with this money you can terraform Sahara desert by planting a billion trees
What is this species of tree that can grow without water or nutrients?
$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
71–80 of 469 posts
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#72Why cant we just plant more trees? Or let the trees we have grow bigger, to soak up all that extra carbon?
Yeah this seems like the obvious thing. If everyone stopped mowing their lawns for 20 years and let trees run wild instead, would that make a dent? What about that plus turn half of our roads into parks? Anyone got a link to a good open source interactive simulator?
In 2016, the US burned 728 million tons of coal: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coal-works
That's one country, for one year. The world has been burning coal for more than a century. To get back to preindustrial CO2 levels, all that coal needs to be unburned and buried again. That's the scale of the problem.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#73Why cant we just plant more trees? Or let the trees we have grow bigger, to soak up all that extra carbon?
>"Why cant we just plant more trees?" We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cyc…
Well, most of the carbon in the ground that we're burning are long-buried trees, right? I wonder what it would take to just bury a lot of trees and let them regrow naturally.
This paper has some interesting ideas: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used quarries. Just need to figure out a scalable way to ensure anaerobic conditions to help prevent CO2 release on breakdown.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#74Here's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the ground.
How about paying a $1m/head bounty for every dead oilman the local militia can bring me? Seems more economical.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#75How is the answer to “carbon removal” not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? It seems implausible to me that any chemical carbon extraction process has superior externalities to just planting more trees or something.
There is no silver bullet. It has to be a combination of: 1) Reduce emissions to zero (will take some time). 2) Use more natural solutions (trees, algae, kelp etc. - will also take time). 3) Enhance natural solutions with tech (enhanced weathering). 4) Develop carbon capture tech to reverse the damage done by the fossil-fuel burning tech.
Presumably entrants will skew towards #4 as we don't have as many solutions there, and depending on how quickly you could scale up a good one, it would be quicker than 1-3, you'd expect.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Why cant we just plant more trees?" We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cyc…
Well, most of the carbon in the ground that we're burning are long-buried trees, right? I wonder what it would take to just bury a lot of trees and let them regrow naturally. This paper has some interesting ideas: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0... My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used q…
You also need to find a way to speed up tree growth rate by 10x or 100x for this solution to be effective before most of the damage is done.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#77There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…
Also, planting trees sequesters co2 into the biosphere. That is not good enough, we need to be sequestering co2 into the geosphere if we want to remove it from the equation
I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere here already by someone, but I've always thought that converting felled 'sequestration stock' to bio-char and making terra preta out of it would be win-win-win, as it could then be used to improve desertified land.
As much as CO2 emissions befear me, so too does increasingly poor topsoil, globally.
- ed
I'm not even sure we'd need to wait for trees to mature either - we just need work with whatever plant absorbs the most CO2. Perhaps algae, even?
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Why cant we just plant more trees?" We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cyc…
Well, most of the carbon in the ground that we're burning are long-buried trees, right? I wonder what it would take to just bury a lot of trees and let them regrow naturally. This paper has some interesting ideas: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0... My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used q…
My understanding is that when wood first appeared on Earth nothing was able to decompose all of that cellulose for millions of years until microbes evolved a way to break the molecules apart and feed on them. I don't know if simply burying the trees is enough to sequester it away now that wood decomposes so readily.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#79I wonder if there's any possibilities in engineering a quick-growing trash tree that would have a higher percentage of mineralization, or properties that facilitate quick pseudo-petrification, so that it can be embedded in concrete without worrying about rot. They would serve the same purpose as rebar, but with greater volume meaning less concrete needed. And it would be a near-permanent carbon sink.
That seems much more complicated than just planting some fast growing plant (eg. bamboo), converting it to charcoal, and burying it somewhere. That achieves the same carbon sequestration effect, without having to worry about petrification.
Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
#80How is the answer to “carbon removal” not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? It seems implausible to me that any chemical carbon extraction process has superior externalities to just planting more trees or something.
All the fossil fuels we've been burning is introducing carbon back into the biosphere. The key to carbon removal is to sequester it back somewhere where it won't be circulating in nature. It's not enough to plant more trees, as those new trees' carbon will just continue to cycle through the environment.
Why do I want to prevent carbon from circulating in nature? I like plants and animals and I want more of them.