With artificial trees against climate change: In the USA, researchers working with a German physicist are developing a promising mechanical forest.
Tempe – Climate change is everywhere. Researchers have been looking for solutions to slow it down or even fight it for many years. A mechanical forest has now been developed at Arizona State University in Tempe (USA).
The artificial trees perform exactly the same task as the naturally occurring plants: they capture and bind the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There is one big visual difference though: this forest consists of many upright pillars with a series of disks instead of wood and leaves.
More efficient than the natural variant: Mechanical forest in Arizona (USA) absorbs CO2
With the help of the discs, the carbon dioxide is captured from the atmosphere and then discharged into underground tanks. The trees developed by Klaus Lackner, a German professor and physicist at Arizona State University (ASU), may not look as pretty as the natural variant, but they are said to be a thousand times more efficient. The ASU writes this on its website. One of the reasons for this is that they take up less space. The columns are ten meters high and each has a diameter of 1.5 meters. There is only a two-inch gap between them, Lackner writes in a report by the news network The Conversation.
And this is how the artificial forest works: the flat discs are soaked in a resin that binds the CO2. Finally, once the substance is saturated, drain it into a container. According to Lackner, this takes around 20 minutes. “We introduce water and steam to release the CO2 in a closed environment, and now we have a low-pressure mixture of water vapor and CO2,” writes the physicist.
However, energy is required to release the carbon dioxide. However, most of the heat can be recovered. According to this, the mechanical forest from the USA is more of a kind of CO2 vacuum cleaner and cannot be compared completely with a natural forest.
Invention in the USA: In the future, artificial forests will also be able to recycle CO2
Due to the great success, three artificial forests are to be opened this year. The cost of this is approximately 2.5 million US dollars, which the ASU announces on its website. “Humanity cannot afford to have ever increasing amounts of excess carbon floating around in the environment, so we need to get it out,” Lackner writes in his report. The forests are expected to absorb thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every day. The big advantage: The mechanical trees can also be set up in drier regions, as they do not make any demands on the soil or climate.
In the future, however, the forest should not only store harmful CO2, but also recycle it. “You can turn CO2 into synthetic fuels — gasoline, diesel or kerosene — that contain no new carbon by blending the captured CO2 with green hydrogen produced with renewable energy,” says Lackner. Such synthetic fuels are called e-fuels.
However, it is currently not possible to assess whether such a CO2 cycle system is actually promising. Ultimately, this also depends on the installation and operating costs of the respective system. In the case of e-fuels, the high energy density, the unlimited supply capability and the easy transport options are offset by the costs of multiple conversion as a disadvantage. (Alina Schroeder)
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