Just before his death in 2006, Gary Comer, founder of Lands’ End, funded a start-up company to develop ways to pull CO2 out of the air. Last week, Comer’s Global Research Technologies officially introduced its unique CO2 vacuum cleaner in conjunction with Earth Day, placing the Arizona company in a good position to win a $25 million prize offered in February to anyone who could invent such a thing. (The hefty prize was the creation of Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, as a motivation for inventors to devise ways of cleaning the air of existing global warming gases.)
One of the innovative capabilities devised here is that the units, unlike other "carbon capture" systems, can be located anywhere, removing carbon dioxide emitted from vehicles on streets worldwide with air-capture devices located in remote and environmentally acceptable locations far removed from the CO2 source.
GRT’s President Wright said, "It’s tremendously rewarding to see the air-capture concept become a successful working system in our laboratory. We foresee the GRT system becoming an economically viable product that will be of tremendous value to all of humanity now and in the future. Removing CO2, a major greenhouse gas, makes it possible to envision a return to lesser if not pre-industrial levels of CO2."
The visionary that dreamed up the basis for the research at GRT is Columbia University professor Klaus Lackner, who published the concept of capturing greenhouse gases using a chemical compound that, when wet, snatched CO2 from the atmosphere.
Read more details in the April 19 report in Christian Sience Monitor:
For a decade, Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner has written about a way to stave off – and even reverse – climate change from human-emitted carbon dioxide: Scrub it directly from the atmosphere. And now, after three years of R&D, a Tucson, Ariz., company has unveiled a working model of a device based on Professor Lackner’s idea" The president of Global Research Technologies, LLC, says, "We’ve got the way, now we have to get the will."
I can make a CO2 absorbing device for you! Just give me an acorn, some water, and a sunny place. It’ll take a while, but it’s FREE, and a much more multipurpose device! Nicer-looking too. Please consider my CO2 absorber / erosion control network / wildife refuge / windbreak / heat sink / educational complex as an alternative – I won’t patent it, but it may not be long before somebody does…
You can’t plant an acorn and expect it to grow in the desert!
Read the article and find out why these “synthetic trees” as some call them, are better than trees in some ways– like actually generating power at the same time.
No one would argue planting trees in the mean time isn’t also helpful.
Sorry – it was an attempt at humor.
Increased population is destroying plants which convert co2 into oxygen. Recently co2 had to be pumped into rainforest because rainforest was dying due to lact of co2.