into the soil in the form of charcoalized biomass. Build up the soil tilth all over and we won't have to use as much fossil fuel fertilizers. Plants are wonderful things to use to capture carbon, and they are solar fusion powered. -See, a high tech fulla buzzwords solution, using the latest biotechnology!
I tell you when I got really suspicious of this dubious "war on carbon", and that is when they first started talking about some new trillion dollar a year carbon trading "industry", as in we don't already have enough middleman wealth skimmers and grifters out there.
Re:CO2 is water soluble (Score:3, Insightful)
CO2 is currently making the oceans PH out of whack and killing corral reefs.
Re:Why not real trees? (Score:3, Insightful)
The artificial "tree" is projected to remove as much CO2 per day as 25194 real trees.
Am I the only one who smells bullshit, in this statement?
You mean to tell me that someone came up with this particular figure, 25194 "real trees", and wasn't laughing his own ass off? And what kind of tree is a "real tree"? Is it an oak? A pine? An eucalyptus? At which stage of development of said tree is this "a real tree"? Which season?
Isn't it ridiculous that the post was modded "informative" although it contains no information whatsoever, except for a number clearly pulled out of someone's ass.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:2, Insightful)
And if we had ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.
Biofuel availability is orders of magnitude less than what is needed to replace fossil sources.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Insightful)
My home, for instance, burns about one CFL every six months.
You're doing something wrong. I have CFLs that I installed in my house *four years ago* that are still working just fine. At minimum, you should get your electrical checked. And don't buy shitty bulbs.
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Insightful)
And thanks to wiki, apparently elemental mercury wasn't used in hat making either. It was another toxic mercury compound mercuric nitrate. I guess my old chem teachers anecdote about that making was wrong.
-Steve
Re:More hair-brained ideas for "Global Warming" (Score:3, Insightful)
"not clear cutting for land development, wood, and paper."
You're as much a "scientist" as I am a concert pianist! More likely you've proclaimed yourself such to add false authority to your post.
"clear cutting" for land development is a requirement of land development. First you remove the vegetation, then you move the dirt into the shape you want, then you build whatever, then you plant on the remaining soil. This is why roads are straight.
Geez, THERE'S an idea! New plants can be grown! Didn't think about that, did you?
"clear cutting" for wood, and paper" - grammatically incorrect but that's nitpicking.
Trees are plants. Forestry is farming. Got it? The idea that evil loggers cut down trees and leave the land bare is...a myth. In North America, for example, there are more tress now than when the country was founded. Why? Because it's a farm crop. The most cost efficient way to HARVEST the CROP plant is to HARVEST the CROP plant then reuse the land. Farming trees for wood isn't like chasing whales around the ocean. Trees are just as much a farm crop as a plant that goes through a complete growth cycle in less than a year. Clear cutting is NOT how trees for wood and paper are harvested. A little research on your part before you make ignorant comments would help you appear less foolish.
Lastly, you are woefully incorrect about the source of CO2 in the environment. Human creation of CO2 through fossil fuel consumption is minimal compared to that created by the ecosystem. CO2 is good. It keeps the planet warm (cold is more deadly than heat) and helps photosynthesis. CO2 is also a minimaly influential greenhouse gas. Water vapor has far more effect.