I saw a youtube video about how Japan burns materials that can’t easily be recycled to produce energy and captures the CO2 produced from the process. The CO2 is then sold to some local factories to produce various things like fire extinguishers, and some algae farms (I googled this and algae is used to produce food and oil).
I googled that at sea level, CO2 in the atmosphere is at 350 PPM, but certain plants thrive at 1500 PPM.
It got me thinking – why can’t we pump CO2 into indoor farms, plantations or forests to sequester more carbon?
Would that even work? Is the carbon just released into the air again once the plants are eaten or broken down?
In: Biology
Because there’s too much CO2.
CO2 moves in a cycle. It’s released when we eat/burn plants, and absorbed by new plants as they grow. So CO2 goes into plant, plant goes into human, CO2 exits human, CO2 goes back into new plant. That’s the carbon cycle.
We broke this cycle by digging up coal (and other fossil fuels), which are made of ancient dead plants that were happily sitting underground holding a lot of carbon. By burning a ton of coal, we released a ton more CO2 into the world than the cycle would normally produce. There aren’t enough plants in existence to absorb it all. The scale is unbalanced.
The only way to fix it is to sequester the carbon back into the ground where we got it from. Which is what most carbon capture schemes are designed to do. Grow a bunch of algae, which uses up carbon, then bury the algae and leave it there.
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