5 ms·

The best long-term carbon sequestration medium we have is wood. It is the slow and unsexy algorithm of: Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be caref

The best long-term carbon sequestration medium we have is wood. It is the slow and unsexy algorithm of: Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be careful not to burn them. Repeat

stevenmays 8y ago
I was under the impression it was phytoplankton, but I can't seem to find a source.
lbenes 8y ago
Your theory sounds good until you consider the practical aspects of the last step: > Be careful not to burn them. Repeat So what do you do with the wood? A billion years ago, your plan would have worked out brilliantly. Some say it's where our oil came from. But now we have fungus among us that evolved to rapidly turn your wood right back into CO2. Unless you sterilize the wood and bury it deep in the ground where it will never be exposed to air or spores, you're right back to square one. Also there's the logistics and carbon footprint of burying and sterilizing the wood. You're not the first person to think of this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/
- mrfusion 8y ago
  Could we mass pressure treat wood to prevent it from being eaten?
  - lettergram 8y ago
    That only works for a period of time depending on conditions. In this case, even a few hundred years wouldn't be good enough.
    - lbenes 8y ago
      Hundred? If the wood is touching soil, try a few decades at best. I just replaced an old rotted out deck that was all pressure treated lumber. Also EPA considers it a hazardous waste. https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chromated-arsenicals-cca https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chro...
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    Sure, if you want to trade one ecological disaster for another.
- coryrc 8y ago
  Just build structures with it, cover with tile or metal to keep the water off, and it will last thousands of years. See Nara, Japan for examples.
  - 101km 8y ago
    From what I've seen in Nara they actually ritualistically rebuild the wooden structures every couple of decades or when there is a fire.
    - novembermike 8y ago
      Yeah, IIRC almost none of the old Japanese wooden buildings are original. They all have a strong ship of Theseus theme going on, but philosophically the Japanese tend to view the building as the place and purpose and layout and not the individual boards that are used to build it so it doesn't get communicated.
- petre 8y ago
  One can use it to build hempcrete homes. Instead of burying it, one would encase the wood frame structure into a hydraulic lime + hemp hurd mixture (cemented single stud framing). The hemp also sequestrates CO2, the lime keeps everything fungus free and further absorbs CO2 from the air as the walls cure. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete
- EGreg 8y ago
  I think about this topic seriously, but reading what you wrote made me realize this rhymes really well: humungous fungus among us and I just had to point it out :)
  - MrMid 8y ago
    But does it rhyme in both British and American English? Just wondering as English is not my first language.
- colordrops 8y ago
  Keep growing them?
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  A well built and maintained wooden house should last over 300 years. There are such even in North America. It requires massive timber though. And to get that on a larger scale, you need good long term forest management policies. Plan for something else than paper or chipboard or glulam. So, not a technical problem, but a political one.
  - endymi0n 8y ago
    I think the direction is good, the conclusion not so much. Nobody has the use or space for a couple hundred timber houses per person on the planet to cope with the current emissions. But if executed correctly (Drones sowing and harvesting millions of tons of fast-growing wood / switchgrass per year) and then correcty getting rid of it so it can't decompose (i.e. probably drying and/or sterilizing it), it might solve carbon capture. That being said, it all involves lots of space, mineral fertilizer and moving parts — on top it might be disastrous to any animal ecosystem trying to get hold in those woods. I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off with stationary carbon capture stations eventually.
    - Gravityloss 8y ago
      It's only going to be one part of the puzzle, at best. But replacing concrete, steel and aluminum, all causing large CO2 emissions while the raw material is created, should be a benefit. Anyway, you can also store a lot of the carbon just as forest, though it's more of a "one time" use of the land. Trees can also live for hundreds of years. And the soil can also store carbon. At least over here, large trees can often survive forest fires too. But it requires changed policy, it's not a technological problem.
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      True. But there are plenty of times currently where plastic could be replaced with wood. From broomstick handles to sporks, we use a lot of plastic that doesn't have to be plastic. Cost is a consideration. But plastic over the long term has a cost, that isn't factored into the manufacturing+sales cost. I'm not suggesting this would solve the problem. That single magic bullet doesn't exist. But it can't hurt either.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Swamps or bogs may be more efficient on a net fixation basis. Anaerobic deposition may better preserve the carbon as well. I'm not immediately finding a comparison of various ecosystems, though there's this on Indonesian swamps: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/004565359390068G https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0045653593... And: "Peatlands only cover about 3 percent of the Earth but they accumulate more carbon than tropical rainforests," says biogeochemist Nancy Dise of Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "In terms of sitting there kind of quietly year after year packing away massive amounts of carbon, nothing tops these peatlands." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peat-and-repeat-rewetting-carbon-sinks/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peat-and-repeat-r...
rsync 8y ago
"Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be careful not to burn them. Repeat" I don't think this pencils out. We use quite a lot of machinery and trucks and electricity to build with and it's not obvious that the carbon sequestered by the wood in a structure is larger than the amount of carbon expended in all aspects of the building of it. In fact, I suspect it might be quite a bit off ... a dry 2x4 weighs very little and there is a lot of driving and idling and generating and power usage involved in building.
- tim333 8y ago
  Clean solar/wind energy with batteries? The OP did say long term. Also wood buildings can look cool https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wood+buildings&num=30&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiYmf3Hwd7aAhWFq48KHTjnAeIQsAQINw&biw=1093&bih=518 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wood+buildings&num=30&tbm=... and maybe our future AI robots can build them.
- DrPhish 8y ago
  Only factoring in the manufacturing cost (that is, not including the cost to haul to site and use) wood products are solidly carbon positive [1]. Lumber harvesting, hauling and processing is surprisingly efficient: It's a cutthroat business with razor thin margins. The more important aspect is that something else would have been used instead. Each building that is of wood construction is one that wasn't built primarily with steel or concrete. Also, effects of scale can be significant. As a simple example, there is about 200 billion kg of carbon sequestered in the contiguous US just in wooden telephone poles. If you can find a widescale use that makes economic sense, you make more immediate sinks. If you can also find ways of long-term sequestering the waste as it enters end of life, you can make ongoing gains in the CO2 balance. [1] - http://articles.extension.org/sites/default/files/CIWP%20pub%20Taylor.pdf http://articles.extension.org/sites/default/files/CIWP%20pub...
danieltillett 8y ago
It is actually better to turn the wood into biochar and put it back into the soil.
- cschwarm 8y ago
  Indeed! However, we do not know how long biochar lasts when used as a soil amendment [eg. 1]. Also, it's only useful in this way when loaded and applied to poor soil in the tropics [2]. For long term storage of CO2, it might be better to just bury the main products of pyrolysis (biochar and pyrolysis oil) where hard coal and the oil once used to be - deep in the earth. Burying both products should also make it cheaper (from a carbon mitigation point of view), since it's hard to make useful products from the pyrolysis oil. The biochar also doesn't need to be as clean as when used for soil. One can even pyrolyse old tires (and possibly plastic). The problem is, of course, that there are no long-term studies about the stability of biochar (and the bio-oil) in deep layers. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcbb.12266 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcbb.12266 [2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd/meta http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd/m...
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    The reference you provide says 556 years. It is actually lasts far longer the deeper you put the biochar in the soil since we do know that breakdown requires oxygen and/or UV light. In some soils the average age of the carbon is 5000 years. The best way to implement this is by slash-and-char of the tropical forests. I have done the calculations and using less than 30% of te tropical forests we can pull out all the CO2 being addded from human activity. It would also create a viable industry in some of the most poor regions in the world.
    - ianai 8y ago
      Would it be feasible to do something similar with ocean water? I’m thinking Northern California or even south - somewhere trees aren’t prevelant already and without using scarce water.
    - 8y ago
pfdietz 8y ago
The problem with wood is that it's not in a thermodynamic minimum energy state. React with oxygen, or thermally decompose to lighter hydrocarbons -- and you will get CO2 coming back. In contrast, the carbonate minerals from the reaction of CO2 with these silicates ARE thermodynamically stable. Even if left exposed on the surface of the Earth they will not release CO2 back into the atmosphere.
nanomonkey 8y ago
Actually partially burning the wood and creating charcoal is a better means of carbon sequestration. Terra preta, also known as biochar, is thought to last about 10,000 years in the soil.

The best long-term carbon sequestration medium we have is wood. It is the slow and unsexy algorithm of: Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be careful not to burn them. Repeat

stevenmays 8y ago

I was under the impression it was phytoplankton, but I can't seem to find a source.

lbenes 8y ago

Your theory sounds good until you consider the practical aspects of the last step: > Be careful not to burn them. Repeat So what do you do with the wood? A billion years ago, your plan would have worked out brilliantly. Some say it's where our oil came from. But now we have fungus among us that evolved to rapidly turn your wood right back into CO2. Unless you sterilize the wood and bury it deep in the ground where it will never be exposed to air or spores, you're right back to square one. Also there's the logistics and carbon footprint of burying and sterilizing the wood. You're not the first person to think of this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/

mrfusion 8y ago
Could we mass pressure treat wood to prevent it from being eaten?
- lettergram 8y ago
  That only works for a period of time depending on conditions. In this case, even a few hundred years wouldn't be good enough.
  - lbenes 8y ago
    Hundred? If the wood is touching soil, try a few decades at best. I just replaced an old rotted out deck that was all pressure treated lumber. Also EPA considers it a hazardous waste. https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chromated-arsenicals-cca https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chro...
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  Sure, if you want to trade one ecological disaster for another.
coryrc 8y ago
Just build structures with it, cover with tile or metal to keep the water off, and it will last thousands of years. See Nara, Japan for examples.
- 101km 8y ago
  From what I've seen in Nara they actually ritualistically rebuild the wooden structures every couple of decades or when there is a fire.
  - novembermike 8y ago
    Yeah, IIRC almost none of the old Japanese wooden buildings are original. They all have a strong ship of Theseus theme going on, but philosophically the Japanese tend to view the building as the place and purpose and layout and not the individual boards that are used to build it so it doesn't get communicated.
petre 8y ago
One can use it to build hempcrete homes. Instead of burying it, one would encase the wood frame structure into a hydraulic lime + hemp hurd mixture (cemented single stud framing). The hemp also sequestrates CO2, the lime keeps everything fungus free and further absorbs CO2 from the air as the walls cure. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempcrete
EGreg 8y ago
I think about this topic seriously, but reading what you wrote made me realize this rhymes really well: humungous fungus among us and I just had to point it out :)
- MrMid 8y ago
  But does it rhyme in both British and American English? Just wondering as English is not my first language.
colordrops 8y ago
Keep growing them?
Gravityloss 8y ago
A well built and maintained wooden house should last over 300 years. There are such even in North America. It requires massive timber though. And to get that on a larger scale, you need good long term forest management policies. Plan for something else than paper or chipboard or glulam. So, not a technical problem, but a political one.
- endymi0n 8y ago
  I think the direction is good, the conclusion not so much. Nobody has the use or space for a couple hundred timber houses per person on the planet to cope with the current emissions. But if executed correctly (Drones sowing and harvesting millions of tons of fast-growing wood / switchgrass per year) and then correcty getting rid of it so it can't decompose (i.e. probably drying and/or sterilizing it), it might solve carbon capture. That being said, it all involves lots of space, mineral fertilizer and moving parts — on top it might be disastrous to any animal ecosystem trying to get hold in those woods. I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off with stationary carbon capture stations eventually.
  - Gravityloss 8y ago
    It's only going to be one part of the puzzle, at best. But replacing concrete, steel and aluminum, all causing large CO2 emissions while the raw material is created, should be a benefit. Anyway, you can also store a lot of the carbon just as forest, though it's more of a "one time" use of the land. Trees can also live for hundreds of years. And the soil can also store carbon. At least over here, large trees can often survive forest fires too. But it requires changed policy, it's not a technological problem.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    True. But there are plenty of times currently where plastic could be replaced with wood. From broomstick handles to sporks, we use a lot of plastic that doesn't have to be plastic. Cost is a consideration. But plastic over the long term has a cost, that isn't factored into the manufacturing+sales cost. I'm not suggesting this would solve the problem. That single magic bullet doesn't exist. But it can't hurt either.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Swamps or bogs may be more efficient on a net fixation basis. Anaerobic deposition may better preserve the carbon as well. I'm not immediately finding a comparison of various ecosystems, though there's this on Indonesian swamps: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/004565359390068G https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0045653593... And: "Peatlands only cover about 3 percent of the Earth but they accumulate more carbon than tropical rainforests," says biogeochemist Nancy Dise of Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "In terms of sitting there kind of quietly year after year packing away massive amounts of carbon, nothing tops these peatlands." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peat-and-repeat-rewetting-carbon-sinks/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peat-and-repeat-r...

rsync 8y ago

"Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be careful not to burn them. Repeat" I don't think this pencils out. We use quite a lot of machinery and trucks and electricity to build with and it's not obvious that the carbon sequestered by the wood in a structure is larger than the amount of carbon expended in all aspects of the building of it. In fact, I suspect it might be quite a bit off ... a dry 2x4 weighs very little and there is a lot of driving and idling and generating and power usage involved in building.

tim333 8y ago
Clean solar/wind energy with batteries? The OP did say long term. Also wood buildings can look cool https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wood+buildings&num=30&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiYmf3Hwd7aAhWFq48KHTjnAeIQsAQINw&biw=1093&bih=518 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wood+buildings&num=30&tbm=... and maybe our future AI robots can build them.
DrPhish 8y ago
Only factoring in the manufacturing cost (that is, not including the cost to haul to site and use) wood products are solidly carbon positive [1]. Lumber harvesting, hauling and processing is surprisingly efficient: It's a cutthroat business with razor thin margins. The more important aspect is that something else would have been used instead. Each building that is of wood construction is one that wasn't built primarily with steel or concrete. Also, effects of scale can be significant. As a simple example, there is about 200 billion kg of carbon sequestered in the contiguous US just in wooden telephone poles. If you can find a widescale use that makes economic sense, you make more immediate sinks. If you can also find ways of long-term sequestering the waste as it enters end of life, you can make ongoing gains in the CO2 balance. [1] - http://articles.extension.org/sites/default/files/CIWP%20pub%20Taylor.pdf http://articles.extension.org/sites/default/files/CIWP%20pub...

danieltillett 8y ago

It is actually better to turn the wood into biochar and put it back into the soil.

cschwarm 8y ago
Indeed! However, we do not know how long biochar lasts when used as a soil amendment [eg. 1]. Also, it's only useful in this way when loaded and applied to poor soil in the tropics [2]. For long term storage of CO2, it might be better to just bury the main products of pyrolysis (biochar and pyrolysis oil) where hard coal and the oil once used to be - deep in the earth. Burying both products should also make it cheaper (from a carbon mitigation point of view), since it's hard to make useful products from the pyrolysis oil. The biochar also doesn't need to be as clean as when used for soil. One can even pyrolyse old tires (and possibly plastic). The problem is, of course, that there are no long-term studies about the stability of biochar (and the bio-oil) in deep layers. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcbb.12266 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcbb.12266 [2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd/meta http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa67bd/m...
- danieltillett 8y ago
  The reference you provide says 556 years. It is actually lasts far longer the deeper you put the biochar in the soil since we do know that breakdown requires oxygen and/or UV light. In some soils the average age of the carbon is 5000 years. The best way to implement this is by slash-and-char of the tropical forests. I have done the calculations and using less than 30% of te tropical forests we can pull out all the CO2 being addded from human activity. It would also create a viable industry in some of the most poor regions in the world.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Would it be feasible to do something similar with ocean water? I’m thinking Northern California or even south - somewhere trees aren’t prevelant already and without using scarce water.
  - 8y ago

pfdietz 8y ago

The problem with wood is that it's not in a thermodynamic minimum energy state. React with oxygen, or thermally decompose to lighter hydrocarbons -- and you will get CO2 coming back. In contrast, the carbonate minerals from the reaction of CO2 with these silicates ARE thermodynamically stable. Even if left exposed on the surface of the Earth they will not release CO2 back into the atmosphere.

nanomonkey 8y ago

Actually partially burning the wood and creating charcoal is a better means of carbon sequestration. Terra preta, also known as biochar, is thought to last about 10,000 years in the soil.