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
The important question is the one at the end of your comments. We can increase the number of plants being grown, but if you really wanted to “fix” the CO2 out of the atmosphere in large quantities, you’d also have to worry about what happens to those plants at the end of their lifespans, whether that be because they’re eaten, or die and rot, or what have you.
The carbon being released into the atmosphere through fossil fuel use comes from plant and other biological matter that was trapped in the ground over millions of years, eventually decomposing into oil, gas, coal, etc.
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