We had a chat on this exact topic with friends last year!
An even cheaper idea may be to use bamboo in a large tropical country, such as Indonesia.
Moreover, it is not crazy to imagine somewhat more expensive storage conditions (lower air pressure a.k.a. an almost-vacuum, maybe?) where these "logs" (bamboo is grass, but it's still a fiber, which, I assume, is CO2-heavy) could slowly evolve into something that may well be a ... drum rolls ... renewable ... drum rolls ... energy source!
Why not dream of Southeast Asia's logistics powered by properly-stored tonnes of bamboo soaked in something clever and stored for a couple years to be good enough to power, say, boats and port cranes?
Unfortunately, much like it always happens with climate science, regulatory capture and, well, to put it blunt, more political reasons have a lot more "strength" than good old first principles physics and rationality. But that's a far sadder topic, so let's stick with sticks for now.
Thank you for this post! (And for the others too, love your blog.)
It is perfectly possible, and not even that difficult, to use biomass as feedstock for the Fischer-Tropsch process and produce synthetic gasoline or diesel fuel. This has been on my to-do-list for a number of years now but since I have a few other things to do it will probably never happen.
Exactly why it is not done on a larger scale, I do not know. But most likely it is just down to economy. Fossil fuels are still too cheap to compete with. If fossil fuel taxes continue rising, however, it should be possible to profitably produce synthetic fuels. The Fischer-Tropsch process is also exothermic, meaning it gives off heat, which is a very convenient feature in, for example, a heating plant. In Sweden it should be possible to use the woodchips in the heating plants and produce heat and synthetic fuel instead of heat and electricity, as today. It would be interesting to study this further and examine at what fossil fuel prices it would be profitable. This might be the topic for a future post.
The solution you're proposing is literally barking up the wrong tree. Plants evapotranspirate, create clouds, cools the earth. Water cycle regulation has a far larger effect than carbon sequestration and is far cheaper. See the following for reference:
Clear-cuttings are definitely not environmentally friendly. More labor and skill intense forestry where a tree here and there is taken down is better for everything and everyone. The only advantage of clear-cuttings and monoculture is to keep labor costs down. So it is more like, IF they need to clear-cut the forest and re-plant it with square kilometers of seedlings of the same species, burying the wood-chips on site instead of freighting them to a heating plant could be logical and cost-effective.
Wildlife protection people would never allow this, I'm afraid. They say all the branches and scraps should be left in the cuttings for insects to live in and consume. And digging up the whole patch would totally destroy the soil ecosystem.
We could say this is fine because we are not doing carbon capture for wildlife, we are doing it for people. But this doesn't really work as an argument, as humans are flexible and can do almost anything given ample resources, so economy is more important for our wellbeing than carbon in the air. If we start removing carbon, we do it mainly for wildlife.
One could also say that wildlife does better in warmer climates, so raising temperature will give us millions of new species in due time, replacing the ones that are lost. Unfortunately, if we plan to last as a species, human activity will probably prevent that happy speciation event from happening, at least on dry land. (With human domination the new species would mainly be human-companion species, in other words pests, and we would fight against them). So if we want to have lots of species we should preserve the existing ones, the argument goes. What do you make of it?
>>Wildlife protection people would never allow this, I'm afraid. They say all the branches and scraps should be left in the cuttings for insects to live in and consume. And digging up the whole patch would totally destroy the soil ecosystem.
Wildlife protection people should never allow the awful kind of forestry that is considered state-of-the-art in Sweden and Finland. Making huge waste-lands through clear-cutting big areas is... not nice. If it happens in Brazil it is scandalous and disastrous. When it happens in Scandinavia it is "sustainable forestry". The clear-cutting of extensive areas and the monoculture of spruce simply can't be any good for wildlife.
Do we want to protect the environment, or the creatures living there?
Do we want to protect the local area, or the planet?
Generally speaking, the only way most people have found to avoid those tradeoffs (and others relating to economic factors) is to take an antinatalist stance. Many environmentalists have settled there. Unfortunately, while it reduces the number of environmentally minded individuals in the short run, people who just don't give a damn will continue to reproduce at high rates, and if environmentalists fail to keep up with them reproductively, the non-environmentally minded will eventually just run everything.
Thank you for writing this! Glad to know, I am not the only one who ever wondered about this approach. ;) And you did the work of calculating + checking whether there is anything written about it in more serious places. It seems so obvious, right? And there should be some deserted coal-mines around to try if transport is cheaper than digging. Plus: Just planting trees is so obviously not a viable/"sustainable" way of CO2-removal; still, I even read on farms: "Our corn-fields remove XY tons of CO2 each year from the atmosphere." Sure, they do. lol
There should be many ways of storing away biomass, although I believe the method I described in this article is the least expensive for Swedish conditions.
While it might seem circumstantial to burn fossil fuels while at the same time burying biomass, I think it makes perfect sense. Fossil fuels are very condensed energy, meaning they are ideal as vehicle fuels. Woodchips are much cheaper than gasoline or diesel per energy unit (even without taxes), but they are not that convenient to put in a tank and run through an engine. Therefore it is perfectly sane to use fossil fuels to drive your car while you bury an equivalent amount of woodchips, hopefully creating new fossil fuels a couple of million years down the road.
Currently these wood chips are being used to make energy (my understanding is that Sweden relies to a significant extent on biomass sources). If we put them in the ground instead, we'll have to get some other source of energy. If that one also releases carbon, what have we gained?
So it seems like this strategy only helps if the marginal replacement energy source releases less carbon than the chips, which I doubt. After all, if it did, why would we be burning the chips? (I guess that's the same question as your "if it's a good idea, why is nobody doing it.")
That is completely true. The heating plant operators will be furious if someone else pays more for their woodchips. Most probably they will not have much alternative except to increase their consumer prices which will force people to install heat pumps instead.
More long-term forests could be managed more for energy production instead of wood production. Instead of growing forests for timber logs one could use coppicing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing), this can easily double the biomass production from a given area producing plenty of woodchips to go around (although no timber logs).
This is on my list to read. I think a healthy forest or grass land stores more carbon in the soil than in the wood or grasses. But I haven't read it yet.
Also a big enough saw dust pile will last for a hundred years with out rotting. I've seen piles and been told that the mill they were from had been gone for a hundred years. Wood chips will rot, but if you could make saw dust you wouldn't have to bury it.
One of the few existing carbon removal methods seems to be biochar, where you make charcoal out of wood, crush it and use it as soil improvement, in the process increasing the soil's carbon content. The biochar is very good for the soil which means it can be sold to farmers, selling the carbon credits is more of icing on the cake than the cake itself.
I did not know about the giant sawdust piles. However, I do know that sawdust rots, so my guess is that it is the sheer scale of the piles that keeps the sawdust from decomposing. The same principle should work for woodchips.
We handle both wood chips and sawdust here. We get sawdust when we use our small sawmill and we use a tractor-powered wood chipping machine to make our own wood chips. We use both sawdust and wood chips to cover the ground in order to decrease the pressure from weeds. My impression is that when spread out on the ground in layers of about 10 centimeters, they both decompose rather quickly. New layers are needed every year or at least every second year.
We Also mulch with both wood chips and saw dist and yes they both disappear with in a few years.
The pile I am talking about was bigger than a pick up truck and undisturbed.
Something about the size of the pile, the size of the dust and the carbon nitrogen ratio (almost pure carbon) keeps big piles from breaking down. But maybe I am misinformed.
It sounds very plausible to me. There are many ways of failing to make a compost. When I spread only 10 centimeters there are many soil organisms to eat it from below. But a giant pile can probably get rather sterile.
We had a chat on this exact topic with friends last year!
An even cheaper idea may be to use bamboo in a large tropical country, such as Indonesia.
Moreover, it is not crazy to imagine somewhat more expensive storage conditions (lower air pressure a.k.a. an almost-vacuum, maybe?) where these "logs" (bamboo is grass, but it's still a fiber, which, I assume, is CO2-heavy) could slowly evolve into something that may well be a ... drum rolls ... renewable ... drum rolls ... energy source!
Why not dream of Southeast Asia's logistics powered by properly-stored tonnes of bamboo soaked in something clever and stored for a couple years to be good enough to power, say, boats and port cranes?
Unfortunately, much like it always happens with climate science, regulatory capture and, well, to put it blunt, more political reasons have a lot more "strength" than good old first principles physics and rationality. But that's a far sadder topic, so let's stick with sticks for now.
Thank you for this post! (And for the others too, love your blog.)
It is perfectly possible, and not even that difficult, to use biomass as feedstock for the Fischer-Tropsch process and produce synthetic gasoline or diesel fuel. This has been on my to-do-list for a number of years now but since I have a few other things to do it will probably never happen.
Exactly why it is not done on a larger scale, I do not know. But most likely it is just down to economy. Fossil fuels are still too cheap to compete with. If fossil fuel taxes continue rising, however, it should be possible to profitably produce synthetic fuels. The Fischer-Tropsch process is also exothermic, meaning it gives off heat, which is a very convenient feature in, for example, a heating plant. In Sweden it should be possible to use the woodchips in the heating plants and produce heat and synthetic fuel instead of heat and electricity, as today. It would be interesting to study this further and examine at what fossil fuel prices it would be profitable. This might be the topic for a future post.
The solution you're proposing is literally barking up the wrong tree. Plants evapotranspirate, create clouds, cools the earth. Water cycle regulation has a far larger effect than carbon sequestration and is far cheaper. See the following for reference:
https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/carbon-warming-water-cooling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofnodQWB6Kc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olsgWPV1fLA
Clear-cuttings are definitely not environmentally friendly. More labor and skill intense forestry where a tree here and there is taken down is better for everything and everyone. The only advantage of clear-cuttings and monoculture is to keep labor costs down. So it is more like, IF they need to clear-cut the forest and re-plant it with square kilometers of seedlings of the same species, burying the wood-chips on site instead of freighting them to a heating plant could be logical and cost-effective.
Good post. It brought to mind this theory from a few years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47063973
In brief. epidemic disease in North America led to reforestation led to the “Little Ice Age.”
So maybe reforestation could work if the scale is big enough?
> But it did make me a bit curious. And a bit curious.
Redundant
> Wood chip burying would copy this natural process, only speeding it up by a magnitude or more.
"by an order of magnitude"
Wildlife protection people would never allow this, I'm afraid. They say all the branches and scraps should be left in the cuttings for insects to live in and consume. And digging up the whole patch would totally destroy the soil ecosystem.
We could say this is fine because we are not doing carbon capture for wildlife, we are doing it for people. But this doesn't really work as an argument, as humans are flexible and can do almost anything given ample resources, so economy is more important for our wellbeing than carbon in the air. If we start removing carbon, we do it mainly for wildlife.
One could also say that wildlife does better in warmer climates, so raising temperature will give us millions of new species in due time, replacing the ones that are lost. Unfortunately, if we plan to last as a species, human activity will probably prevent that happy speciation event from happening, at least on dry land. (With human domination the new species would mainly be human-companion species, in other words pests, and we would fight against them). So if we want to have lots of species we should preserve the existing ones, the argument goes. What do you make of it?
>>Wildlife protection people would never allow this, I'm afraid. They say all the branches and scraps should be left in the cuttings for insects to live in and consume. And digging up the whole patch would totally destroy the soil ecosystem.
Wildlife protection people should never allow the awful kind of forestry that is considered state-of-the-art in Sweden and Finland. Making huge waste-lands through clear-cutting big areas is... not nice. If it happens in Brazil it is scandalous and disastrous. When it happens in Scandinavia it is "sustainable forestry". The clear-cutting of extensive areas and the monoculture of spruce simply can't be any good for wildlife.
These are common tradeoffs:
Do we want to protect the environment, or the creatures living there?
Do we want to protect the local area, or the planet?
Generally speaking, the only way most people have found to avoid those tradeoffs (and others relating to economic factors) is to take an antinatalist stance. Many environmentalists have settled there. Unfortunately, while it reduces the number of environmentally minded individuals in the short run, people who just don't give a damn will continue to reproduce at high rates, and if environmentalists fail to keep up with them reproductively, the non-environmentally minded will eventually just run everything.
Thank you for writing this! Glad to know, I am not the only one who ever wondered about this approach. ;) And you did the work of calculating + checking whether there is anything written about it in more serious places. It seems so obvious, right? And there should be some deserted coal-mines around to try if transport is cheaper than digging. Plus: Just planting trees is so obviously not a viable/"sustainable" way of CO2-removal; still, I even read on farms: "Our corn-fields remove XY tons of CO2 each year from the atmosphere." Sure, they do. lol
There should be many ways of storing away biomass, although I believe the method I described in this article is the least expensive for Swedish conditions.
While it might seem circumstantial to burn fossil fuels while at the same time burying biomass, I think it makes perfect sense. Fossil fuels are very condensed energy, meaning they are ideal as vehicle fuels. Woodchips are much cheaper than gasoline or diesel per energy unit (even without taxes), but they are not that convenient to put in a tank and run through an engine. Therefore it is perfectly sane to use fossil fuels to drive your car while you bury an equivalent amount of woodchips, hopefully creating new fossil fuels a couple of million years down the road.
Currently these wood chips are being used to make energy (my understanding is that Sweden relies to a significant extent on biomass sources). If we put them in the ground instead, we'll have to get some other source of energy. If that one also releases carbon, what have we gained?
So it seems like this strategy only helps if the marginal replacement energy source releases less carbon than the chips, which I doubt. After all, if it did, why would we be burning the chips? (I guess that's the same question as your "if it's a good idea, why is nobody doing it.")
That is completely true. The heating plant operators will be furious if someone else pays more for their woodchips. Most probably they will not have much alternative except to increase their consumer prices which will force people to install heat pumps instead.
More long-term forests could be managed more for energy production instead of wood production. Instead of growing forests for timber logs one could use coppicing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing), this can easily double the biomass production from a given area producing plenty of woodchips to go around (although no timber logs).
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/d/0393356094/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0393356094
This is on my list to read. I think a healthy forest or grass land stores more carbon in the soil than in the wood or grasses. But I haven't read it yet.
Also a big enough saw dust pile will last for a hundred years with out rotting. I've seen piles and been told that the mill they were from had been gone for a hundred years. Wood chips will rot, but if you could make saw dust you wouldn't have to bury it.
One of the few existing carbon removal methods seems to be biochar, where you make charcoal out of wood, crush it and use it as soil improvement, in the process increasing the soil's carbon content. The biochar is very good for the soil which means it can be sold to farmers, selling the carbon credits is more of icing on the cake than the cake itself.
I did not know about the giant sawdust piles. However, I do know that sawdust rots, so my guess is that it is the sheer scale of the piles that keeps the sawdust from decomposing. The same principle should work for woodchips.
Why would chips rot, when saw dust would not? (I assumed, they both do when open-air, both very slowly, but the saw dust faster.)
We handle both wood chips and sawdust here. We get sawdust when we use our small sawmill and we use a tractor-powered wood chipping machine to make our own wood chips. We use both sawdust and wood chips to cover the ground in order to decrease the pressure from weeds. My impression is that when spread out on the ground in layers of about 10 centimeters, they both decompose rather quickly. New layers are needed every year or at least every second year.
We Also mulch with both wood chips and saw dist and yes they both disappear with in a few years.
The pile I am talking about was bigger than a pick up truck and undisturbed.
Something about the size of the pile, the size of the dust and the carbon nitrogen ratio (almost pure carbon) keeps big piles from breaking down. But maybe I am misinformed.
It sounds very plausible to me. There are many ways of failing to make a compost. When I spread only 10 centimeters there are many soil organisms to eat it from below. But a giant pile can probably get rather sterile.
Not completely crazy.
https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=59493.0