31 votes
Accepted

Why does the cost of planting trees vary so much across different websites?

There are different levels of service. In itself planting a tree is very easy and cheap, of the 3 billion trees in the UK, most drop thousands of seeds each year and some germinate all by themselves ...
Christopher Gilmour's user avatar
7 votes

Why does the cost of planting trees vary so much across different websites?

Any time you want to give money to a charity, you should do some basic research on how the charity spends donated money. Some charities spend over 90% of donated funds on charitable works, with ...
arp's user avatar
  • 171
5 votes

What can an individual do to meaningfully practice carbon capture?

It is much easier to avoid emissions than to capture CO2. Anyway, one can roughly prioritize as follows: Leave it to professionals. There are expert organizations that focus on CO2 reduction. This is ...
Rainer Glüge's user avatar
4 votes

Is biochar actually a viable way of carbon sequestration?

The answer is: Unknown. So try it. We need more data points. In general if energy can be extracted from a reaction, some bacteria does it for a living. Given the nature of certain ecozones, ...
Sherwood Botsford's user avatar
4 votes

What is the minimum indoor CO2 concentration that is achievable using houseplants?

The short answer is no, not anywhere close to 200ppm and not appreciably lower than ambient conditions. The modern standard for buildings is a full air change every three hours. This means your ...
Jean-Paul Calderone's user avatar
4 votes

What is required to make air travel sustainable?

Another option that could be explored (and indeed is, to a limited extent) is the increased use of airships. Being neutrally buoyant, they need much less energy per trip, and the propulsion could be ...
Nick C's user avatar
  • 773
4 votes

What's the fastest growing plant by carbon density?

Since grass and switchgrass already been mentioned; Hemp and Paulownia tree may be the alternative answer. They are among the fastest growing plants. For hemp, one unit land area of hemp(s) can ...
underscore's user avatar
3 votes

Why don't we use cattle to re-store CO₂ in the soil?

Both of the links you shared are important videos to watch for anyone interested in learning about the process and should be considered required viewing material in classrooms where agriculture is ...
Scott Tramposch's user avatar
3 votes

What is required to make air travel sustainable?

For all-electric passenger jets, battery capacity must increase to hold four times more energy per unit mass Currently available batteries have poor specific energy compared to jet fuel: Jet fuel: ...
LShaver's user avatar
  • 11.8k
2 votes

Would “Guerilla Gardening” help combat climate change and/or be feasible/legal?

Your calculations are way off. One cubic meter of wood harvests about 1 tonne of carbon dioxide. An average tree is 0.6 cubic meters so that's 0.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tree. To reduce ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
2 votes

Is grass efficient for carbon sequestration?

I wonder how much carbon dioxide does grass sequester, compared to trees. Moreover, is grass still efficient in absorbing pollution? It seems to me that grass would be more efficient in storing carbon ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
2 votes

Is grass efficient for carbon sequestration?

I believe its all about mass, biomass is effectively sequestered CO2. In year one a lawn probably has a greater mass than a one year old tree, and so more CO2 sequestered. But in year twenty the tree ...
Christopher Gilmour's user avatar
2 votes

How can I separate carbon monoxide from wood gas?

If you are going to use wood gas to run a generator, don't bother removing the CO. Burn it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3KipK49v7g is a vid on making a woodgas powered truck. That said: ...
Sherwood Botsford's user avatar
2 votes

How can I separate carbon monoxide from wood gas?

This master's thesis by Dahiru Rufai Ahmed at the university of Oulu provides a comprehensive background into the removal of CO2 from wood gas. On pages 36-37 it mentions the water-gas shift (WGS) ...
0tyranny0poverty's user avatar
2 votes

What can an individual do to meaningfully practice carbon capture?

I suggest a variation on juhist's forest landfill proposal: Assuming budget isn't an issue, and you're very patient, I'd suggest: buy land adjacent to a viable (native or at least non-monocultural) ...
Richard Lane's user avatar
2 votes

Is anyone developing direct carbon capture for home HVAC system based on natural gas?

This is not practical. There are two main ways in which carbon dioxide can be captured from gas burning equipment. One is that there's a plant that liquifies air and creates a pure stream of oxygen. ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
2 votes

Would moving baby trees help with carbon sequestration?

I think you'll find that in areas where forests are managed, baby trees come from a central location the only purpose of which is to grow lots of these small baby trees. The trees are used to create a ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
2 votes

Would moving baby trees help with carbon sequestration?

By moving a tree from one area to another, that's -1 tree to the source and +1 tree to the destination, for a net change of 0 trees over the region. That probably won't make much of a difference ...
Nic's user avatar
  • 2,849
2 votes

Does a solar powered direct air capture plant capture more CO2 from air than a forest planted on the same area?

A quick googling for energy need of direct air capture gives these estimates: 1200 kWh/tonne-CO2 2000 kWh/tonne-CO2 8.8 GJ/tonne-CO2 (2400 kWh/tonne-CO2) 14 GJ/tonne-CO2 (3900 kWh/tonne-CO2) Let's ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
1 vote

Is anyone developing direct carbon capture for home HVAC system based on natural gas?

There are some very interesting new approaches to this problem which have the potential to dramatically change the calculus for point-of-emissions CO2 capture and storage. First, a technique using ...
Haw'n Hillbilly's user avatar
1 vote

What can an individual do to meaningfully practice carbon capture?

You can start growing an exploiting a Moso bamboo forest. Bamboo is known for growing fast and storing a lot of CO2. It is said that one hectare of Moso Bamboo can store up to 250 tons of carbon. ...
Tatiana B's user avatar
1 vote
Accepted

Which CDR options, on balance, are the most feasible?

you can sequester a considerable amount of carbon by afforestation Planting new forest is only capable of capturing about the same amount of carbon dioxide that has been released by burning down ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
1 vote

How is biochar production as a CDR method different from crop residue burning?

Let's compare biochar production from wood with burning wood: 1000 tonnes of biochar sequester 3000 tonnes of CO2 and the production of said biochar creates 5000 MWh of energy as heat, requiring ...
juhist's user avatar
  • 4,786
1 vote
Accepted

How is biochar production as a CDR method different from crop residue burning?

Deliberate biochar production differs from open burning in two important ways. The first is oxygen availability as you said. Limiting the amount of oxygen means far more of the biomass ends up as ...
Chris H's user avatar
  • 2,116
1 vote

Can we capture carbon from decomposing plants?

If you were to decompose it anaerobically, you'd get methane, not CO2 and wouldn't need to process it to get fuel. Composting, on the other hand, should be aerobic, and does produce CO2, as well as ...
Chris H's user avatar
  • 2,116
1 vote

Hyper carbon accumulator(s) for backyards

This article (and the "Part two" it links to) gives a lot of technical detail and some practical advice: Why Not Start Today: Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do. In ...
M Juckes's user avatar
  • 1,001
1 vote

Why don't we use cattle to re-store CO₂ in the soil?

Cattle have become unpopular because they have been accused of farting methane. This is the main answer to your question. However in ecologically sound pastures cattle do restore CO2 to the soil, and ...
Janet Rooke's user avatar
1 vote

Quantity of new trees needed to compensate all human CO₂ pollution

Trees follow the logistics curve for growth. More complicated, the number of trees descreases as they get larger. E.g. after a forest fire, lodgepole pine sprout at about 10 per square foot. In 10 ...
Sherwood Botsford's user avatar
1 vote

Is biochar actually a viable way of carbon sequestration?

There are many problems with the article you cited, but I agree with the main point it makes about the need for extensive research before any global scale solution should be attempted. Nevertheless, ...
Scott Tramposch's user avatar
1 vote

Is biochar actually a viable way of carbon sequestration?

There is certainly one way how to do carbon sequestration with biochar: fill empty coal open pit mines with that charcoal, and cover with soil. That's how the fossil fuel in that pit was stored for a ...
tanius's user avatar
  • 449

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