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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

#41

Post by beat »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #19
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!

It turns into wood! It's actually pretty amazing. I always though the physical substance of wood came out of the ground, through the roots, but in fact wood is made almost exclusively out of air. Trees are frozen air.

As an aside, that's also how we lose weight! When we burn away fat, we breathe it out.

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

#42

Post by sp332 »

xahrepap wrote: post #2

I planted one of these trees a few years ago and I think it's absolutely gorgeous. I can't get over how absolutely huge the leaves get. A lot of people hate them though, for the same reason outlined in the article: you can't kill them. Many consider them weeds.

All I remember about empress trees is the extremely strong smell of the flowers. Not very pleasant, to me.

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

#43

Post by radicalbyte »

dlazar wrote: post #32
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 (basi…

The easiest thing to do is to burn it into biochar and then either bury that or use it as a fertilizer on fields where it will get taken up in the soil.

There are some active land management techniques which do something similar with shrubs/plants/grasses which generate an enormous amount of soil and therefore trap a lot of carbon.

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

#44

Post by coderintherye »

jaclaz wrote: post #39

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 i…

World Tree is solid. I've talked with the owner and she has a good program set up with the farmers who grow the trees to get the capital they need to plant them and then revenue share from the sales. They raised money (about $1 million) on WeFunder earlier this year to help grow the program.

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

#45

Post by safog »

ricefield wrote: post #35

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...

That's like 6x the size of Texas. Can probably pull that off if everyone in the world pitches in.

Not sure what other effects like invasiveness of the species factor in.

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

#47

Post by sambroner »

ricefield wrote: post #35

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...

So like 2% of the worlds acreage...

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

#48

Post by slg »

ricefield wrote: post #35

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...

For people like me who don't have a good mental image of the size of 970 million acres, I did the math and that is just over half of the land in the continental United States.

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

#49

Post by rosser »

safog wrote: post #45
ricefield wrote: post #35

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...

That's like 6x the size of Texas. Can probably pull that off if everyone in the world pitches in. Not sure what other effects like invasiveness of the species factor in.

> The Empress Splendor tree belongs to the genus Paulownia. There are many different species of Paulownia and only one is classified as invasive, the Paulownia tomentosa (http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/plants/printree.shtml). We do not use this variety, choosing instead non-invasive species such as the Paulownia fortuneii.

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

#50

Post by tcgv »

> Empress trees (...) absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre.

In 2016, U.S. GHG emissions were 20.15 metric tons CO2-equivalent per person[1].

So basically each american would have to cultivate about 0.196 acre of empress trees (792 sq meters, or 8522 sq foot) to become carbon neutral.

[1] http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-environmental-footprint-f...

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