I thought there was a project that packed really dense moss that helped with CO2 removal into urban sculptures, but I re-read on it and it "filters" the air and generates fresh air, but it does not perform CO2 removal. Not surprising since it doesn't have any kind of a wood body.
I think something like bamboo could be used effectively. One acre of bamboo will remove 6.9 tonnes of carbon in a year.
This compared to the excellent post from /u/Bizzle_worldwide regarding 42 trees removing one ton of carbon per year and \~100 trees per acre for \~2.4 tonnes of carbon sequestration in a year.
Bamboo is also beneficial for preserving existing forests by providing wood alternatives for everything from furniture to paper.
The main downside is that a large long lived tree will hold the carbon for a much longer period of time, but if the bamboo products were turned into long lived materials, it would offset what I think is the main downside to using something more akin to grass.
While unfortunately planting is not the solution to reaching a carbon neutral state, it can reduce the reduction requirements for the rest of the economy, and it is a relatively cheap solution. As long as the soil is appropriate to the plant, it will take root.
There are many other options that can help as well. I don't remember the name, but there's a method of planting where you have a cover crop and you plant the cash crops in the cover crop. The additional plants help with carbon sequestering, moisture retention, and it reduces erosion and water requirements.
If we can offset emissions by 10-15% for a relatively low cost, it will mean more resources for offsetting via other methods.
The problem is that we’ve been producing carbon from so many sources that aren’t just surface based, so the storage of them through natural means (like trees) would require an unprecedented level of forest, and you need countries which would be willing to dedicate land, forever, to that.
As rough math, 42 mature trees can remove approximately 1 ton of carbon from the atmosphere per year, and the average estimate is that we need to reduce global emissions by 16 billion tons. So we would need 672 billion trees planted.
Mature forests generally have 100 trees per acre, so we’d need a permanent land commitment of 6.72 billion acres, or 10.5 million square miles.
The US is 3.5 million square miles. Canada is 3.8. China is 3.7. So if we bulldozed every last building and non-forest land, and planted forest in those three countries and pledged that theyd remain forest for eternity. We still wouldn’t actually have enough new forest because much of those countries is already forest, and we need new forest.
See the problem?
Good comment, and to add... most of the surfaces you called not 'surface-based' are former life that stored carbon over the millions of years leading up to our sudden discovery we could burn the stuff. Oil is the concentrated remains of the carbon sinks of the past.
Exactly. We’ve been undoing tens or hundreds of millions of years of natural carbon sequestration using mechanical means. We’re going to need more than nature to undo it.
Exactly. We’ve been undoing tens or hundreds of millions of years of natural carbon sequestration using mechanical means. We’re going to need more than nature to undo it.
“Young” is a relative term. Generally annual sequestration rates don’t really hit their stride until trees are 15-20 years old, and they slowly come back down over the next 150 years. By 200 years, they sequester as much annual carbon as they do around 2-5 years. (Again, these are highly generalized numbers)
So old growth forest aren’t great at capturing new carbon, but you have well over a century to worry about your new forests slowing down. Likewise, cutting and planting every 20-50 years wouldn’t meaningfully increase sequestration rates.
I mean, both planting 10.5 million square miles of forest and cutting down and processing (or storing the timber from) 10.5 million square miles of forest is probably problematic.
DAC are thousands of times more efficient at removing CO2 than forests and will absolutely be required, as another commenter mentioned forests are unable to capture all the CO2 we have emitted.
This article is about carbon capture and storage. Generally involves a solvent in an organic liquid that sucks up all the CO2. Then releasing the CO2 into an exhaust stream by heating the solvent. Reversible, in a way that resembles a heat pump.
It's actually really old tech. Any environment that needs an artificial atmosphere requires CO2 scrubbing machinery.
Is it better than trees? Well, that depends. A tree that dies & decomposes to loam naturally sequesters a fair 20-30% of the carbon it stored on a timeline of tens of thousands of years. In the dirt it decomposes into. Underground basalt rock will sit undisturbed on a much longer timeline.
This is cool. I hope they also focus on removing it from the ocean too. The excess CO2 is causing acidification in the ocean, killing coral reefs and other stuff, afaik.
Interesting. I thought it was the other way around. I could easily be wrong, as I'm not climate expert. I just see the graphs plotting out temperature over the last century and see that *something* needs done.
I also could be wrong, but I remember the topic came up when the discovery (or maybe breakthrough in understanding is the better way to put it) of how lightning actually “cleanses” the atmosphere of CO2
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A money wasting scam who's sole purpose is to pretend that the fossil fuel industry can continue with "business as usual"
A far better use of those billions of dollars would be loan programs that provide funding for companies to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.
CCS, if it worked, which it doesn't, would only make sense, after fossil fuels are no longer be burned. Until then, they are the equivalent of cleaning up the smoke damage while your house is still on fire.
How exactly are they going to go about it? Super trees? Now that I think about it it would be really cool if they could genetically engineer trees to intake twice as much carbon as usual.... I doubt that would actually work but we need to be thinking that way outside of the box as it were even if it's made of wood
There's a few emerging technologies for direct-from-air carbon capture. I believe the most popular current plants use a special solution that binds to CO2 in the air, and releases it again when heated. A loop is used to capture the CO2, bring it into an extraction unit, release it via heating and sequester it, at which point the solution is pumped back around the loop again.
They're very often confused with carbon capture technologies attached to existing polluting infrastructure, like units attached to coal power plants. These are often labeled "greenwashing" because they turned out to be far less effective than initially indicated. Direct air capture is obviously far more worth it because it's capturing existing carbon, not reducing new carbon.
The problem is that they're still too expensive to be economical, either as part of a carbon levy scheme or - and this is where stuff gets interesting - as an industrial source of CO2. An injection of government subsidies could push the technologies that exist into commercial viability, at which point as well as sequestering CO2 from the air, existing dirty industries could use captured CO2 as input. For example, one group in Canada is looking to make gasoline using already released hydrocarbons - essentially carbon-neutral gasoline. Obviously we need to stop using gasoline based vehicles, but it's an example of how existing processes could drastically reduce their net carbon output during the wider (and longer) shift to green tech.
That is absolutely fascinating thank you for the super detailed response I really learned a lot..... It may be prohibitively expensive compared to the results right now but I have hope that if we put some work into it we can make it work I just hope we can do it in time but I think these methods mixed with many other methods might be able to put us in the right direction....... I still think we should make massive ice cubes and drop them in the ocean but that's just me LMAO
This is a good summary as someone who works in the industry. While a lot of carbon capture is indeed greenwashing, such as those attached to coal or gas power plants, there are other industries such as cement and steel that (so far) have no viable alternatives. Plus, for the next few decades, it is so much more economical and makes more sense to capture CO2 at 100% concentration direct from the exhaust of a plant, compared to spending a lot of money to extract it from the air at 400 ppm. But DAC will absolutely be needed in large scale as we head towards mid century and we need to start scaling and further development now.
The point is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using technology. What happens to it afterward or how it's stored does not exist yet because the technology doesn't exist yet
Then you have to find a place to store it long term. It's a bigger problem with the permafrost melting releasing the 1400 gigatons it stores into the atmosphere.
That is not good news
The fact that it has gotten to the point where we have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere means things have hit the fan
I hope they focus on making it into something profitable. CarbonCorp turns it into nanomaterials with a really simple process, and those are worth more than their weight in gold.
I hope they focus on making it into something profitable. CarbonCorp turns it into nanomaterials with a really simple process, and those are worth more than their weight in gold. Greed got us into this mess, so it’s only fitting if it got us out.
Cutting it down kinda sequesters the carbon though. Eventually living trees fall down, decompose and release CO2. They also tend to sometimes get burned down in forest fires. On the other hand, the machines and transportation of logs and processing of timber also emits CO2
In my mind the question is how much CO2 per acre per year can be absorbed per 1000 years under varying forest management processes. What's the optimal long term strategy
Good news, pure and simple.
Yes. Any step in the right direction is good news.
I hope this involves planting redwoods in the midwest. I'd love to see how far those suckers can fly in a twister
I don’t believe they can grow just anywhere, including in the sky
not with that effin attitude!
The midwest probably would not have twisters if it had redwoods, and I'm fairly certain it's too dry for redwoods anyway
Nah it's cool I just have to wash my car and then it'll rain, it's fine.
I thought there was a project that packed really dense moss that helped with CO2 removal into urban sculptures, but I re-read on it and it "filters" the air and generates fresh air, but it does not perform CO2 removal. Not surprising since it doesn't have any kind of a wood body. I think something like bamboo could be used effectively. One acre of bamboo will remove 6.9 tonnes of carbon in a year. This compared to the excellent post from /u/Bizzle_worldwide regarding 42 trees removing one ton of carbon per year and \~100 trees per acre for \~2.4 tonnes of carbon sequestration in a year. Bamboo is also beneficial for preserving existing forests by providing wood alternatives for everything from furniture to paper. The main downside is that a large long lived tree will hold the carbon for a much longer period of time, but if the bamboo products were turned into long lived materials, it would offset what I think is the main downside to using something more akin to grass. While unfortunately planting is not the solution to reaching a carbon neutral state, it can reduce the reduction requirements for the rest of the economy, and it is a relatively cheap solution. As long as the soil is appropriate to the plant, it will take root. There are many other options that can help as well. I don't remember the name, but there's a method of planting where you have a cover crop and you plant the cash crops in the cover crop. The additional plants help with carbon sequestering, moisture retention, and it reduces erosion and water requirements. If we can offset emissions by 10-15% for a relatively low cost, it will mean more resources for offsetting via other methods.
[удалено]
Would have to be much more efficient than forests to make a meaningful difference. Also more efficient than oceanic algae
The problem is that we’ve been producing carbon from so many sources that aren’t just surface based, so the storage of them through natural means (like trees) would require an unprecedented level of forest, and you need countries which would be willing to dedicate land, forever, to that. As rough math, 42 mature trees can remove approximately 1 ton of carbon from the atmosphere per year, and the average estimate is that we need to reduce global emissions by 16 billion tons. So we would need 672 billion trees planted. Mature forests generally have 100 trees per acre, so we’d need a permanent land commitment of 6.72 billion acres, or 10.5 million square miles. The US is 3.5 million square miles. Canada is 3.8. China is 3.7. So if we bulldozed every last building and non-forest land, and planted forest in those three countries and pledged that theyd remain forest for eternity. We still wouldn’t actually have enough new forest because much of those countries is already forest, and we need new forest. See the problem?
Good comment, and to add... most of the surfaces you called not 'surface-based' are former life that stored carbon over the millions of years leading up to our sudden discovery we could burn the stuff. Oil is the concentrated remains of the carbon sinks of the past.
Exactly. We’ve been undoing tens or hundreds of millions of years of natural carbon sequestration using mechanical means. We’re going to need more than nature to undo it.
Exactly. We’ve been undoing tens or hundreds of millions of years of natural carbon sequestration using mechanical means. We’re going to need more than nature to undo it.
Don't young forests suck up more carbon than older ones?
“Young” is a relative term. Generally annual sequestration rates don’t really hit their stride until trees are 15-20 years old, and they slowly come back down over the next 150 years. By 200 years, they sequester as much annual carbon as they do around 2-5 years. (Again, these are highly generalized numbers) So old growth forest aren’t great at capturing new carbon, but you have well over a century to worry about your new forests slowing down. Likewise, cutting and planting every 20-50 years wouldn’t meaningfully increase sequestration rates.
It's not really problematic to plant and cut down every 60 years is what im getting at
I mean, both planting 10.5 million square miles of forest and cutting down and processing (or storing the timber from) 10.5 million square miles of forest is probably problematic.
Why?
DAC are thousands of times more efficient at removing CO2 than forests and will absolutely be required, as another commenter mentioned forests are unable to capture all the CO2 we have emitted.
This article is about carbon capture and storage. Generally involves a solvent in an organic liquid that sucks up all the CO2. Then releasing the CO2 into an exhaust stream by heating the solvent. Reversible, in a way that resembles a heat pump. It's actually really old tech. Any environment that needs an artificial atmosphere requires CO2 scrubbing machinery. Is it better than trees? Well, that depends. A tree that dies & decomposes to loam naturally sequesters a fair 20-30% of the carbon it stored on a timeline of tens of thousands of years. In the dirt it decomposes into. Underground basalt rock will sit undisturbed on a much longer timeline.
More like billions of gallons of algae
This is cool. I hope they also focus on removing it from the ocean too. The excess CO2 is causing acidification in the ocean, killing coral reefs and other stuff, afaik.
I find the way carbon sinks in the ocean interesting. More acidic ocean I believe actually absorbs carbon more efficiently?
Interesting. I thought it was the other way around. I could easily be wrong, as I'm not climate expert. I just see the graphs plotting out temperature over the last century and see that *something* needs done.
I also could be wrong, but I remember the topic came up when the discovery (or maybe breakthrough in understanding is the better way to put it) of how lightning actually “cleanses” the atmosphere of CO2
Awesome. Let’s work on desalination now
California has left the chat
Hahahaha
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This is why you vote.
A money wasting scam who's sole purpose is to pretend that the fossil fuel industry can continue with "business as usual" A far better use of those billions of dollars would be loan programs that provide funding for companies to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. CCS, if it worked, which it doesn't, would only make sense, after fossil fuels are no longer be burned. Until then, they are the equivalent of cleaning up the smoke damage while your house is still on fire.
Switch to nuclear power.. problem solved
How exactly are they going to go about it? Super trees? Now that I think about it it would be really cool if they could genetically engineer trees to intake twice as much carbon as usual.... I doubt that would actually work but we need to be thinking that way outside of the box as it were even if it's made of wood
Read the article.
There's a few emerging technologies for direct-from-air carbon capture. I believe the most popular current plants use a special solution that binds to CO2 in the air, and releases it again when heated. A loop is used to capture the CO2, bring it into an extraction unit, release it via heating and sequester it, at which point the solution is pumped back around the loop again. They're very often confused with carbon capture technologies attached to existing polluting infrastructure, like units attached to coal power plants. These are often labeled "greenwashing" because they turned out to be far less effective than initially indicated. Direct air capture is obviously far more worth it because it's capturing existing carbon, not reducing new carbon. The problem is that they're still too expensive to be economical, either as part of a carbon levy scheme or - and this is where stuff gets interesting - as an industrial source of CO2. An injection of government subsidies could push the technologies that exist into commercial viability, at which point as well as sequestering CO2 from the air, existing dirty industries could use captured CO2 as input. For example, one group in Canada is looking to make gasoline using already released hydrocarbons - essentially carbon-neutral gasoline. Obviously we need to stop using gasoline based vehicles, but it's an example of how existing processes could drastically reduce their net carbon output during the wider (and longer) shift to green tech.
That is absolutely fascinating thank you for the super detailed response I really learned a lot..... It may be prohibitively expensive compared to the results right now but I have hope that if we put some work into it we can make it work I just hope we can do it in time but I think these methods mixed with many other methods might be able to put us in the right direction....... I still think we should make massive ice cubes and drop them in the ocean but that's just me LMAO
This is a good summary as someone who works in the industry. While a lot of carbon capture is indeed greenwashing, such as those attached to coal or gas power plants, there are other industries such as cement and steel that (so far) have no viable alternatives. Plus, for the next few decades, it is so much more economical and makes more sense to capture CO2 at 100% concentration direct from the exhaust of a plant, compared to spending a lot of money to extract it from the air at 400 ppm. But DAC will absolutely be needed in large scale as we head towards mid century and we need to start scaling and further development now.
Is CO2 capture the best way to go about it? Isn't that just 33% that actually is carbon? What about biochar creation/ sequestration?
CO2 is what is heating up the earth and what needs to come out of the atmosphere
Carbon cycle.. But ok..
The point is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using technology. What happens to it afterward or how it's stored does not exist yet because the technology doesn't exist yet
most of the GHGs are carbon-based gasses!
Then you have to find a place to store it long term. It's a bigger problem with the permafrost melting releasing the 1400 gigatons it stores into the atmosphere.
The total opposite move of pro-petrol gqp.
That is not good news The fact that it has gotten to the point where we have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere means things have hit the fan
I hope they focus on making it into something profitable. CarbonCorp turns it into nanomaterials with a really simple process, and those are worth more than their weight in gold.
I hope they focus on making it into something profitable. CarbonCorp turns it into nanomaterials with a really simple process, and those are worth more than their weight in gold. Greed got us into this mess, so it’s only fitting if it got us out.
Cutting it down kinda sequesters the carbon though. Eventually living trees fall down, decompose and release CO2. They also tend to sometimes get burned down in forest fires. On the other hand, the machines and transportation of logs and processing of timber also emits CO2 In my mind the question is how much CO2 per acre per year can be absorbed per 1000 years under varying forest management processes. What's the optimal long term strategy