Why can’t we just sequester CO2 into plants we eat or forests?

2.76K viewsBiologyOther

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

23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

For millions of years trees fell and didn’t rot (nothing could digest the Lignin that makes up wood) this removed large amounts of Carbon from the atmosphere creating Coal. Also for millions of years animals that died and fell into the deep ocean removed large amounts of carbon from the world forming oil. Both of these sources of carbon have been brought out sequestration in more or less the last 200 years. The problem is… scale.

You are viewing 1 out of 23 answers, click here to view all answers.