I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
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I'll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective...
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You'd also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you'll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we've generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we'll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world's power on CO2 scrubbing, we'd end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won't do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora's box and it'll cost us centuries to close it
You're right about most of this, but the carbon doesn't return to the atmosphere "as soon as they die".
I have a log in the back garden that has been there for twenty years, there's wood houses a hundred years old
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that's left outside will release all it's carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn't always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that's where a significant fraction of all coal came from.
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
But planting trees doesn't provide transportation or electricity, it does pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere though. In this case you can compare the capture technology to trees planted on the same area of land and see which one is better land use for the same purpose.
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that "refines" the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
(There's no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
planting trees also only works for carbon capture if you don't cut them down until they have lived their entire natural lives, which is not the way it's done anywhere.
Explain that one to me. The tree is made of carbon, storing the tree somewhere outside the carbon cycle would reduce the amount of carbon. Why would they need to be fully mature?
Yeah, just cut it and store it when the growth brings diminishing returns