Trees and plants are net consumers of CO2 when they grow, but become neutral when they reach maturity, so they are more of a carbon buffer. The buffer can be freed when they burn or rot, both of which happen naturally.
The best way to permanently take away CO2 from the atmosphere is to cut off the trees and somehow store them where the CO2 cannot escape (and to free space for new trees to grow). Some of the carbon from dead plants is stored in the soils, but this takes a lot of time to do.
In the long run biofuels + carbon capture can be carbon negative.
We already have shortage of building-grade wood, because it needs to be grown for 60-90 years, while today's wood is cut at 30. Younger wood is softer, attracts bugs, rots easily.
Wow! so much scientific conversation and not one thought about gazillion of animals who live in those trees. Did you guys know earth was doing pretty fine with just trees and animals before all these tech, or even their talk, appeared in the scene.
> The best way to permanently take away CO2 from the atmosphere is to cut off the trees and somehow store them where the CO2 cannot escape
I really don't understand this logic. The oil industry spends billions every year to extract oil (= fossilized biomass) buried deep underground, because burning biomass gives you cheap energy.
If you cut down and store enough trees to compensate for the current CO2 emissions, you will have access to an immense volume of biomass, much easier to "extract" than oil is.
What do you think is going to happen with this biomass? People are going to burn it to make cheap energy again..
Actually, why would you even go through the trouble of cutting down the trees in the first place? You could just, not extract the oil and end up with the exact same amount of energy you will have at the end of this complex process.
One way to to store that carbon by burning the trees is and storing the CO2 underground - it will be costly to extract and worthless to do so and you will get some energy out of it.
Doesn't burying the trees drastically increase the length of capture? Then it's a matter of cost and resource optimisation. I'd do the job of planting, cutting, trucking, and burying trees with pride.
You joke, but if you have a solid idea of how to permanently¹ sequester carbon from trees in a cheap and scalable fashion, it might be worth submitting that proposal. If nothing else, it can serve as a baseline against which other proposals are judged (as in X tones more cost effective than the "plant some trees" approach).
¹ Some uses for wood, like as fuel, release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Likewise anything where the wood decomposes.
A tree is actually a very poor method of carbon capture. It's not durable and doesn't last ages. It can catch fire. And it takes decades. If you're gonna do organic methods then blue-green algae is way better. But I think the idea here is to come up with a technology that's even better than that.
