With respect to trees, there is a group doing a trial run of sequestering carbon by burying biomass and then regrowing it, in this case burying trees and regrowing them. Gates is not the one leading the venture, but the Gates foundation is one of multiple supporters. The group raised about $6.6 million, which makes the 70 million acres number wildly off. Admittedly I have no idea how much it costs to buy access to forest land in the middle of nowhere and bury a bunch of trees, but I feel comfortable saying it is more than 10 cents / acre.
Sounds simple enough. Though definitely skeptical that it could be done that cheaply, without accidentally catching fire, and in time to stop anything.
Interesting article. It mentions the natural pickling of the wood to slow down decomposition. I wonder if this could be done cheaply even before burial - any slowing down would be beneficial.
You would have to capture it from the higher elevations (volume A) and then compress under pressure into a far smaller volume of B (this requires energy), which would then be stored underground (in a liquid state due to heat).
Unless we come up with a nifty way of creating energy from this process its dead on arrival (as the physics make no sense given the scale of the problem).
Plants have already come up with a way to store energy - photosynthesis. They capture carbon and have been doing so for time immemorial. Trees are not the most efficient - I believe there are some grasses that are faster (including seagrass). Whether it can be done at the right scale, along with other solutions, will be difficult.
It’s not really energy we need. It’s the negative of entropy. There has to be some corresponding source of entropy for us to gather the negative entropy and not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Plants really use solar negative entropy, harnessed off the increase in entropy from fusion in the sun’s core. They store that in sugar molecules, which basically reverses the burning process that creates CO2. Then they burn it again when they need it. It’s the intermediate storage that reduces CO2.
Carbon capture is always going to cost negative entropy (or energy that can do work for us). Maybe we can use it as a battery, for example in a hydrogen economy.
Long term carbon sequestration in basalt is a more stable approach. Energy budget-wise I don’t know the comparison. It seems as if CO2 levels are expected to decrease if human production is net zero. That means it is a question of how rapidly we get there.
I didn’t read that, but salt water preserves better doesn’t it? I mean, they find shipwrecks after many years, no? Aren’t most of those old boats made of wood? I thought the salt prevented a lot of microbial growth so the stuff that would eat at the wood just isn’t there.
Deep water , but not necessarily salty. Salt prolly has some effect, but Lake Superior will do fine. Just eliminate sun light and oxygen, that will slow the whole decomposition thing.