The quest to trap carbon in stone • Hacker News Board

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#71

Post by downWidOutaFite » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

gtsop wrote: post #70

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a kid's level of understanding you could also deduce that the carbon must end up in the plant matter, and that a forest's plant matter density doesn't increase forever. Old forests reach a carbon-neutral equilibrium (decaying plants release carbon). New forests suck up carbon until they reach that equilibrium. Another idea you could deduce from this is that if we remove plant matter from the forest, and lock tha…

I think more information is needed as input here. In pwrticular, what is the ratio of consumed/stored co2 in the photosynthesis process. My super basic understanding is that co2 is being used as fuel to convert energy into tree-food. By that logic i would expect at least a portion of the co2 to be actually transformed to other elements rather than stored as-is into the tree.

Your intuition is correct. The basic photosynthesis chemical formula is

  6CO2 + 6H2O + (light) ---> C6H12O6 + 6O2

The carbon goes from CO2 to C6H12O6, which are carbohydrates. The carbs are used by the plants for both energy and plant matter. The carbs that are used for energy are released back into the atmosphere as CO2 via cellular respiration. For carbon sequestration what matters is that the carbon in the plant matter stays fixed and doesn't get converted back into CO2 and released.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#72

Post by Schiendelman » Wed, Dec 29, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

victorbstan wrote: post #2

If you want a history of failed technologies just lol at a Wired back issues catalog.

And a treasure trove of ideas that weren’t ready for prime time but could be now/soon.

Re: The quest to trap carbon in stone

#73

Post by euroderf » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

MauranKilom wrote: post #43

gtsop wrote: post #25

When I was a kid my teacher told me trees convert co2 to oxygen. If I had to suck co2 out of the atmosphere I would plant more trees and stop choping/burning down existing ones. It is cheap, sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, but I guess this isn't tecky enough for today's world. Maybe if we add a wifi module on trees it would fix it.

Trees do that, but what happens when they die? Planting trees to fix CO2 emissions is like fixing the leak in your roof by putting more buckets below. Sure, it helps a bit, but it only buffers the water - you still need to dump it. Similarly, we need to get carbon out of the cycle. For reference, some googled numbers: - The amazon rainforest holds about 123 billion tons of carbon in total . - For the past decade, we'…

Now that we have consumed so many oil & gas deposits, do we simply have too much carbon ? Could a space elevator start taking loads of carbon (in whatever state of matter) and dispersing them into space ? It would be a testbed for Venus, which most definitely has way too much carbon. Dispose of a few zillion tons and then terraforming becomes more realistic.