It is the slow and unsexy algorithm of:
Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be careful not to burn them. Repeat
> Be careful not to burn them. Repeat
So what do you do with the wood? A billion years ago, your plan would have worked out brilliantly. Some say it's where our oil came from. But now we have fungus among us that evolved to rapidly turn your wood right back into CO2.
Unless you sterilize the wood and bury it deep in the ground where it will never be exposed to air or spores, you're right back to square one. Also there's the logistics and carbon footprint of burying and sterilizing the wood.
You're not the first person to think of this:
It requires massive timber though. And to get that on a larger scale, you need good long term forest management policies. Plan for something else than paper or chipboard or glulam.
So, not a technical problem, but a political one.
humungous fungus among us
and I just had to point it out :)
I'm not immediately finding a comparison of various ecosystems, though there's this on Indonesian swamps:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0045653593...
And:
"Peatlands only cover about 3 percent of the Earth but they accumulate more carbon than tropical rainforests," says biogeochemist Nancy Dise of Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "In terms of sitting there kind of quietly year after year packing away massive amounts of carbon, nothing tops these peatlands."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peat-and-repeat-r...
I don't think this pencils out. We use quite a lot of machinery and trucks and electricity to build with and it's not obvious that the carbon sequestered by the wood in a structure is larger than the amount of carbon expended in all aspects of the building of it.
In fact, I suspect it might be quite a bit off ... a dry 2x4 weighs very little and there is a lot of driving and idling and generating and power usage involved in building.
The more important aspect is that something else would have been used instead. Each building that is of wood construction is one that wasn't built primarily with steel or concrete.
Also, effects of scale can be significant. As a simple example, there is about 200 billion kg of carbon sequestered in the contiguous US just in wooden telephone poles. If you can find a widescale use that makes economic sense, you make more immediate sinks. If you can also find ways of long-term sequestering the waste as it enters end of life, you can make ongoing gains in the CO2 balance.
[1] - http://articles.extension.org/sites/default/files/CIWP%20pub...
Also wood buildings can look cool https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wood+buildings&num=30&tbm=...
and maybe our future AI robots can build them.
However, we do not know how long biochar lasts when used as a soil amendment [eg. 1]. Also, it's only useful in this way when loaded and applied to poor soil in the tropics [2].
For long term storage of CO2, it might be better to just bury the main products of pyrolysis (biochar and pyrolysis oil) where hard coal and the oil once used to be - deep in the earth. Burying both products should also make it cheaper (from a carbon mitigation point of view), since it's hard to make useful products from the pyrolysis oil. The biochar also doesn't need to be as clean as when used for soil. One can even pyrolyse old tires (and possibly plastic).
The problem is, of course, that there are no long-term studies about the stability of biochar (and the bio-oil) in deep layers.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcbb.12266 [2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd/m...
In contrast, the carbonate minerals from the reaction of CO2 with these silicates ARE thermodynamically stable. Even if left exposed on the surface of the Earth they will not release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
I don't mean a general "we." I mean you, reading these words, and me. You can decrease your emissions, plastic pollution, etc. No technology needed. No loss in quality of life.
The biggest environmental issue we can affect in our daily lifestyle is recycling and reducing household rubbish. It’s another important issue and one where we really can make a difference in our everyday behaviour.
Buy less meat or no meat.
Never buy a car new. Used are more cost effective anyway.
Same goes for clothes.
Choose an electricity supplier that uses a green source of power or buys offset certificates for all the power they produce.
If your employer is going to pay to send you to a conference of your choice, pick the one that is 300 miles away over the one that is 3000 miles away.
I've no source for that, though, it was quite some time ago that I read it.
And if that carbon-free electricity is going to charge the batteries of machinery to do this, wind and solar will be just as good at that.
Not some simplistic scale-up of Rickover's submarine engine.
Even if this could be done in a manner that keeps the air safe to continue breathing, the other problem from doing too much of this is that it could increase the Earth's albedo and have a global cooling effect (akin to when volcanic eruptions on earth have caused famines, skipped summers/growing seasons). But in some ways, that may make this the perfect worst-case-scenario solution to runaway global warming. We could periodically use "clean" nuclear detonations to put enough particulates in the air to reduce the global temperature and sequester carbon. Once the particulates settle, if there is still too much CO2, we could do another round of detonations, etc.
It's not like until e.g. merely 80 years ago scientists still helped produce and sell radioactive consumer products. Or they considered thalidomide safe. And any number of such things...
Here was my biggest takeaway:
> More realistically, he said, Oman could store at least a billion tons of CO2 annually. (Current yearly worldwide emissions are close to 40 billion tons.)
So we're looking at 2.5% sequestration of what we're currently adding, from the largest deposits in the world. Best case, realistically.
The whole thing sounds like a total non-starter.
An example of such a time, from various available such historical "sometimes"?
e.g. say we emit 100 and absorb 95, absorbing 2.5% of our total emissions actually cuts net emissions in half. Or are you already figuring that in?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natu...
We don't see to be growing more trees anytime soon, and we aren't adding any new oceans either.
which has happened without really any planning. It's just that sort of stuff could be actively encouraged.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Min...
To be clear, I'm all for research about carbon sequestration, but it should not be an excuse to keep polluting irresponsibly. On the long term, we simply can't get away with compensating all our big negative impacts with big positive ones - how about introducing some moderation in our lifestyles instead?
Sounds like it could more than halve the atmosphere (from 93 times Earth atmosphere to 43 times).
Though worth remembering that the surface of Venus is an untouched wilderness region containing billions of years of geologically significant information. I'm all for walking around a balmy Venus, but if it involves pulverising the surface, we need to be extracting all the scientific information from the untouched wilderness area as we do it, because a lot will be lost forever otherwise.
So:
Geologists for a long time assumed the carbonates found with igneous rocks resulted from CO2 reacting with these igneous rocks were formed very very long ago.
A scientists uses carbon dating and discovers that the carbon in these carbonates was in fact formed relatively recently.
This should prompt 2 questions, but seemingly only prompted the first:
1) If unreacted pyroxenes and olivine in these rocks can capture CO2 to form carbonates relatively fast on geological timescales, can we help this natural process speed up?
Answer: yes, but unclear at what energetic cost, and unclear what to do with these carbonates afterwards.
2) WHERE do the carbonates end up, if the carbonates from older carbon are mysteriously MISSING???
Answer: reacting back to CO2 upon rainfall, or by erosion and weather ended up in seas and lakes!
One does not need rocks to create cabronates: simply expose water with CO2 and CO2 will both absorb as (CO2)_gas and also react with water to form carbonic acid H2CO3:
(H2O)l + (CO2)g <=> (H2CO3)l
If we take the resulting say magnesiumcarbonate from the rock that has captured CO2, and put it in water, it will first dissociate like all salts (metal, non-metal compounds) resulting in free mobile Magnesium ions and free mobile carbonate ions. You might as well just let CO2 in the air react with the sea acidifying it...
They pretend the carbonate form is a sink where we can dump our CO2, while in fact this very interpretation is inconsistent with the original discovery that the carbon in these carbonates is young. If it was truely stable the carbonates would predominantly contain old carbon.
So unless they have a plan to store these carbonates and protect it from rainfall, and prevent it from flowing into bigger bodies of water, I see no solution, only excuses to appear green such that banks can invest "green money" into these mining companies again, or perhaps to get "green subsidies" or perhaps to escape carbon taxes...
