Capturing Carbon With Garbage Heaps 186
davide marney writes "In a Washington Post opinion piece, Hugh Price argues that using a decidedly low-tech solution to sequestering excess carbon — making piles of agricultural waste — is better than many 'green' solutions already in practice. Sometimes the easy answer is the right answer. After all, it's how coal forms, and we know that works pretty well."
Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
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but how can you have huge federal bureaucracies and sell carbon credits and implement strange new taxes if everybody uses the simple and elegant solution? Clearly this proposal has a fatal flaw.
I know what you mean, but this has surely the first time that a big pile of plant matter has been referred to as "elegant"...
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Re:Yeah - Idiocracy vs. Agricultural Revolution (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm surprised that most people have missed this in the first thread. The #1 primary fatal flaw, is that the 'waste' being plowed under isn't waste at all. Farmers plow it under instead of removing it because it's the cheapest and best fertilizer that you don't need money to buy. The remaining plant matter that gets plowed under is exactly the material that the next crop of the same plant needs to grow.
It blows me away that they figured this out in the middle ages and we've forgotten it. This is one of the p
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B) Who said there is a silver bullet solution and only one option can be tried?
C) You don't deserve that karma, your statement was trite and counterproductive.
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no. If we reduce the number of people then each of them will wallow in all the surplus energy, guzzling it and releasing huge amounts of CO2.
The "root problem" is that the economy has been based on fossil fuels for so long that everybody's mindset is broken. eg. Coal power is far more dangerous/dirty than nuclear power but nobody seems to be rushing to switch over.
It also doesn't help that most of the people who make policies bought their way to power using the profits from oil. Getting them to promote alternatives is like trying to push shit up a hill.
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>>>If we reduce the number of people then each of them will wallow in all the surplus energy, guzzling it and releasing huge amounts of CO2.
I doubt that. If the US and EU population was reduced by 1/10th (to 80 million), we wouldn't have to worry about global warming at all. at least in our half of the world. Sure some of us might get greedy & burn 1.5-2 times as many coal-generated KWH, but overall it would still be a huge drop in CO2 emissions.
I agree with the grandparent poster - the root
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If we reduce to 80 million we have to kill 720 million.
I guess we could use them as fuel. It would be the carbon-neutral thing to do.
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>>>If we reduce to 80 million we have to kill 720 million.
Nice troll. Have you never heard of China's 1 child per family policy? It will take some time, but the size of each succeeding generation will be cut in half, and no need to kill anyone. So the US/EU starts with 800 million, and we'll assume they are all in their 20s for ease of calculation. They have 400 million kids. 20 years later the next generation will be 400 million parents having 200 million kids. 20 years later the next gener
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And while you're doing this, India will increase in population by about a billion people. Net effect: more pollution, fewer Europeans, fewer Americans.
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And how has that worked for China?
Their population continues to RISE [google.com], with a slight increase over what was seen at the beginning of the 60s.
One Child became the law in 1979, and is already being reconsidered (yet again) [time.com].
40 years is long enough to see at least 50% of the 50% reduction you claim. Yet its not there.
The carrying capacity of China's land mass seem to keep up, as there has been no huge famine and standards of living have raised significantly. That rise in SOL and education alone will account fo
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And how do we decide who to off?
I decide. Next question.
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It isn't the overpopulated countries which are responsible for CO2 emissions, in general. The places with high birthrates generally have very low CO2 emissions, with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia.
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No no!! You have it all wrong. As I've posted before every person sequesters almost a kilo of carbon in their body. In fact (and this works in favor of the American propensity to obesity) the fatter you are the more carbon you are sequestering.
So the right plan is:
1. Have lots of babies
2. Feed them really well
3. When people die bury them in a desert where they will dry out without rotting so the water can be recycled leaving the carbon still sequestered.
4. Enjoy your newly created global cooling.
BTW
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If you did in fact "walk your talk" then you would simply had committed suicide. Meanwhile you are still carbon-negative by wasting precious resources by eating and by purchasing goods and services. If you touch any technology that you hadn't hand-made yourself from minerals you've extracted from the earth yourself, vegetable fibres or even animal parts then you have been contributing directly for this state of affairs since you were born. And here you are, posting comments on an online forum, wasting pr
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If you did in fact "walk your talk" then you would simply had committed suicide.
So, don't try to mask your pathetic misanthropy and psychopathy under this thin veneer of righteous ecology. Just because you hate the world and suffer from some mental illness...
Mental illness?!
With comments like those, be careful of the blackness, Mr Kettle.
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at the compost pile. so as not to waste that sack of toxic waste you'll call a corpse.
and where did you find a wind up computer and magic fairies to bring you the internet, Mr. Kaczynski [wikiquote.org]
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But the earth will be inherited by the children of those who do NOT follow that plan.
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Why bother even arguing with a person who doesn't think their genes should be passed on? They have failed Darwin 101 and life in general. I'd respect the arguments of a hedonist more then a defeatist, though not much more.
When microbes first appeared on this planet, when life first made the jump to land and back again, through snow ball earth and numerous species destroying catastrophes, from the time the first ape climbed down from the trees and started walking upright, through countless wars and confl
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I assure you that if there is a pandemic, poor and minorities will be the hardest hit. (or so the papers will tell us, anyway).
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I assure you that if there is a pandemic, poor and minorities will be the hardest hit. (or so the papers will tell us, anyway).
I propose that's mostly because they tend to live in the most population-dense urban areas. Those are definitely the last places you want to be if the shit hits the fan. Among lots of other reasons, there are many more people in such areas than the amount of food that could be grown on that land. If people start dying like flies due to a real pandemic (not this avian flu bullshit) the steady supply lines that keep dense cities fed will be immediately disrupted.
On a more opinion-based note, I have visi
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Despite tabloid examples designed to shock many of the "morons" care enough about giving their children a chance to do better than them and will
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Actually (Score:3, Informative)
I read TFA and his answer is two fold: 1. stop burning waste or plowing it from forests/farms and instead pile it (as the summary says), and 2. plant more trees and plants.
It's a pretty interesting idea, but it seems like it would be really hard to get traction because people won't believe it work. To be fair, while the theory seems pretty sound to me, it still seems like it wouldn't work. Why this is, I cannot say. Perhaps because it seems too easy.
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I think what bothers you (and anyone who hears this idea), is that we expect to do something to capture CO2. Here we are actually supposed to do nothing, or more precisely, prevent the plants from decomposing. This is somewhat counterintuitive.
Although I'm no expert in the field, the reasoning in article is sound. A few weeks ago, my brother asked me a question: If we eat, how come we don't gain weight? Granted, the food is used to make energy, but energy is only the bonds between atoms/molecules. To make e
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What bothers me about this idea, actually, is all the non-carbon nutrients it takes out of the ecosystem. There's a reason why we have compost piles, you know--we use the output from them to fertilize our gardens, so we can grow more stuff. That's not to say it's a bad idea, but I think it would be necessary to think a little harder about it--what plant waste contains minimal nutrients, and can be safely sequestered? What plant waste is better recycled? Clearly, anything that's currently being burne
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Yep, but you usually output about 100-200 gr of feces (that's the figure I remember from my Physiology class, can't find a citation; The best I found on-line is here [poopreport.com]). Since we usually eat a lot more than that, the mass should be leaving the body by other means. We don't lose much heavy molecules through the urine and perspiration. The latter contains mostly water and salts, while the former also contains some waste molecules, but not in a meaningful amount (weight-wise). That leaves only one other venue -
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Don't ignore water content: whether urine is "mostly water and salts", it counts as mass, and is included both in water or fluids we drink and as a significant part of most food.
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Yep, but you usually output about 100-200 gr of feces (that's the figure I remember from my Physiology class, can't find a citation; The best I found on-line is here [poopreport.com]). Since we usually eat a lot more than that, the mass should be leaving the body by other means. We don't lose much heavy molecules through the urine and perspiration. The latter contains mostly water and salts, while the former also contains some waste molecules, but not in a meaningful amount (weight-wise). That leaves only one other venue - CO2 in our respiration.
Bingo: water.
Not just feces and urine should account for a lot of what comes out, most folks forget that most things we eat also have a lot of water.
Also your conclusion is wrong, since breathing puts out a lot of water (as does keeping our skin nice-looking; "hydrating" creams acts by sucking water from the lower skins layers to the top).
I think the amount of carbon we emit in the form of CO2 has got to be puny. But let's see:
Normal breathing uses 6 l/min of air and when it comes out it goes from 0.04% CO [wikipedia.org]
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Since the article was about the CO2 balance of solids, I felt it was correct to disregard water balance, as it is basically WIWO (water in, water out). The complicated calculation is for food. Food is partially water and partially other molecules (proteins, fats, carbohydrates, minerals and misc.). The water is easy to see how it goes out (WIWO). A person has between 50-70% water (the more we age, the less water we have). Since the cooking dries the meat somewhat, I think it's safe to assume about 30% of wa
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Since the article was about the CO2 balance of solids, I felt it was correct to disregard water balance, as it is basically WIWO (water in, water out).
What part of "C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O + Energy" don't you understand?
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What part of
Energy - burned into CO2 and H2O (as explained in a post above me)
don't you understand?
I was separating our intake into plain water and foods. Foods I divided into the water content of the food and the solids (proteins, carbohydrates, etc.). About the water (plain + water in the food) I said it is WIWO. Regarding the solids, I said some is used to build stuff (AKA cells... mostly) and some is used to make energy. Regarding energy, I agreed that the output is CO2 + H2O (AKA water). Here we have de novo creation of water, and thus this water is not WIWO.
Agreed,
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If it was tested successfully and had no unexpected consequences, I think most people would rejoice. Politicians would get to solve global warming without raising taxes or implementing any unpopular measures. This is what every successful politician wakes up hoping to do (the distorted view you see sometimes on Slashdot notwithstanding).
The problem is those unexpected consequences. I've been hearing about crop residue sequestration for nearly a decade, but the problem has always been in the sequestration pr
Too easy? Try too simplistic. (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides the fact that the entire idea boils down to "plant a shitload of trees and then bury them" it is a rather uninformed... well... brain-fart. Literally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost_pile#Industrial_systems [wikipedia.org]
Mechanical sorting of mixed waste streams combined with anaerobic digestion or in-vessel composting, is called mechanical biological treatment, increasingly used in developed countries due to regulations controlling the amount of organic matter allowed in landfills.
Treating biodegradable waste before it enters a landfill reduces global warming from fugitive methane; untreated waste breaks down anaerobically in a landfill, producing landfill gas that contains methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
And the "treatment" basically boils down to inducing either pre-emptive anaerobic or aerobic process - which produces either methane or CO2.
Also, being all enthusiastic about the "After all, this is how all that coal and oil formed in the first place", author of the Washington Post story has obviously forgotten that natural gas (i.e. methane) is found in abundance wherever there is oil.
In the end, this could never come even close to being productive. Nor cheap.
HUGE amounts of (agriculturally usable) space to plant the trees/plants would be needed. We're talking about enough trees/plants to suck up all the CO2 produced by every power-plant.
Plants would need to be something that grows year-round, sucks up a lot of CO2, doesn't need fertilizer or nutrient rich soil and preferably grows vertically to take up less space. Hemp would probably be ideal, combined with pines or some other evergreen for the colder months.
Acres and acres would have to be planted for every single power-plant.
Plus, we are back to "carbon-credits" here as it would be physically impossible to plant all that shrubbery around the powerplants.
Then, more space would be needed to build the treatment plants that would suck out the carbon.
Also, energy and money to run it as it would probably not be breaking even monetarily. Would it be breaking even carbon-vise is a whole new ballgame.
Then, the now nearly inert waste would need to be transported to the landfills buried/piled there - i.e. more energy, more CO2 released, more money.
More you go into it, the more does the whole "as big as the plant itself, costing $700 mil." [scientificamerican.com] deal sound attractive.
Although, personally, I find the idea of burying the gas underground to be even dumber than the "piling garbage idea".
Re:Actually (Score:5, Interesting)
This cannot work the way TFA suggests: TFA is far too simplistic. Just piling up agricultural byproducts would only produce a large compost heap. It would remain bioactive until it either caught fire through spontaneous combustion or turned into soil. Either way, the carbon has not been sequestered; it remains in the biosphere. The cycle of repose in the large heaps is just too short to be useful.
That said, there is an approach that would work, in those parts of the world that have snow in the winter. We could create artificial peat bogs.
Dig pit a couple of acres in cross section and a thousand feet deep. Make it water tight and fill it to the brim with icy cold (4 degree C) fresh water-- it doesn't have to be potable and sea water might work but I only know about fresh water peat bogs, Add a compression mechanism, such as a sinkable platform the size of the pit, weighed down with some of the rock from the digging. Let it sink to the bottom of the pit. Chip the plant material down to a size that will compact easily, then slowly force the chippings under the compressor. That's it. Once operating, the main cost is that of stuffing the new chippings into the bottom of the pit.
There will be some slow anaerobic activity but so long as the pits are small in diameter relative to their depth, the water will stay cold, stagnant, and deoxygenated. The chip injector needs to be designed to avoid stirring the waters: you want that stagnation. You want dead, cold water that will minimize bioactivity.
A peat farm of ten pits each 2 acres by 1,000 feet deep could accept more than 4,000 acre-feet of agricultural byproduct each year for one hundred years before it fills, and then it would continue operations indefinitely. For at that point the compressor could be removed since the weight of the old peat would be enough to hold new chippings at the bottom, and the top few feet of finished peat could be removed each year for longer term storage elsewhere. Such as tilling it into desert sand dunes to stabilize them or stuffing it into depleted mine shafts, or storing blocks of the stuff in the Greenland or Antarctic iceboxes.
Eventually most of the carbon in the peat would return to the biosphere, but this approach would help buy us time to get off our fossil fuel dependency. For that matter, peat is not only a useable substrate for developing petroleum products, it is an effective fuel all by itself. It could be that peat farms could directly replace coal and oil, once we get our needs for petrochemicals down to sustainable levels.
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The problem isn't 'carbon in the biosphere', we're basically stuck with the same amount of carbon one way or another. It's not like we're 'making' carbon or getting rid of it in a relatively closed system like 'planet earth'. The problem (if it is a problem) is too much carbon dioxide -in the atmosphere-. The solution to that could easily be sequestration in agricultural compost heaps.
I was thinking about this recently, but with a twist. Why not bundle-up the heaped material in compressed cubes the size of
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. Just piling up agricultural byproducts would only produce a large compost heap. It would remain bioactive until it either caught fire through spontaneous combustion or turned into soil.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Take our major garbage dumps, the ones that have been around a long time. It was always presumed that the things would biodegrade spontaneously over time. We now know that isn't true ... at the bottom of a large dump the cold and lack of oxygen inhibit aerobic bacterial growth. Make these sequestration piles big enough, and only the outer layers will be bioactive. The rest be well-preserved.
Newspaper (Score:2)
I've always been a big fan of recycling but recently I've realized that recycling newspaper is probably wrong - it drives down the cost of wood pulp at a time when we ought to be providing economic incentives for people to plant more trees. We're better off sequestering its carbon - down some old coal mines or the equivalent - yes I know there are issues with methane and land fills but I see those as being things that one can spend some money on researching technological solutions for not just a reason for
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I'm not sure that providing an incentive to plant and cut down trees is better than reducing the incentive to cut down the trees that already exist.
Tax large-scale treecutting, and use the proceeds to plant trees.
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Because he didn't provide any hard numbers, even back-of-the-envelope calculations, or quote an authority other than himself who thinks this is a good idea?
Note that's not to say it's a bad idea. It just means that it's just an interesting idea, but not worth getting excited about until someone has actually looked into it.
I had this "idea" singe many years (Score:2)
It's probably close to a decade ago, that I had had this specific idea. Also, burying all sorts of "energy" waste, such as difficult-to-recycle cardboard, paper, wooden and polymer products. But I guess my idea was way ahead of time, hence I'm not filthy rich.
Actually, even now, nobody gets filthy rich from capturing carbon.
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There is plenty of money that can be made from extracting carbon, just not capturing it in spent forms that require an energy input.... well besides agriculture. But even most forms of agriculture merely use Carbon as a temporary holding element until the energy can be released again.
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Would it be a more productive use of that nuclear energy than displacing fossil fuel for existing electricity generation?
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NO! (Score:2)
Look, our planet has the same amount of carbon as it did when it satrted (basically). It's a closed system. The problem isn't 'too much carbon', it's 'too much carbon int he air'. Carbon is what makes soil fertile, it's the basis of our ecosystem. We just have a nasty habit of burning it.
There's no point in shooting carbon off into space, once you have it in a form that's ready to pack into a railgun, you've already taken it our of the atmosphere and the important part of the job is done.
What we should do i
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I've been telling people for years if they want to help the environment, to stop recycling paper. It makes some people angry. It makes other people think.
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I've been telling people for years if they want to help the environment, to stop recycling paper.
Yep, that would go some way towards capturing carbon, if the wood pulp for the paper is produced from tree farms (that is, continually replenished wood stock).
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It doesn't have to be a tree farm, just a managed forest. For example, in my country (Canada) the forested are has increased for at least the last few decades because whenever any forest is cut, more new trees are planted than were taken. I think the situation is similar in most modern foresting countries.
Paper is easier. (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me it would just be easier to stop recycling paper, and create tax incentives for the consumption of more paper. ;)
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It takes almost the same amount of energy to recycle paper as it does to start from virgin wood. Bleach too.
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Saving them from what? A life of indentured servitude? Seriously, the use of old-growth timber in paper making is a whole other topic, one which need not be used to muddy the merits of using paper products as a carbon sequestration vector.
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It takes more energy to recycle it, apparently.
We probably don't need to consume more of it, but we could certainly stop recycling the huge amounts of paper we currently use.
I suggested not recycling paper on Slashdot before. It really pissed people off. ;)
Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Kinda had this thought some time ago . . . plus, locally, we have numerous "brown fields" that are so loaded down with industrial waste from the 19th and 20th century that they aren't entirely safe for humans and certainly can't grow much of anything, outside of maybe, oh I don't know, gypsum weed. Or maybe jatropha curcas, I hear that stuff is pretty hardy.
I don't know what plants like gypsum and/or jatropha would actually pull out of soil like that, aside from water and some other nutrients, but if they could be used to leech toxins/industrial waste out of the soil, they could then be "piled high" to create a combination CO2 heap and toxic waste dump. Of course, you'd just be moving some of the nasty crap that made "brown fields" possible from one "brown field" to the next, and I would expect the NIMBYs to be rather upset about that. Still, seems like an okay idea. Let's face it, if you've got an area cordoned off to be your CO2 dump, it's not like you want anything disturbing it anyway, so may as well infuse it with horrible toxic waste that would cost a fortune to dump elsewhere.
Methane (Score:5, Informative)
One word methane. It results from anarobic decomposition and is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
Re:Methane (Score:4, Insightful)
But if we capture that methane, we can burn it to produce energy.
Convert methane to methanol (Score:4, Informative)
You can convert methane to methanol.
Methanol is FAR cheaper than ethanol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_fuel [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, but you can blind drinking methanol. You're better converting it to ethanol, and shipping it to Ireland.
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Sure, NOBODY has thought of that.
There are lots of ways to avoid releasing methane. You can bury it deep enough, bury it somewhere cold, or create biochar. Probably lots of other ways too.
If you do end up with some methane it's awfully handy for things like heating homes and generating electricity.
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Sure, the article isn't particularly well thought out (it's written by a newspaper production planner), but the concept isn't a bad one.
TFA is almost always full of errors and over simplifications.
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Not such a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the examples was to bury agricultural waste instead of plowing it into the ground. The obvious problem is that the "waste" is what becomes the soil in a few years, putting back minerals, nitrogen and other elements that the plant needs to grow. Without putting this "waste" back into the ground, the only way to get the same full, lush plants that are soaking up all this carbon is to use man made fertilizers, which are a big enough problem with ground water that we don't need to adopt a new agriculture method that requires even MORE of them.
If we could separate out all the carbon from our garbage and bury it in the way he talks about, great, there will be coal in a few millennia. But generally speaking, this sounds incredibly unworkable and naive.
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by Pharmboy (216950) on Sunday September 19, @08:46AM (#33626556)
by gabebear (251933) on Sunday September 19, @08:46AM (#33626558)
No it isn't, read the article (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm afraid it's naive. Every gram of plant material removed from the fields represents a gram of soil and water, removed from the local ecosystem. The field does not care where it is restored from, whether manure, river silt, or petrolum based fertilizers. But if the material is not replenished, the field will lose topsoil and productivity. Topsoil also isn't that thick: 50 foot thick topsoil is considered rare and extremely valuable. The layer in many "farm belts" is quite thin from over-use.
So just cartin
Plant mass != soil + water removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, the carbon came from the atmosphere and so did the water. The basic equation here is n(H2O) + n(CO2) -> n(CH2O) + n(O2), with carbon dioxide removed from the air and replaced with oxyge
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> As for 50ft topsoil....merely to have written this suggests your connection with farming is extremely tenuous.
Absolutely, that statement baffled me too. I've dug many pits down to over 5 meters and I've never seen topsoil more than 2 meters deep. In those cases it wasn't even proper topsoil, more like loose turf which collects on low lying land due to erosion and percolation. The average is roughly 0.5 meters in my area and it is renowned for the quality of the agricultural land.
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Wow. Way to not even read his post.
GP claimed that there are negligible useful materials aside from carbon stored in many plant parts. Whether that's true or not, your reply didn't even address it.
By planting appropriate nitrogen fixing plants you could probably wind up with a net improvement in soil fertility while still removing carbon.
where in the world is there 50ft topsoil? (Score:2)
Where in the world is there 50 foot of topsoil? a few inches is more the usual, I thought.
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You hit it right on the nose. In their efforts to solve what they see as a problem with one element (carbon) this process would also strip the other nutrients from the soil like nitrogen and potassium (potash). Do this long enough and all you are left with is sand and clay. Incapable of growing crops in any normal sense and would be about as successful as making a desert fertile without the use of supplements.
If folks doubt that this can happen they should do some research on how cotton agriculture so sever
Plowing under? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Make charcoal (Score:4, Interesting)
One variation of this proposal that I have seen is a bit more technical. It heats the agricultural waste in a reduced oxygen atmosphere to generate syngas and charcoal. The syngas you can burn to generate power. The charcoal you bury in old mines. The advantages were that you burn less fossil fuel and the the charcoal was less smelly than rotting waste. Disadvantage is that its more complicated.
Re:Make charcoal (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, and... (Score:2, Interesting)
sometimes making "simple" solutions actually work is more complicated than the "complex" alternative. As an engineer you run into this all the time, the manager who's so enamored of his brilliance he can't see the flaws in his idea.
This guy is talking about creating artificial peat bogs. It actually *is* an intriguing idea, but I don't see it as "simple". It certainly isn't an "alternative" to government subsidies or regulation. Somebody is going to have to pay the farmers to do this, and to buy the land
Wrong science (Score:5, Insightful)
Price says, "Without access to oxygen, bacteria cannot break down plant material."
Price, who obviously knows nothing about biology, is forgetting about the vast majority of all species on the planet: anaerobic microbes. They are quite good at turning organic material into carbon dioxide and methane. This happens in all animal guts, including yours, as well as anaerobic digesters, soils, underwater sediments, bogs, etc. His garbage heap "solution" sounds, to me, like an anaerobic digester. It would transform the waste into carbon dioxide and methane. Methane, by the way, has a green house gas equivalent of about ten times that of carbon dioxide. However, you can capture the methane and burn it to generate electricity. But, there's nothing novel about this; we've been doing it with our agricultural waste for decades. Especially in Europe where, for example, Germany has 4,500 cooperative facilities solely for the purpose of anaerobic breakdown of agricultural waste and capturing the methane produced, to be used as green energy.
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Weeds (Score:2)
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What could possibly go wrong?
It works, but ocean dumping is more efficient (Score:3, Interesting)
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The problem with ocean-dumping is that it displaces water (naturally, I haven't examind the paper to see wether that is addressed), which we've got enough problems with as it is.
My idea (which has taken me an aggregate of about 2 minutes to think of) is to grow fast-growing trees, cut them down, bury them in old mineshafts, fill the remaining space with sea water, seal & forget.
If you fill all the coal mines with wood, you fill the same volume of space as the coal you took out and burnt - coal probably
Are we in April? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is April Fools' gold:
>Without access to oxygen, bacteria cannot break down plant material. (...)
>Instead of trying to manufacture ethanol from switchgrass, would it be more effective to burn oil and bury the switchgrass? We sometimes pay farmers not to grow crops to sustain prices; should we pay them to grow otherwise useless crops and stockpile them? (...)
> Can leaves, bark and branches that are now discarded or burned be piled up instead? Is it more beneficial to recycle paper or to collect it? (...)
>The writer is the director of production planning at The Post.
LOL In the end I get it. The writer of this Washington Post article is the guy in charge of printing the paper-version of the Washington Post (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/hugh-price/7/2a8/68a [linkedin.com]). And he is trying to build an argument that producing paper and stockpiling it may be the solution to the environmental problems of our times! ("Help the Planet, Get the Paper Version instead of the online version!")
Reality can be funnier than fiction.
Landfill contamination isn't so simple (Score:3, Informative)
Aside from some of the obvious mistakes this opinion piece makes.
> There is no need to worry about toxins leaching into the water supply. No elaborate liner or monitoring is required
This is wrong. There are some situations where organic rich runoff can cause problems.
The following link:
http://toxics.usgs.gov/topics/rem_act/saco.html [usgs.gov]
describes:
" dissolved organic carbon in the leachate plume is dissolving arsenic from arsenic-containing iron oxides in the aquifer and bedrock"
Not about Mac OS. (Score:2)
I thought that this article was about debugging Mac OS memory leaks by examining the disposal of allocated memory. Slashdot. You just can't tell till you read the fine print.
ANAEROBIC composting (Score:2)
TFA's author is not as much an expert or authority on the matter as he imagines: he's unaware of the fact that there are anaerobic decomp proce
Yet again, Professor Farnsworth is right (Score:2)
Science cannot move forward without heaps!
Honestly it sounds genius (Score:2)
Honestly it sounds like a pretty sound idea. I am curious if there are any obvious scientific flaws here that I am missing. I hunted around a bit and noticed someone a few years ago (in the dept of atmospheric sciences at UMD college park) ran the numbers on this using trees:
The article is readable here:
http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/3/1/1 [cbmjournal.com]
His numbers are $14 / ton CO2 (or $50 per ton carbon) with an estimate of a total of 10 gigatons carbon / year .
Given the total fossil fuel emission is right now is a
Re:No fertilizer allowed (Score:5, Interesting)
Better use the waste to make biochar [wikipedia.org]. No artificial fertilizer necessary.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The simple soultion is to fix the root cause of the problem, ie: stop burning coal.
Re: (Score:2)
I think we could do some creative stuff to get more sequestration out of the biosphere...
What about trying to put fast-growing grasses into deserts. You mow the grass, bundle it up, and -bang- sequestered carbon! Rinse, repeat.
Re: (Score:2)
But when you think about, i trunk can do the work of 100 men in a day, would the carbon footprint be more or less then the 100 men doing the same job?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're assuming that those 100 men would vanish in the absence of employment -- rather than consume resources funded by unemployment, or perhaps another job that was viable only because the glut of available labor pushed wages low enough, or because the work week was shortened to spread the work among everyone.
People don't just go away because their job did.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
then explain why "old school" techniques in Africa are so inefficient and ungreen (e.g. huge releasers of CO2).
Re: (Score:2)
Ah yes. As long as we don't, then that's okay. What the hell, the blood of a few billion people on my hands so I can feel happy that uh...I'm not polluting the earth. I'm starting to really believe the line of thought that environmentalists are suffering from some type of neurological disorder.