New CO2 Harvester Could Help Scrub the Air 368
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."
Frayed Knot (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... (Score:5, Informative)
No. Yesterday there was an article about one small group of scientists who claim that the next ice age should begin in 1500 years based on the frequency of ice ages in past history. One group's predictions hardly qualifies as "general consensus from the scientific community."
Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... (Score:4, Informative)
Just piling on....
Research on the net [plant-trees.org] seems to suggest a tree can sequester anywhere form 21 pounds to 73 pounds of CO2 per year, depending on species and size.
Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... (Score:4, Informative)
Someone, somewhere, made a math or transcription error. This http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 [acs.org] says they get 78mg/g. You need about 13 g of this stuff (the treated fumed silica) to adsorb 1 g of CO2.
Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... (Score:4, Informative)
Go here http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja2100005 [acs.org] for slightly more accurate information. It's about 13:1 adsorbent:CO2 by weight. Not pretty, but not catastrophic.
Ahh yes, there appears to be a typo in the article linked from the summary. The article from the summary says:
each gram of the material sopped up an average of 1.72 nanomoles of CO2
While your article (which was linked to from the other article) says:
1.71 mmol CO2 per g or 75 mg CO2 per g of adsorbent.
Which makes it 1000 times better than it appears to be in my post above.
Re:Massive farms of artificial trees... (Score:5, Informative)
I used to be a tree farmer, you insensitive clod! (Really, no joke, I was). Planting trees makes plenty of money, even without carbon trading offsets. If you can get credits for CO2 removal, it is even more profitable.
I never cut my trees down, and still made money with it, because the "standing timber" increased in size while I owned it, and therefore was worth more as an asset. You have to buy a forest which is not mature for that to work. Mine were ~20 years old when I bought them, old enough to reach peak growth. Seedlings don't build much lumber volume the first few years. After some time, the maturing trees slow down their growth and some start dying off, so at that point you can start to harvest at a steady rate, and planting replacements for the ones you harvest to maintain growth. When that happens depends on which kind of tree it is.