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
I work in carbon capture. Basically, we took a bunch of carbon that was stored underground and not going anywhere, especially not to the atmosphere, and took it out and put it in the “cycle”. Now that CO2 can go to plants, sea, forests, etc, but all of those have different carbon storage timelines (i.e. plants will degrade back into CO2 in a relatively short timeline). So our options are currently: Send it back underground, this time as CO2 instead of as massive hydrocarbon chains, or make the CO2 into something more stable than plants, forests, etc. Funnily enough, plastic is a great carbon sink. Methanol is currently the best thought of “future” usage of CO2, though it’s not cheap to make.
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