Carbon Capture Concept

According to the BBC news site, geo-physicist Professor Klaus Lackner is floating an idea for an artificial tree that would leech carbon dioxide out of the environment.

Lackner's contraption would ape the behavior of actual trees by having "leaves" pull out CO2 from the air as it passes over them. In essence, the CO2, when coming into contact with sodium hydroxide, is absorbed, resulting in a sodium carbonate liquid.

While an intriguing possibility, Lackner admits that it would be a stopgap measure. The Prof's vision would be that each of thousands of the devices would extract 90,000 tons of C02 from the atmosphere every year. According to the BBC article, the yearly production of one of the "trees" would be roughly equivalent to the emissions of 20,000 cars.

The proposed storage method (extracting the gas and pumping it deep underground, where the temperature renders the gas denser than water) leaves a little to be desired, but Lackner has come up with an idea to ponder.