Graphyte, a new company incubated by Bill Gates’s investment group Breakthrough Energy Ventures, announced Monday that it has created a method for turning bits of wood chips and rice hulls into low-cost, dehydrated chunks of plant matter. Those blocks of carbon-laden plant matter — which look a bit like shoe-box sized Lego blocks — can then be buried deep underground for hundreds of years.
This isn't really a method for extracting CO2 from the air so much as a method to make sure that plant matter which has already extracted it from the air doesn't return it via burning or decomposition. It makes plants carbon negative instead of carbon neutral.
I don't really see the point of burying it when turning it into building materials would be much more effective, by replacing carbon-generating building materials (and being a great insulator). It might be a bit more expensive but building materials have value so it would be more cost-effective? Wood chip is already used to insulate buildings. I don't get why they just want to bury this stuff instead of making good use of it.
If you've ever been around a logging operation, you'd see how much (half?) of the plant matter extracted doesn't make it into a logging truck, but is instead piled unto 3-story high heaps and then burned. Being able to sequester that material instead would be amazing
Typically i believe that it tends to be about twenty to forty percent of the tree by mass, but that’s still nearly doubling the about of carbon we sequester if we can sequester it.
Sounds like the blocks are sealed to stop decomposition.. so I guess the bricks would rot if the seal is compromised? That wouldn't be good for a building. And it would let the carbon out.
Huge scale carbon sequestration is the only direct answer to the situation, anything else is just dealing with the symptoms or buying some time. It's quite possible that even if we could drop to below 300ppm overnight we'd still have to ride out the climate inertia that's already in play, big things don't just stop on a dime.
The comments in this article list a lot of problems though, with the biggest one being the lack of any numbers to even evaluate anything. Can it scale? What's the side effects of taking that biomass out of the cycle (and not just pure carbon blocks)? What's the net energy usage per ton sequestered? What other finite resources will be needed instead of somewhere else?
I mean, sure...doing something is better than not, but only if it makes some difference. And I haven't seen anything that begins to make a dent in the problem, especially when we aren't even fixing the emissions themself, something we do have more control over. We should be doing everything that has a factor, but we're so reluctant to change because we still think we have time to do it later.
Even at their price, it's almost always cheaper to not emit in the first place. Once we've got emissions down near zero, tools like this can help to slowly get things back near where they were