Though the ‘Synthetic Tree’ may hardly resemble its natural brethren, developers hope it will capture more than a thousand times as much carbon dioxide as the real thing. The working prototype traps carbon in a compression chamber where it is converted into liquid carbon dioxide, a byproduct that is easier to store and manage. It’s similar in design to the carbon sponges used in coal power plants, but is intended to work anywhere.
The lead developer and Columbia University scientist, Professor Klaus Lackner notes in a CNN interview,
“Half of your emissions come from small, distributed sources where collection at the site is either impossible or impractical, we aim for applications like gasoline in cars or jet fuel in airplanes. We are going after CO2 that otherwise is nearly impossible to collect.”
The design is continually being improved and Lackner is currently writing a proposal for the U.S. Department of Energy. He estimates that a single unit would cost about the price of a sedan and could remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere per day, which amounts to the use of approximately 20 American vehicles. While those numbers seem frighteningly low, if governments back the research on a large scale, it could make significant improvements to the future of our atmosphere.
[via Gizmodo]
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