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Capturing Carbon With Garbage Heaps
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."
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 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.
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It will work so long as we don't use modern farming techniques that contribute to CO2, such as fertilizer and diesel machinery. Can we really remember how to do that?
It seems to me it would just be easier to stop recycling paper, and create tax incentives for the consumption of more paper. ;)
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.
One word methane. It results from anarobic decomposition and is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
How about: extract energy from that agricultural waste using biogas (possible now) or some combination of physical/chemical process (being worked on, with success here & there)? That way:
Seems like more effective way, and required tech is available now.
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
How much gas and money would be used by NOT plowing under leftover stuff in the field? Plowing under organic-mater enriches the soil and the collection and transportation of all this stuff would take a lot of energy.
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.
In organic farming it's common to plant winter crops that fix nitrogen and then plow them in in the spring, but this is completely different from plowing in straw. Until burning of stubble was banned in Europe, this was the commonest fate of straw. Plowing it in has downsides - including returning pest eggs, fungi and viruses to the soil. Removing it completely would have many of the benefits of stubble burning with none of the pollution downsides. I suspect this is neither unworkable nor naive, but it is a solution that doesn't involve lots of pork and so will be resisted by bureaucrats.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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 and transport the waste there, and to deal with the effects of removing so much biomass from th cropland.
Things like grassahol subsidies are supposed to incent the development of new technologies. If those technologies ever make grassahol cheaper than oil, then the subsidies will have bootstrapped a new private grassahol market. That's a big "if", but so is research in energy technologies like fusion. What is problematic is that the farm lobby distorts the program, just as it would a farm waste sequestration program. So it's not a politically simpler solution.
$100 million dollars to scrub 1.5% of the carbon out of the atmosphere sounds like a huge amount of money, until you consider this. A single F22 Raptor cost half again as much (150 million), and we've managed to purchase 166 of those. Most people would admit that is a lot of money, but there are still people that think buying a few more would be a good investment. When you're talking about an entire national economy like the US, 100 million to accomplish something important isn't that much.
Now consider the damage figure for Hurricane Katrina, which stands at 81 billion. Now you can't say that any hurricane was *caused* by global warming, but severe hurricanes are more *frequent* under an AGW scenario. If the frequency of such hurricanes increases, a few billion dollars to dial that down wouldn't be that much money, much less 100 million.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Perhaps weeds would be able to help us out here, since they grow quickly and don't seem to require any fertilizer. Needing only water, farmers could be subsidized to plant endless crops of some particularly fast-growing (genetically tailored?) varieties that would subsequently be harvested and buried. Perhaps burial would also help to prevent these oxygen-deprived organic masses from turning into sources of methane, which as a greenhouse gas is 25 times more potent than CO2. Or, maybe the methane could be trapped and burned to produce energy. This would produce CO2, but not be nearly as bad as letting the methane escape into the atmosphere.
how people think until it's too late (or about to be too late). That is the root of the problem. People in this country (USA) are too conditioned to believe what their government, church or political party tells them to believe. Chang that and anything is possible. Shoehornjob
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
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." deal sound attractive.
Although, personally, I find the idea of burying the gas underground to be even dumber than the "piling garbage idea".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Professor Gregory Benford has papers on it. http://www.physics.uci.edu/faculty/benford.html There are several papers here going back several years discussing geo-sequestration of carbon in a manner non returnable to the atmosphere. The proposal here does not lock the carbon away.
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 primary rules of agriculture that we learned about in the Agricultural Revolution.
P.S. It's what plants crave.
P.P.S. Captcha: charcoal. Is it just me or are an inordinate number of the captchas on slashdot relevant to the subject of the article? Maybe I missed that post.
You can convert methane to methanol.
Methanol is FAR cheaper than ethanol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_fuel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
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 oxygen. Since hay and dead leaves are pretty dry, the effective water content is likely to be equivalent to a centimeter of rain equivalent at most.
Looking at grasses, the main structural rigidity element is silicon dioxide, which is why grass stems are abrasive.
This means that removing plant stems and dead leaves only really removes very small amounts of nitrogen and elements other than CHO, and insignificant amounts of water. The silica arises from stone weathering, again not morally a problem.
The problem arises, in fact, from the removal of the actual crop. It is this that contains the essential soil elements you mention - the N,P,S, the trace elements like potassium,magnesium, selenium and chromium - that have to be replenished with either fertiliser or manure. Removing the parts of the plant that are actually waste from the view of plant reproduction is not a problem. The manure produced by ruminants contains the trace elements because their diet contains plant fruiting bodies and tubers. If you tried to feed cows on straw rather than hay, you would rapidly appreciate the difference - though you wouldn't last long as a dairy farmer.
As for 50ft topsoil....merely to have written this suggests your connection with farming is extremely tenuous. I on the other hand live in a farming district, I'm well aware of local farming practices, and we grow a lot of our own fruit and vegetables. It isn't naive to know what parts of the plant represent renewables, and what part represents non-renewables.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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). 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.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
If this is really garbage, you can do the same thing, but put it to better use, by converting it into biochar, then getting it back down deep in the soils on the farms from which it originated.
Just "capturing carbon" is retarded. We are a carbon based society, this is valuable stuff to keep us working and alive. We need to stop thinking of carbon as a problem, and start treating it as the wonderful asset it is. Just using it more wisely will help in every direction.
And FUCK wall street and that scam "carbon credits" nonsense, and all the deluded supporters of that stupid idea. I have no idea why so many "greenies" want to be useful idiot tools of wall street. I guess they just get told what to think and then run with that, like some sort of brainwashed cult.
Whoever wrote this article should probably get himself a science education. The article is nothing more than some guy in charge of paper recycling at the Washington Posts fantasy, and has 0 scientific merit to back up any of his fanciful claims.
If you have a science background, and want a good laugh, go read the article.
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 rejecting the idea out of hand.
http://www.cs-carbonsolutions.de/htc-process.htm
There are so many things wrong with this article I'm not sure where to begin. Five minutes of Googling would have shown the author his "simple, elegant solution" is neither simple, elegant, nor a solution. He clearly has no understanding of the decomposition process taking place inside a compost heap and what is produced. His claim that there are no toxic leachates for example can be shown untrue by anyone who has had to work with industrial quantities of waste sawdust and bark. Pile this material high enough that the lower layers go anoxic and you get some interesting stuff leaking out of the heap.
Baseless opinion from a marketing droid who can't be bothered to do a bit of research. I'm sure Fox will love it.
And who is going to kill 80 million people? And how do we decide who to off? It ought to be the richest 10% who produce most of the waste.
Let's start in those other neighborhoods way over there... I've checked and there don't happen to be suitable collection spots in mine.
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
describes:
" dissolved organic carbon in the leachate plume is dissolving arsenic from arsenic-containing iron oxides in the aquifer and bedrock"
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.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
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 processes that do not require atmospheric oxygen (only what is chemically locked in the biomass).
It's a third-party opinion from an untrusted source who is not an expert on the chosen subject. Being submitted to Slashdot doesn't make it any more authoritative.
Science cannot move forward without heaps!
Eat the rich.
Where in the world is there 50 foot of topsoil? a few inches is more the usual, I thought.
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 is work on managed forestry, where we find ways to maximize growth of plants in areas that aren't of ecological importance (or areas that could use trees, like deserts upwind of agricultural lands). Once the trees are growing slower, you cut down every-other one and plant more. A felled tree -is- sequestered carbon.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Reducing the world's population by an order of magnitude or so is the only answer to this and so many other problems. Every thing else is just dithering and delay. Figure out a way to do this sanely and humanely, or it will happen on it's own, and it won't be pleasant.
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
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 apparantly only 8 gigatons C / year the numbers work out pretty well.
Some of the issues on methane emission are addressed in the article .. the natural extension of this article is using something fast growing and equivalent like fast growing vines like.. kudzu which is so fast growing its a bioinvasive plant in the south .. I'm looking around to see if anyone has run the numbers of using kudzu but I bet its cheaper (including land usage) than using trees.
Oh yes, very bright, burn fossil fuels to make charcoal to bury.
On paper some silly obligation is met via a loophole but in reality there is more carbon dioxide produced and the plant matter would be far better ploughed into the soil unburnt.
when disease spreads like wildfire through truly overpopulated regions the problem will correct itself.
if you want to run around and scream the end is nigh, go ahead. but ranting about "non-solutions" at the same time is going to make us all blow cola out our nose.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
i think biochar as previously posted here would be better since you would not need to rigourously keep anaerobic conditions
The places where plant matter parks for long time spans tend to be highly acidic bogs. Even ordinary landfills, with their sealed bottoms, and layers of clay on top produce significant quantities of methane -- an even more potent greenhouse gas.
Oops. Back to the drawing board.
I don't about where you are, but here, they aren't allowed to burn forest waste, not in the open anyway. Many large mills burn their own waste to generate process steam to heat the OSB and particle board presses, or to generate power to run the saws.
Straw is used for feed (straw + grain works pretty well) or bedding. After bedding use, it can't be burned (wet with soggy bits) and it's frequently spread on fields.
The big fad right now in agriculture is zero tillage. Leave the stubble. In some cases leave the straw. Plant the next crop through the straw and stubble, with precisely the amount of fertilizer that crop needs parked next to the seed.
So in a nutshell, there isn't any ag waste here.
There is some merit in reducing waste to biochar. You can extract some of the energy out of it, use it for whatever, and put about half the original carbon back into the ground as charcoal. Charcoal is quite stable.
The jury is still out whether adding charcoal to temperate soils will work the same way it has in the Amazon. But even if it doesn't, it's likely to do no harm, which makes it a suitable parking space for carbon.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
It is amassing to me that we are suggesting such things when there are so many good options available. The idea is definitely not a good idea. It is however a good way to quickly strip the land of what nutrients is still has. And that twice over, because as plant matter is taken away instead of left for the friendly bacteria to do their jobs -which happens to be to free up nutrients to promote plant growth and fight against diseases- they will begin to disappear. There is a much more rewarding way to store the carbon that will promote plant growth and it was employed by ancient Peruvians if I'm not mistaken. It hasn't been done for more than 500 years though but the plants still grow with unbelievable vigor where the "Tera Preta" remains. The locals heated bio-waist to make carbon which they tilled into the soil because the carbon still contains the minerals that the plant contained and also permits air to reach the roots of the plants because it is porous and also loosens the soil. The carbon does not break down into carbon dioxide it is effectively trapped there for good. I used it here in mexico to grow and amazing garden which everyone swore I was using fertilizer on, which by the way is not the case. The incredible thing is that in order to have a spot to grow the garden I had to rake up gravel that was spread out over clay. As you can see I was pretty desperate to grow a garden.
The byproduct of making the carbon, when done right, is free hydrogen which can be used to generate electricity or whatever. this was common place over two hundred years ago when the streets were lit by "town gas" or "wood gas". But who would want to save the environment if you can't patent it and charge royalties right. Oh well, guess we'll keep looking for more ways to destroy the earth untill someone steps in.
If you keep removing all the plant waste from a farm and burying it elsewhere, wouldn't this deplete the soil of nutrients? I'm not a farmer, but I have to wonder.