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
You can do this. You grow lots of trees, then you turn the trees into charcoal (using some of the trees as fuel), then the charcoal is nearly pure carbon removed from the air which you can then stack and/or bury. Then you grow more trees where the old ones were.
It takes an awful lot of trees to do this though, meaning a lot of land, nutrients, water, time, labour and infrastructure.
It can totally be done. If it is practical and scalable is another question. The temptation to use the charcoal would also be pretty high as it would be a great source of energy.
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