MechanicalTree™ will collect carbon from the atmosphere and help accelerate the fight against climate change
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
In a major innovation in the fight against climate change, Carbon Collect Ltd. has developed a MechanicalTree™ which is primed to become a leading technology in the global drive to reduce carbon emissions. Incorporating research and innovations by Arizona State University engineering professor Klaus Lackner, and following a concentrated two-year design and engineering program, the first commercial scale MechanicalTree™ was unveiled this week by Carbon Collect on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus. Carbon Collect is incorporated in Ireland.
Carbon Collect’s MechanicalTree™ is up to a thousand times more efficient at removing CO2 from the air than a natural tree. The captured carbon from the Mechanical Tree™ can be sequestered or sold for re-use in a variety of applications including food and beverage, industry, agriculture and energy. Future research in emerging sectors such as synthetic fuels promise to expand the use cases for captured carbon.
Unlike other Direct Air Capture technologies, the MechanicalTree™ can remove CO2 from the atmosphere without the need to use blowers or fans. Instead, the technology uses natural wind to deliver air through the system. This makes it a passive, lower cost and scalable solution that is commercially viable. When deployed at scale, the technology could help curb the growing amount of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere and help to combat the effects of global warming.
“We are delighted to launch our first commercial scale MechanicalTree™ at Arizona State University, which is a valuable partner in the development of our project. We believe we have developed a real and scalable solution to combat the effects of C02. Our goal now will be to accelerate the global climate effort and to contribute to reversing carbon emissions over the next decade and beyond. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable work on our project by Klaus Lackner and the ASU Center for Negative Carbon Emissions,” said Reyad Fezzani, Vice Chairman of Carbon Collect.
The MechanicalTree™ installed on the ASU campus represents a radical new geometry for direct air capture systems, a tall column and disks. If widely deployed, the tree could help alleviate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In operation, the MechanicalTree™ rises to a height of 33 feet (10 meters) to collect carbon from ambient air. Once loaded with carbon, the stack of discs will retract into the base unit and give up the carbon drawn from the air.
An engineering program was initiated by Carbon Collect in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. In two years, the company has moved from concept to the first commercial scale MechanicalTree™. Carbon Collect and ASU are working with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop engineering blueprints for carbon farms in the United States.
“Carbon dioxide is a waste product we produce every time we drive our cars or turn on the lights in our homes,” Lackner said. “Carbon Collect’s MechanicalTree™ can recycle it, bringing it out of the atmosphere to either bury it or use it as an industrial gas.”
Carbon Collect is presently operating off its first funding round, with a focus on delivering the initial engineering program and launch of the first MechanicalTree™. The company intends to progress to a second funding round prior to the end of 2022, which will be a key preparatory step for scaling and executing its business plan.
Carbon Collect plans to scale the technology starting with a series of direct air capture carbon farms which will capture approximately 1,000 tons of CO2 per day, designs for which are being completed.
“Our passive process is the evolution of carbon-capture technology, which has the ability to be both economically and technologically viable at scale in a reasonably short time frame,” said Pól Ó Móráin, CEO of Carbon Collect Ltd.
Carbon Collect’s team comprises a group of leading business and technology executives, as well as experienced engineers and scientists. The company holds exclusive global rights to key innovations of Dr. Klaus Lackner at ASU, and the company licensed ASU’s designs invented by Dr. Lackner. The company then engineered and fabricated the MechanicalTree™ and continues to sponsor ongoing research on carbon removal at ASU. Arizona State University is one of a group of shareholders of Carbon Collect Ltd. The company is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and has a wholly owned subsidiary, Carbon Collect Inc. in Delaware, United States. The Vice Chairman and Executive Director is US-based Reyad Fezzani, and the CEO, Pól Ó Móráin, is based in Europe.
Sounds good. How much does it cost? Does it cost less than 1000 times the cost of a natural tree? If it doesn’t, why would I buy one?
Suspiciously lacking in financial and technical details. There’s no there there.
And can this “trapped” CO2 be used? Can they sell it? Food industry and manufacturing use a f*ck ton of CO2, seems they could finance their entire operation that way, instead of stealing my money.
If they are so concerned about the climate they would be doing this all for free, not stealing our tax dollars.
Lackner seemed to gloss over a few inconvenient observations. First, is that in parts of this country turning on the lights has no impact at all on carbon dioxide emissions since electricity is generated by hydropower. Second, it is not usually pointed out that carbon dioxide is emitted each time one takes a breath. Finally, trees may not be as efficient as the claim for the mechanical tree’s ability to remove carbon dioxide; however, trees not only remove carbon dioxide but also produce oxygen.
Sooooo…. their only competition is the Plant Kingdom, which utilizes CO2 in a logical way to grow, produce usable products, and provide us with shelter and food.
Ri-i-i-i-i-ght.
The reality is that their egos demand that they kill off the plant kingdom, thereby rendering the planet barren of life. They must really despise biology in ways even I don’t understand.
Well, Planet Earth was fun to live on until these witless wonders decided to ruin it for the rest of us.
I took a look at their website Carbon capture solutions | Negative emissions | MechanicalTree™ (mechanicaltrees.com). Not a lot of detailed info but apparently it is a vacuum chamber the “tree” is lowered into to suck the CO2 (and H2O and N2) out of the sorbent, Then the CO2 is separated using “standard” processes and liquefied. Seems pretty energy intensive to me.
And how much CO2 does it remove each day? each week? each month? More than my houseplants?
In 750 words, they don’t say.
Is this what the Greens call “returning to nature”?
I realize it’s a long way to go before these things have any real impact, but what happens if/when they do? What if they overshoot the target (and what IS the target)?
Talk about a threat to life on earth…
The red spot is where you put in the money to make it work.
Great start. How about we replace all living things on Earth with some sort of technical/digital stand in and stop worrying about the joy of life. Can you imagine the breathtaking vista of a beautiful meadow of digitized mechanical grass and a standardized equally spaced grove of those hideous gas suckers in the image above. If we’re going in this direction my humble suggestion is the first beings to be replaced should not be trees but rather that strange hominid that spends its pathetic existence seeking ways to replace nature with technology.
..sucking the air dry of food to all real trees – while at the same time windmills axes the life out of birds. Morning has broken….
You guys (not just Jorgen) are a tough audience.
This may be a commercially viable method of Carbon (dioxide) Capture and Storage, or it may not. If it is, it eliminates the rationale for photovoltaic and windmills.
And when all the “natural” trees are dead, we’ll know it’s done its job.
I can only see ONE positive thing: at least they don’t kill birds or bats …
Should come with a warning. If successful, this device will limit plant growth at best, or create a desert at worst.
This is truly scary stuff. CO2 is essential for life, it’s not a waste product.
Trees remove CO2 far more efficiently because they don’t require electricity to make the process move forward.
Uh, my takeaway from this piece is Carbon and Co2 are the same thing.
These monsters want to take plant food out of the air, increasing the need for chemical fertilizers and directly hurting the lives of poor people around the world.
This farce has gone on long enough.
What is the carbon cost of construction, deployment, and operations and how long is the service life? Bet that each unit costs more than 1000 trees, that it doesn’t last as long as the growth cycle of a single cultivated pine or spruce, and you won’t get anything for building materials out of it when it is retired. But why go past the Eurekalert source to know that it is a con?
There is very little you can do with that captured CO2 that doesn’t result in it ultimately escaping back into the atmosphere. Selling it to food and beverage manufactures is silly because it will just gas out of the drink, or out of the drinker. (People can’t store CO2 in their bodies or process it into anything; we just breathe it out.) Supplying it as an “industrial gas” depends on the industrial process. If it is vented to the atmosphere in the process, again just wasted effort. If it is incorporated into something like synthetic limestone (calcium carbonate), OK, but natural limestone dug out of a quarry is surely cheaper. Various pie-in-the sky schemes to turn it back into fuel require (obviously) input of energy, more than was released — entropy is a bitch — in the combustion of the fuel. So you need energy to do work on the air to concentrate the CO2, and then more energy to drive the fuel-synthesis process. This is the kind of thing that harnessed fusion energy was supposed to provide the limitless electricity for. But now I guess we are going to be doing this with windmills.
So in reality, all you will be able to do with this sequestered CO2 and achieve net negative CO2 are:
1) use it to purge elderly oil and gas wells to get out the last bits. Most of the CO2 will stay underground.
2) trap it as synthetic limestone — more energy needed to run this process — which you then dump somewhere dry (so acid rain doesn’t dissolve it and release CO2
3) pump it into purpose-built storage reservoirs
4) manufacture a truly gargantuan number of fire extinguishers, more than anyone will ever rationally need for all imaginable fires, ever.
Only the first use has any rational economic business case, but since we are going to stop pumping oil and gas anyway, there will be no market for well-purging. The last 3 are simply dead-weight losses that someone will have to pay for, on the assumption — “the social cost of carbon” — that sucking this CO2 out of the atmosphere is worth every cent that it costs, no matter how much.
Note that most projections now say that half of the journey to net-zero involves these carbon-capture schemes, given that no serious person believes that we will ever get to gross-zero fossil fuel use. (Indeed the true believers oppose CCS because they fear it will prevent us from making hard choices to embrace energy poverty.) And note that none of them have been shown to work at scale. This is an Emperor’s New Clothes story.
https://www.iea.org/reports/direct-air-capture-2022