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 amount of carbon in the world we screwed up on here is massive. The ultimate goal is to bring that atmosphere CO2 density down from ~~350~~ 420 PPM to around 300 PPM, probably even lower. But that’s for the whole atmosphere across the entire planet and represents literal billions of tonnes of carbon.
Such small plans to use carbon for something useful are nice, but don’t solve the global problem. It just very slightly slows down the rate at which CO2 is added to the atmosphere. For example, all the cars in the world burning fuels are still going. A couple of factories NOT blowing their CO2 into the air and using it for something else is a step in the right direction, but it’s a hell of a long way to go.
Trees aren’t a great sequester strategy. They grow old, die, burn down in forest fires, and regrow. That’s a carbon cycle of a few hundred years. What we need to make up for is the incredibly number of tonnes of oil drilled out from the ground and burned over the last century or so. Trees aren’t going to make up the difference… unless we could turbo grow the trees, cut them down, and then bury them somewhere, like where all that oil once was. But the scale of the project is still crazy huge if we want to have trees grown at the same rate we consume oil… or, higher really to get that CO2 level to start decreasing.
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