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Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

bloomberg.com

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Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#31

Post by wjnc »

eitland wrote: post #14
joshAg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carbon becomes part of the wood of the tree. After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned.

> After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned. To nitpick: or if it decomposes in other ways.

And what if we bury it? Can we do landfills with the trunks of these trees, like filling up old brown coal mines? This was something that I was thinking about while driving past a few former mines in Germany. Great places to fill up with decomposables. At a certain point the top layer will stop the bottom layers CO2 from leaking, I expect?

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#32

Post by dlazar »

mal10c wrote: post #4

I think this is a neat idea but have one question. I'm not a chemist but am curious what happens to all that carbon after it's taken in by the tree. Does that carbon become something else? Or does it just kind of hang out in the tree until the tree dies? Once the tree dies, does all that carbon just go back to the atmosphere again? Thanks for any insight!

Also not a chemist, but here's my basic understanding.

The tree absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and combines it with water (H2O) from the soil to produce more complex chemical compounds (such as carbohydrates). This process uses sunlight as the source of energy, and is better known as photosynthesis. The chemical compounds thus produced are used by the tree as structural material (the wood), or as stored energy (basically, reverting the photosynthesis reaction, aka "burning", releases the energy).

If the tree matter gets consumed by animals, those animals are going to use the stored energy, and ultimately re-release the stored carbon as CO2. If the tree just dies and is allowed to decompose, bacteria and other microorganisms will do the same: they'll eat the carbohydrates that the tree produced, and they'll breathe out the resulting CO2. If the tree is burned as fuel, the CO2 gets re-emitted directly.

So, to truly remove that CO2 from the atmosphere, the tree needs to be felled once it's stopped growing, and the resulting wood stored someplace where it can't be decomposed by microorganisms. Burying it is one solution to this (and this is what happened during the carboniferous era, when much of our coal and oil got created: dead trees fell in shallow swamps and were quickly buried under a layer of silt which prevented the decomposition).

Again, I'm no expert, so I'm happy to stand corrected if I've made any mistakes above.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#33

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mal10c wrote: post #4

I think this is a neat idea but have one question. I'm not a chemist but am curious what happens to all that carbon after it's taken in by the tree. Does that carbon become something else? Or does it just kind of hang out in the tree until the tree dies? Once the tree dies, does all that carbon just go back to the atmosphere again? Thanks for any insight!

Interesting tidbit about this. The reason we have so much fossil fuel in the first place is because of what happened during the Carboniferous era. Trees evolved the capability to produce lignin, the 'woody' material in trees. However, it took millions of more years for microorganisms to evolve the ability to decompose lignin.

So instead of what happens today when a tree dies and rots, the tree died and just piled up in the forest. I always think it's amazing to imagine what a forest must have looked like during the Carboniferous with all these dead trees just piled high. Trees were essentially like today's plastic: non-biodegradable refuse that stuck around for millennia. Eventually all those trees got buried and turned into fossil fuels (mostly coal).

And, interestingly, this process let to huge climate change back then, too - basically the reverse of what's happening now (and at a much slower pace). Trees sucked all this carbon out of the air and reduced global temperatures by about 8C.

Edit: One other note - there were of course still forest fires during the Carboniferous. It's believed they would have been incredible raging infernos with so much undecomposed combustible material.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#34

Post by frankbreetz »

eanzenberg wrote: post #24

The best thing we can do for the earth is take a lot of the money being spent and plant tons of trees, then use the wood as co2 storage in the form of furniture.

Isn't most furniture already made out of wood? I'd imagine if we made every single piece of furniture out of wood it wouldn't make a bit of difference. We need to make things out of wood that are not already made of wood, like skyscrapers and large buildings. If that's not enough we need to cut down trees and bury them so they don't decompose and then plant more. I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that needs to be removed.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#35

Post by ricefield »

Not an expert in this... at 103 metric tons of CO2 per acre per year, how many acres of this do we need to plan to make an impact?

Look like according to this random Medium blog, we should aim to remove 10B metrics tons every year? So that's 970MM acres? https://medium.com/@friedmann2/going-negative-time-to-suck-i...

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#36

Post by bumby »

ksec wrote: post #27

I thought Bamboo was the fastest growing tree? I remember it grows more than an inch every hour. Since no one has done mass planting of Bamboo, there must be some down fall that wasn't well known? Edit: Turns out Bamboo is classified as plant. But the question remains the same.

I think you mean classified as a grass

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#37

Post by nielsole »

ksec wrote: post #27

I thought Bamboo was the fastest growing tree? I remember it grows more than an inch every hour. Since no one has done mass planting of Bamboo, there must be some down fall that wasn't well known? Edit: Turns out Bamboo is classified as plant. But the question remains the same.

Maybe because they are hollow they can store relatively little considered their height?

Also: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/160324-bambo...

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#38

Post by EquallyJust »

ksec wrote: post #27

I thought Bamboo was the fastest growing tree? I remember it grows more than an inch every hour. Since no one has done mass planting of Bamboo, there must be some down fall that wasn't well known? Edit: Turns out Bamboo is classified as plant. But the question remains the same.

Don't know too much about this but I can speculate.

Bamboo is hollow so probably doesn't capture as much carbon compared to a solid tree. You can also use the wood from trees in a lot more places than bamboo.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#39

Post by jaclaz »

One of the firms referenced in the Bloomberg article actually offers the plants (and opportunities of investment in them) and has a number of answers to the questions asked in the thread:

https://worldtree.info/empress-tree/

Though I have personally never heard about anything actually manufactured with the actual "empress" or "princess" timber.

It seems like in Japan it has a number of tradititonal uses, the family is that of the Paulownia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#40

Post by iovrthoughtthis »

Don’t we need to take into account the local ecology? If we deploy one single plant to “solve” our carbon capture needs aren’t we both going to reduce biodiversity (they out compete local species) and set up a single point of failure? (Like banana trees now)
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