Unfortunately, the site refused to let my browser or my password manager fill in my credit card details. Maybe I'll remember to dig out my physical card at some point, but there's a good chance that a web development issue will reduce the number of sign-ups you get. Online payments are normally super-easy for me, and still quite secure.
AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: And if you'd like I'd like to talk to you about these issues. APOLOGIES NOW for what will feel like a lecture. You are quite right about the volume of the CO2 we have emitted. I just downloaded the data for 1940-2022 and that makes for some serious discussion. It took 44 years from 1940 to 1984 to pump 500 Billion tons into the atmosphere. It took only 21 years 2005 for the next 500 Billion tons It took only 15 years 2020 for the next 500 Billion tons making it 1.5 Trillion tons And we'll go past 2 Trillion tons at the current rate around 2033. That of course doesn't include the billions of tons from badly managed coal mines in places like China or what happened pre-1940 or lots of human activities that aren't counted. So the real problem going forward isn't Net-Zero. Its how we get to Net-Subzero and NOT bankrupt the World's economy or destroy modern civilisation getting there. Because if we do either of those things we really will have an apocalypse. FYI - I did my degree in America and we once had a NASA engineer do a special guest lecture on terraforming Mars. He very simply said "It's Impossible" and then explained WHY. He introduced us to 2 subjects I know call planetary mechanics and planetary dynamics. *Planetary mechanics* are just the raw amounts like we have 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere and it takes X Joules to raise Y cubic kilometers so many degrees. *Planetary dynamics* are things like gas cycles, water cycles, thermal cycles (like the AMOC). On simple planetary mechanics Mars is impossible to terraform. It ends the discussion when you realise that it takes 178 Trillion tons of air just to make a 1km thick layer of Earth normal air around a body that large. You don't even get to the subject of how to keep it attached to the planet. Its just where do we get that much air in the first place. Here's the problem we have with CO2. I have seen plenty promotion, neutral and debunk videos on both carbon capture & storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC). Even if we could use one of the technical solutions the problem is ENERGY. Where do we simply get enough energy to run those systems? If we did try one of those DAC systems you then have to ask how we process that many cubic kilometers to get at those 400 parts per million of CO2 to extract 2.5 Trillion tons. This is the problem the guy from NASA when trying to explain what he found to other people. *The numbers are so large that people can't conceive of what those numbers mean.* If the Earths surface is 510,072,000km² then that basically equates to 1/2 Billion cubic kilometers of air just in the first kilometer of 100 above the Earths surface. *How does anyone actually think they are going to feed volume that through a bunch of factory built units?* How much energy and materials will it take and how much CO2 will be produced building all those units? Sorry the only way it can actually be done is with TREES? The question is how do we convince every person on the planet they have to plant (on average) about 1,000 trees. That's about 8 Trillion trees and we need 1 in 10 to grow to maturity and suck in and CAPTURE about 1.5 tons of CO2 each. Sorry but we are going to have to do things like plant tree lines along very fence line on every farm on the planet. AND YES you make an incredibly important point we just can't go throwing trees in the ground we have to actually do some PLANNING. You can't just throw pine trees into the Sahara, but with the right plan we can plant staggering numbers of date palms, olive trees, cedars and other suitable varieties across all that open space of North Africa. YES we'd have to supply staggering amounts of water until they generate their own weather, but there are low energy options there. I worked on the Ravensthorpe Nickel Project back in the mid 2000s and that has an interesting desal plant. Its NOT reverse osmosis which long term has too high maintenance costs. Because I'd worked on another Wier project they gave me the FAT for the desal plant. Weir called it vapour compression but from memory it was built more like a Multi-stage flash distillation system and may well have combined those 2 technologies. Either way it used only a fraction of the power an RO plant of the same size. The reason such plants aren't used a lot is they can be tricky to start-up and they only have 1 speed (flow rate). You can't just turn them on and off at will like you can RO *AND YES* I have done RO systems one of which was quite complex. So yes it sound crazy to tell everyone we need to plant 8 Trillion trees. But I am sorry but there is no other feasible way to do it. Everything else either relies on a technology we can't build enough of or a technology we can't power or some ridiculous seeding fantasy of the sky or the oceans. If you look at some of the ideas being proposed for seeding the sky to let in less light or seeding the ocean to have more oceanic algae plankton to consume the C02 are so absurd they are only worth considering to see how absurd they are. Nobody knows if they would work, or how much we'd need let alone what happens if it gets out of control and needs shutting down. We can shut down even the most complex plants we build but *how would you shut down the SO2 seeding in the upper atmosphere I have seen proposed?* Likewise if the iron seeding of the ocean to promote algae growth goes haywire. What's the contingency for that? As an aerospace engineer placing a giant sun shield out at the L1 Lagrange Point makes better sense. We could build it with louvres and control what heat comes in. You just need to get me something like US$50 Trillion and hand me control of the entire engineering infrastructure of the planet. before you ask if it cost US$200 Billion to build the ISS with a weight of 450t in LEO. What do you think it would cost to build something at L1 that weighs on the order of a million tons and needs constant onsite maintenance to keep it orientated and in position. Plus we'd need a fleet of satellites monitoring the entire Earth's surface at 10m resolution or better to watch the effects. Actually we'll need those whatever we do. That's one of the few things we can do. the question is will we do it to save the planet or watch it die.
I think it's important to distinguish between "planting trees" as part of nature-based solutions (restoring ecosystems such as mangrove forests & reforestation (excluding aforestation)) and using tree plantations as part of a BECCS process - these don't restore ecosystems or biodiversity but can have many adverse impacts if not managed properly. In nature trees perform many critical tasks, such as regulating local climates & as part of the water cycle & purification, stabilising soil, providing habitat for many many species, protecting the land during storms (especially from the action of the sea), provide food awa contruction & other material (must be harvested sustainably) etc etc. Trees help with human physical & mental well-being, especially kids. In cities trees help filter the air, manage water, provide shade & calm traffic. When a tree dies and falls to the ground it regenerates the soil, provides a safe enviro for seeds and provides habitats for all sorts of creatures. Trees are most useful within a natural context as part of ecological systems, processes & services whilst also providing goods construction material, fibres, food & medicine etc for animals & humand. Planting trees for BECCS provides none of these benefits, but may compete for land for other land uses such as crops (unless planted on already degraded land such as an old mine site) and strip the land of important nutrients & ground water. All BECCS can do is make a private company very rich (+ their investors) via gov subsidies, i.e. tax payer money. Tx for another awesome video topic. Tackling the ecological, biodiversity & climate crises - they are the same thing - requires multiple actions & solutions... there is no "one thing fixes everything" solution (if only it was that easy)!
Now that Fungi has been added to Flora and Fauna in at least one country and with the irrational ban on Fungi research in the US being eased, if not removed, maybe we get to find Fungi full potential. Do we really understand mycelium networks? Do we really understand forests as a whole thing, empiricism breaks everything down and is a useful tool, but to truly understand the myriad complex relationships is something else.
actually there is a silver bullet. It's the Rhizosphere. More specifically, reforming our Agricultural system around a single unified purpose. Restoring the global Rhizosphere, sustaining it with organic waste, and achieving a scarcity free agricultural model that is not governed by the religion of economics. And not only is this a silver bullet for both ecological conservation and atmospheric carbon reduction, it's also a sociopolitical silver bullet because the labor required is unskilled, and the career path is Dirt Farming. Literally any able bodied human being over the age of 11 can participate in the process of turning organic waste into thriving Rhizosphere. That means all homeless, unemployed, and their families could be given a stable life long career as a small family farm tasked with the sole purpose of rehabilitating the Rhizosphere. If the napkin math holds up, is would require about 5 million people per continent actively employed year round as Dirt Farmers. And that job can be used to redefine global poverty and rather than spending more money on a social safety system to compensate for how tall the billionaire's towers have gotten, we just raise the floor up to a safe level. The level of a Dirt Farm that brings in enough revenue to support a thriving family of 3 to 5 per hectare. Then whatever we pay them becomes the new minimum wage. No more corporate stranglehold on human labor. No more homelessness. No more unemployed. There will always be room for 5 million people per continent to sustain and repair the harm human activity has on global ecosystems. We just have to enable them to be the ones who do it rather than pretending a blank check to the same people who caused this crisis is somehow going to solve it. So yeah, there's a real big fkin silver bullet that can and will cascade into many different sociopolitical and economic solutions.
@@ZennExile even if all best practices regarding small farming hold, I see two big problems with your thesis. (1) corporate interests consume quite a lot of the land in many countries. (2) 5 million per continent isn't even close to enough jobs to guarantee full employment. Besides, there are already labor shortages on many farms in the West. If the homeless in the West really wanted to, many could probably become farmers (many others have disabilities). But you can't force them to basically leave their communities to go farm.
@@ZennExile Exellent point, exept humans love to bury healthy soils under layers of hard cement, steel & asphalt whenever they get the chance. I assume you are aware of the depave & permaculture movements, and are a fan of fungi?! Yes, we do need to restore soils for both renenerative farming and ecosystem restoration - many cities are implementing excellent community composting projects (not everyone lives on a plot of land) and urban development strategies like LIUDD, SUDS, WSUD & Sponge Cities look to nature & soils to absorb excess rainfall to replenish ground water - all these techniques require healthy soils. Only a few humans are actually aware how critically important healthy soils are, and yet our lives literally depend on it! Unfortunately the vast majority of people live in urban centres and most of us are becoming further & further disconnected from the natural world. Tx for the info; I am going to research this topic.
I’m personally very interested in biochar/pyrolysis based carbon capture. In this method you take biomass and expose it to high temperatures on a low oxygen environment (typically a kiln) this releases a modest amount of energy and produces a charcoal which, if used as a soil additive, can sequester carbon for centuries on the surface.
I live off grid and have excess solar and biomass. I'm working on making an "oven" to capture syngas and make char. Ii got into Biochar experiments about 15 years ago and all I can say is the poorer the soil the better the results. I swear to God I had a pear tree that when a pear fell it was so heavy it broke my wife's toe! Biochar works!
This is super silly unless the kiln is able to provide the heat without offsetting any good from pyrolysis. Is the kiln from concentrated sunlight? If not, why do this?
Forestry for wood used in construction is much better than BECCS in the short term, as that carbon stays fixed for the lifetime of that structure. BECCS is a good option for agricultural waste products but for a managed plantation, that wood should go to construction.
Indeed, the emission-benefits of construction wood is even more than the contained carbon since it typically displaces the use of steel or concrete and that displaced emission also has to be taken into account. All in all a massive opportunity for a regenerative timber industry to become a big ally in combating climate change.
Wood can be a great low energy building material. But, wood construction is not a good way to store carbon. Wood buildings may last hundreds of years and store carbon during that time. But, they will at the end of that time burn or decompose in a landfill and release their carbon back into the atmosphere. That several hundreds of years of storage is insignificant compared to the 300 million years of storage provided by fossil fuels.
@@jeffsweeney312 Great remark! However, climate change is in many ways an acute crisis, with a decadal timescale in stead of a century or millenia time-scale. Ecosystems can more easily adapt if the changes are spread out from decades to centuries. The deep ocean ocean (as opposed to the ocean surface) can start to play a role in absorbing carbon in the century-to-millenia timescale. So in that regard, wood as timber remains nearly undiminished as a paradigm to combat climate change.
@@jeffsweeney312 Can't you just boil the old construction wood to make it heavier than water and dump it in anoxic waters? I mean, we still have to massively reduce carbon exhaust, but this might improve the storage time of the carbon.
7:32 THIS is where the real potential of using trees for Carbon Capture is. Stop at the torrefaction step, take that torrefied biomass (aka Biochar) and use it as a soil amendment, to grow more trees, faster. That's the real solution, IMO. it would be great to see you do a deeper dive into pyrolysis, if you haven't already (need to scour the channel's backlog of videos!)
@MediumPointBallPoint nope, biochar is stable in the soil for thousands of years. Because the carbon is ss recalcitrant, microorganisms cannot use it as a food source, instead it is habitat space. There are biogenic (ie human made) soils in the Amazon that were created by biochar. The Amazon has some of the most biologically active and erosive conditions in the world yet biochar made by ancient human civilizations there created these pockets of fertile, high carbon soils that are still around to this day. Terra praeta, look it up
@@tonydeveyra4611 Excellent. I assumed incorrectly from her statement about the old growth forests that the carbon would still be bio-available and subject to reintroduction. Knowing this, I may stop composting and start torreing my organic waste.
And another point, We have given billions of dollars in subsidies or grants to oil and gas producers to develop their Carbon Capture systems and to date the results are awful. Now is that because you can't scale the systems up easily or is it because they are not really trying too hard? I think it might be both.
I would say it is a little bit of both. Also carbon capture can look like a silver bullet solution, which is very convenient for big oil&gas companies image. They will most likely keep doing that for a long time, because this technology does not seem to make any substantial progress.
I think it might be that they can't figure out how to make enough money on the CCS's. Plus, so far they are too dangerous in terms of the chemicals needed in the processes, as well as need tons of energy in the processes which would look foolish to proceed with. 95% of the carbon captured today is used for enhanced oil recovery projects. Not to mention that the storage of liquid CO2 is a big dangerous and unsolvable problem.
Peat Bogs The Ugly duckling of natural carbon capture. Better than trees, because the carbon is locked away in the bog (unlike trees, where the wood will decay, releasing the carbon). However, peat bogs are only viable in very specific locations and environments. They aren't a solution, but should be protected and appreciated just as much as we celebrate forests.
And yet in the UK, companies are rushing to buy up and plant large areas of peat moorland with trees - it's cheap, and with the hunting interests that traditionally maintained such areas having become an easy political target, it comes with a social caché too that makes it politically easy. The scale of this is massive, and speaking to many investors in the space, they don't actually care about the carbon balance, as as soon as they've bundled the certified 'saved' carbon and sold it on, it's no longer their problem.
As a resident of Treelandia, also known as Canada, I can say that I have seen wildfires of epic proportions. Every time I see or taste it in the air, I just think of how all that immense amount of energy could have been heating peoples homes, cooking food or making heat and power for towns and cities in a combined heat and power plant way. Our destructive, world ending problem has a solution and that is to cut and burn the deadwood continuously, we would save so much on fire hazards on the one hand and save energy from dams, nuclear power plants, and we could use the wood as a battery of sorts to provide peaker power for wind and solar lulls. It is such an important part of the puzzle here where I live. My forest goes unbroken for millions of square kilometers. It is like a volcano that has preventable eruptions. Also every hunter here knows forest fire sites are the best hunting grounds for the next few years after a fire, the ground is so fertile and the plants and animals really respond to it afterwards, much like in volcanic soils
Hi Rosie. What about doing an article on growing columns of kelp in the Pacific, which is released every year to accumulate in the depths of the Pacific seabed?
I watch the train as it regularly passes through the Calder valley and I see it when I am at my veganic food forest. I can't see how it makes sense and I can't see how they can possibly be planting enough to really replace what the are burning.
I think it's an easy way for UK government to declare several GW of carbon neutral energy. Green-washing? Given that it's not carbon neutral it would be interesting to understand more about how it compares with the original coal fuel
Well, here is another anxiety producing bit of information, those old growth forests that were doing a good job of storing Co2 are being logged at rates that are increasing not decreasing. Getting to nitty gritty of this harvesting is almost impossible because of the information roadblocks put in the way by governments that promised to be more transparent if elected. I have to wonder who runs our governments in Australia, the people we elected or the people who donate money to the people we elected? As they say, follow the money and you will find the answer.
I feel this falls in the category of greenwashing BS now, but worth revisiting at some point. If your really careful about location and fastidious about your supply chain, perhaps it could play a small part in helping with that expensive storage heavy last 20% of abatement. With the usual caveat of CCS needing to become a real thing. BECCS Peaker Plants as seasonal storage. Using it as baseline power is silly... I wince every time i see Drax on that otherwise inspiring UK live power grid chart.
I don't think you can run BECCS (or coal for that matter) very well as a peaker plant. Probably just turn on when it starts getting cold and off when it stops.
Can you explain more about why you have an aversion to Drax? The place I work for is considering partnering with them but still doing our diligence to decide.
@@pajarobobo because Drax is a former coal-fire plant massively subsidised by the UK tax payer to be repurposed into BECCS. They don’t source their trees to burn from the UK, they get them from North America, have them shipped to their plant in the UK by fossil fuel-powered boats, to then burn them to produce electricity with an efficiency of ~ 30%… absolutely scandalous. They have also said for over 10 years that they would invest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to capture the CO2 emissions they produce by burning wood and they never have. They keep delaying it, pausing, saying that they don’t have enough money or that they have “on-going” CCS trials. Terrible activity.
My family and I have planted trees over the years more for giving back to nature. Unfortunately out of about 300 planted only about 25 trees have survived. I get really annoyed hearing people say plant trees because they're renewable. That maybe true in higher rainfall regions of the world but in Canada that's not necessarily the case. I've seen trees regenerated naturally on the same land grow more prolifically than planted ones.
Thanks Rosie, very informative review. As you mention, we have emitted 2.5 trillion tons of CO2. It follows that we need to remove around 1 trillion tons of Carbon from the atmosphere to get back to pre industrial levels. The minimum energy that process of de-carbonising our atmosphere will be, I presume, is the energy one gets by burning 1 trillion tons of coal at a minimum. It a daunting thought. That's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines that will be needed on top of the energy we use to achieve this.
Rosie I love your work. Recent research papers have shown old growth forests store more carbon than young forests. Not just in total but actively, because earlier papers were not factoring in the full extent of on going soil carbon increases. Again I have seen a well-touted paper that says there is ample reforestation space and it is the main options for effective carbon capture. Grasslands should be preserved and you are thoroughly read up on the rebuttals. :) Follow up studies only added a few trees to pasture land as shade and still found ample reforestation space and that this was the most viable option at scale. Your later video has completely trashed CCS & DCCS, I even quote your conclusions to others. BECCS of forest land and Biomass from forests for energy in general is counterproductive. It is habitat destruction incarnate and generally tantamount to evil as a bad idea can get. Mass 'economy of scale' power plants are voracious destroyers of forests that don't grow that fast, and should be restored habitats left to their own for 200+ years. So forest based biomass is inane. It is a rich man's way of fooling people to agree to make them richer while increasing the global destruction. Tree planting misses the point; we need forest restoration. The land given back to nature, disavowed thereafter, and left undisturbed for a millennia. There is also regenerative agriculture, which at least for pasture land does increase soil carbon storage and improve range health and plant diversity as well. Literally rejecting money and business as the basis of the calculation is the only way to solve any of this ecological peril and climate change. Economics has no other objective than making money. It put on sheep's clothing to greenwash itself, but is sneaking a profit motive into every decision. Therefore it never solves anything. We must value nature as part of us, that which makes our mind and sanity, gives us an understanding of life, puts our transitoriness in perspective. Then we must choose life around us over things we are advertised to need for our status. Essentially, political and business leaders, the wealthy, worthy, powerful, are all delusional poisoned minds, that we should regard as sad hoarders, of money, or possessions, and treat with measured pity and try to rehabilitate. At least these voices should be ignored in important decisions going forward. We need to find our sanity in the community of life around us. Meaning forests stay intact a millennia and we don't need to be sold commoditized substitutes for really living.
I would suggest that Biochar would be a great stopping point for BECCS as has the following advantages. You know exactly how much CO2 is being stored. It is effective as a soil additive and can increase crop yields by 20% or more. It is stable in the soil for 1000-10000 years. I would just love it is you would do a video on this subject as I know you would do a great job.
I think that the fact that biomass represents stored energy is of great importance. It can be used to fill the gaps when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Using biomass with CCS, as backup for intermittent renewables, is what tips the balance for me.
Thanks for the video, really interesting and informative and I didn't realise just how short of the target we would fall if we leave C sequestration to trees. One beef (pun intended!) I have though is with the land area required for livestock. As an Aussie, you will be aware more than most of the land used for grazing cattle in the interior of your great country. Most of it is just not suitable for cropping (or growing trees for that matter) and if it is to produce any food it is only in the form of meat, fibre and possibly dairy. I say possibly dairy because most land used for dairy farming is of better quality. Another oft repeated trope is the amount of land used for grazing vs. crop land. Two factors which complicate this are 1. land used for grazing is often vastly less productive so will never grow as many calories as good cropping land. 2. This poor grazing land grows very high quality protein rich food, i.e. meat, which is very valuable to many people. BTW, before anybody says it, I am not talking about the feedlot system of beef production where crops are fed to cattle, just extensive grazing. Sorry for the essay!
Great to see a realistic video on trees; everyone else seems to ignore everything that happens after planting, including, how to permanently store the captured CO2. I always cut my trees down again to make firewood, which then releases all the captured CO2, but if I don't cut them down then they eventually die and release the CO2 anyway! Can you make a video on Marine Biomass sometime, don't see much information on it, but a few people seem very excited by the possibilities of kelp farming being far more productive than tree forests, and most of our world is ocean.
Most of the world is ocean, but most of the ocean is to deep for any kind of anything to do with it ;) I don't know the numbers, but i bet, there is more usable land there there is usable ocean floor. One of the best ever natural carbon sinks are btw moore and Swamp. Biomass saturated with water cant decompose as there is no oxygen for the microbes eating it. And so it stays there.
You should watch RethinkX idea of absorbing CO2 from the ocean with what essentially is adding dirt to the seas to fix the CO2 already dissolved in the water. If true it would be the cheapest way and quickest too. Several decades to bring us to preindustrial levels as opposed to centuries.
@@tami6867 You say the ocean is too deep, but I remember being in the Sargasso Sea, Seaweed everywhere, and 7Km deep in places! A bigger issue is that a lot of the ocean doesn't have enough nutrients, but the ocean is a big place, there may be plenty that can be used.
@@tami6867 Yes, here we are busy restoring our peat bogs that had trees planted all over them last century, the trees are now being cut down because peat is better storage than trees! Trouble is that peat grows far too slowly, but everyone is ignoring that!
@@nigels.6051 Yes sure there are "plants" living down there. plants in quotes as those dont do photosyntesis, and therefor dont eat carbon, but instead must somehow eat detrius or whatever. BTW cool that you've made such a submarine experience. Are you marine ecologist or something? :) And therefore only the shallow areas of the ocean with light in them could be used for seaweed etc. Sure there is algee that just floats around, but it was already shown, that promoting algee growth by fertilizing the ocean will emmit more CO2 than the algee will consume. And removing tiny algee from millions of km³ water to remove them from the biological cycle is not a easy thing you just do. Thats why i think, if one want to carbon capture, removing it from the ocean water with lots of CO2 in it with some stationary osmosis technology that is already in development is way more promissing than building on plants for that. You always must keep in mind, that plantmatter has relatively low carbon content, and thus storing it for CS is crazy inefficient. Therefor you must somehow separate the carbon, by some burning process or idealy a pyrolyse process as there pure C can be produced. To be fair, such technology is under development, but i woulndt bet on it, as its far from beeing safe that it will be scaleable. Any and "solution" that cant be scaled is not a solution, easy and sad as that.
In my area Wetlands promoted as a carbon capture method. I am not convinced, can you please make a video showing the short-term and long-term benefits and cons. Thanks Good video thanks for sharing your hard work 👍
Wetlands peat lands and mangroves are what eventually turned into the coal that is such a problem today. So they are excellent at trapping carbon as long as you don't dig it up and burn it.
Good to know how ever I was wondering how long until they saturate and release more methane then carbon capture seems like replacing one green house gas for a worse won. That's why I am curious to see some actual numbers.
I saw a TV documentary about a study in Oregon that came to the conclusion that old growth forest continuously captured carbon and incorporated it into the soil. New plantations of trees were said to be emitters of carbon until they became well established. With all these competing claims it's incredibly difficult to know what to do for the best.
Have you looked into OTEC, or Oceanic Thermal Energy Conversion? One of the stated benefits with OTEC is they bring up cold nutrient rich water from the deep and use it to feed and maintain fish farms. Instead of producing fish I always wondered if the cold nutrient rich water could be used to produce algae possibly for fuel or released into the ocean to feed on the Carbonic Acid and sink when their life cycle is complete. I would love to know your opinion.
One thing about emissions from farming is that many of them aren't actually fossil carbon but instead things like methane or nitrogen oxides that are relatively short-lived and are synthesized from atmospheric gasses to begin with. That means if we had atmospheric carbon low enough we could in principle just ingnore them and accept relatively low warming they produce. Then there's also emissions from land use change. These ones in large part happen only once because they basically are a loss of carbon in the soil that used to be some ecosystem before becoming farmland. Most of these, IIRC, come from developing countries where modern agriculture has not matured yet and populations are still growing. They can also be partially offset by switching to more sustainable farming practices that retain and capture more carbon than the current ones.
Hi Rosie! Thanks for the video. I've got questions that may be relevant: what happens to the carbon in tree trunks when we use techniques like hugelkultur (in which we bury the biomass)? Does all the carbon end up back in the atmosphere eventually? Or does part of the carbon stays in the soil? Or even does part of the carbon stays in the soil and is eventually used by plants and ends up as part of the carbon captured by them? Also, I may have found a slight mistake: around 3:20 on the video, you present a paper that says planting trees could capture "200 gigatonnes of additional carbon" (200 billion tonnes you say right after, 2 x 10^8 tonnes), and then you say that over the course of human history we've put 2 and a half trillion (2.5 x 10^9 ) tonnes in the atmosphere. Then you say that's over a hundred times what we could sequester with tress. Didn't you mean over ten times (2.5 x 10^9 / 2 x 10^8)?
Reduce plowing, plant cover crops. What was the carbon content of soils before plowing? What is the excess carbon content in the atmosphere? What is the major carbon sink?
How about growing plants like bamboo and hemp (building materials, paper, textile, industrial fibres)? Not for power generation, but use as permanent material.
I've been thinking about for a while, and I've come up with a plan: Grow massive amounts of algae in a manmade lake in the Sahara. Use the sun distill Red Sea water (or draw from the Nile), use the sun to power machinery, and use the sun to dry the algae before burying it in the desert to prevent decomposition. Algae grows wicked fast in sunny, hot conditions. We can feed it with wastewater. By mummifying the carbon in the desert we can lock it up, or even bury it in salt mines, etc.
Lets not forget that a lot of countries like Germany probably can't do the energy transition without long term (seasonal) energy storage. The reason is that in the winter germany can't get enough energy from solar and wind i.e. there are gaps when renewables just don't produce the power that is needed. Lets also remind ourselves that wood (and other biomass) is an energy storage device that can easily store energy for months and even years. So biomass (not just wood) can help in that regard. Yet, it probably won't be enough. We'll still need some hydrogen or other e-fuels.
In Scotland, as in many similar places, the landscape naturally was covered in trees, the West Coast being a temperate rain forest, which is hard to beat in carbon capture and biodiversity. Now it is largely open moorland. Kept so either by subsidised sheep farming. Or deer shooting or grouse shooting, the later being the worse as they burn the Heather….all so a very very very rich folk can shoot things. It does occur to me, every time we go on about the Amazon etc, we should put our own house in order first.
I remember reading an article that say that Japan is responsible for the deforestation in Indonesia bc instead of using their own forests for wood they import it from there while most japan forests were artificially planted and arn't native, so forest conservation could harm the environment.
Rosie I think you also need to factor in another huge advantage of tree cover added to the planet over other forms of carbon sinks. As we are in the end trying to reduce/stop global warming ,we need to look at other factors of temperature increase. The urban heat island effect is real and measurable. High density urban areas are really bad for this, really really bad. Lower density is only good for the improvement of lifestyle and mental health, but physically cooler, often directly due to more urban tree cover with good planning. But the usually ignored factor is that forests themselves are a physically cooler places, than for example a farmed field of wheat. So more forests directly drops the temperature of the land on which it sits and in the calculation of how to reduce global warming, this should be included into the calculation.
Remember that when you look at a tree, you only see the carbon that is above ground while there can be even more underground that you don't see in the root mass. When a tree burns or dies, it takes much longer for the underground carbon to get back into the atmosphere. Research is underway to modify plants to cause them to form carbon nodules in their root systems that would enable agricultural crops to directly sequester carbon in the soil.
@@jeffsweeney312 There are many different forms. You can find plenty of information if you search on "soil carbon sequestration." Work is going on in picking plants and trees that do this well, and in modifying plants to do it better. I am interested in modifications that result in carbon that is harder for microorganisms to breakdown so it stays in the ground for very long times. This kind of approach does not require building machines or transporting wood or processing, just changes to seeds.
To keep the forestry carbon captured stored for longer we should keep it from oxidizing. And to increase the amount that can be stored we should remove it from the grow site. So why not just bury the wood somewhere where it doesn't rot? A good place for this is in anoxic waters since the other oxidizers are rarer and will quickly deplete in the presence of that much carbon, so adding more carbon would improve the site's ability to retain carbon. All we need to figure out is how to make wood sink. Which I think is an already solved problem. The just grow plants, harvest plants, process them to make low in oxygen and denser than water, and dump them in anoxic waters. Presto, the the problems with using plants for carbon capture (lack of space and lack of permanence) are solved. Or if you to go the cooler but more expensive route: Press them all into diamonds, so we can all get diamond windows.
Thanks for the helpful videos, can you go into pyrolysis and biochar for agriculture as a means to process biomass from many sources and qualities towards soil carbon and reduced N and C emissions in agriculture?
Application (firing) of biomass in a slighty-converted conventional coal powerplant with added CCS means approx. 2/3 of the primairy energy in de biomass gets lost due to conversion efficiency of the steam cycle. CHP Combined Heat and Power basically has a better overall efficiency, but there is usually not enough heat demand close to a 400...1200 MW (electrical output) power plant (i.e. roughly 800.000 ... 2.400.000 kW thermal output) with the electric power demand. CHP based on on lower power district heating powerplant with electric power generation and CCS is more energy effective. SYNC between heat demand and power demand will always be an issue: storage will be needed to have balance demand and supply.
Bamboo and hemp remove a lot more carbon from our atmosphere than trees and using these materials to build homes will lock up the carbon for hundreds of years especially in hempcrete walls. We would need to Produce the lime binder in electric kilns powered by renewables and then capturing the CO2 and storing it underground. Hempcrete walls absorb CO2 as the lime turns back into limestone. Calcium oxide to calcium carbonate.
The Point about process and transport emissions for bio-energy is a red herring as all these could be replaced with zero carbon sources. It's like saying EVs aren't zero emission because some of the power used to charge them currently is produced with fossil fuels, but that will change. This is what a transition to net zero looks like!
Hej Rosie. I would be very interested to hear your explonation how can be cows other than at worst carbon neutral it everything they consume, aka plants is theoretically carbon negative. Even if large part of the emissions goes back with the 💩, it should be still carbon neutral at least, since those carbons where already sequestered from the air at the beginning of the cycle. Same time if us the humans consume it, we produce at least as much of waist what turns into co2, but it seams it doesn't count. Please help me to figure out this, I am totally confused how this can be a so huge issue. For me this sounds like we are not counting the same emission in case of vegetarian meals and meat eaters. Please edducate me :) Many thanks.
This is my argument as well, the only problem seems to be that we have increased the number of cows on Earth since the time when cows were wild animals, and with China becoming keen on cow meat the numbers are currently increasing rapidly. However, the problem with cows is that they produce methane, and methane has a half life of 8.6 years, so we don't need to compare to the stone age, only to the beginning of this century...
@nigels.6051 Yes, it's slighly an issue with population growth, but I would like to point out, that we human beings are producing methane as well. I would argue, at there is similar methane production made by humans when we digest the food, just we eat per person much less. The material doesn't get wasted just transforms. At the end it will tur to soil both. So I am not sure from the perspective of the carbon cycle it has any difference if the vegetable is eaten by a human or a cow. The process is very similar and since it was already sequestered from the air it should be equally net zero. Do I miss something?
@@gene8194 First, I believe that cows produce vastly more methane than humans due to their specialist digestive system for digesting grass rather than vegetables, although it does seem to depend on what you feed them, give them vegetables or seaweed and they are OK. That bit is indeed going to be net zero given a fixed population size. Second, the production of grass is not currently net zero, grass production requires a lot of nitrogen fertiliser, the production of which is currently very CO2 expensive, but that should be changing soonish as we start to get wind/solar generated fertilisers. Overall, I don't see the need to reduce our population of cows in order to reach net zero, although there is good argument not to allow a dramatic increase. There is good reason to produce net zero nitrogen fertiliser, in fact that seems a necessity if we are to keep our meat.
What if, instead of burning it and doing CCS with the CO2 released, we converted the biomass into charcoal, and buried it? Charcoal should degrade extremely slowly underground, and it usually helps with soil structure. Could it be a thing?
Oh, you want to invent coal? I agree with your idea After we are no longer mining and using coal. That is already happening, witness the rate that coal mining and use is dying in the US.
In Sweden we have a lot of heat and cogeneration plants. Previously they burned both fossil and biogenic carbon but they switched to mostly garbage and biogenic sources. In Sweden there are industries that have contributed to transform our forests to become tree plantations and clear cutting important biodiversity old growth forests for satisfying the industries need for steady supply of wood and pulp. So even though Sweden get a lot of matter from these industries to the burning plants we still need to import garbage, left over wood products. So I think maybe CSS will increase that need to supply the burning plants? And it will contribute to the pressure of industries demand in Swedish old growth biodiversity? But still if we’re keeping these plants maybe it should be mandatory with CCS on them anyway?
Great review, congratulations Rosie! However, I think that energy can also be produced by pyrolyzing biomass, but biochar, which in principle binds 20-30% less CO2 than CCS, when returned to the earth greatly increases its productivity and accelerates biomass production, even for industrial or even food production purposes! Also, if we do not burn, but store the CO2 absorbed in the wood in buildings and furniture, then by temporarily storing it for 30-100 years, we give the technology enough time for a real green transition! Only this temporary storage should be supported and recognized with voluntary market credits to some extent, so that it is worth reducing the level of atmospheric CO2. The totalitarian idea that only permanent CO2 storage is the recognized and accountable method is completely wrong and self-destructive. Humanity is physically incapable of this! But we can reach the goal in several steps, think of the several stages of space rockets, Armstrong would never have taken that "small step" in one stage!
Growing trees for shade or shelter as well as sequestering carbon would have an additional benefit. Tarmac being black absorbs heat contributing to heat island effect increasing heat island effect, requiring more aircon for cooling. In the northern lands trees can provide shelter from the colder northerly winds reducing the need for heating. Shelter belts can used to allow animals graze longer into the winter and reducing there envoirmental impact .
There is just one problem with BECCS, there is just no way it can burn the wood and gain enough energy to capture all the CO2 emitted. A ton of wood can release about 4,000kWh of thermal energy. A typical thermoelctric generator has not more than 30% efficiency to convert that heat energy into electric energy (just for comparison, even nuclear power plants barely manage to get over 35% efficiency). This means that at best, a ton of wood burned can get you about 1,200kWh of electricity. The problem here is that one tonne of CO2 required 1,400kWh of electric energy to be removed from the air, and wood releases about 1.8 tonnes of CO2 per tonne burned. This means that you would require somewhere about 2,100 to 2,200kWh of electricity to capture the emissions of that one burned tonne. Sure, we could argue that the carbon concentration at the source is much bigger, so capturing the CO2 would be more energy efficient, but even if this system managed to capture 1 tonne of CO2 with only 700kWh, the system would barely make enough energy to capture that CO2. And we wouldn't have accounted the energy needed to compress that CO2 and pump it deep underground. In other words, there is no way to make a profit out of this, unless you can sell carbon credits. But carbon credits only allow oil companies to maintain their status quo, and therein lies the problem...
All plants feed the soil carbon. That is they feed microbes that feed on each other and also digest inanimate minerals from the sands, silts and clays to eventually be released as nutrients to plants when eaten by predator microbes that release as plant available. Biological sequestration has cooling benefits beyond removal of CO2, such as increasing fertility, water infiltration, water retention. Transpiration from leaves has a latent heat cooling impact in the immediate surroundings. Shade prevents sunlight from turning into heat where it hits bare or dark surfaces on the ground. Microbes ride the water vapor from transpiration to become nuclei for cloud formation at a lower temperature than dry air. This forms clouds that reflect light back into space that avoids becoming heat. Farming practices can achieve net increases in organic content that achieves these great results. I hope this potential will be widely recognized in order to scale up to a meaningful impact.
Unfortunately, regenerative agriculture was not a comparison element in this piece. Conservation tillage and the use of nitrogen and carbon-fixing cover crops have great potential in achieving negative carbon results over vast areas over time, using only photosynthesis. This was researched in a project involving several hundred farms over hundreds of hectares on the Canadian Prairies overseen by researchers at the University of Saskatchewan for over a decade. They found that the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil was equivalent to the average emissions from 3.4 million petrol burning cars. The Rodale Institute in the US has done similar research at smaller scales and has published well-referenced reports on the topic. Australia also has a strong regenerative agriculture movement. One of the emerging key considerations in agriculture and forestry is soil disturbances through tillage and clear cut logging, which releases CO2 and methane while disrupting the living soil microcosm (mainly beneficial fungus) and soil structure, leading to further loss of nutrient transfer capability and moisture, and poor drainage. "No till" and regenerative forestry (as well as preserving and building new wetlands where applicable) should now be moved to near the top of the list of climate solutions and ecological systems preservation methods. Engineering solutions cannot do it alone.
umm... the objection to tree planting seems to be that mature trees don't capture much carbon. Given that... cut down the trees, use them to build stuff, and re-use the same land to gather some more carbon with new baby trees. If you harvest the wood, say every 20 years... does it move the needle at all?
What about BECCS with algae? I'd love to hear your take on it. Algae for biodiesel has faltered but burning the algae itself seems like a KISS approach
Replace the burners to burn powdered iron where the the byproduct is rust that can be converted back powdered iron using hydrogen from renewable energy and leave the trees to grow up to really productive carbon capture with intensive Silva culture and use hemp for fiber and paper. ...and hemp has additional bonuses like food and oil from hemp seeds, and fibre for paper making, hempcrete, and um, other recreational activities 😂
Dear Rosie, PLEASE do a video, or short series of vids on 'Carbon Capture and Storage' technologies. What is the state of the art? Are they improving? Does ANYONE actually want them to work? They are generally only ever raised as a 'fossil-fuel-fantasy' bogeyman in 'Greenie' videos, wherein the cost and, it appears, the basic lack of, finished, engineered, scalable tech is rendering the idea unfeasible, if not a scam, but here, you present it as choice, not an engineering challenge, so I'd love to know what's goin' on. Thanks.
I agree with your skepticism, when it comes to burning biofuels, when you cut down a tree and burn it, just because you did not wait 60,000,000 years for it to become a fossil fuel, does not mean it is any cleaner, a large amount of CO2 will still be released, even if you plant a replacement tree, it could take half a century to absorb as much CO2 as the original. I could see a justification for burning wood, in countries that do not get sufficient wind or Solar energy though out the year, to be able to build a winter reserve of stored Green chemical energy, (probably as Green Hydrogen) burning biofuels for the coldest 3 months of the winter would give 9 months for the CO2 released to be reabsorbed, but this should not be done on a continuous basis, because I do not believe that nature could reabsorb it all, especially as the world continues to suffer from an alarming increase in forest fires. Of course, when it comes to burning biofuels, you come back to the same disadvantage you get with burning fossil fuels, not only do you have to pay to build the boiler and generating plant, but every day you must pay for the fuel to run it, at least with real renewables, wind wave, solar or tidal, you only have to build the generating plant, the fuel to run it is free, ok you must build an energy storage plant as well, but that is still going to be cheaper than buying fuel every day, and of course land used for biofuels can not be used for food production or wildlife. Drax claims that it only uses waste wood from the timber industry, I work in night transport which requires me to make nightly visits to Liverpool docks, which is where the wood pellets for America come ashore, stored in 3 huge silos, which feed into the Drax train, which consists of approximately 30 rail trucks of the type you might be familiar from the mining industry, each truck holds much more than its road equivalent I would estimate that each rail truck could carry 50 tons, multiplied by 30 would mean 1,500 tons of wood pellets each trip, the train leaves at approximately 8 P.M. each evening and returns at 5 A.M. each morning which makes it perfectly possible for there to be a daytime run as well, but that I cannot confirm. That quantity of wood pellets on a daily basis leaves me skeptical about their definition of waste wood.
Other kinds of bioenergy are being developed. Algie,... Urban Forestation,......... Bioducts; making bioroofs on roads and railways. And,...... Wood can be used for insulating houses,......... Thus reducing the need for heating,..... And,... Just to say that every solution that isn't conflicting with other solutions is needed. To curb climate change...
First, any crops or similar plants require water and probably fertiliser, while requiring similar heavy machinery for harvesting and transport. In other words: similar emissions to crop agriculture, with a corresponding high cost in water and fertiliser if farmed intensively. And then there's the other sources of emissions Rosie mentioned, like transport, so whether CCS would be able to even negate the production side of bioenergy is debatable. Secondly, crops grow slowly over significant land areas, so people will be motivated to farm intensively (which is unsustainable and destroys the soil) microbiome) and, as mentioned by Risie, cut down natural habitats to use the land for crops. We are already seeing the environment-destroying results of this in countries where bioenergy is sourced on a large scale, particularly with habitat destruction. Bioenergy can simply never keep up with our civilisation's intensifying electricity uses, providing far too little energy for the corresponding land use. Bioenergy itself only really works sustainably on large scales when it's an added process to normal crop and tree production, using waste parts of the plant as fuel. Just bolting on CCS to this process would be helpful (if CCS lives up to its technological promise)l, but how much impact would this have on global atmospheric carbon?
Using underwater grown plants would remove the risk of fire and therefore the cyclic return of carbon. Just let the plant sink to the bottom, providing fresh feed for all the organism at the sea floor and removing the carbon. Rinse and repeat. I wonder if we would do this on scale, if it would even provide some benefits - e.g. farm parts of the plants for livestock or direct human consumption. Also, accelerated aging of rocks might be more effective than BECCS - I don't really fancy the tree planting, we were horrible at it so far (monocultures, pest-sensitive forests, forest fires, ...), so I don't think it's the way to go.
Yes, and the vegetation provides shelter for young fish, which would be good for nutririous food supplies. Sea grass is easilly nurtured in near shore areas and can be cultivated for construction and furnishing material.
Is not the wood component of a tree a stable form of captured carbon. The tree can die and the wood remain. The captured carbon is still stable and storable. This carbon in the form of wood could be stored. Maybe placed in one of those giant holes in the Aussie outback call mines. Place the wood in the ground, exclude oxygen and it may not rot nor burn and so the carbon is stored. Then replant the same land and grow more trees and capture more carbon. Is not carbon still held in wood after a tree dies?
Have to agree with Rosie on this one. But that does not meen we should not plant and nurture both trees and forests. Tree removal and forest fires are happening at a faster rate than planting can happen. Savannah land best use is livestock.
If we take degraded highly grazed land that has poor soil quality (low humus = low carbon + low water retention and low productivity) which we have heaps of all over the world, and use permaculture practices to create food forests that is low maintenance high productivity, high carbon storage and high water retention. Things like chop and drop, swales and dams, high biodiversity, high level of productive/useful plants (tree, bushes, shrubs and herbaceous) all increase carbon captured in the soil and in the plants. This system often spontaneously creates new permanent creeks and streams due to the slowing of water moving through the environment and also creating microclimates with localised cooling and increased humidity in previously hot and dry climates. Being more damp makes it more resistant to fire. Planting useful and food producing plants solves the problem of taking up farmland, it reduces localised flooding, drought and heatwaves and it stores carbon as the soils increase in humus. The soil stores more carbon than just planting trees. The only issue is it’s harder to harvest the food in a cheep mass produced way when maintaining diversity in a more natural looking structure though we are likely to have bots able to pick delicate produce in diverse terrains. Alternatively in food forests close to communities when you are hungry and unemployed it’s not such an imposition to wander around a few archers for a few hours once every few weeks. Low food miles too.
Would Giga-farms outside our cities be helpful to our citizens? Giga-farms could grow food in half and grow high carbon biology for heating, electricity, and biochar for geological long-term burial. You mentioned 2.5 trillion tonnes of industrial carbon has been emitted...what is the potential production and depositation removing industrial carbon globally?
CO2 capture and storage is currently very inefficient. The way to change that is to burn biomass in oxygen and then the only waste gas is co2 and water vapour which condences out. The oxygen comes as a waste product of green hydrogen production from the electrolysis of water. This gives 4 times the amount (by weight) of oxygen as hydrogen. Biomass burns at a much higher temperature in oxygen which can make energy recovery (as electricity) more efficient, However it might destroy current biomass furnaces so the way to get around that is to recycle some of the CO2 exhaust into the pure C2 to reduce its concentration down to say 30%.. This process would then store the pure CO2 waste gas into old oil wells with high efficiency while generating electricity. Currently all the O2 is vented as waste where hydrogen is produced by electrolysis.
Surely the best solution then is to just produce and store wood pellets indefinitely. There will be around twice as much carbon in a fuel pellet than the equivalent weight of CO2 and it’s less likely to escape if stored correctly. Then, you can continue to use the land to grow more trees to produce more pellets to extract from the longer carbon cycle…
What about Cross laminated timber so that the forest and carbon omissions there in are locked away in the construction sector where it can replace both steel and concrete because of its excellent structural performance, and therefore is a much more credible way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere
The big catch 22 we are starting to feel, in relation to more trees, is the roll of climate change in increasing large fire risks. So while more CO2 helps grow more trees, we might just be providing more fuel for worsening fire seasons, and all the pollution effects from that. The only path forward is to move away from fossil fuels.
Algae farms would probably be the best way to sequester carbon, since it's easier to move around, dry out, and convert into bricks. The biggest challenge of sequestering carbon is gonna be keeping it _away_ from people who want to burn it for fuel. The desire to make money off of this process is going to be too enticing and I fear that all carbon capture efforts are going to be undone by industrial folks who want to greenwash the idea of digging it back up and burning it because it's "carbon neutral" when it utterly ruins the point of going through all this trouble in the first place.
Only harvest adult trees, leaving room for young trees to grow more and capture carbon. Build houses small and big from wood. Carbon will be stored as long as the house stands. If these houses replace houses that was intended to be built from concrete, there will even less carbon released.
How about algae? The concentration of CO2 in water is much higher because it dissolves, and algae can produce oils for fuel. Torre the rest and use as soil amendment or simply put in old coal mine. There are place where algae grows out of control now, like the Mississippi delta. Anyone up for harvesting free energy?
"Cutting down trees" is a moot point if you use hemp as a fuel. It absorbs CO2 at a much faster rate than the same area of forest, is less restricted by geography, can be harvested much easier, and if it were to burn down it wouldn't release as much CO2 as a burning forest would.
The trouble is, people keep cutting down trees. The best storage of carbon is in the coal and gas it is already stored in. Just keep it in the ground. Meat is also carcinogenic. Check out the WHO list of carcinogenic substances if you do not believe. I remember Tasmanian forestry execs not worried about chopping down the tallest tree in the southern hemisphere because the second tallest would become the tallest.
Make charcoal from all agrcultural WASTE & use it as soil improver! Even though it catches only a part of the plants carbon content, it's a very simple process that can be done locally by every farmer or forest owner. They should be paid for the carbon captured as an incentiv.
The best mix of direct air carbon capture -- and it's patently obvious that BECCS is among the best options -- can at best tackle a few percent of the GHGs in the air in time to avoid runaway to Hothouse Earth. The rest must come from curtailing fossil trade, at least 2% of today's level per month, to zero by 2030. Not 'net zero'. Not 'zero with carbon credits'. Zero. It will take both of those combined, plus diverting biomethane from making it to the air as much as possible, plus conservation, to avoid a Derna on half of all coasts every year, a Lahaina every week, by 2050. o zer
There are too many weasel words in this video. Just because something is a "maybe" or someone "suggested" something doesn't make it reliable information. Increasing carbon sinks through reforestation, mangrove farming, and other greening efforts are by far the most realistic, cheapest, and greenest methods of CO2 sequestration for balancing the CO2 cycle (not "net zero" as it's not possible).
Drax uses pelleted wood, mainly sourced from old growth 🇺🇸 & 🇨🇦 forests that are processed and shipped via the sea with very little, & in some cases, no replanting. It's simply a scandalous state of affairs that UK taxpayers subsidise these activities whilst Drax as a company tries to claim it's all carbon neutral. CCS, whilst technically feasible, is [so] energy intensive as to be massively inefficient and economically untenable, which is why so many CCS plants have been quietly shut down after plenty of hoo ha prior to the commencement of operations; Drax will be no different. By and large, CCS remains just an excuse for polluters to continue greenwashing their 'business as usual' practices. This isn't to say that at some point in the future, CCS technology won't evolve to be more than just a fig leaf on a very thorny bush.
BECCS? no thanks! It's just not opportune now when there are still so many smokestacks with dense CO2 gas ripe for being captured / non-emitted. Immediate to-do list includes rewilding (shrinking the agriculture area as much as possible) and repurposing forests intended for firewood or pellets to a regenerative timber industry. I mean, trees suffer from the criticism that they re-emit their carbon after dying and dropping onto the forest soil, but if you massively displace that dead wood into valuable long-term stock like buildings, there is a genuine opportunity opening up (also of course because using wood will subtract from steel and concrete consumption).
Just let the cows eat grass. They burp less, the pastures store more carbon in time, and cows burp less than with corn... whiteoak pastures does this and they've proven to be carbon negative...
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AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: And if you'd like I'd like to talk to you about these issues.
APOLOGIES NOW for what will feel like a lecture.
You are quite right about the volume of the CO2 we have emitted. I just downloaded the data for 1940-2022 and that makes for some serious discussion.
It took 44 years from 1940 to 1984 to pump 500 Billion tons into the atmosphere.
It took only 21 years 2005 for the next 500 Billion tons
It took only 15 years 2020 for the next 500 Billion tons making it 1.5 Trillion tons
And we'll go past 2 Trillion tons at the current rate around 2033.
That of course doesn't include the billions of tons from badly managed coal mines in places like China or what happened pre-1940 or lots of human activities that aren't counted.
So the real problem going forward isn't Net-Zero. Its how we get to Net-Subzero and NOT bankrupt the World's economy or destroy modern civilisation getting there. Because if we do either of those things we really will have an apocalypse.
FYI - I did my degree in America and we once had a NASA engineer do a special guest lecture on terraforming Mars. He very simply said "It's Impossible" and then explained WHY. He introduced us to 2 subjects I know call planetary mechanics and planetary dynamics. *Planetary mechanics* are just the raw amounts like we have 2.5 Trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere and it takes X Joules to raise Y cubic kilometers so many degrees. *Planetary dynamics* are things like gas cycles, water cycles, thermal cycles (like the AMOC). On simple planetary mechanics Mars is impossible to terraform. It ends the discussion when you realise that it takes 178 Trillion tons of air just to make a 1km thick layer of Earth normal air around a body that large. You don't even get to the subject of how to keep it attached to the planet. Its just where do we get that much air in the first place.
Here's the problem we have with CO2. I have seen plenty promotion, neutral and debunk videos on both carbon capture & storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC). Even if we could use one of the technical solutions the problem is ENERGY. Where do we simply get enough energy to run those systems?
If we did try one of those DAC systems you then have to ask how we process that many cubic kilometers to get at those 400 parts per million of CO2 to extract 2.5 Trillion tons.
This is the problem the guy from NASA when trying to explain what he found to other people. *The numbers are so large that people can't conceive of what those numbers mean.* If the Earths surface is 510,072,000km² then that basically equates to 1/2 Billion cubic kilometers of air just in the first kilometer of 100 above the Earths surface. *How does anyone actually think they are going to feed volume that through a bunch of factory built units?*
How much energy and materials will it take and how much CO2 will be produced building all those units?
Sorry the only way it can actually be done is with TREES?
The question is how do we convince every person on the planet they have to plant (on average) about 1,000 trees. That's about 8 Trillion trees and we need 1 in 10 to grow to maturity and suck in and CAPTURE about 1.5 tons of CO2 each. Sorry but we are going to have to do things like plant tree lines along very fence line on every farm on the planet.
AND YES you make an incredibly important point we just can't go throwing trees in the ground we have to actually do some PLANNING. You can't just throw pine trees into the Sahara, but with the right plan we can plant staggering numbers of date palms, olive trees, cedars and other suitable varieties across all that open space of North Africa.
YES we'd have to supply staggering amounts of water until they generate their own weather, but there are low energy options there. I worked on the Ravensthorpe Nickel Project back in the mid 2000s and that has an interesting desal plant. Its NOT reverse osmosis which long term has too high maintenance costs. Because I'd worked on another Wier project they gave me the FAT for the desal plant. Weir called it vapour compression but from memory it was built more like a Multi-stage flash distillation system and may well have combined those 2 technologies. Either way it used only a fraction of the power an RO plant of the same size. The reason such plants aren't used a lot is they can be tricky to start-up and they only have 1 speed (flow rate). You can't just turn them on and off at will like you can RO *AND YES* I have done RO systems one of which was quite complex.
So yes it sound crazy to tell everyone we need to plant 8 Trillion trees. But I am sorry but there is no other feasible way to do it. Everything else either relies on a technology we can't build enough of or a technology we can't power or some ridiculous seeding fantasy of the sky or the oceans.
If you look at some of the ideas being proposed for seeding the sky to let in less light or seeding the ocean to have more oceanic algae plankton to consume the C02 are so absurd they are only worth considering to see how absurd they are. Nobody knows if they would work, or how much we'd need let alone what happens if it gets out of control and needs shutting down. We can shut down even the most complex plants we build but *how would you shut down the SO2 seeding in the upper atmosphere I have seen proposed?* Likewise if the iron seeding of the ocean to promote algae growth goes haywire. What's the contingency for that?
As an aerospace engineer placing a giant sun shield out at the L1 Lagrange Point makes better sense. We could build it with louvres and control what heat comes in. You just need to get me something like US$50 Trillion and hand me control of the entire engineering infrastructure of the planet. before you ask if it cost US$200 Billion to build the ISS with a weight of 450t in LEO. What do you think it would cost to build something at L1 that weighs on the order of a million tons and needs constant onsite maintenance to keep it orientated and in position.
Plus we'd need a fleet of satellites monitoring the entire Earth's surface at 10m resolution or better to watch the effects. Actually we'll need those whatever we do. That's one of the few things we can do. the question is will we do it to save the planet or watch it die.
The ad made it next to impossible for me to understand the rest is video.
I think it's important to distinguish between "planting trees" as part of nature-based solutions (restoring ecosystems such as mangrove forests & reforestation (excluding aforestation)) and using tree plantations as part of a BECCS process - these don't restore ecosystems or biodiversity but can have many adverse impacts if not managed properly.
In nature trees perform many critical tasks, such as regulating local climates & as part of the water cycle & purification, stabilising soil, providing habitat for many many species, protecting the land during storms (especially from the action of the sea), provide food awa contruction & other material (must be harvested sustainably) etc etc. Trees help with human physical & mental well-being, especially kids. In cities trees help filter the air, manage water, provide shade & calm traffic. When a tree dies and falls to the ground it regenerates the soil, provides a safe enviro for seeds and provides habitats for all sorts of creatures.
Trees are most useful within a natural context as part of ecological systems, processes & services whilst also providing goods construction material, fibres, food & medicine etc for animals & humand. Planting trees for BECCS provides none of these benefits, but may compete for land for other land uses such as crops (unless planted on already degraded land such as an old mine site) and strip the land of important nutrients & ground water. All BECCS can do is make a private company very rich (+ their investors) via gov subsidies, i.e. tax payer money.
Tx for another awesome video topic. Tackling the ecological, biodiversity & climate crises - they are the same thing - requires multiple actions & solutions... there is no "one thing fixes everything" solution (if only it was that easy)!
BECCS seems bad, but what's a good alternative? Air source CCS seems even worse.
Now that Fungi has been added to Flora and Fauna in at least one country and with the irrational ban on Fungi research in the US being eased, if not removed, maybe we get to find Fungi full potential. Do we really understand mycelium networks? Do we really understand forests as a whole thing, empiricism breaks everything down and is a useful tool, but to truly understand the myriad complex relationships is something else.
actually there is a silver bullet. It's the Rhizosphere. More specifically, reforming our Agricultural system around a single unified purpose. Restoring the global Rhizosphere, sustaining it with organic waste, and achieving a scarcity free agricultural model that is not governed by the religion of economics.
And not only is this a silver bullet for both ecological conservation and atmospheric carbon reduction, it's also a sociopolitical silver bullet because the labor required is unskilled, and the career path is Dirt Farming. Literally any able bodied human being over the age of 11 can participate in the process of turning organic waste into thriving Rhizosphere.
That means all homeless, unemployed, and their families could be given a stable life long career as a small family farm tasked with the sole purpose of rehabilitating the Rhizosphere. If the napkin math holds up, is would require about 5 million people per continent actively employed year round as Dirt Farmers.
And that job can be used to redefine global poverty and rather than spending more money on a social safety system to compensate for how tall the billionaire's towers have gotten, we just raise the floor up to a safe level. The level of a Dirt Farm that brings in enough revenue to support a thriving family of 3 to 5 per hectare.
Then whatever we pay them becomes the new minimum wage. No more corporate stranglehold on human labor. No more homelessness. No more unemployed. There will always be room for 5 million people per continent to sustain and repair the harm human activity has on global ecosystems.
We just have to enable them to be the ones who do it rather than pretending a blank check to the same people who caused this crisis is somehow going to solve it.
So yeah, there's a real big fkin silver bullet that can and will cascade into many different sociopolitical and economic solutions.
@@ZennExile even if all best practices regarding small farming hold, I see two big problems with your thesis. (1) corporate interests consume quite a lot of the land in many countries. (2) 5 million per continent isn't even close to enough jobs to guarantee full employment. Besides, there are already labor shortages on many farms in the West. If the homeless in the West really wanted to, many could probably become farmers (many others have disabilities). But you can't force them to basically leave their communities to go farm.
@@ZennExile Exellent point, exept humans love to bury healthy soils under layers of hard cement, steel & asphalt whenever they get the chance. I assume you are aware of the depave & permaculture movements, and are a fan of fungi?!
Yes, we do need to restore soils for both renenerative farming and ecosystem restoration - many cities are implementing excellent community composting projects (not everyone lives on a plot of land) and urban development strategies like LIUDD, SUDS, WSUD & Sponge Cities look to nature & soils to absorb excess rainfall to replenish ground water - all these techniques require healthy soils.
Only a few humans are actually aware how critically important healthy soils are, and yet our lives literally depend on it! Unfortunately the vast majority of people live in urban centres and most of us are becoming further & further disconnected from the natural world.
Tx for the info; I am going to research this topic.
I’m personally very interested in biochar/pyrolysis based carbon capture. In this method you take biomass and expose it to high temperatures on a low oxygen environment (typically a kiln) this releases a modest amount of energy and produces a charcoal which, if used as a soil additive, can sequester carbon for centuries on the surface.
I live off grid and have excess solar and biomass. I'm working on making an "oven" to capture syngas and make char.
Ii got into Biochar experiments about 15 years ago and all I can say is the poorer the soil the better the results. I swear to God I had a pear tree that when a pear fell it was so heavy it broke my wife's toe! Biochar works!
This is super silly unless the kiln is able to provide the heat without offsetting any good from pyrolysis. Is the kiln from concentrated sunlight? If not, why do this?
Forestry for wood used in construction is much better than BECCS in the short term, as that carbon stays fixed for the lifetime of that structure. BECCS is a good option for agricultural waste products but for a managed plantation, that wood should go to construction.
Indeed, the emission-benefits of construction wood is even more than the contained carbon since it typically displaces the use of steel or concrete and that displaced emission also has to be taken into account. All in all a massive opportunity for a regenerative timber industry to become a big ally in combating climate change.
Wood can be a great low energy building material. But, wood construction is not a good way to store carbon. Wood buildings may last hundreds of years and store carbon during that time. But, they will at the end of that time burn or decompose in a landfill and release their carbon back into the atmosphere. That several hundreds of years of storage is insignificant compared to the 300 million years of storage provided by fossil fuels.
@@jeffsweeney312 Great remark! However, climate change is in many ways an acute crisis, with a decadal timescale in stead of a century or millenia time-scale. Ecosystems can more easily adapt if the changes are spread out from decades to centuries. The deep ocean ocean (as opposed to the ocean surface) can start to play a role in absorbing carbon in the century-to-millenia timescale. So in that regard, wood as timber remains nearly undiminished as a paradigm to combat climate change.
@@jeffsweeney312 Can't you just boil the old construction wood to make it heavier than water and dump it in anoxic waters? I mean, we still have to massively reduce carbon exhaust, but this might improve the storage time of the carbon.
7:32 THIS is where the real potential of using trees for Carbon Capture is. Stop at the torrefaction step, take that torrefied biomass (aka Biochar) and use it as a soil amendment, to grow more trees, faster. That's the real solution, IMO.
it would be great to see you do a deeper dive into pyrolysis, if you haven't already (need to scour the channel's backlog of videos!)
Soil organizms may digest this and produce methane (worse), but maybe just put it back into the coal mine where it came from...
@MediumPointBallPoint nope, biochar is stable in the soil for thousands of years. Because the carbon is ss recalcitrant, microorganisms cannot use it as a food source, instead it is habitat space. There are biogenic (ie human made) soils in the Amazon that were created by biochar. The Amazon has some of the most biologically active and erosive conditions in the world yet biochar made by ancient human civilizations there created these pockets of fertile, high carbon soils that are still around to this day. Terra praeta, look it up
@@tonydeveyra4611 Excellent. I assumed incorrectly from her statement about the old growth forests that the carbon would still be bio-available and subject to reintroduction. Knowing this, I may stop composting and start torreing my organic waste.
And another point, We have given billions of dollars in subsidies or grants to oil and gas producers to develop their Carbon Capture systems and to date the results are awful. Now is that because you can't scale the systems up easily or is it because they are not really trying too hard? I think it might be both.
I would say it is a little bit of both. Also carbon capture can look like a silver bullet solution, which is very convenient for big oil&gas companies image. They will most likely keep doing that for a long time, because this technology does not seem to make any substantial progress.
I think it might be that they can't figure out how to make enough money on the CCS's. Plus, so far they are too dangerous in terms of the chemicals needed in the processes, as well as need tons of energy in the processes which would look foolish to proceed with. 95% of the carbon captured today is used for enhanced oil recovery projects. Not to mention that the storage of liquid CO2 is a big dangerous and unsolvable problem.
Peat Bogs
The Ugly duckling of natural carbon capture. Better than trees, because the carbon is locked away in the bog (unlike trees, where the wood will decay, releasing the carbon).
However, peat bogs are only viable in very specific locations and environments.
They aren't a solution, but should be protected and appreciated just as much as we celebrate forests.
And yet in the UK, companies are rushing to buy up and plant large areas of peat moorland with trees - it's cheap, and with the hunting interests that traditionally maintained such areas having become an easy political target, it comes with a social caché too that makes it politically easy. The scale of this is massive, and speaking to many investors in the space, they don't actually care about the carbon balance, as as soon as they've bundled the certified 'saved' carbon and sold it on, it's no longer their problem.
Wouldn't any anoxic water be usable for this? Just boil the wood to make it heavier than water and then dump it in the anoxic waters.
As a resident of Treelandia, also known as Canada, I can say that I have seen wildfires of epic proportions. Every time I see or taste it in the air, I just think of how all that immense amount of energy could have been heating peoples homes, cooking food or making heat and power for towns and cities in a combined heat and power plant way. Our destructive, world ending problem has a solution and that is to cut and burn the deadwood continuously, we would save so much on fire hazards on the one hand and save energy from dams, nuclear power plants, and we could use the wood as a battery of sorts to provide peaker power for wind and solar lulls. It is such an important part of the puzzle here where I live. My forest goes unbroken for millions of square kilometers. It is like a volcano that has preventable eruptions.
Also every hunter here knows forest fire sites are the best hunting grounds for the next few years after a fire, the ground is so fertile and the plants and animals really respond to it afterwards, much like in volcanic soils
Hi Rosie.
What about doing an article on growing columns of kelp in the Pacific,
which is released every year to accumulate in the depths of the Pacific seabed?
Drax, yeah. It shops pellets from Canada to burn in the UK. Not exactly green.
most carbon emissions are from last mile delivery by truck, container ships are surprisingly efficient per unit weight
But the longer distance makes accountability harder
I watch the train as it regularly passes through the Calder valley and I see it when I am at my veganic food forest. I can't see how it makes sense and I can't see how they can possibly be planting enough to really replace what the are burning.
The pellets likely need energy to dry and produce, so you wonder how much energy yield there actually is.
I think it's an easy way for UK government to declare several GW of carbon neutral energy. Green-washing? Given that it's not carbon neutral it would be interesting to understand more about how it compares with the original coal fuel
Well, here is another anxiety producing bit of information, those old growth forests that were doing a good job of storing Co2 are being logged at rates that are increasing not decreasing. Getting to nitty gritty of this harvesting is almost impossible because of the information roadblocks put in the way by governments that promised to be more transparent if elected. I have to wonder who runs our governments in Australia, the people we elected or the people who donate money to the people we elected? As they say, follow the money and you will find the answer.
I feel this falls in the category of greenwashing BS now, but worth revisiting at some point. If your really careful about location and fastidious about your supply chain, perhaps it could play a small part in helping with that expensive storage heavy last 20% of abatement. With the usual caveat of CCS needing to become a real thing. BECCS Peaker Plants as seasonal storage. Using it as baseline power is silly... I wince every time i see Drax on that otherwise inspiring UK live power grid chart.
I don't think you can run BECCS (or coal for that matter) very well as a peaker plant. Probably just turn on when it starts getting cold and off when it stops.
@@szurketaltos2693exactly. They’re like coal plants: they’re not easy to turn ON/OFF without significant costs.
Can you explain more about why you have an aversion to Drax? The place I work for is considering partnering with them but still doing our diligence to decide.
@@pajarobobo because Drax is a former coal-fire plant massively subsidised by the UK tax payer to be repurposed into BECCS. They don’t source their trees to burn from the UK, they get them from North America, have them shipped to their plant in the UK by fossil fuel-powered boats, to then burn them to produce electricity with an efficiency of ~ 30%… absolutely scandalous. They have also said for over 10 years that they would invest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to capture the CO2 emissions they produce by burning wood and they never have. They keep delaying it, pausing, saying that they don’t have enough money or that they have “on-going” CCS trials. Terrible activity.
Yeah yeah exactly use it as reserve power seasonally like Rosie said.
How long does it take for a carbon capture plant to capture the amount of carbon emission associated with setting up the plant?
My family and I have planted trees over the years more for giving back to nature. Unfortunately out of about 300 planted only about 25 trees have survived. I get really annoyed hearing people say plant trees because they're renewable. That maybe true in higher rainfall regions of the world but in Canada that's not necessarily the case. I've seen trees regenerated naturally on the same land grow more prolifically than planted ones.
Thanks Rosie, very informative review.
As you mention, we have emitted 2.5 trillion tons of CO2. It follows that we need to remove around 1 trillion tons of Carbon from the atmosphere to get back to pre industrial levels.
The minimum energy that process of de-carbonising our atmosphere will be, I presume, is the energy one gets by burning 1 trillion tons of coal at a minimum.
It a daunting thought. That's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines that will be needed on top of the energy we use to achieve this.
Why do people always say vs this vs that when it comes to climate solutions. We need to do EVERYTHING. Thank you for the video
Rosie I love your work. Recent research papers have shown old growth forests store more carbon than young forests. Not just in total but actively, because earlier papers were not factoring in the full extent of on going soil carbon increases. Again I have seen a well-touted paper that says there is ample reforestation space and it is the main options for effective carbon capture. Grasslands should be preserved and you are thoroughly read up on the rebuttals. :) Follow up studies only added a few trees to pasture land as shade and still found ample reforestation space and that this was the most viable option at scale.
Your later video has completely trashed CCS & DCCS, I even quote your conclusions to others.
BECCS of forest land and Biomass from forests for energy in general is counterproductive. It is habitat destruction incarnate and generally tantamount to evil as a bad idea can get. Mass 'economy of scale' power plants are voracious destroyers of forests that don't grow that fast, and should be restored habitats left to their own for 200+ years. So forest based biomass is inane. It is a rich man's way of fooling people to agree to make them richer while increasing the global destruction.
Tree planting misses the point; we need forest restoration. The land given back to nature, disavowed thereafter, and left undisturbed for a millennia.
There is also regenerative agriculture, which at least for pasture land does increase soil carbon storage and improve range health and plant diversity as well.
Literally rejecting money and business as the basis of the calculation is the only way to solve any of this ecological peril and climate change. Economics has no other objective than making money. It put on sheep's clothing to greenwash itself, but is sneaking a profit motive into every decision. Therefore it never solves anything.
We must value nature as part of us, that which makes our mind and sanity, gives us an understanding of life, puts our transitoriness in perspective. Then we must choose life around us over things we are advertised to need for our status. Essentially, political and business leaders, the wealthy, worthy, powerful, are all delusional poisoned minds, that we should regard as sad hoarders, of money, or possessions, and treat with measured pity and try to rehabilitate. At least these voices should be ignored in important decisions going forward. We need to find our sanity in the community of life around us. Meaning forests stay intact a millennia and we don't need to be sold commoditized substitutes for really living.
I would suggest that Biochar would be a great stopping point for BECCS as has the following advantages. You know exactly how much CO2 is being stored. It is effective as a soil additive and can increase crop yields by 20% or more. It is stable in the soil for 1000-10000 years. I would just love it is you would do a video on this subject as I know you would do a great job.
I think that the fact that biomass represents stored energy is of great importance. It can be used to fill the gaps when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Using biomass with CCS, as backup for intermittent renewables, is what tips the balance for me.
Thanks for the video, really interesting and informative and I didn't realise just how short of the target we would fall if we leave C sequestration to trees. One beef (pun intended!) I have though is with the land area required for livestock. As an Aussie, you will be aware more than most of the land used for grazing cattle in the interior of your great country. Most of it is just not suitable for cropping (or growing trees for that matter) and if it is to produce any food it is only in the form of meat, fibre and possibly dairy. I say possibly dairy because most land used for dairy farming is of better quality.
Another oft repeated trope is the amount of land used for grazing vs. crop land. Two factors which complicate this are 1. land used for grazing is often vastly less productive so will never grow as many calories as good cropping land. 2. This poor grazing land grows very high quality protein rich food, i.e. meat, which is very valuable to many people.
BTW, before anybody says it, I am not talking about the feedlot system of beef production where crops are fed to cattle, just extensive grazing.
Sorry for the essay!
Great to see a realistic video on trees; everyone else seems to ignore everything that happens after planting, including, how to permanently store the captured CO2. I always cut my trees down again to make firewood, which then releases all the captured CO2, but if I don't cut them down then they eventually die and release the CO2 anyway! Can you make a video on Marine Biomass sometime, don't see much information on it, but a few people seem very excited by the possibilities of kelp farming being far more productive than tree forests, and most of our world is ocean.
Most of the world is ocean, but most of the ocean is to deep for any kind of anything to do with it ;)
I don't know the numbers, but i bet, there is more usable land there there is usable ocean floor.
One of the best ever natural carbon sinks are btw moore and Swamp. Biomass saturated with water cant decompose as there is no oxygen for the microbes eating it. And so it stays there.
You should watch RethinkX idea of absorbing CO2 from the ocean with what essentially is adding dirt to the seas to fix the CO2 already dissolved in the water. If true it would be the cheapest way and quickest too. Several decades to bring us to preindustrial levels as opposed to centuries.
@@tami6867 You say the ocean is too deep, but I remember being in the Sargasso Sea, Seaweed everywhere, and 7Km deep in places! A bigger issue is that a lot of the ocean doesn't have enough nutrients, but the ocean is a big place, there may be plenty that can be used.
@@tami6867 Yes, here we are busy restoring our peat bogs that had trees planted all over them last century, the trees are now being cut down because peat is better storage than trees! Trouble is that peat grows far too slowly, but everyone is ignoring that!
@@nigels.6051 Yes sure there are "plants" living down there. plants in quotes as those dont do photosyntesis, and therefor dont eat carbon, but instead must somehow eat detrius or whatever. BTW cool that you've made such a submarine experience. Are you marine ecologist or something? :)
And therefore only the shallow areas of the ocean with light in them could be used for seaweed etc. Sure there is algee that just floats around, but it was already shown, that promoting algee growth by fertilizing the ocean will emmit more CO2 than the algee will consume. And removing tiny algee from millions of km³ water to remove them from the biological cycle is not a easy thing you just do.
Thats why i think, if one want to carbon capture, removing it from the ocean water with lots of CO2 in it with some stationary osmosis technology that is already in development is way more promissing than building on plants for that. You always must keep in mind, that plantmatter has relatively low carbon content, and thus storing it for CS is crazy inefficient. Therefor you must somehow separate the carbon, by some burning process or idealy a pyrolyse process as there pure C can be produced. To be fair, such technology is under development, but i woulndt bet on it, as its far from beeing safe that it will be scaleable. Any and "solution" that cant be scaled is not a solution, easy and sad as that.
In my area Wetlands promoted as a carbon capture method. I am not convinced, can you please make a video showing the short-term and long-term benefits and cons. Thanks
Good video thanks for sharing your hard work 👍
Wetlands and peat lands do act as major carbon sinks. Hence the importance of protecting or restoring them. Look it up.
Wetlands peat lands and mangroves are what eventually turned into the coal that is such a problem today. So they are excellent at trapping carbon as long as you don't dig it up and burn it.
Good to know how ever I was wondering how long until they saturate and release more methane then carbon capture seems like replacing one green house gas for a worse won. That's why I am curious to see some actual numbers.
I saw a TV documentary about a study in Oregon that came to the conclusion that old growth forest continuously captured carbon and incorporated it into the soil. New plantations of trees were said to be emitters of carbon until they became well established. With all these competing claims it's incredibly difficult to know what to do for the best.
Have you looked into OTEC, or Oceanic Thermal Energy Conversion? One of the stated benefits with OTEC is they bring up cold nutrient rich water from the deep and use it to feed and maintain fish farms. Instead of producing fish I always wondered if the cold nutrient rich water could be used to produce algae possibly for fuel or released into the ocean to feed on the Carbonic Acid and sink when their life cycle is complete. I would love to know your opinion.
One thing about emissions from farming is that many of them aren't actually fossil carbon but instead things like methane or nitrogen oxides that are relatively short-lived and are synthesized from atmospheric gasses to begin with. That means if we had atmospheric carbon low enough we could in principle just ingnore them and accept relatively low warming they produce.
Then there's also emissions from land use change. These ones in large part happen only once because they basically are a loss of carbon in the soil that used to be some ecosystem before becoming farmland. Most of these, IIRC, come from developing countries where modern agriculture has not matured yet and populations are still growing. They can also be partially offset by switching to more sustainable farming practices that retain and capture more carbon than the current ones.
Hi Rosie! Thanks for the video. I've got questions that may be relevant: what happens to the carbon in tree trunks when we use techniques like hugelkultur (in which we bury the biomass)? Does all the carbon end up back in the atmosphere eventually? Or does part of the carbon stays in the soil? Or even does part of the carbon stays in the soil and is eventually used by plants and ends up as part of the carbon captured by them?
Also, I may have found a slight mistake: around 3:20 on the video, you present a paper that says planting trees could capture "200 gigatonnes of additional carbon" (200 billion tonnes you say right after, 2 x 10^8 tonnes), and then you say that over the course of human history we've put 2 and a half trillion (2.5 x 10^9 ) tonnes in the atmosphere. Then you say that's over a hundred times what we could sequester with tress. Didn't you mean over ten times (2.5 x 10^9 / 2 x 10^8)?
Reduce plowing, plant cover crops.
What was the carbon content of soils before plowing?
What is the excess carbon content in the atmosphere?
What is the major carbon sink?
Great video Rosie
Hope I don't sound patronising but you are getting better and better your narration sounds more natural every week
Cheers
As always informative and balanced.
Thank you Rosie!
How about growing plants like bamboo and hemp (building materials, paper, textile, industrial fibres)? Not for power generation, but use as permanent material.
I've been thinking about for a while, and I've come up with a plan: Grow massive amounts of algae in a manmade lake in the Sahara. Use the sun distill Red Sea water (or draw from the Nile), use the sun to power machinery, and use the sun to dry the algae before burying it in the desert to prevent decomposition.
Algae grows wicked fast in sunny, hot conditions. We can feed it with wastewater. By mummifying the carbon in the desert we can lock it up, or even bury it in salt mines, etc.
Lets not forget that a lot of countries like Germany probably can't do the energy transition without long term (seasonal) energy storage. The reason is that in the winter germany can't get enough energy from solar and wind i.e. there are gaps when renewables just don't produce the power that is needed. Lets also remind ourselves that wood (and other biomass) is an energy storage device that can easily store energy for months and even years.
So biomass (not just wood) can help in that regard. Yet, it probably won't be enough. We'll still need some hydrogen or other e-fuels.
In Scotland, as in many similar places, the landscape naturally was covered in trees, the West Coast being a temperate rain forest, which is hard to beat in carbon capture and biodiversity. Now it is largely open moorland. Kept so either by subsidised sheep farming. Or deer shooting or grouse shooting, the later being the worse as they burn the Heather….all so a very very very rich folk can shoot things.
It does occur to me, every time we go on about the Amazon etc, we should put our own house in order first.
I remember reading an article that say that Japan is responsible for the deforestation in Indonesia bc instead of using their own forests for wood they import it from there
while most japan forests were artificially planted and arn't native, so forest conservation could harm the environment.
Rosie I think you also need to factor in another huge advantage of tree cover added to the planet over other forms of carbon sinks. As we are in the end trying to reduce/stop global warming ,we need to look at other factors of temperature increase. The urban heat island effect is real and measurable. High density urban areas are really bad for this, really really bad. Lower density is only good for the improvement of lifestyle and mental health, but physically cooler, often directly due to more urban tree cover with good planning. But the usually ignored factor is that forests themselves are a physically cooler places, than for example a farmed field of wheat. So more forests directly drops the temperature of the land on which it sits and in the calculation of how to reduce global warming, this should be included into the calculation.
Remember that when you look at a tree, you only see the carbon that is above ground while there can be even more underground that you don't see in the root mass. When a tree burns or dies, it takes much longer for the underground carbon to get back into the atmosphere. Research is underway to modify plants to cause them to form carbon nodules in their root systems that would enable agricultural crops to directly sequester carbon in the soil.
I am really curious. Can you give an order of magnitude estimate for the storage times of carbon in soils? Maybe some references that I can read?
@@jeffsweeney312 There are many different forms. You can find plenty of information if you search on "soil carbon sequestration." Work is going on in picking plants and trees that do this well, and in modifying plants to do it better. I am interested in modifications that result in carbon that is harder for microorganisms to breakdown so it stays in the ground for very long times. This kind of approach does not require building machines or transporting wood or processing, just changes to seeds.
To keep the forestry carbon captured stored for longer we should keep it from oxidizing. And to increase the amount that can be stored we should remove it from the grow site. So why not just bury the wood somewhere where it doesn't rot? A good place for this is in anoxic waters since the other oxidizers are rarer and will quickly deplete in the presence of that much carbon, so adding more carbon would improve the site's ability to retain carbon. All we need to figure out is how to make wood sink. Which I think is an already solved problem.
The just grow plants, harvest plants, process them to make low in oxygen and denser than water, and dump them in anoxic waters. Presto, the the problems with using plants for carbon capture (lack of space and lack of permanence) are solved.
Or if you to go the cooler but more expensive route: Press them all into diamonds, so we can all get diamond windows.
Right you are, Rosie!
As always, great content. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the helpful videos, can you go into pyrolysis and biochar for agriculture as a means to process biomass from many sources and qualities towards soil carbon and reduced N and C emissions in agriculture?
Application (firing) of biomass in a slighty-converted conventional coal powerplant with added CCS means approx. 2/3 of the primairy energy in de biomass gets lost due to conversion efficiency of the steam cycle. CHP Combined Heat and Power basically has a better overall efficiency, but there is usually not enough heat demand close to a 400...1200 MW (electrical output) power plant (i.e. roughly 800.000 ... 2.400.000 kW thermal output) with the electric power demand. CHP based on on lower power district heating powerplant with electric power generation and CCS is more energy effective.
SYNC between heat demand and power demand will always be an issue: storage will be needed to have balance demand and supply.
What about algae? It wouldn't take up land that we need for food or animals
wouldnt hemp be better than corn and tress?
Bamboo and hemp remove a lot more carbon from our atmosphere than trees and using these materials to build homes will lock up the carbon for hundreds of years especially in hempcrete walls. We would need to Produce the lime binder in electric kilns powered by renewables and then capturing the CO2 and storing it underground. Hempcrete walls absorb CO2 as the lime turns back into limestone. Calcium oxide to calcium carbonate.
The Point about process and transport emissions for bio-energy is a red herring as all these could be replaced with zero carbon sources. It's like saying EVs aren't zero emission because some of the power used to charge them currently is produced with fossil fuels, but that will change. This is what a transition to net zero looks like!
Hej Rosie. I would be very interested to hear your explonation how can be cows other than at worst carbon neutral it everything they consume, aka plants is theoretically carbon negative. Even if large part of the emissions goes back with the 💩, it should be still carbon neutral at least, since those carbons where already sequestered from the air at the beginning of the cycle. Same time if us the humans consume it, we produce at least as much of waist what turns into co2, but it seams it doesn't count. Please help me to figure out this, I am totally confused how this can be a so huge issue. For me this sounds like we are not counting the same emission in case of vegetarian meals and meat eaters. Please edducate me :) Many thanks.
This is my argument as well, the only problem seems to be that we have increased the number of cows on Earth since the time when cows were wild animals, and with China becoming keen on cow meat the numbers are currently increasing rapidly. However, the problem with cows is that they produce methane, and methane has a half life of 8.6 years, so we don't need to compare to the stone age, only to the beginning of this century...
@nigels.6051 Yes, it's slighly an issue with population growth, but I would like to point out, that we human beings are producing methane as well. I would argue, at there is similar methane production made by humans when we digest the food, just we eat per person much less. The material doesn't get wasted just transforms. At the end it will tur to soil both. So I am not sure from the perspective of the carbon cycle it has any difference if the vegetable is eaten by a human or a cow. The process is very similar and since it was already sequestered from the air it should be equally net zero. Do I miss something?
@@gene8194 First, I believe that cows produce vastly more methane than humans due to their specialist digestive system for digesting grass rather than vegetables, although it does seem to depend on what you feed them, give them vegetables or seaweed and they are OK. That bit is indeed going to be net zero given a fixed population size. Second, the production of grass is not currently net zero, grass production requires a lot of nitrogen fertiliser, the production of which is currently very CO2 expensive, but that should be changing soonish as we start to get wind/solar generated fertilisers. Overall, I don't see the need to reduce our population of cows in order to reach net zero, although there is good argument not to allow a dramatic increase. There is good reason to produce net zero nitrogen fertiliser, in fact that seems a necessity if we are to keep our meat.
What if, instead of burning it and doing CCS with the CO2 released, we converted the biomass into charcoal, and buried it? Charcoal should degrade extremely slowly underground, and it usually helps with soil structure. Could it be a thing?
Oh, you want to invent coal? I agree with your idea After we are no longer mining and using coal. That is already happening, witness the rate that coal mining and use is dying in the US.
Another excellent report! Next time, you might want to explain the difference between BECCS and BICRS, 😊
In Sweden we have a lot of heat and cogeneration plants. Previously they burned both fossil and biogenic carbon but they switched to mostly garbage and biogenic sources. In Sweden there are industries that have contributed to transform our forests to become tree plantations and clear cutting important biodiversity old growth forests for satisfying the industries need for steady supply of wood and pulp.
So even though Sweden get a lot of matter from these industries to the burning plants we still need to import garbage, left over wood products.
So I think maybe CSS will increase that need to supply the burning plants?
And it will contribute to the pressure of industries demand in Swedish old growth biodiversity?
But still if we’re keeping these plants maybe it should be mandatory with CCS on them anyway?
Great review, congratulations Rosie! However, I think that energy can also be produced by pyrolyzing biomass, but biochar, which in principle binds 20-30% less CO2 than CCS, when returned to the earth greatly increases its productivity and accelerates biomass production, even for industrial or even food production purposes! Also, if we do not burn, but store the CO2 absorbed in the wood in buildings and furniture, then by temporarily storing it for 30-100 years, we give the technology enough time for a real green transition! Only this temporary storage should be supported and recognized with voluntary market credits to some extent, so that it is worth reducing the level of atmospheric CO2. The totalitarian idea that only permanent CO2 storage is the recognized and accountable method is completely wrong and self-destructive. Humanity is physically incapable of this! But we can reach the goal in several steps, think of the several stages of space rockets, Armstrong would never have taken that "small step" in one stage!
There seems to be a lot of potential for wooden buildings. Unlike carbon capture, I see some tangible progress in this area.
@3:34 Isn't 2.5 trillion closer to more than 10 times as much?
As allways informative, accurate unbiased 🙂
Growing trees for shade or shelter as well as sequestering carbon would have an additional benefit. Tarmac being black absorbs heat contributing to heat island effect increasing heat island effect, requiring more aircon for cooling. In the northern lands trees can provide shelter from the colder northerly winds reducing the need for heating. Shelter belts can used to allow animals graze longer into the winter and reducing there envoirmental impact .
Moove them to rested pasture!
There is just one problem with BECCS, there is just no way it can burn the wood and gain enough energy to capture all the CO2 emitted. A ton of wood can release about 4,000kWh of thermal energy. A typical thermoelctric generator has not more than 30% efficiency to convert that heat energy into electric energy (just for comparison, even nuclear power plants barely manage to get over 35% efficiency). This means that at best, a ton of wood burned can get you about 1,200kWh of electricity.
The problem here is that one tonne of CO2 required 1,400kWh of electric energy to be removed from the air, and wood releases about 1.8 tonnes of CO2 per tonne burned. This means that you would require somewhere about 2,100 to 2,200kWh of electricity to capture the emissions of that one burned tonne.
Sure, we could argue that the carbon concentration at the source is much bigger, so capturing the CO2 would be more energy efficient, but even if this system managed to capture 1 tonne of CO2 with only 700kWh, the system would barely make enough energy to capture that CO2. And we wouldn't have accounted the energy needed to compress that CO2 and pump it deep underground. In other words, there is no way to make a profit out of this, unless you can sell carbon credits. But carbon credits only allow oil companies to maintain their status quo, and therein lies the problem...
All plants feed the soil carbon. That is they feed microbes that feed on each other and also digest inanimate minerals from the sands, silts and clays to eventually be released as nutrients to plants when eaten by predator microbes that release as plant available. Biological sequestration has cooling benefits beyond removal of CO2, such as increasing fertility, water infiltration, water retention. Transpiration from leaves has a latent heat cooling impact in the immediate surroundings. Shade prevents sunlight from turning into heat where it hits bare or dark surfaces on the ground. Microbes ride the water vapor from transpiration to become nuclei for cloud formation at a lower temperature than dry air. This forms clouds that reflect light back into space that avoids becoming heat. Farming practices can achieve net increases in organic content that achieves these great results. I hope this potential will be widely recognized in order to scale up to a meaningful impact.
What about a drastic cut in the Anglo-Saxon birth rate?
Unfortunately, regenerative agriculture was not a comparison element in this piece. Conservation tillage and the use of nitrogen and carbon-fixing cover crops have great potential in achieving negative carbon results over vast areas over time, using only photosynthesis. This was researched in a project involving several hundred farms over hundreds of hectares on the Canadian Prairies overseen by researchers at the University of Saskatchewan for over a decade. They found that the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil was equivalent to the average emissions from 3.4 million petrol burning cars. The Rodale Institute in the US has done similar research at smaller scales and has published well-referenced reports on the topic. Australia also has a strong regenerative agriculture movement. One of the emerging key considerations in agriculture and forestry is soil disturbances through tillage and clear cut logging, which releases CO2 and methane while disrupting the living soil microcosm (mainly beneficial fungus) and soil structure, leading to further loss of nutrient transfer capability and moisture, and poor drainage. "No till" and regenerative forestry (as well as preserving and building new wetlands where applicable) should now be moved to near the top of the list of climate solutions and ecological systems preservation methods. Engineering solutions cannot do it alone.
umm... the objection to tree planting seems to be that mature trees don't capture much carbon. Given that... cut down the trees, use them to build stuff, and re-use the same land to gather some more carbon with new baby trees. If you harvest the wood, say every 20 years... does it move the needle at all?
What about BECCS with algae? I'd love to hear your take on it. Algae for biodiesel has faltered but burning the algae itself seems like a KISS approach
Algae is great and if you compost the algae, the resultant product will boost soils on a huge scale.
What about Bio char. Turn all the organic matter into charcoal and add it to the ground. Nutrients are returned the release of carbon is not.
Replace the burners to burn powdered iron where the the byproduct is rust that can be converted back powdered iron using hydrogen from renewable energy and leave the trees to grow up to really productive carbon capture with intensive Silva culture and use hemp for fiber and paper.
...and hemp has additional bonuses like food and oil from hemp seeds, and fibre for paper making, hempcrete, and um, other recreational activities 😂
Dear Rosie, PLEASE do a video, or short series of vids on 'Carbon Capture and Storage' technologies. What is the state of the art? Are they improving? Does ANYONE actually want them to work? They are generally only ever raised as a 'fossil-fuel-fantasy' bogeyman in 'Greenie' videos, wherein the cost and, it appears, the basic lack of, finished, engineered, scalable tech is rendering the idea unfeasible, if not a scam, but here, you present it as choice, not an engineering challenge, so I'd love to know what's goin' on. Thanks.
I agree with your skepticism, when it comes to burning biofuels, when you cut down a tree and burn it, just because you did not wait 60,000,000 years for it to become a fossil fuel,
does not mean it is any cleaner, a large amount of CO2 will still be released, even if you plant a replacement tree, it could take half a century to absorb as much CO2 as the original.
I could see a justification for burning wood, in countries that do not get sufficient wind or Solar energy though out the year, to be able to build a winter reserve of stored Green
chemical energy, (probably as Green Hydrogen) burning biofuels for the coldest 3 months of the winter would give 9 months for the CO2 released to be reabsorbed, but this should not
be done on a continuous basis, because I do not believe that nature could reabsorb it all, especially as the world continues to suffer from an alarming increase in forest fires.
Of course, when it comes to burning biofuels, you come back to the same disadvantage you get with burning fossil fuels, not only do you have to pay to build the boiler and generating
plant, but every day you must pay for the fuel to run it, at least with real renewables, wind wave, solar or tidal, you only have to build the generating plant, the fuel to run it is free, ok
you must build an energy storage plant as well, but that is still going to be cheaper than buying fuel every day, and of course land used for biofuels can not be used for food
production or wildlife.
Drax claims that it only uses waste wood from the timber industry, I work in night transport which requires me to make nightly visits to Liverpool docks, which is where the wood pellets
for America come ashore, stored in 3 huge silos, which feed into the Drax train, which consists of approximately 30 rail trucks of the type you might be familiar from the mining
industry, each truck holds much more than its road equivalent I would estimate that each rail truck could carry 50 tons, multiplied by 30 would mean 1,500 tons of wood pellets each
trip, the train leaves at approximately 8 P.M. each evening and returns at 5 A.M. each morning which makes it perfectly possible for there to be a daytime run as well, but that I
cannot confirm. That quantity of wood pellets on a daily basis leaves me skeptical about their definition of waste wood.
Other kinds of bioenergy are being developed. Algie,... Urban Forestation,......... Bioducts; making bioroofs on roads and railways. And,...... Wood can be used for insulating houses,......... Thus reducing the need for heating,..... And,... Just to say that every solution that isn't conflicting with other solutions is needed. To curb climate change...
Would you consider uploading your videos to another platform or syncing your channel with a place like odysee?
First, any crops or similar plants require water and probably fertiliser, while requiring similar heavy machinery for harvesting and transport. In other words: similar emissions to crop agriculture, with a corresponding high cost in water and fertiliser if farmed intensively. And then there's the other sources of emissions Rosie mentioned, like transport, so whether CCS would be able to even negate the production side of bioenergy is debatable.
Secondly, crops grow slowly over significant land areas, so people will be motivated to farm intensively (which is unsustainable and destroys the soil) microbiome) and, as mentioned by Risie, cut down natural habitats to use the land for crops. We are already seeing the environment-destroying results of this in countries where bioenergy is sourced on a large scale, particularly with habitat destruction. Bioenergy can simply never keep up with our civilisation's intensifying electricity uses, providing far too little energy for the corresponding land use.
Bioenergy itself only really works sustainably on large scales when it's an added process to normal crop and tree production, using waste parts of the plant as fuel. Just bolting on CCS to this process would be helpful (if CCS lives up to its technological promise)l, but how much impact would this have on global atmospheric carbon?
Trees are a solution to capturing emissions, but only a very temporary one, something that most people fail to think through.
Using underwater grown plants would remove the risk of fire and therefore the cyclic return of carbon. Just let the plant sink to the bottom, providing fresh feed for all the organism at the sea floor and removing the carbon. Rinse and repeat.
I wonder if we would do this on scale, if it would even provide some benefits - e.g. farm parts of the plants for livestock or direct human consumption.
Also, accelerated aging of rocks might be more effective than BECCS - I don't really fancy the tree planting, we were horrible at it so far (monocultures, pest-sensitive forests, forest fires, ...), so I don't think it's the way to go.
Yes, and the vegetation provides shelter for young fish, which would be good for nutririous food supplies. Sea grass is easilly nurtured in near shore areas and can be cultivated for construction and furnishing material.
Great analysis, thanks
Another fantastic video, good job mate
Easiest way to stop increasjng greenhouse emssions is stop burning stuff.
Is not the wood component of a tree a stable form of captured carbon. The tree can die and the wood remain. The captured carbon is still stable and storable. This carbon in the form of wood could be stored. Maybe placed in one of those giant holes in the Aussie outback call mines. Place the wood in the ground, exclude oxygen and it may not rot nor burn and so the carbon is stored. Then replant the same land and grow more trees and capture more carbon. Is not carbon still held in wood after a tree dies?
Have to agree with Rosie on this one. But that does not meen we should not plant and nurture both trees and forests. Tree removal and forest fires are happening at a faster rate than planting can happen. Savannah land best use is livestock.
If we take degraded highly grazed land that has poor soil quality (low humus = low carbon + low water retention and low productivity) which we have heaps of all over the world, and use permaculture practices to create food forests that is low maintenance high productivity, high carbon storage and high water retention. Things like chop and drop, swales and dams, high biodiversity, high level of productive/useful plants (tree, bushes, shrubs and herbaceous) all increase carbon captured in the soil and in the plants. This system often spontaneously creates new permanent creeks and streams due to the slowing of water moving through the environment and also creating microclimates with localised cooling and increased humidity in previously hot and dry climates. Being more damp makes it more resistant to fire. Planting useful and food producing plants solves the problem of taking up farmland, it reduces localised flooding, drought and heatwaves and it stores carbon as the soils increase in humus. The soil stores more carbon than just planting trees. The only issue is it’s harder to harvest the food in a cheep mass produced way when maintaining diversity in a more natural looking structure though we are likely to have bots able to pick delicate produce in diverse terrains. Alternatively in food forests close to communities when you are hungry and unemployed it’s not such an imposition to wander around a few archers for a few hours once every few weeks. Low food miles too.
Would Giga-farms outside our cities be helpful to our citizens? Giga-farms could grow food in half and grow high carbon biology for heating, electricity, and biochar for geological long-term burial. You mentioned 2.5 trillion tonnes of industrial carbon has been emitted...what is the potential production and depositation removing industrial carbon globally?
CO2 capture and storage is currently very inefficient. The way to change that is to burn biomass in oxygen and then the only waste gas is co2 and water vapour which condences out. The oxygen comes as a waste product of green hydrogen production from the electrolysis of water. This gives 4 times the amount (by weight) of oxygen as hydrogen. Biomass burns at a much higher temperature in oxygen which can make energy recovery (as electricity) more efficient, However it might destroy current biomass furnaces so the way to get around that is to recycle some of the CO2 exhaust into the pure C2 to reduce its concentration down to say 30%.. This process would then store the pure CO2 waste gas into old oil wells with high efficiency while generating electricity. Currently all the O2 is vented as waste where hydrogen is produced by electrolysis.
Surely the best solution then is to just produce and store wood pellets indefinitely. There will be around twice as much carbon in a fuel pellet than the equivalent weight of CO2 and it’s less likely to escape if stored correctly. Then, you can continue to use the land to grow more trees to produce more pellets to extract from the longer carbon cycle…
What about Cross laminated timber so that the forest and carbon omissions there in are locked away in the construction sector where it can replace both steel and concrete because of its excellent structural performance, and therefore is a much more credible way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere
If the risk of wildfires is a threat to forest that were planted for CO2 sequestration would they not be a threat to one planted for BECCS?
Canada's forst fires this season generated more CO2 than all other Canadian based sources combined this year.
The big catch 22 we are starting to feel, in relation to more trees, is the roll of climate change in increasing large fire risks.
So while more CO2 helps grow more trees, we might just be providing more fuel for worsening fire seasons, and all the pollution effects from that.
The only path forward is to move away from fossil fuels.
Champion effort.
Rosie rocks! 🎉😊
Algae farms would probably be the best way to sequester carbon, since it's easier to move around, dry out, and convert into bricks. The biggest challenge of sequestering carbon is gonna be keeping it _away_ from people who want to burn it for fuel. The desire to make money off of this process is going to be too enticing and I fear that all carbon capture efforts are going to be undone by industrial folks who want to greenwash the idea of digging it back up and burning it because it's "carbon neutral" when it utterly ruins the point of going through all this trouble in the first place.
Only harvest adult trees, leaving room for young trees to grow more and capture carbon.
Build houses small and big from wood. Carbon will be stored as long as the house stands.
If these houses replace houses that was intended to be built from concrete, there will even less carbon released.
How about algae? The concentration of CO2 in water is much higher because it dissolves, and algae can produce oils for fuel. Torre the rest and use as soil amendment or simply put in old coal mine. There are place where algae grows out of control now, like the Mississippi delta. Anyone up for harvesting free energy?
"Cutting down trees" is a moot point if you use hemp as a fuel. It absorbs CO2 at a much faster rate than the same area of forest, is less restricted by geography, can be harvested much easier, and if it were to burn down it wouldn't release as much CO2 as a burning forest would.
Plant life begins to die at 180ppm CO2. Pre industrial levels were at 200ppm.
The trouble is, people keep cutting down trees. The best storage of carbon is in the coal and gas it is already stored in. Just keep it in the ground. Meat is also carcinogenic. Check out the WHO list of carcinogenic substances if you do not believe. I remember Tasmanian forestry execs not worried about chopping down the tallest tree in the southern hemisphere because the second tallest would become the tallest.
CO2 is the gas of life. We have to feed the plants with CO2. Henry’s law explains what happens with CO2. There is no climate crise!😊
Make charcoal from all agrcultural WASTE & use it as soil improver!
Even though it catches only a part of the plants carbon content, it's a very simple process that can be done locally by every farmer or forest owner.
They should be paid for the carbon captured as an incentiv.
Love it
The best mix of direct air carbon capture -- and it's patently obvious that BECCS is among the best options -- can at best tackle a few percent of the GHGs in the air in time to avoid runaway to Hothouse Earth.
The rest must come from curtailing fossil trade, at least 2% of today's level per month, to zero by 2030. Not 'net zero'. Not 'zero with carbon credits'. Zero.
It will take both of those combined, plus diverting biomethane from making it to the air as much as possible, plus conservation, to avoid a Derna on half of all coasts every year, a Lahaina every week, by 2050.
o zer
There are too many weasel words in this video. Just because something is a "maybe" or someone "suggested" something doesn't make it reliable information.
Increasing carbon sinks through reforestation, mangrove farming, and other greening efforts are by far the most realistic, cheapest, and greenest methods of CO2 sequestration for balancing the CO2 cycle (not "net zero" as it's not possible).
Not convinced, I want clean air as well
trees don't clean air
@@DSAK55i was thinking more of not wanting the output from the biomass plants
Drax uses pelleted wood, mainly sourced from old growth 🇺🇸 & 🇨🇦 forests that are processed and shipped via the sea with very little, & in some cases, no replanting. It's simply a scandalous state of affairs that UK taxpayers subsidise these activities whilst Drax as a company tries to claim it's all carbon neutral. CCS, whilst technically feasible, is [so] energy intensive as to be massively inefficient and economically untenable, which is why so many CCS plants have been quietly shut down after plenty of hoo ha prior to the commencement of operations; Drax will be no different.
By and large, CCS remains just an excuse for polluters to continue greenwashing their 'business as usual' practices. This isn't to say that at some point in the future, CCS technology won't evolve to be more than just a fig leaf on a very thorny bush.
Bio fuels are incredibly safe to store we could have a bio carbon based economy.
BECCS? no thanks! It's just not opportune now when there are still so many smokestacks with dense CO2 gas ripe for being captured / non-emitted. Immediate to-do list includes rewilding (shrinking the agriculture area as much as possible) and repurposing forests intended for firewood or pellets to a regenerative timber industry. I mean, trees suffer from the criticism that they re-emit their carbon after dying and dropping onto the forest soil, but if you massively displace that dead wood into valuable long-term stock like buildings, there is a genuine opportunity opening up (also of course because using wood will subtract from steel and concrete consumption).
What if the trees lived 200-400 years and made food? Soo many holes in the arguments presented. Pity.
Just let the cows eat grass. They burp less, the pastures store more carbon in time, and cows burp less than with corn... whiteoak pastures does this and they've proven to be carbon negative...