Can We Engineer Technology That Can Do What Plants Do?

October 14, 2014 – Today our Earth atmospheric composition contains 400 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide (CO2). That’s 75 ppm higher than the atmosphere of 1970. The cause for the increase is attributed to human activity and no other phenomena.

In the last week here in Toronto scientists gathered at a conference entitled, Bio-Inspired Ideas for Sustainable Technology. The goal of those gathered was to learn from plants how to better utilize solar energy by replicating photosynthesis through technology. Artificial photosynthesis is an important goal. With it we could produce ten times the energy needs of humanity state the scientists attending this conference.

But what the conference didn’t discuss is how mimicking another physiological feature of plants could also help us deal with the current concern about CO2 and correlated atmospheric warming. That’s because, next to the ocean, plants are the biggest carbon sink on the planet. They breathe in CO2 and expel water vapour and oxygen.

So while scientists are grappling with artificial photosynthesis, others are looking at capturing CO2 directly from the atmosphere just like plants. Three of the latter, Peter Eisenberger, Graciela Chichilnisky and Edgar Bronfman are leading a team to do just that – create a technology that sucks the greenhouse gas out of the air. They have launched a new company, Global Thermostat, and have built a pilot plant in Menlo Park, California, that is currently in operation demonstrating what they describe as a low-cost solution to atmospheric warming that can be grafted to existing industrial facilities to capture carbon.

Eisenberger, a physicist at Columbia University, first presented his carbon dioxide-capture idea  to the American Physical Society in 2009. He was greeted with skepticism. Eisenberger told his audience at the time that he was working with amines, chemicals that can capture CO2. Amines were being used in carbon sequestration experiments to bind concentrated CO2 being emitted in the outflow stack at fossil-fuel burning power plants. But he went on to describe how they could be used to directly capture the gas from open air where concentrations were far more diffuse. He even told his audience he could recycle the amines used to continuously perform carbon capture. Considering the correlation between rising atmospheric temperatures and the rise in CO2 levels over the last 50 years it seemed that Eisenberger’s observations should have resonated with his audience. Apparently it did with some who were working at the U.S. Department of Energy and five years later with funding from the department an operating prototype (seen below) is demonstrating the technology.

The technology is patent pending in more than 100 countries. It can be installed at power plants, cement smelters, refineries and other CO2-emitting industrial facilities. It uses far less energy than any other carbon sequestration technology. The CO2 captured can be sequestered underground, incorporated into cement, plastic and other industrial products, fed to algae to enhance biofuel production, or be sold for carbon credits.

If widely distributed it may prove to be a key innovation in our pursuit of carbon negative solutions.

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