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The carbon becomes part of the wood of the tree. After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned.

by joshAg 7y ago

eitland 7y ago
> After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned. To nitpick: or if it decomposes in other ways.
- wjnc 7y ago
  And what if we bury it? Can we do landfills with the trunks of these trees, like filling up old brown coal mines? This was something that I was thinking about while driving past a few former mines in Germany. Great places to fill up with decomposables. At a certain point the top layer will stop the bottom layers CO2 from leaking, I expect?
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    If you bury it you might be able to stop oxygen from getting in and turning into CO2, at least with any speed. But if water gets in you can still have methanogen bacteria come in and turn the wood into methane. Which you might be able to capture and sell and displace methane mined out of the ground but that isn't the same as locking it away forever. This process is why you have methane production in swamps and conventional landfills.
  - thinkcontext 7y ago
    There are a lot of things wrong with this idea. - Shallow burying the wood would not stop emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. Doing so would deprive it of oxygen which would cause the production of methane which is even worse than co2 - Wood is way less dense than coal so even if the idea worked you would only be able to store a fraction of the amount of co2 - Its hard to imagine the sheer scale of collecting all the wood to ship back to the mines. As mentioned wood is much less dense than coal so the effort to ship the wood to coal mines would be much more difficult than shipping the coal out of the mines. Not to mention that the wood would be coming from a much wider area. There are ideas about burning wood to produce electricity, capturing the CO2 exhaust and pumping that deep underground. The concept is called Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

The carbon becomes part of the wood of the tree. After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned.

by joshAg 7y ago

The carbon becomes part of the wood of the tree. After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned.

eitland 7y ago

> After the tree dies, it would only go back into the atmosphere if the trunk was burned. To nitpick: or if it decomposes in other ways.

wjnc 7y ago
And what if we bury it? Can we do landfills with the trunks of these trees, like filling up old brown coal mines? This was something that I was thinking about while driving past a few former mines in Germany. Great places to fill up with decomposables. At a certain point the top layer will stop the bottom layers CO2 from leaking, I expect?
- Symmetry 7y ago
  If you bury it you might be able to stop oxygen from getting in and turning into CO2, at least with any speed. But if water gets in you can still have methanogen bacteria come in and turn the wood into methane. Which you might be able to capture and sell and displace methane mined out of the ground but that isn't the same as locking it away forever. This process is why you have methane production in swamps and conventional landfills.
- thinkcontext 7y ago
  There are a lot of things wrong with this idea. - Shallow burying the wood would not stop emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. Doing so would deprive it of oxygen which would cause the production of methane which is even worse than co2 - Wood is way less dense than coal so even if the idea worked you would only be able to store a fraction of the amount of co2 - Its hard to imagine the sheer scale of collecting all the wood to ship back to the mines. As mentioned wood is much less dense than coal so the effort to ship the wood to coal mines would be much more difficult than shipping the coal out of the mines. Not to mention that the wood would be coming from a much wider area. There are ideas about burning wood to produce electricity, capturing the CO2 exhaust and pumping that deep underground. The concept is called Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).