Comment by IvanK_net
4 days ago
We could plant, cut down and burn trees for the energy, in a circle, and keep carbon levels in our atmosphere the same, instead of digging up new carbon from the ground and burning it. We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.
This consumes far more land area than we have available.
The first blast furnaces were indeed fuelled this way, from locally sourced charcoal, but coal/coke took over due to requiring far less effort (energy!) to extract.
Going by https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy... , the UK's single large scale biomass power plant is fuelled by over sixteen million hectares (160,000km^2) or approximately one Wisconsin. If we wanted to power the whole UK electricity from biomass, we'd need ten Wisconsins. (Wisconsin, presumably, would have to find some other source of power in this scenario)
(of course, Drax wasn't built to burn imported biomass, it was built to burn locally extracted coal ...)
Drax uses about 12,000km^2, not 160,000km^2.
A slightly more useful land area is the United Kingdom itself, which is 243,000km^2. With this technique, it takes an area 1/19th the size of the UK to produce 4% of its energy.
This isn't a feasible approach to energy production, but it's an order of magnitude less bad than your figures have put forward.
> We will have to bury carbon back under the ground at some point.
Location doesn’t matter. Duration of storage matters. If we could find a way to lock it up in a building material that would be effective and useful.
It's not exactly turning CO2 into bricks, but there's a few applications of biochar as an additive to improve concrete, asphalt, particleboard, etc.
Yes. That's what my view is. If we cut down the trees, and burn them, we'll have the same level of C atoms in the atmosphere. If we keep using gas and oil coming under the ground, the number of C atoms will keep increasing.
Although I am not exactly sure about the ratio of the C atoms stored in the atmosphere, and C stored in trees, houses, but it seems to me the Logical move that we should stop getting gas and petrol from under the ground and start using trees and other plants instead.
Trees take too long to grow relative to how much is used in construction, let alone if it were used as a fuel vs coal.