In an unassuming building on the outskirts of Tucson, scientists have developed a prototype machine that might one day be hailed as the thing-a-ma-jig that helped beat back global warming.
It’s hard to miss the irony that the device, likened to an artificial tree, was born in the hot, dry desert landscape of Arizona.
Here, where little but cactus absorb CO2 from the sweltering air, the scientists and an entrepreneur have come together to develop a device that mimics aspects of photosynthesis.
“Just like a tree, it has leaf-like surfaces over which the air flows and then the CO2 is taken out of the air by getting in contact with these surfaces,” said Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York. The tall, debonair physicist is largely credited with inventing the new technology.
Lackner’s vision and the worry that rising carbon dioxide levels could trigger an abrupt change in climate prompted the late Gary Comer, founder of the Lands’ End clothing empire, to invest in his idea. With Comer’s seed money and advice from Columbia’s climate sciences pioneer Wallace Broecker, a company called Global Research Technologies opened shop in 2004 to turn Lackner’s dream of a synthetic tree into a reality.
Although the synthetic tree can’t yet convert sunshine into fuel as plants do, it can beat plants at half their own game, according to Lackner. “We can pack the leaves much more tightly because they don’t have to get sunshine,” he said. “And, consequently, we can absorb about 1,000 times as much CO2 as an equally sized tree could absorb.”
By sucking carbon dioxide out of the air at a rate that could potentially offset CO2 emissions from humans, the machine – officially called a “CO2 scrubber” – might change the carbon playing field. Critics, though, question whether it will ever be economically feasible to deploy a whole fleet of such scrubbers throughout the world, let alone dispose below ground all of the CO2 they gather.
At first sight, Lackner’s machine doesn’t look much like a planetary scrubber or a tree.
It’s a big box with sheets of special plastic hanging in it. But the sheets are able to draw the CO2 out of the air by ionizing the gas so it binds to the plastic like a magnet. Once the CO2 is collected, it’s removed by a blast of humidity, allowing the plastic resins to be reused. Without the removal process, the CO2 couldn’t be sequestered and the machine would be an energy guzzler.
The device, which Lackner envisions in full-scale at about the same size as a 40-foot-long shipping container, could remove as much as one ton of carbon dioxide from the air in a day’s operation.
One ton, of course, wouldn’t make much of a dent in the approximate 30 billion tons of CO2 emissions that enter the atmosphere every year. But if enough of these scrubbers were built – and enough would number in the tens of millions by Lackner’s estimate – they might be able to tilt the carbon balance away from the brink of severe climate change.
A fleet – or forest – of the scrubbers could be deployed, placed in locations where there is either a demand for CO2, such as near greenhouses that use it to boost plant growth, or near places where it can be stored.
Tens of millions is a big number, though, and right now Global Research Technologies estimates it will cost them $250,000 to build just one scrubber unit. Lackner, chairman of GRT, and Allen Wright, the company president, are currently looking for private investors willing to ante up the costs of building and deploying the first real scrubber unit, which they said could be finished in two years’ time.
Tens of millions, of course, would take more time and more money.
Lackner said the large figures just reflect the size of the problem. “The number of cars, the number of trucks – all of those are numbers on that scale, so it’s not impossible to get there,” he said. “Because we are dealing with a problem of a billion cars, we are also having to put up a solution that is on that same scale.”
Global Research Technologies completed the first prototype of the CO2 scrubber last year. And it’s working, according to Lackner, who said it can keep up with the emissions from one car.
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