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
We absolutely can do that, and there are people trying to replant forests for that very reason.
However, there’s a LOT of CO2 out there, and only so many forests we can plant. And for the other things like food or algae, those aren’t carbon sinks, because they only hold carbon until they are ‘used’ in whatever fashion they get used. For example, a ton of corn is grown for ethanol (fuel.) That takes carbon from the air to grow corn… which is then put right back in the air when the fuel is burned. And a net negative, due to all the other carbon produced to grow, process, transport that fuel.
We need some kind of massive scale increase to make it have a significant effect, and that’s hard to do. Forest entire deserts perhaps. Or grow massive amount of quickly growing trees and dump them to the bottom of the ocean and plant more. (Wood takes many centuries to decay underwater.)
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