so IIRC, plants are mostly made of carbon pulled from the air, this being especially true for fast growing plants with minimal root systems (there may be better examples than bamboo, but that one comes to mind). Also, we have plenty of big empty pits because of strip mining. So… why not just have bamboo / whatever farms whose sole purpose is filling those pits with “captured carbon” in the form of fast growing plants. Like yea some of it will rot, but if you pile it on fast enough it quickly becomes a hostile environment for most bacteria.
In: Planetary Science
Farming, even bamboo, is pretty carbon-intensive. If you are planning to farm bamboo and then transport it to a strip mine, that’s going to use produce a bunch of carbon gases as well.
And we already have lots of “captured carbon” (trash) to put into holes. You’re describing landfills with an extra wasteful step of growing bamboo added on.
Finally, I don’t understand “instead of.” If a bamboo farmer sets up shop in town, that does not prevent the neighboring factory from *also* capturing their carbon byproducts.
Buried plants would break down into methane, which is a fossil fuel *and* a greenhouse gas.
Methane can remain trapped in the earth’s crust, but trapping enough of it on purpose would be damn hard.
What would happen is the methane would bubble up and cause more warming. Then decay into carbon dioxide and water in the atmosphere – also greenhouse gasses.
Some genius would probably try to mine the stored methane to sell for cash before it gets out naturally anyway.
Bamboo isn’t just pure carbon. Its a lot of carbon, but it also has “other stuff” in it like electrolytes and minerals. Without that other stuff, bamboo will not grow.
A lot of that other stuff is pulled out of the soil and bamboo grows quickly because it depletes the soil that its growing in. That’s not a problem in the wild, because the bamboo dies and rots back into dirt – which contains all of the other stuff that it originally pulled from the dirt, allowing the next bamboo plant to grow. It is a problem when you’re harvesting the bamboo because all of the stuff that the bamboo needed to pull out of the soil in order to grow doesn’t get returned to the soil.
Industrially farming bamboo requires you to constantly fertilize the soil. You need electricity to make the fertilizer and gasoline to transport the fertilizer to the bamboo farm. The amount of carbon that is produced as a result of generating that electricity or burning that gasoline is more than the carbon that bamboo pulls out of the air as it grows.
There’s actually a new study that came out about [Wood Vaulting](https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adm8133) and how it is very likely a viable means of carbon capture. Skeptics Guide to the Universe talked about it on the podcast this week.
This is an area of active research, wood vaults for carbon storage. The “disposal” areas must have the right conditions, otherwise the carbon returns to the atmosphere eventually.
I believe there have been a few locations identified that would preserve the wood, and sequester the carbon for 1,000 yrs+.
There are technologies being developed to capture carbon from the atmosphere, put it into a granulate and then bury it to calcify it.
I work with a company that does that, I’m not sure how it all works, I just get to see all the cool machinery!
There’s a lot of problem with carbon capture tech, mainly that it doesn’t work at scale and inefficient. You are right that just planning tree would be better.
That said, just planning tree had it own problem. You can’t Just plan bamboo, or any 1 singular plant for that matter. It could actually have a reverse effect. What you really want is bio-diversity, and that is really hard to do.
Scale. The reason fossil fuels are so useful as fuel is that they’re incredibly energy (and carbon) dense. We emit approximately 37 *billion* tons of carbon per year.
Bamboo is not nearly as dense, so it would take a shocking amount of bamboo to offset any material amount of our emissions.
You’re not completely wrong about this. If you look at the huge amounts of organic waste that are burnt or let to rot every year, it would be a very reasonable way to capture carbon if you would bury this (in a place it can’t escape from)
As for bamboo, while there are differences, plants that grow quickly generally have lower carbon density. That is why slow wood is if better quality.
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