Comment by deepsun
16 hours ago
Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea.
And grow new trees in their place of course.
Considering the scale that we are burning oil and gas, our sequestration efforts would have to be comparable. Continuing to burn oil and gas and trying to recapture it is madness, like realizing you are driving way too fast and instead of taking your foot off the gas, you keep flooring it but start applying the brakes.
If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.
If we just could stop burning that oil, that would be great.
It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.
Yes, agree. But I'm not sure direct air capture is more scalable than trees. Yes trees need to be moved, but at least they grow by themselves.
IMO DAC promises are either wishful thinking or a deliberate attempt to sabotage more aggressive climate policies.
Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.
So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).
There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.
You can make charcoal, you even get a little bit of energy out of it or can use the wood gas as chemical feedstock. It’s still completely impractical to scale to the gigatons we’d need to sequester.
Dumping wet wood--even very, very wet wood in a lake and sinking it to the bottom does not "remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem". It does not remove any fresh water from the ecosystem.
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The more likely candidate is mineral based, because yes trees are hard to scale this way.