Wednesday June 24, 2009

Synthetic trees aim to capture CO2 from the air

edition.cnn.com :

Scientists in the US are developing synthetic trees capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing. As the wind blows though plastic "leaves," the carbon is trapped in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide. The technology is similar to the carbon capture methods at coal power plants, however the "synthetic tree" can catch carbon anywhere. Professor Klaus Lackner of Columbia University says it is highly efficient for its size compared to a wind turbine. Lackner and his colleagues have developed a sorbent that uses a relatively small amount of energy to release the CO2 and is not prohibitively expensive.

Lackner's colleague Professor Wally Broecker says most people still don't recognize the magnitude of the task the world faces in reducing global carbon emissions, and it was likely that one day urgent action would need to be taken. "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."

- Amongst the various CO2 capture techniques that have been proposed, this looks like an interesting approach. Whether it scales or not (or if it gets Richard Branson's stamp of approval) will have to be seen, particularly regarding the issue of carbon storage. I'm a little leery about the CO2 storage part however, whether in liquid form or whatever it may be. It would make more sense if some economic use could be found for it, for example as CO2 injections to increase oil well pressure with the tertiary oil recovery method. With that, we're back to the old "find the nearest oil field" game once again.

Virgin CEO Richard Branson was talking about scrubbing a billion tons of carbon dioxide a year. A billion tons. Compared to that, the scale of nuclear waste, especially with reprocessing, looks positively miniscule, which is great, except for the political posturing part. Well, it's time to look past political posturing. The world needs all the solutions it can get, whether it's a transition to an electric car fleet, renewable energy, nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage. Anything and everything that can work, we've got to look into it.

See also :

1. Climate expert urges dropping clean coal
2. China overtakes US as world's biggest CO2 emitter
3. BP, Rio Tinto cancel $2 billion Australian clean coal power plant
4. Slow Down For Peak Oil : Airplanes, ships, cars ease off throttle to save fuel

(2009-06-24 13:21:44 SGT) [Env] Permalink Comments [1]

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