Virtual "trees" that function like real trees?

[rateyes]

I've been "brainstorming" (and, yeah, I know...with my brain it's more a drizzle than a storm), but I was wondering...

Trees absorb CO2, right? And, somehow (I guess through photosynthesis?) remove the carbon, putting back into the air, 02 (oxygen), right?

Do you think there could be a way to build "virtual trees" that mechanically do the same thing. They wouldn't have to look like real trees...but, machines that filter the C02 in the atomosphere and release oxygen. And, if so, how would we store the carbon?

Just a question.

Ready for the snark.

[Glorfindel]

1. Since we can't prevent deforestation, your idea sounds good to me

I can't imagine how to implement such a thing, but there's an old saying something like, "Whatever the mind of man can conceive, the hand of man can invent."

[XemaSab]

2. Real trees are free

I probably pull 50 or 60 privet, pecan, catalpa, and oak trees out of the yard every year.

Virtual trees: not so free.

[rateyes]

3. Yes. But, if somehow we could come up with a way of planting the real things,

AND, put "virtual trees" on houses, rooftops, etc. I don't know. Just thinking out loud.

[MercutioATC]

5. Oh, it's possible...it's just REALLY expensive.

...a lot more expensive than just planting some trees...

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. This is called carbon sequestration. A topic of much discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

No plans to make fake trees though.

[dysfunctional press]

6. you mean like these..?

http://greenupgrader.com/3744/synthetic-trees-could-be-environmental-co2-scrubbers/

Developed by Dr. Klaus Lackner these synthetic trees could be used as CO2 scrubbers cleaning our air. Using a chemical reaction to pull carbon dioxide from the air this technology could buy the world time to development and implement alternative energy sources.
The idea is that air would flow through the vanes of these structures. Flowing through sodium hydroxide (NaOH) which is inside the synthetic tree CO2 would chemically react to create sodium carbonate liquid which condenses and collects at the bottom of the synthetic tree. This would be the storage mechanism for excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

Then what? Well the condensed liquid would be pumped into porous rock below the sea bed using oil drilling technology. There the carbon would be stored for millions of years.

[jsamuel]

8. but how much energy does it take to create the sodium hydroxide?

does that release more carbon than it collects?

Plus, wouldn't it just be easier to plant a tree?

[rateyes]

11. yeah. Whaddayaknow? Thanks.

[ddeclue]

13. Not really such a good idea.. it would eventually escape and

change the pH balance and making the water acidic.

You really can't expect this to work over the long run unless you are really chemically converting the CO2 into something fundamentally different.

[dysfunctional press]

17. i'd rather just have more real trees.

:shrug:

i wasn't advocating for fake trees- just answering the op's question.

[pitohui]

7. you mean "artificial" (not "virtual", correct?) they cost millions of euros!!!

i saw a program about the town in spain w. the artificial trees (not virtual trees, which most people would assume to mean "online" trees!)

the trees did sequester the carbon but cost millions of dollars each -- well, it was spain, so euros not dollars but that's the order of magnitude we're talking about

maybe someone could post the program again

it is not practical, we are just going to have to stop cutting down old growth trees instead of looking at every oak tree as $100,000 in lumber on the hoof -- even $100K is less than "millions"

what nature does for free, providing clean air, water etc. would cost an exorbitant sum if we have to do it all ourselves, this is why we're not all living gravity-free in outer space already, stop and think about it

the cypress trees cut down and sold for "mulch" and some private business's cheap profit...how many billions of dollars, not to mention lives saved, did they cost the public because the removal of the trees to the east of new orleans allow the city to be exposed to tropical storm damage that it would not otherwise be subject to...and this is true for other cities and towns in the gulf south as well...think about it, a tree so "cheap" it was cut up for mulch and sold at home depot...we can't replace that w. a costly artificial tree! -- the economics don't make any sense

[valerief]

9. We could clone Batshit Bachmann. She inhales CO2 and exhales that icky oxygen

(cuz none apparently goes to her brain).

[MineralMan]

10. No snark, but in cities like Saint Paul, where I live,

it's an urban forest. There are 8 trees in my yard alone, and I'm just average. One is a 50 year old silver maple that shades almost a third of the lot.

It takes a long time for the urban forest to develop, so suburbs aren't as heavily forested. This past fall, I had a pileated woodpecker hang around in my maple for over a week. It liked the suet blocks I hung from the tree.

In addition, Saint Paul has green swaths througout the city, which harbor deer and foxes and wild turkeys, all of which tend to show up in people's yards off and on during the year.

Many cities have similar urban forests.

[ddeclue]

12. Yes but it would be very inefficient and energy intensive.

CO2+4H2+energy=2H20+CH4 - it's called the Sabatier process - it will probably be used in any manned trip to Mars as a way to recycle air.

The energy could come from nuclear, hydroelectric or solar or another non greenhouse gase emitting source.

The down side is that CH4 (Methane) is much worse of a greenhouse gas than CO2.

On the other hand, you could then burn the CH4 as fuel or use it to make a fuel like methanol or even synthetic gasoline.

"Synthetic trees" are certainly an option technically speaking but it really makes more sense to convert ground and water based vehicles to battery electric, save the hydrocarbon fuels for aircraft (where there isn't a good alternative) and charge all those ground based vehicles directly off of the non greenhouse gas emitting sources like nuclear, solar or hydro and just not create the CO2 in the first place.

We could also reduce the use of aircraft for shorter run trips as well by building more high speed MAG-LEV trains for shorter trips and non transoceanic trips. These trains run 350-450 km/hr which is plenty fast for shorter trips of 1000 km or less.

If we do this and lower CO2 output and not cut down all the ACTUAl trees and replant them instead they would eventually remove the CO2 we've put into the air and bring things back into balance.

Synthetic trees are just an unnecessarily high tech solution to the problem when simpler options exist.

Doug De Clue
Aerospace Engineer

[The2ndWheel]

14. We'd never need another real tree again. Other than to make the view nice

We could not only cut every real tree down, and get some economic use out of them, but we could build and maintain the artificial trees to replace them, increasing GDP that much more. The idea is pure job creation.

We probably shouldn't even stop at trees. Once the planet can function without trees, why would we stop there? It would be stupid to go that far and then just stop. Any planetary function that isn't already part of our economic system should be brought into...well, not really brought into, more like swallowed, engulfed, killed, whatever...our scope of activity. What else? The oceans? Rain? Clouds? Sunlight? The more we make the world fit only our requirements, the less we have to worry about when it comes to our impact on the planet.

Honestly, and I'm not kidding, you've got the answer to the problem. Make the world a machine. The difficult part is how to get from a living world, to that world. That's not going to be easy, that's going to take some time. You have all that diversity that you have to get rid of, but you can't do it too quickly, or else things don't work. Then you have all the complex interactions between living organisms that you have to account for, and then replace. You have all the inefficiency of life, of existence, that you have to harness and control, for the rest of time, or else what you build is going to erode.

Again, the great thing is that you're taking the living tree, and replacing it with a finished product. After that, it doesn't matter what we do, because the finished product is already dead. The world would then be increasingly like people who live in the economic system; interchangeable, easily replaceable, standardized for maximum productivity. Not much choice at this point.

[KittyWampus]

16. Reductionism run amok.

[KittyWampus]

15. My concept has been sod rooftops in all cities. One can maximize CO2 sequestered by choosing

certain types of grasses.

[Orsino]

18. That free energy we've gotten in centuries of carbon combustion...

...would have to be paid back. It can be done, but the obvious question is: how many new coal-fired plants would we build to run these machines? I would also have to wonder whether the acreage that would have to dedicated couldn't support greater carbon sequestration with trees.

[Xithras]

19. You could do it, but it would be a net loss environmentally.

Trees actually require three resources in order to sequester carbon. 1) They need energy, provided in the form of solar power. 2) They need clean and fresh water, typically gathered by rainfall or tapped from an underlying water table. This one is a bit harder for us to reproduce given the fact that many parts of the world already have freshwater shortages. 3) Most importantly, and most easily forgotten, is the fact that trees require minerals removed from the surrounding soil to bind with the carbon. Trees don't merely take carbon and store it, they convert it into another resource to sequester it (wood). That process requires additional material for the chemical processes involved in that conversion. You would need to constantly feed this material into your machines.

You'd have a fourth problem too. Since trees sequester by converting carbon dioxide to wood, you'd need to find a substitute medium to convert your carbon dioxide into within your artificial converter.

A skilled engineer could probably design a machine that duplicates the features and results of a natural tree, but I honestly suspect that the result would be a machine that looked suspiciously like a...tree. Trees have the advantage of hundreds of millions of years of evolution and optimization for that role, and it's difficult to believe that we could build anything better using the same resources and energy footprint.

[Lyric]

20. What about elevated forests?

Real ones, with real trees.

Build solid, steel-reinforced, concrete platforms with high-sided walls over cities. Fill them with soil. Transplant and plant trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, mosses--anything that naturally lives in a forest.

It keeps the trees away from the pollution on the ground.

It creates bird, insect, and even animal habitat, should we choose to put non-bird animals up there.

It reduces the amount of UV radiation reaching where we live--it would be like permanent shade. We can include strategic "holes" with big industrial fans to ventilate the city scattered throughout the structure so that enough daylight to live and work still gets through, OR we could build them in strips (like highways) rather than as one big platform, so that the forests criss-cross a city rather than cover it completely.

One entire corner could be devoted to composting food scraps, etc. from the city, and could be adjacent to an enormous community garden, and/or fields full of berry bushes and fruit trees. Avoid the orchard dilemma and just plant fruit and nut trees in the "wild"--let the fruits and nuts be harvested for local food pantries.

It would reduce the carbon footprint of a city significantly.

We could put solar panel towers among the trees to catch sunlight and send it back to the city, thus helping to reduce fossil-fuel electricity usage.

We could use the trees and soil to filter the rainwater; whatever comes through the "platform" will have gone through layers of soil, sand, and humus before reaching the city underneath--thus making it cleaner and safer for the citizens below.

It would provide a place for recreation; build access ramps and green-space meadow parks along with the forest. Allow people to nature walk, camp (sans fires) and play up there. Make it so that it's only accessible to the public via bicycles and walking. City kids that have rarely (if ever) seen a "real" forest would have access to this place.

To sell it to the conservatives: it would make flying a plane into civilian buildings difficult to impossible, as you wouldn't be able to see much of the "city" from above. It would also reduce the ability of foreign nations to spy out US cities.

If we can build superhighways that are elevated above a city, why not forests? We have the technology to do it.

[Winterblues]

21. The greatest consumer of CO2 is Algae

The oceans provide more fresh oxygen than all the trees on earth combined.

[KittyWampus]

22. oh, thanks for the fun fact.