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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the plant-a-tree dept.

Noah Deich, the executive director for the Center for Carbon Removal, ruminated on the directions planetary-scale carbon removal schemes might take. The list of proposals is extensive and growing, he notes, but they generally fall within two "capture pathways:" biological and chemical.

Biological carbon schemes largely rely on natural plant photosynthesis to snare carbon from the air. Though Deich observes this is an essentially "carbon-neutral" phenomenon—plants use carbon from the air to build vascular tissue, but the carbon is released back into the atmosphere when the plants die and decompose—the process nevertheless can be tweaked to lock up large amounts of carbon for long periods of time. For example, you can literally farm for carbon.
...
Restoring ecosystems—particularly wetlands—is a promising avenue for carbon removal.

"Many ecosystems provide natural carbon sinks, but they (may have been) degraded over time by agricultural and urban expansion," Deich explains. "Restoring carbon-storing ecosystems like peatlands and mangroves can aid in mitigating climate change, while also providing numerous other ecosystem services (such as clean water, open space, wildlife habitat and fisheries enhancement)."

Another encouraging option is reforestation. The extant prime example is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), a 2005 initiative by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. While its results have been mixed, the thinking is that since deforestation may account for 10 to 30 percent of atmospheric carbon emissions, planting lots and lots (and lots) of trees may reverse or at least stabilize accumulating greenhouse gases.
...
Chemical carbon storage offers somewhat more limited options, involving two basic approaches.

"Direct air capture and storage includes technologies that can capture industrial-scale quantities of CO2 from ambient air using solvents, filters or other methods," Deich notes. But there's an inherent drawback: "Direct air capture systems are energy consuming—not energy generating—so they generate net-negative emissions only when the sequestered CO2 is greater than the CO2 emitted to power the system."

Mineral capture and storage, on the other hand, is a passive process that exploits the natural CO2 sequestering qualities of some minerals, such as silicates. By extracting, crushing and spreading such minerals over large areas, Deich maintains that significant quantities of CO2 could be captured and stored.

Carbon remediation schemes that are cost centers will probably fail, but schemes that are profit centers might succeed. Can money be made by mining carbon from the atmosphere?


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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:10PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:10PM (#276733) Journal

    Tree. Don't AGW people constantly denigrate trees as a storage medium?
     
    No, people with a sense of scale denigrate trees as a storage medium. How many trees does it take to suck up 9449 million metric tons, emitted per-year, of carbon? (that's 2011 numbers, BTW).
     
    Considering a tree can absorb "as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, and can sequester one ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old."
     
      Reference 1 [ornl.gov]
      Reference 2 [americanforests.org]
     
    That's a LOT of trees!

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