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Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

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Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#141

Post by modo_mario »

Klapaucius wrote: post #51
modo_mario wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. It's not really historical as in far in the past. The relatively recent bill pushed by Trump that gives massive tax credits for CO2 sequestration were a veiled subsidy(or whatever you wish to call it) towards extracting more oil with enhanced oil recovery.

Even if proposed for vicarious motives, the technology as such may still be the right way to go. From an environmental perspective, CO2 sequestration for EOR (enhanced oil recovery) makes little sense, other than reducing the carbon footprint of production a bit, demonstrating the storage principle and further developing key technology. What makes more sense is to use geological storage for CO2 captured from industri…

I feel like artificial DAC will be a pipedream. Especially when we can't even stop ourselves from emitting now which is ridiculously much easier I don't see us capturing co2 at 412ppm on an almost unfathomable scale.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#142

Post by shagie »

shagie wrote: post #71
kokojie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to vent the CO2 into space?

The earth is constantly 'venting' gas to space. This is known as atmospheric escape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape The earth is currently losing 3kg/s hydrogen and 50g/s of helium because that's what is in the upper atmosphere where a molecule can gain sufficient velocity to escape the orbit. The issue with CO2 is that it is a heavier gas and so takes more energy to escape and is also more likely t…

(since the 3kg/s and tons was bothering me...)

3kg/s is 95kt/year. The United States emits about 4,900,000kt/year of CO2.

Just wanted to get those rates on the same scale.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#144

Post by Floegipoky »

thechao wrote: post #139
Floegipoky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet your friend would be into mass "Earl comes by every year with a few buckets of native seed"- no closure, and definitely not sexy

I've been doing this to my lawn (central Texas): putting in a turf varietal of the native Texas Buffalo grass. This year, we had a 5ish month drought with a couple months of 105° daytime temps. My Buffalo went dormant; all of my neighbors' Bermuda died : the soil temp went too high for it. Soil temp death is something I've been warning people about for years. It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is…

Hopefully your neighbors see the difference and a few decide to take your lead!

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#146

Post by jaredhallen »

orthecreedence wrote: post #85
vanderZwan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim that they would be even more effective because they can grow incredibly fast.

I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really solve the problem. We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuri…

> We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuries).

Building soil organic matter does result in some amount of carbon remaining in the soil, and has the added benefit of increasing the productivity of the land. I imagine a phased approach where the first effort is to increase soil organic matter on a large scale, and then transition to using some of that improved soil to grow a second phase (maybe, trees, maybe hemp, maybe something else) to capture even more. It seems to me that widespread improvement of soil organic matter is the lower hanging fruit, so to speak.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#147

Post by ThinkBeat »

arbuge wrote: post #84
ThinkBeat wrote: post #83

Trees absorb while growing. Reach "max CO2" At which point you need to cut down the trees and plant the next generation. You somehow store the trees so they will not have any risk of releasing the CO2 again.(like if they burn) or at least that is was Neal Stephenson wrote in his latest book. (fiction is always great for scientific knowledge)

Building with the lumber from them is one way of storing them. Even that is not infinite though, though it could buy you a lot more time until renewables and possibly CCS become more viable.

True.

As long as you can keep the houses from catching fire. I do admit we have a lot of new knowledge and technologyy that radically improves fire security

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#148

Post by neves »

mountaintimefrm wrote: post #40

So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic car…

Weird article. Almost all of Amazon soil is very poor.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#149

Post by quixoticelixer- »

ajuc wrote: post #136
quixoticelixer- wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of fuel used by transporting 10,000 seedlings is easily sequestered by just one of them growing.

But it was growing already. The bottleneck is land allocated for trees, not the tree-planting procedure (in fact it's automatic once you have some trees in vicinity).

No, you get trees for planting from a nursery, not from the wild. And tree planting is not "automatic"

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#150

Post by quixoticelixer- »

westurner wrote: post #122
quixoticelixer- wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biochar is also intensive and only converts a relatively small amount of that carbon into stable charcoal.

Hemp is compostable, though because it's so tough, shredding and waiting for it to compost trades (vertical) space & time for far less energy use than biocharification unless it's waste heat from a different process. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) > Biomass feedstocks doesn't have a pivot table of conversion efficiencies?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... : > Biomass…

Composting oxidizes a lot of the carbon. And since you have to replant, harvest and fertilise everyyear it is a lot more intensive than forestry where you do that ever 30 (15-100) years
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