Reading between the lines what I'm saying is: Your benchmark is to do better than wood. If you can make bricks faster than a tree can grow wood, this will become an investment rather than money pit.
maybe trees aren't as cool as whatever they're doing???
Most forests in North America evolved millions of years ago to deal with fire to reproduce and keep invasive species culled. Humans interfere with these process in several ways (::grunt::, logging bad, ::grunt::, fire bad, ::grunt scratch::). Studies need to be conducted where we could substitute fire for logging without impacting wildlife. Certain forests would be better candidates for this, but it's also important to make sure slow-growth forests have adequate fire protection to prevent runaway fires.
There's already a lot of momentum with sustainable logging in North America, but it is something that needs to be done in South America and Asia as well.
Logging creates _a lot_ of useful products for people to use, but it requires continuous monitoring and research to keep it green.
But yeah they don't require energy to build them, can be made with simple seeds, integrate really well with local ecosystems (much better than anything man-made), don't need maintenance, self-propagate and cause more benefits like ecosystem diversity, limiting floods and wind.
They do have some drawbacks too though like serious flammability. And we can't burn them afterwards or we'll get all the CO2 back.
You’d have to sequester them such that they don’t biodegrade. This involves deep burial, difficult for a solid, or submersion, which means ruining a deep-sea habitat (and creating a carbon time bomb).
If you want nature to do it you need to engineer some way for the carbon to disappear basically forever.
Because it doesn't scale, at least for the purposes of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
because money
Build a really tall pipe and push it all into space?
However targeted, point-source applications that are effectively scrubbers for carbon-intense processes make a lot of sense because of the opportunities for high-concentration collection and recirculation for multiple passes across the substrate.
I'm wondering if Heirloom is putting any effort into the latter approach. The article only reports on open-air facilities.
There's just no point. It's a pipe dream for those who are still looking to continue business as usual.
Until we really have Terawatts of basically free renewable energy to spend and we're already CO2 neutral globally, it's way more efficient to just not emit the CO2 in the first place.
I think it's good they keep a finger on this tech and experiment with it but I don't view it as something even remotely useful to bring CO2 levels down. First we need to stop emitting.
Producing concrete involves decomposing limestone into calcium oxide and CO2, which is done in a furnace powered by fossil fuels and then just released into the atmosphere. Concrete cures by capturing some of that CO2 again.
This plant takes more limestone, decomposes it using "renewable energy" (i.e power that could have been used to displace non-renewable sources, but isn't), but stores the CO2 in a tank, which is then just put back into concrete. Concrete that would have naturally slightly offset itself anyway?
The net effect is surely just a bit worse than nothing?
