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I've had this on my mind for a bit, but carbon capture seems to be oversold from my understanding. The way I see it, additional trees would reduce atmospheric c

I've had this on my mind for a bit, but carbon capture seems to be oversold from my understanding. The way I see it, additional trees would reduce atmospheric carbon at that moment in time, but as they burn or decay it releases CO2 back to the atmosphere and the problem continues. If the issue is that we've pumped so many tons of carbon out of the Earth, the solution is to pump so many tons of carbon back in. Remove it from the cycle so that the net amount of surface carbon is reduced. Personally, my solution is to start chucking trees down a mineshaft and backfill the shaft when it's full. It's crude but it gets the idea across. Edit: happened to be listening to a podcast writing this and right as I finish they start talking about olivine, which is a mineral that can absorb it's weight in CO2 and prices around $7 USD/ton. Maybe a better option for carbon removal

coagmano 5y ago
This is the most prominent olivine sequestration project I've found: https://projectvesta.org https://projectvesta.org Stripe (and others) are currently purchasing negative emissions from a bunch of projects like this to help move them down the cost curve: https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases There's lots of cool work in this space at the moment, which is much more measureable than "trees not cut down"
rory 5y ago
The mineshaft-chucking idea could actually work decently. You'd probably want to turn it into charcoal first though.
- notatoad 5y ago
  wouldn't turning it into charcoal release a lot of the carbon?
  - toast0 5y ago
    It releases some of the carbon, but the resulting mass is nearly all carbon, rather than the big mix of composition that trees are. It makes sense to try to sequester just the carbon and not the rest. If you have a reasonable forestry plan to supply the source wood, do reasonable emissions control and harvest the energy released while producing the charcoal, and have a good place nearby to sequester the carbon, it might be a pretty decent way to get to carbon sequestration. This is, of course, a hand wavey argument. I'm not qualified to put together real numbers for how effective this could be and what the relative emissions and energy output would be.
- waterhouse 5y ago
  Someone has written a paper on "Carbon sequestration via wood burial". Estimates $14 per ton of CO2. https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

coagmano 5y ago

This is the most prominent olivine sequestration project I've found: https://projectvesta.org https://projectvesta.org Stripe (and others) are currently purchasing negative emissions from a bunch of projects like this to help move them down the cost curve: https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases There's lots of cool work in this space at the moment, which is much more measureable than "trees not cut down"

rory 5y ago

The mineshaft-chucking idea could actually work decently. You'd probably want to turn it into charcoal first though.

notatoad 5y ago
wouldn't turning it into charcoal release a lot of the carbon?
- toast0 5y ago
  It releases some of the carbon, but the resulting mass is nearly all carbon, rather than the big mix of composition that trees are. It makes sense to try to sequester just the carbon and not the rest. If you have a reasonable forestry plan to supply the source wood, do reasonable emissions control and harvest the energy released while producing the charcoal, and have a good place nearby to sequester the carbon, it might be a pretty decent way to get to carbon sequestration. This is, of course, a hand wavey argument. I'm not qualified to put together real numbers for how effective this could be and what the relative emissions and energy output would be.
waterhouse 5y ago
Someone has written a paper on "Carbon sequestration via wood burial". Estimates $14 per ton of CO2. https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...