LONDON, England (CNN) -- Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.





A conceptual design of how the "synthetic tree" might look should they ever reach the stage of production.





As the wind blows though plastic "leaves," the carbon is trapped in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid carbon dioxide.





The technology is similar to that used to capture carbon from flue stacks at coal-fired power plants, but the difference is that the "synthetic tree" can catch carbon anytime, anywhere.





"Half of your emissions come from small, distributed sources where collection at the site is either impossible or impractical," said Professor Klaus Lackner, Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University.





"We aim for applications like gasoline in cars or jet fuel in airplanes. We are going after CO2 that otherwise is nearly impossible to collect," he told CNN.





While the idea of carbon-catchers may sound far-fetched, an early model has been built and Lackner is in the process of writing a proposal for consideration by the U.S. Department of Energy.





He personally explained the concept in a 45-minute meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu last month at a three-day symposium on climate change in London.





"He was there and I was there and he showed interest," Lackner told CNN. "That's exciting, but I don't particularly want to discuss this in a public forum because I think this gives me a little bit of an opportunity to tailor my proposals to the Department of Energy in a way that makes them more palatable."





Lackner started working on the concept of an ambient carbon catcher in 1998. "I argued back then and I still argue that the reason this can be done, from a theoretical point of view, is that the CO2 in the air is actually surprisingly concentrated, therefore the device you need to collect CO2 is quite small."





The "synthetic tree" looks more like a public convenience block than a hi-tech method of reducing carbon emissions, but Lackner told CNN it is highly efficient for its size when compared, for example, to a modern power-generating wind turbine.





"If you give me one of those big windmills which have those big areas through which the rotor moves -- how much CO2 can I avoid? And if I had an equally sized CO2 collector -- how much CO2 can I collect? It turns out the collector is several hundred times better than the windmill."





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Lackner told CNN that initial concerns over the cost of the technology were focused on the "front-end" carbon collector, including the sorbent used to catch the carbon dioxide in the air.





But after years of research, Lackner told CNN he and his colleagues have developed a sorbent that is "close to the ideal," in that it uses a relatively small amount of energy to release the CO2 and is not prohibitively expensive.





"By the time we make liquid CO2 we have spent approximately 50 kilojoules [of electricity] per mole of CO2." Compare that, Lackner said, to the average power plant in the U.S. which produces one mole of CO2 with every 230 kilojoules of electricity.





"In other words, if we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful," he said.





Lackner told CNN the biggest cost was at the "back-end" of the collector, primarily the technology used to release the CO2 from the sorbent.





He said for that reason, on a cost-basis, the "synthetic tree" could not compete with modern coal-fired power plants that are designed to release fewer carbon
What does the tree do? What would the "Synthetic tree" capture? What would happen to the trapped carbon? What university is working on this technology? Who is developing the technology?
collecting carbon carbon in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid Columbia Scientists in the United States
question: What does the tree do?, answer: collecting carbon | question: What would the "Synthetic tree" capture?, answer: carbon | question: What would happen to the trapped carbon?, answer: in a chamber, compressed and stored as liquid | question: What university is working on this technology?, answer: Columbia | question: Who is developing the technology?, answer: Scientists in the United States