11–20 of 178 posts
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization
Also, use solar and wind ships instead. We don't need to sink more nuclear material...
I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2. Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical ero…
I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2. Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical ero…
Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.
wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
An approach like this could benefit from crops which are not productive for humanity otherwise, but which grows much faster and eats CO2 cheaper than trees.
Does that mean “stop replanting forests?” Absolutely not.
wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2. Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical ero…
You might kill off plants though frozen seeds are viable for an extended period, but the incoming ice age is going to preserve aglee until atmospheric CO2 returns to normal even if we’re talking millions of years.