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True, but sequestrations bottom line is we have to remove more than is released from biomass. Joel Send a noteboard - 23/10/2011 11:41:20 AM
Sure, it would be better to sequester carbon as fuel than just wall it away somewhere never to be seen again, but the "increasing biomass" aspect is what has always bothered me about sequestration: It would take a fairly significant net mass increase to even temporarily reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, and unless we are talking about huge sequoia groves or something, nearly all of it will go back into the atmosphere in a century or two at most. Ironically, the most effective form of carbon sequestration was fossil fuels themselves compactly tucking huge amounts of carbon away where only someone hell bent on digging through a mile of rock to obtain and then burn it could release it. The genie may be out of the bottle on that one; I doubt we can plant enough trees and grow enough algae to offset a few hundred million years of global forests and building sized lizards. I would certainly love to see our deforestation trends reversed, because they exacerbate the problem, and finding a way to farm deserts and tundra to slow the retreat of forests in the relatively few areas where they remain would help that a lot, but carbon neutrality may be the best we can hope for at this stage.


Very little of Earth's Biomass, which has generally been around 100 gigatonnes a year in terms of carbon IIRC, ever ends up as oil/coal/etc... though odds are much more oil and nat gas was produced and lost than we have since they tend to leak and earthquakes can rupture pockets, bacteria then eats it up... our world oil supply (known reserves) is roughly equivalent in mass to annual biomass production, being generous all those various fossil fuels might be somewhere between a decade to a centuries worth of planetary biomass production... so keep scale in mind here, all those wonderful fossil fuels are a teeny tiny fraction of a percent of a percent of our planet's total production to date... there are 1,324,000,000,000 proven barrels of oil in reserves, and you get 433 kg of CO2 from burning on, or 5.73x10^14 kg... but the known amount of CO2 currently in the atmosphere is 30x10^14 kg, so torching all known oil only adds about 17% to that... keep in mind again that biomass figure (if it helps a gigatonne is about 10^12 kg, that fossil fuel CO2 was 573 GT and atmosphere CO2 3000 GT) which since CO2 is about 1/4 Carbon by mass (12/44 but close enough) so you can sequester carbon very fast if you need to.

Also, keep in mind that biomass sequesters the stuff temporarily, limestone and similar do it close to permanently and is in constant production but obviously slowly and not by any agricultural technique. Once killed a chunk of biomass begins emitting CO2 (it always does ofcourse but it generally absorbs an equal amount or more while growing) as it decays, obviously a large wooden table does this very slowly so one doesn't just have to 'dump the stuff down a hole', a ton 'sequestered carbon' in furniture format in each of a billion household for instance is a gigatonne right there, a years supply of biofuel in cisterns stored as a reserve would seriously stabilize fuel prices and the nice thing about a 'ethanol spill' is that it's as environmentally damaging as spilling a jack and coke on the lawn at a BBQ. Call it 60 billion barrels, which in case you're curious is about 10 billion cubic meters. Of course a ton of wood is hardly a lot of furniture or housing and we can turn the stuff into plastic too, or take rough lumber coat it with wax or something and dump t down a hole but as mentioned I consider the 'dump it down a hole' method intensely retarded and eye-rolling indicative of why environmentalists generally do such a wonderful job angering or scaring industrialists, who alternatively would smile cheerfully at being able to sell some immense 300 pound hardwood desk to consumers with a sticker on it saying 'extra massive for increased sturdiness... help sequester carbon and buy products that will last a life time' as opposed to paying to dump a few hundred pounds of carbon in a hole. Of course another great way to sequester carbon is to increase the amount of it stored in food, like increasing crop yields since agriculture sequesters more carbon per unit area and time than damn near everything else, especially a useless piece of desert. And if we ever start being able to mass manufacture graphene, which is now selling at a mere million bucks a square meter down from around a hundred billion a couple years ago not long after it was disvoered, we've got something else really cool to dump carbon into, since graphene and carbon anotubes are 100% carbon... there's also carbon aerogel, wonderful insulator, that we can turn the crap into that too as production spins up... ya know those wonderful space elevators I mentioned in the 'oops misunderstood you' section of the last post would weigh around 10 GT all on it's own, all 'sequestered carbon' if the feedstock to make it was air or biofuel or whatever, so don't think we can't find ways to use excess carbon besides dumping it down a big hole, and whatever it's other negative effects increased CO2 does increase plant growth and if you have some non-fossil fuel power source you can desalinize and pump with there's plenty of arid land that could 'sequester' the stuff as trees or food... corn stores up about 500 pounds of CO2 per ton itself... we presumably need to sequester about 100 tons per person... just to keep scale always foremost here, a thousand board feet of lumber weighs around 8 tons, it takes thousands of board feet to build a house, so you can use up carbon pretty quick when you need to.

But from your comments I think you misunderstand sequestering, while by and large carbon comes out of the air for plants and returns to the air from plants (by and large, limestone and the like don't appear from magic nor does all carbon in the air come from dead plant matter or fossil fuel) fundamentally carbon stored for a century is out of play. You've got Z carbon, with Z= X+Y where X is the stuff in the air and Y is the stuff stored in biomass. You want X to be a certain amount at all times, 3000 GT I guess, but Z is rising as we burn fossil fuels, so Y must go up to match it. If you are currently getting, say, 10 tons/ acre out of some crop that turns over in a year, pretty much nothing has happened, you sequester 10 tons basically, but if you use some other crop that also sequesters at 10 tons a year but doesn't have turnover of a year, but rather of a century, with presumed biomass on the spot being 1000 tons, that 1000 tons is effectively 'out of play' or sequestered continuously... that's about how much a redwood weighs by the way and you do get multiple trees per acre though I can't give you an exact mass per acre figure but they'd sequester that 600 GT of carbon dioxide on about 10^8 acres, roughly Texas size, or about a third of Libya, and one can't help but point out that fog, which is necessary to grow redwoods, is fairly easy to produce with various passive desalinization methods. Roving a bit off topic, "Neat cool magnetic algae' and heading towards my general 'why global warming worries me not so much' which I'd like to avoid but I did want to go over sequestering since I think you may be a bit unclear on the subject based on your comments. Also let me take a moment to say that all these numbers are quick Googles and/or napkin math so may be inaccurate.

As long as we can do that it is a viable option, but I remain unconvinced that we can, or at least, will. In terms of scale, time scales are important, too: Whether carbon stored in biomass is released by decay in one year or a hundred is irrelevant unless we can and do sequester even more carbon in the interim; otherwise the time factor only determines whether we must eventually confront the postponed problem in a year or a century. With forests that generate vegetative biomass in three dimensions rapidly losing literal ground to pasture and farmland that generates it in two it is hard to argue we are achieving that increased terrestrial vegetative biomass. That in turn makes it hard to argue sequestration is a viable option without a major priority shift.

As with the algae, the big issue is whether we use land not currently devoted to that task or simply grow something different in forests cleared for pasture and farmland, because the latter represents a net LOSS of terrestrial vegetative biomass. Obviously, growing it in a third of Libya that is currently open desert would be positive whether it took the form of magnetic algae, grain or redwoods, but growing magnetic algae in North TX cotton fields or pasture land would have a negligible impact, if any. Even growing it in the form of a 50 foot pine that will go from seedling to lumber in 30 years time will not help much unless many more pines are planted elsewhere in the interim; otherwise, all we have done is delay the problem 30 years.

For the record, I want to be clear I am NOT advocating dumping carbon in a hole and sealing it off forever, only saying that sequestration will not reduce atmospheric CO2 unless it truly sequesters carbon for an extended period. Even reforestation will not do that job unless trees are growing faster than they are dying and rotting (hence the redwoods.) To the extent reducing atmospheric CO2 is a desirable goal, the best route is increasing use of energy sources that do not emit CO2 and reducing the overall growth of our energy demands. The best way to do the former still seems like fission, hence anti-nuclear environmentalism seems very counterproductive to me. The best way to do the latter is probably to banish the conceit that industrialization and urbanization are invariably and inherently desirable ends in themselves; even a suburban environment has more vegetative biomass, and more persistent vegetative biomass, than an urban one (at least most places; in WI you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a city park with ample trees.) In general, even the ubiquitous suburban front yard has more biomass than an apartment rooftop, which is one of the selling points.
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Interesting new Biofuel innovation: Magnetic Algae - 22/10/2011 03:05:13 AM 493 Views
I must be missing something with biofuel, though this certainly sounds like good news for it. - 22/10/2011 04:41:17 AM 265 Views
It's rather difficult to cram a fission reactor into a car - 22/10/2011 05:10:23 AM 269 Views
If the batteries are that bulky then, yeah, biomass or something similar is appealing. - 22/10/2011 07:15:22 AM 346 Views
We're constrained by what economics and tech permit - 22/10/2011 08:09:22 AM 266 Views
And physics, always physics. - 22/10/2011 08:34:07 AM 310 Views
And scale... scale is important too - 22/10/2011 01:40:18 PM 249 Views
True, but sequestrations bottom line is we have to remove more than is released from biomass. - 23/10/2011 11:41:20 AM 367 Views
I think you're still misunderstanding this concept - 23/10/2011 01:26:14 PM 247 Views
Um... as stated, biomass creation=B'(t)=/=biomass creation. - 23/10/2011 10:46:04 PM 385 Views
No, that would be net Biomass increase with time - 24/10/2011 07:49:10 AM 253 Views
Forget Biofuel. When do we start making magnetic people! - 22/10/2011 07:43:43 AM 230 Views
One would have problems imagining why - 22/10/2011 08:09:55 AM 250 Views
Except during the middle of the day, you can usually use the sun. - 22/10/2011 08:36:54 AM 259 Views
Uh... have you ever tried to navigate by the sun? - 22/10/2011 09:05:40 PM 241 Views
Frequently, hence the comment. - 23/10/2011 09:35:31 AM 322 Views

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