How “Mechanical Trees” Could Solve a Huge Global Warming Problem

Text by INVERSE

Two centuries of burning fossil fuels have put more carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere than nature can remove.
As that CO2 builds up, it traps excess heat near Earth’s surface, causing global warming. There is so much CO2 in the atmosphere now that most scenarios show ending emissions alone won’t be enough to stabilize the climate — humanity will also have to remove CO2 from the air.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a new goal to scale up direct air capture, a technology that uses chemical reactions to capture CO2 from the air. While federal funding for carbon capture often draws criticism because some people see it as an excuse for fossil fuel use to continue, carbon removal in some form will likely still be necessary, IPCC reports show.

Technology to remove carbon mechanically is in development and operating at a very small scale, in part because current methods are prohibitively expensive and energy-intensive. But new techniquesare being tested this year that could help lower the energy demand and cost.

We asked Arizona State University professor Klaus Lackner, a pioneer in direct air capture and carbon storage, about the state of the technology and where it’s headed.

What is direct carbon removal, and why is it considered necessary?

When I got interested in carbon management in the early 1990s, what drove me was the observation that carbon piles up in the environment. It takes nature thousands of years to remove that CO2, and we’re on a trajectory toward much higher CO2 concentrations, well beyond anything humans have experienced.

Humanity can’t afford to have increasing amounts of excess carbon floating around in the environment, so we have to get it back out.

Not all emissions are from large sources, like power plants or factories, where we can capture CO2 as it comes out. So we need to deal with the other half of emissions — from cars, planes, taking a hot shower while your gas furnace is putting out CO2. That means pulling CO2 out of the air.

Since CO2 mixes quickly in the air, it doesn’t matter where in the world the CO2 is removed — the removal has the same impact. So we can place direct air capture technology right where we plan to use or store the CO2.

The method of storage is also important. Storing CO2 for just 60 years or 100 years isn’t good enough. If 100 years from now all that carbon is back in the environment, all we did was take care of ourselves, and our grandkids have to figure it out again. In the meantime, the world’s energy consumption is growing at about two percent per year.

One of the complaints about direct air capture, in addition to the cost, is that it’s energy-intensive. Can that energy use be reduced?

Two large energy uses in direct air capture are running fans to draw in air and then heating to extract the CO2. There are ways to reduce energy demand for both.

For example, we stumbled into a material that attracts CO2 when it’s dry and releases it when wet. We realized we could expose that material to wind, and it would load up with CO2. Then we could make it wet, and it would release the CO2 in a way that requires far less energy than other systems. Adding heat created from renewable energy raises the CO2 pressure even higher, so we have a CO2 gas mixed with water vapor from which we can collect pure CO2.

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We can save even more energy if the capture is passive — it isn’t necessary to have fans blowing the air around; the air moves on its own.

My lab is creating a method to do this, called mechanical trees. They’re tall vertical columns of discs coated with a chemical resin, about five feet in diameter, with the discs about two inches apart, like a stack of records.

As the air blows through, the surfaces of the discs absorb CO2. After 20 minutes or so, the discs are full, and they sink into a barrel below. We send in water and steam to release the CO2 into a closed environment, and now we have a low-pressure mixture of water vapor and CO2.

We can recover most of the heat that went into heating up the box, so the amount of energy needed for heating is quite small.
By using moisture, we can avoid about half the energy consumption and use renewable energy for the rest. This does require water and dry air, so it won’t be ideal everywhere, but there are also other methods.

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