Comment by gus_massa
5 hours ago
I agree. Plants are not very efficient (1% or 2%) but they include packaging the CO2 in a stable form. You can store the grain or wood for long periods of times.
In this case, it looks like they get CO2 as a gas. It's cheaper because you don't have to use energy to undo the burning, but it's difficult to store for a long time.
(I'm not sure if someone tried to make a fake underground bog in abandoned mine. Just fill with wood and water to keep the oxygen low and make the wood decompose slowly.)
Take a look at "wood vault". 'Wood vaulting': A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of | Grist https://share.google/lS8xnMGEd1pMzlNg2 Economically not attractive but apparently very efficient in locking up CO2.
The problem with any scheme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is the incredible amount of carbon we've blown into the air in the last 150 years. Just look at the size of the machines we use to harvest coal. Essentially you'd need to have machines of similar size working for many decades to re-bury the carbon we extracted and burned. Who's gonna pay for that?
> stable form
Not really, forest fires happen and then a few hundred of years of sequestered CO2 gets released back in an instant.
Organic material with oxygen gas floating around is not stable.
Sequestering carbon into the ocean might be a better strategy. Not flammable and not subject to stupid capitalism effects around land prices.
The ocean has already absorbed 30% of the CO2 humanity has emitted. It causes issues: ocean acidity rises, which reduces plankton ability to grow. Plankton being the base of the ocean food chain, all ocean life gets impacted.
You'd need to find a way to sequester carbon without it leaching in the water.
https://marine.copernicus.eu/ocean-climate-portal/ocean-carb...