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In a U.S. First, a Commercial Plant Starts Pulling Carbon From the Air
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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No. Carbon neutral isn’t enough. We are going to have to go carbon negative.
We can’t just take hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon and dump it into the atmosphere and leave it there to re-sequester itself. That’s going to take a long time to reverse enough to even buck the current trend of global warming, if we were able to just go carbon neutral today.
Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.
Coal only got there specifically because there was nothing evolved to eat lignin for a long time and dead trees piled up so high that dead trees on top ended up compressing their ancestors into it.
Crude only got there because plants and algae in shallow water died, mixed into sediment, rinse, repeat times a few million years, get compressed by the weight of all the layers above, and turn to crude.
The sequestration of ancient carbon wasn’t just by virtue of being plants, but what happened after those plants died.
It is a historically unprecedented and utterly necessary project. Only a combination of all of the above can even get us close. It's way too late to be choosy.
I keep hoping some smart environmentalist/entrepreneurs figure out more markets for sequestered carbon. For example how we can use more wood in construction. I just can't see the right kind of social change happening before it's too late so hopefully there's a way to capitalism our way out of this.
I essentially just said the same thing in another reply before I read this one.
I don’t think growing more trees for sequestering is, alone, going to work, due to the sheer scale. Growing trees itself is great. We should totally do that. But for the purpose of sequestering carbon long-term, it’s not that great.
Best we could hope for is a method to discover some new building material that we could manufacture directly from captured atmospheric carbon. Then there is a downstream market for it and the carbon gets “sequestered” as part of our economy of durable goods. Like an alternative to wood, or copper, PVC/PEX, or cement, or steel studs, or rubber, or concrete, or plastic, or hell even girders.
That also would buy us a decade or two, at least, to figure out how to effectively recycle said materials, and be free of a lot of industrial sources of ancient carbon.
Unless humans get involved and harvest and sequester the tree remains themselves.
Then there still is still a need to expend tons of energy disposing it in a way to not have it re-release in a few hundred thousand years.
The scale is insane to comprehend. We would essentially have to manufacture the equivalent of every pound of coal that’s ever been burned to get to pre-industrial levels, while also consuming as little fossil fuels as possible. I do not think it is possible to do so with trees alone unless we have a lot of cheap green power. Because ultimately some entity, be it government or corporation or philanthropist, will have to pay for it.
And then there is the issue of land rights for where you’re gonna dump all of the captured carbon. That’s a problem either way. I hope we start discovering some new post-space-age reclaimed-carbon-based building materials. That’s probably the best we could hope for. Then there is a huge downstream market for captured carbon which means way less ancient carbon being pulled up into the cycle, and hopefully we can get start regrowing back some old-growth forests and continue to sustainably harvest old wood.
I’m not poo-pooing this technology. It’s super important for us to invest and scale up carbon capture methods. But it can’t be expected to be immediately economically viable. It’s still very immature. Thats not a bad thing. That just means it needs time (and funding) to mature.
Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t saying it’s a good idea. But absent any fancy technology it’s not entirely impossible to plant fast growing trees, harvest them, and then bury them in a mine or at the bottom of a hypoxic body of water.
It would certainly have to be a global, multi-generational undertaking. But it looks like that’s going to be the case with every other solution as well.
I thought this hypothesis was disproved and it was some geological process that buried the trees? I remember there was a study about lignin content in other fossils and it was compatible with fungi decomposing wood.
The trees got buried in oxygen-free peat bogs where decomposers could not survive.