Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Is the artificial tree the solution to climate change? There have been a number of stories advocating artificial trees recently. Proponents of artificial trees believe that normal trees haven’t got the capacity to deliver the CO2 reductions they want. They insist we should try to improve on nature, by replacing natural respiration, with industrial scale absorption and disposal of CO2.
For example, consider the following story;
Is an artificial tree part of the solution to climate change? These guys think so.
… What if we had a way to suck that excess the CO2 right back out of the sky?
Well, actually, we do, says Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
“These are our best ways of capturing CO2 from the air,” Jones says as he walks under a canopy of trees on the school’s campus. “Trees evolved over millions of years to do this very efficiently.”
Physicist Klaus Lackner stands beside a miniature greenhouse in his lab at ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, in which he’s testing out the properties of his “artificial tree. Lackner says he expects a square mile of artificial trees could suck as much as ten million tons of CO2 a year out of the atmosphere. Credit: Ari Daniel Thing is, we just don’t have enough trees to fix our CO2 problem. In fact, the earth has fewer acres of trees every year. But Jones says that even if we planted trees everywhere we could, they still wouldn’t be able to pull enough CO2 out of the air to offset our emissions.
Which for Jones means one thing. “We have to come up with a chemical tree that can effectively extract CO2 out of the air,” he says.
Essentially mimic nature, only do her one better.
Is it just me, or is there something deeply unsettling about the modern green movement, and its infatuation with technological monstrosities? They build bird frying solar collectors, and bird and bat chopping windmills, to save the birds and bats. They ignore devastating industrial pollution in China, to ensure the supply of Rare Earth elements required to build their wind turbines and electric cars. And now they want to build artificial trees, because they think natural trees aren’t up to the job.
How much of the natural world do greens intend to bulldoze, dig, pave over, pollute, incinerate or slice up, in order to save “nature”?
Liberalism is an incurable mental disease !!
Even the name is 100% phony.
life in the oceans removes CO2 from the atmosphere and combines it with ocean salts to from limestone. plate tectonics carries this limestone into the mantle, where it is reduced by heat and iron to form natural gas. this natural gas bubbles to the surface where it is consumed by life in the presence of oxygen to produce energy and CO2. the cycle then repeats.
microbes have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years. humans are simply part of this natural cycle.
Ensuring health of the environment was never the motivation or organizing principal – it is just a mask for Marxists trying to control everyone and everything.
@ur momisugly dean: It is becoming more and more apparent is n’t it. Suck enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to reduce the food supply and voila in a generation you’d have mass starvation a huge reduction of the world’s population which is exactly what these animals are after.
ahhh, sorry, “is it not” rubber fingers this morning
You got that right. The insanity never ceases to amaze.
How much fossil fuel is needed to build (& plant) a “tree?”
8.3 tree equivalents, but hey who’s counting.
That would seem a conservative estimate 😉
It’s fossil elsewhere. Elsewhere doesn’t count in your COP something promises.
For those who think natural trees are not good enough to deal with CO2 and think up cockamanie Ideas like artificial trees what can I say…….. GET A LIFE!
michael
Mike, I think my acres of 10 foot corn and 4 foot bean plants are doing a great job of sucking up CO2. Does anybody know how trees compare to croplands?
Please somebody, save the environment from these planet-savers ….
….. I guess it might be us.
I nominate the above as comment of the day.
Why do we honor this kind of nonsense by criticizing it? Wouldn’t it be more effective to point out that the climate changing effect of Carbon Dioxide is so slight that it is lost in the noise of natural variations, and there is no need to concern ourselves with a doubling or tripling of this beneficial gas?
More CO2 = more vegetation to suck it up. Problem solved.. 😉
And just think how much more environmental devastation will follow once the strip-mining bucket loaders, fishing trawlers, and Tesla factories are all running off inexhaustible green energy!
This can get exponentially worse.
The Green movement needs many Earths to save one.
If you think infinite growth of green fantasies in a finite world is possible, you must be an ecoloon or a bankster.
*****
Smell test! Someone verify if they are of the mind to… I used 450 trees/acre, 2000 pounds per ton.
At the above tree density each tree would have to absorb approximately 70,000 pounds of CO2 per year to meet the 10 million ton threshold.
I think a stand of these artificial trees would we the death of us all, worst case producing a gravitational singularity that would split the planet. Best case the forest sinks under this massive load and the sea level crisis actually occurs.
Or my calculations are off. 🙂
ckb – I was wondering how many tons of CO2 would even pass by one of these ‘trees’ in a year. At 380 ppm of the air (water vapor is taken out to get 400 ppm). Using your 70,000 lbs would require (184 million lbs of air)* (efficiency of extraction) at every tree.
What happens the second year?
“Being green” I remember, years ago in my youth,
Meant you were gullible, naive and in search of the truth;
We all think “being green” means something else today,
But how far from old definitions do the greens really stray?….
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/the-truth-be-told-green-or-green-eyed/
Which for Jones means one thing. “We have to come up with a chemical tree that can effectively extract CO2 out of the air,” he says.
I’d like to know the process by which this chemical tree actually works. Does it:
a) suck CO2 out of the air and store it? or;
b) convert it to something else?
If a) then how is it stored? Big balloons? Pressurized containers? Dry ice? What if the storage system fails? Everyone downwind is asphyxiated? Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me, he must have meant b)
But, if b) how much energy does it take to run it? You decompose the CO2 into other compounds like the trees do, but you need energy to run the process. The trees get their energy from the sun, but this guy wants to do many times what trees do, so he’s going to need a whopping big energy source. In fact, since these things are less than 100% efficient, he’s going to need more energy to convert the CO2 into something else than we got out of the fossil fuels by burning them in the first place. Seems sort of self defeating….
I think I have a slight rewording that in my opinion may be more reflective of Jones actual intent:
**********
Which for Jones means one thing. “We have to come up with a research formula that can effectively extract grant money out of the tax payers” he says. “There are a lot of tax payer dollars being thrown around by the politicians, but there’s a lot of competition too. We have to get bigger headlines and more media attention if we want to get a good thick slice of the pie. We couldn’t come up with any ideas practical enough to work, but that’s not the goal, it only has to sound good enough to get funded.”
Minor Detail…. I suppose a wind farm on the left and a solar farm to the right, between the 2 they should be able to supply enough energy to run the artificial trees at peak performance. I’ve put in the wind farm because the trees will not need solar energy directly but, having enough power they could work 24/7….. Now that I think of it… how about coupling the solar panels with the trees……
with a back up natural gas run generating facility during unfavorable weather conditions and nighttime!
Reader’s Digest condensed version:
i) Air is fan-forced through a dense “brick” that adsorbs the CO2
ii) the CO2 discharges from the brick when it gets wet
iii) they want more money to work out how to capture and store that CO2 when they wet the bricks in the discharge process
In the meantime they are weaving the brick material into branched structures with large surface areas, vaguely resembling the morphology of plants (so they don’t have to force air through the bricks.) These structures will be made into artificial forests that release CO2 when it rains – whoops!
This is what the first prototype “tree” looks like:
http://cdn1.pri.org/sites/default/files/styles/original_image/public/961646068%281%29.jpg
🙂
And the carbon footprint of that “tree” is—?
Can you imagine a forest of these things?
This resembles engineering about as much as my childhood drawings of lasers mounted on cars. Yes, it looks like an idea, but the details are deliberately fuzzy and contain critical errors that invalidate the whole thing, most of which are centered around energy.
There was an earlier article in WUWT on the CO 2 capture prototype in California see here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/13/comments-on-the-american-physical-society-report-on-direct-air-capture-of-co2/
In the interest of complete disclosure, I consulted on the mechanical design aspects of the Global Thermostat apparatus which captures CO 2 from the air.
As I understand it the “trees” do not require the energy consumption of the fans, etc; however they apparently have not worked out how to capture the CO 2 or to handle rain. Just a small detail to be worked out.
I was going to make a comment that if they made each “tree” a wind turbine and each blade one of these “CO2” capture thingies and covered them with solar panels then maybe they’d achieve their goals. But, I guess, since bearings are often an issue with current wind turbines maybe those proposing these things just need to get their bearings? 😎
Kwarizmi, Gunga Din, Cat, MikeWaite,DMH an the rest…
Speaking of trees:
http://41.media.tumblr.com/1013d0e9102e726e0fc58684a7181e36/tumblr_ntkjjlBET01rzv6rko1_500.jpg
Well, it sure does run on power then. And a forest of these tress will use, how much power?
Good thing refining all that metal will not produce any CO2.
There is no way around the thermodynamics of reducing the CO2.
As stated, plants do it using the sun. They do it much more efficiently when CO2 is higher, because any process that uses a very low concentration source material must expend energy to concentrate that material, or else it will proceed very slowly.
But on the bright side…all that metal is very bright.
It appears to be a monument to a perverse ecology.
Looks like a classic case of a solution looking for a problem.
” but you need energy to run the process. ”
Look closely at the picture. Notice the electrical cord running from each “tree”
Since CO2 is partly carbon, lets just pull the carbon out. We can then store Carbon as diamonds – good value there – and sell them to pay for the energy used. With time we will make so many diamonds that they won’t be worth anything. And then De Beers will be really angry! But we will be done with this CO2 business!
It’s just about the money. That’s all. You can’t get rich selling real trees.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser seemed to be able to.
Isn’t that George Weyerhaeuser? He is known as uncle George around here anyway.
You were never in the nursery biz, eh?
Ask Jose Costa if you can get rich selling trees.
That’s why I grow my own.
I pity any downwind plant life struggling to breath. I wonder how they’ll know when they can disable these, or if long after the world has been scrubbed of life, they continue to suck life-giving CO2 out of the atmosphere in the fashion of lost fishing nets that never stop trapping fish, aquatic mammals, sea turtles, and crustaceans. The crazy green movement is now recommending ecoterrorist tactics.
To understand this stupidity, just follow the money trail (as usual).
If the stupidity can be understood.
Exactly. With all the money on offer to solve this “problem” you will be seeing a lot more of these sort of things.
Dammit, the hand writing was on the wall when they began to replace real Christmas tree with artificial Christmas trees. And now they are after ALL trees. And have any of you listened to my warnings about astroturf!!!!!!
Eugene WR Gallun
It’s worse than you thought, Mr. Gallun. Did you notice that when they went to artificial Christmas trees, the Greens also banned Santa from putting lumps of coal in the bad children’s stockings? Where do you think China is getting some of its coal now? Santa is in on it!
“Bad Santa”!
H.R.
O Nos!!! Not Santa!!!!!!
Eugene WR Gallun
Astroturf?
Are you daring to imply that this idea is “out there”?
(IRS audit on the way. 😎
So the idea is to build scrubbers, which R trees. Ive planted well over a million scrubbers…er trees. So am good, can I go back to being not scared?
And I suppose they will emit oxygen as real trees do…No mention of that,,,
I used to hae some respect for Georgia Tech… now I have to wonder.
Will there be little square nests for the birdies?
They will make better, “smart” (programmable) birds that can make square nests and know how to avoid wind turbines.
Didn’t they have one of them on “The Incredibles”?
As I recall, all it did was shout out warnings. An EPA bird for sure!
He’s got his eye on carbon credits. Money does grow on trees after all.
We need more CO2 in the air, not less. Or are they trying to kill nature to save it? More CO2 means more food. A warmer world is much preferred to a colder one.
Natural trees are doing better than “capturing the CO2”, they store it under useful forms like wood or food and in addition they release oxygen.
What will “capturing CO2” serve if this lead to make oxygen to disappear ?
It’s a fact that artificial trees suffer COPD. you’ll have to supply inhalers for every tree.I’m The southern agent so give me a call. Shipping is free per million units.
sarc
…”Dry Ice” No more Hot Beer!!!!
All we need for beer is an old CO2 fire extinguisher with some left in it.
These artificial tree ideas all stem from the academic’s need to find something new to research and consequentially these appear at monotonous regularity from those academics to realise that 100s of millions of years of evolution has done a better job than they could even hope to achieve in a few years.
So, green living things are just not green enough?
You got it. The last thing the warmunists want is a solution. Just as after they saturate the landscape with windmills, they will denounce them – then artificial trees will be what is needed. And on and on…
Permanent Revolution!
Hey, check out this Air Purifying Billboard:
http://images.gizmag.com/gallery_lrg/utecair.jpg
It might actually work for highways or urban signage
http://www.gizmag.com/utecs-air-purifying-billboard-installed-at-lima/31931/
How come it’s not LED lit?
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-009-9626-y
Irrigated afforestation of the Sahara and Australian Outback to end global warming
Abstract
Each year, irrigated Saharan- and Australian-desert forests could sequester amounts of atmospheric CO2 at least equal to that from burning fossil fuels. Without any rain, to capture CO2 produced from gasoline requires adding about $1 to the per-gallon pump-price to cover irrigation costs, using reverse osmosis (RO), desalinated, sea water. Such mature technology is economically competitive with the currently favored, untested, power-plant Carbon Capture (and deep underground, or under-ocean) Sequestration (CCS). Afforestation sequesters CO2, mostly as easily stored wood, both from distributed sources (automotive, aviation, etc., that CCS cannot address) and from power plants. Climatological feasibility and sustainability of such irrigated forests, and their potential global impacts are explored using a general circulation model (GCM). Biogeophysical feedback is shown to stimulate considerable rainfall over these forests, reducing desalination and irrigation costs; economic value of marketed, renewable, forest biomass, further reduces costs; and separately, energy conservation also reduces the size of the required forests and therefore their total capital and operating costs. The few negative climate impacts outside of the forests are discussed, with caveats. If confirmed with other GCMs, such irrigated, subtropical afforestation probably provides the best, near-term route to complete control of green-house-gas-induced, global warming.
This study from 2009 suggests that natural trees are entirely up to the task and, even with using the planned desalinated water to irrigate them, could do so at much less cost than these technological monstrosities.
Presumably the power for desalination comes from “carbon-free” sources such as wind or solar farms, or (gasp!) nuclear power plants.
Desalination costs would make the plan as-written infeasible, but if the desal costs go down significantly, this would certainly be possible, and it would be useful to life and humanity as well.
It’s not even unreasonable. Before the Medieval Warm Period hit, the Saraha was a vast Savannah. It can be so again.
You could use something like this
Seawater Greenhouse
There are vast amounts of fossil water deep beneath the Sahara. And it gets recharged every time the Milankovich cycle greens the Sahara all by itself.
Do they mention how much water a large tropical tree transpires every day?
I guess artificial trees in Alaska would be fire proof and eliminate that forest fire problem (and elsewhere) just to relate to this post….Can you Imagine Yellowstone forest fire damage to be replaced by these lovely artificial trees? (at least some cell phone towers resemble trees more than the ones in this first image).
Off topic, but when is the article on Obama in Alaska going to appear? – I have muchos links on a thread for that one…
Write a post and submit story to Anthony 🙂
Thanks for the advice – if I were to write it I would take it apart point by point with links to show all of the inaccuracies. Not sure if I can find them all in time for a rebuttal…Sometimes it takes forever to find the links that I remember, but searches come up dry sometimes. (I was trying to find the link recently about the 1mm/yr SLR prediction by Nils-Axel Mörner), but never really found the actual quote – even on WUWT…
I’m not sure I’d have the strength to read it. The brief clip of his speech today shown on local HK TV news had me screaming.
I did read that he wants to build more Icebreakers to counter the Russians in the Arctic.
(But if he really believes in AGW, why bother? The North Pole is already gone.)
GD, Promising icebreakers right now brings immediate gratification, which keeps the public satiated.
On numerous occasions, whenever carbon capture is mentioned, I remark that nature has already solved the problem, ie the tree.
There is no need to make the tree more efficient. Simply plant more trees. There is in practice no shortage of land to do this.
In fact nature, in response to higher levels of CO2, is naturally already doing this, and this is why the planet is presently greening (at a rate faster than man deforests) and why the carbon sink is growing year on year such that the amount of annual CO2 increase is only about 1/2 of the annual CO2 emitted by man.
” In fact, the earth has fewer acres of trees every year.”
I don’t believe this to be true.
What trees we do have are grower far faster than ever.
I also suspect that marginal grasslands will be able to support trees in a higher CO2 environment, due to decreased moisture requirement.