I’m listening to a podcast and the lady says we eventually will need to become a net 0 society and then go negative to reverse the effects of climate change.
This entails sucking carbon from the atmosphere. Why can’t we just invest in this now and keep our oil and coal energy? What can this carbon be used for once we have taken it from the atmosphere? She says we just pump it into the ground?
In: Engineering
This process is called carbon sequestration. It’s not *exactly* just dumping solid carbon into the ground, but rather using carbon-based compounds in ways that nature can naturally absorb it.
There is a finite amount of carbon (and every other element) on the earth. The problem now is that the balance of it has shifted, where more of the earth’s carbon used to be underground in hydrocarbon chains forming petroleum, coal, and natural gas, a lot of it has been released into atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas. The simplest form of carbon sequestration is tree planting, as they absorb CO2 from the air and use it to form lignin and cellulose, more commonly known as wood. Dead trees’ carbon is either consumed by decomposers, which eventually die and become part of the soil, or is harvested for construction, where it can stay lit for a very long time. Some of it is burned, re-releasing the carbon.
Industrial-scale carbon sequestration is also possible, but very difficult as CO2 is a very stable compound; it’s hard to separate into elemental oxygen and carbon.
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