https://natural-resources.canada.ca/stories/simply-science/e...
Now it all finally makes sense!
Interesting. I would have guessed that any kind of forests have quite limited cap how much carbon it could retain in dead wood, and that this cap will be pretty much fixed. Unless something will stop natural decay processes releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere I don't see how existing grown forest could increase its capacity, since I suppose it is already at its equilibrium.
(Unlike peatlands, where most of accumulated carbon remains underwater, so it presumably has much larger capacity.)
Simply said, without "burying or sinking wood mass" I see no easy way to prevent carbon from returning into the atmosphere. Basically if we need to take carbon from the atmosphere, we should ideally put it back from where we have been mining it for last couple of centuries.
The article says, "We found that a forest that's developing toward old-growth condition is accruing more wood in the stream than is being lost through decomposition" and "The effect will continue in coming decades, Keeton said, because many mature New England forests are only about halfway through their long recovery from 19th- and 20th-century clearing for timber and agriculture".
Still a bit confused about the emphasis in wood deposits in "streams" – reportedly way more effective, but I'd guess with very limited capacity to really "lock" the mass – compared to regular hummus – not that effective, but for forest with couple of centuries of growth ahead I'd guess way more capacious. Good news either way, though!
Plants get most of their carbon from CO2 anyway, so in most cases carbon accumulates in the loam (outside of intensive agriculture at least). They produce far more than decomposers have a use for and that's how CO2 accumulates in soil. It only needs to be replenished by the rest of the carbon cycle because of erosion.
Not always. Depending on fire some of it is turned into charcoal and then never returned.
Further, even if we didn't face the issue of running out of land, we don't appear to be able to actually plant trees fast enough and well enough (many of the "millions of trees" planting projects, especially in developing nations, have had tree survival rates of under 10%)
Forests help and are part of the strategy, but fundamentally not moving the needle.
efficiency of photovoltaic - 20%
so photovoltaic is 15 times more land efficient then burning biomass. so we absolutely need trees to provide ecological functions. but in era of 5kwp PV array paying itself in 5-6 years(and still working afterwards), to heat water... its is ridiculous to cut trees and burn them to have hot water. 80% of time Canadian citizen can have 100% solar hot water (PV), less then 100% rest of the year.
It is illegal In The logging Industry to use merchantable wood for paper or fire wood. Wood has grades and graded wood is worth a lot more than fire or paper wood. Paper wood also has a grade but it is a low grade. Often firewood can be shipped to paper mills as an example.
A PV-heavy grid potentially starts to look a lot more distributed in interesting ways like scale than the traditional grid which was always more centrally orchestrated than it sounded.
Then it becomes a building/complex/neighborhood community building problem in some cases. The shift to a properly distributed scale is that it can be bottom-up rather than top down. Also, some large scale projects may still be needed, it isn't an either/or, a mixture of provides flexibility in the long term. But you certainly need to worry about planning fewer large scale projects if you are expecting a market full of small ones.
> And management of millions of small batteries is harder than management of thousands of bigger batteries. Millions of small batteries are also vastly more expensive than thousands of bigger battery projects.
The cost is more distributed rather than being only one or two infrastructure companies in a region. The management is more distributed with more entities involved. Top-down control is harder, but in some ways that is as much a feature as a bug. Local batteries can prioritize local needs, that's a feature versus "just do what your central provider wishes". Grid-wise needs become a larger market with more players, which also means more competition and more interesting prices.
Which I oppose; my own governor is arguing that exporting wood pellets is a net gain. Face palm.
That said, learning about biochar is on my todo list. I do forest restoration work (volunteer) and am excited to try anything which helps build topsoil, store carbon, hastens reforestation. example question: So we'd capture that wood gas when making biochar...?
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Otherwise, I agree with all. Especially comment elsethread about our existing "distributed storage" system(s) like hot water tanks and EVs at rest.
Fortunately, misc startups are trying to tap into that potential. eg combining heat pumps and water tanks, residential district heating. eg virtual power plants (peer-to-peer systems) aggregating residential batteries (EVs, power walls, and soon appliances) into grid level storage.
It's such an amazing time to be alive. The opportunities are insurmountable.
Solar doesn't require high tech. We use solar panels cause we are good at making circuits. But solar thermal with mirrors should work for lower technology. They wouldn't have the chips for controlling mirrors, but could have some system of central control or just have people move them.
Get some fast growing plant like Japanese Knotweed or bamboo, grow it out for a year, harvest and dump the biomass into a decomissioned mineshaft to minimize contact with the atmosphere. Rinse and repeat.
Better off with bio-CSS using GMO kelp or algae, e.g., biomass that grows faster and doesn't rot or burn.
I also did not specifically say trees need to be used. I mentioned fast growing things like bamboo. If there is another biological organism (GMO or not) that accumulates carbon-rich biomass faster, then I'm interested in understanding how that compares to more modern CCS techniques that require electricity for example.
https://www.whoi.edu/know-your-ocean/ocean-topics/climate-we...
My only concern is that building those houses might actually emit more carbon than they are supposed to keep. But assuming that we moved from Oil era to Nuclear and/or Renewables, that should not happen.
Eg:
You have a forest of trees that take 20 years to mature
You cut the trees and regrow the forest every 20 years
You use the timber to build houses (or furniture or whatever) that are _on average_ replaced after 60 years.
This will pull 3x the carbon from the atmosphere than just the forest by itself
One way humans can improve on this is by making charcoal out of wood and burying it or just spreading it on soil. This drastically improves the fertility of the soil improving the rate that that soil can sequester carbon by growing trees even faster, and, as long as the charcoal is mixed in soil and not in a huge dry pile on top where it might burn, this process need never reach an equilibrium and can keep accumulating more and more carbon, more and more fertility and water retention capacity, more and more abundance of food production. This is what the ancients did in making terra preta in South America and similar charcoal-infused soils that have been found all over the world.
We do this where I live in California. It's a way to reduce forest fuel load while increasing carbon sequestration and fertility. Only cost is labor. It's theoretically possible to do at large scale with machinery instead of people, though the attempts I've seen have not proved viable. For a low expense human-scale way to do it, just making big piles and burning them from the top down (so no smoke) - piling more and more fuel on as it burns, and then dousing with water once it's mostly a big pile of coals, works quite well. With the addition of a big metal ring for a kiln, efficiency can go up even more from (very roughly) 50% of carbon turned to charcoal, to maybe 80 or 90%. Numbers vary considerably. But in all cases, the amount of carbon moved from the rotting or burning cycle to permanently sequestered is significant.
Compared to the short term carbon sequestration of building things out of wood (99% of which will burn within a few centuries), these soils have lasted thousands of years. There must be some mechanism that will eventually recycle this carbon back to the atmosphere but it may be on the timescale of hundreds of thousands of years for most of it.
Forests will store carbon as and while they are growing, but as and when they reach a stable size they will stop storing additional carbon. That is, carbon stored by growth will equal that released by decay.
Otherwise plants/trees are just a type of carbon battery - pull carbon, burn for fuel, carbon goes back out, gets pulled back in again.
If that fraction isn't negligible, we'd be better off burning it. Determining that fraction, across a range of conditions, is nontrivial.
It's the same logic for construction materials. A house has dozens of trees worth of lumber in it, and that carbon is now trapped in the house for however many decades it takes until the house eventually burns down or rots. Meanwhile the trees that were cut regrew, so the total "inventory" of trapped carbon has increased. (Appreciating of course that the lifetime carbon cost of the emissions required to maintain and climate-control a house will far exceed the modest value of what is trapped in its walls, but all of this is just for the sake of argument.)
There's a bit of nuance to be filled out, like challenges of forest plantation monoculture and so on, but it always sounded quite practical to me. Iirc the idea derived from "coal".
Basically any place where you've got high timber production within a reasonably short distance of an arid area could make for a relatively low-tech sequestration/storage pipeline.
I grew up in an area known for coal and logging. Ever since I heard of sequestration brought up I thought the area sounded perfect for it. Fell (maybe mulch) the trees, kiln dry to remove weight/moisture, and toss them down a mineshaft.
It always felt a bit peotic to 'reseed' a coal mine
Maybe it would be more effective to drop wet lumber off in the desert for a few years by rail before moving the dry lumber to permanent underground storage. This assumes two stages of transport to and from the desert would cost less carbon than transport to a kiln and then to storage.
I’m not convinced that the wood even needs to be dried before burying, though.
2. Store spent fuel in massive wooden dry caskets. (500-1000x steel)
3a. Float caskets to Antarctica
3b. Offload via rail to South Pole
4. They stay frozen for a million years and don't rot. Problem solved.
Edit: I think I've thought of a good alternative though. Instead of crating up the nuclear waste, it could be randomly dispersed in forests around the world to scare people away from those forests, thereby creating nature reserves which should last for generations.
With saltwater it's a bit trickier because it's decently oxygenated even to depth and there is a lot of life dedicated to breaking down wood in the ocean. If you can get it to sink into the muck it lasts a lot longer though.