Synthetic Carbon Eating "Trees"

A synthetic "tree" is currently be developed at the University of Columbia in New York that would collect CO2 from our atmosphere. As wind passes through its plastic "leaves" the carbon dioxide would be trapped, compressed and stored in its liquid form. The tree, in comparison to the real McCoy would be able to collect CO2 about 1,000 times faster. However, when taking into consideration how much energy is used to collect the gas, for every 1,000kg collected, only about 800kg is actually removed from the atmosphere. Because, approximately 200kg would be re-emitted by the coal plant powering it. Not terribly inefficient, considering. But if it was set up to run off of solar or wind, it would be able to collect the total of about 1 ton of CO2 an day without re-emitting any CO2.

The idea of a synthetic tree that can collect excess CO2 in the atmosphere is a break-through concept, especially in the world today where more than 6200 million tons of CO2 is being emitted each year across the globe. But, my question is, where would this excess CO2 go? Would it be pumped underground or poured into the oceans? Doing either would likely cause more problems..

I would like to propose another idea, which would completely eliminate of the potential problem as where to put the excess CO2. What if we could create synthetic "smart" trees that could convert a specific percentage of CO2 to Oxygen as real trees do? They would be able to gauge the percentage of the gases in the environment around them, and adjust, as needed the correct percentage of CO2 that would need to be converted in order to keep the correct balance of CO2 and Oxygen in our atmosphere. In this way, we would be able to ensure that there were no imbalances, and we wouldn't have to worry about where to put the collected CO2, because it would be converted into Oxygen.

With all of this excitement going on over the possibility to collect CO2, let it be reminded that we should still be doing all we can to reduce carbon emissions. Just because we can produce machines to reduce CO2, doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying to cut down on our carbon footprint!!

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/06/22/synthetic.tree.climate.change.ccs/