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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

#61

Post by jfengel »

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…

And they're going to have to think of something to do with that wood, if it's going to be part of a carbon reduction methodology. The trees don't live forever, and if they are left to rot or burn, they release all that CO2 back into the environment.

Lumber would be one use. So would charcoal, or paper. Or possibly even burying them. But either way, growing them is only half the battle.

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

#63

Post by Allower »

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #40

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)

Look who's being all logical over hear. pssh

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

#64

Post by crispyambulance »

tcgv wrote: post #50

> 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...

Empress trees certainly have some impressive specs, but no one plant is going to be the silver bullet.

Can we eventually take per capita carbon footprint down to a fraction of what it was in 2016? I think so, if the people can be convinced to elect sane leaders in the US and elsewhere.

Can vast regions in the USA and other countries be re-forested? Yes, if the willpower is there.

Is it worthwhile to develop artificial carbon sequestration facilities that operate on vast scales? Yep.

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

#65

Post by nathantotten »

tcgv wrote: post #50

> 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...

Presumably, some of that 103 tons are taken care of already by existing plants/trees.

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

#66

Post by soulofmischief »

__sy__ wrote: post #54
tcgv wrote: post #50

> 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...

I also did a similar back-of-the-envelop calculation the moment I saw this 103 tons per acre figures. Global CO2 emissions: ~40GT/year Area required: ~600K square miles This is approximately the size of the entire state of Alaska. Every year.

The year is 21XX. Multi-story "tree towers" pierce the skyline in every direction, competing for vertical supremacy with even the tallest of skyscrapers. Solar and other renewable energy sources provide the lighting necessary for the unexposed levels.

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

#67

Post by thinkcontext »

wjnc wrote: post #31
eitland wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

There are a lot of things wrong with this idea.

- Shallow burying the wood would not stop emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. Doing so would deprive it of oxygen which would cause the production of methane which is even worse than co2

- Wood is way less dense than coal so even if the idea worked you would only be able to store a fraction of the amount of co2

- Its hard to imagine the sheer scale of collecting all the wood to ship back to the mines. As mentioned wood is much less dense than coal so the effort to ship the wood to coal mines would be much more difficult than shipping the coal out of the mines. Not to mention that the wood would be coming from a much wider area.

There are ideas about burning wood to produce electricity, capturing the CO2 exhaust and pumping that deep underground. The concept is called Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

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

#68

Post by jaclaz »

coderintherye wrote: post #44
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.

Good, so you can maybe know (and tell us) what is manufactured from the actual timber (i.e. to whom it is sold and for what use).

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

#69

Post by dlazar »

radicalbyte wrote: post #43
dlazar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, I hadn't realized pyrolysis (used to produce biochar) does not release CO2. Seeing "pyro" (Greek for "fire") I had assumed oxidation. Sounds like a good technique for making the wood "indigestible" for microorganisms. I wonder if it's worth doing energywise, compared with just burying it somewhere.

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

#70

Post by bwanab »

__sy__ wrote: post #54
tcgv wrote: post #50

> 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...

I also did a similar back-of-the-envelop calculation the moment I saw this 103 tons per acre figures. Global CO2 emissions: ~40GT/year Area required: ~600K square miles This is approximately the size of the entire state of Alaska. Every year.

Not every year. Given the article's assertion of the 103 tons per acre per year, your Alaska of Empress trees would do it until they all die and presumably those forests will be maintained into perpetuity.
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