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
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.
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