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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.
It seems to me it would just be easier to stop recycling paper, and create tax incentives for the consumption of more paper. ;)
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.
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.
Biochar is a great idea and it can also produce energy from sewrage. Trees are god but we coud cover the whole planet with trees and it would only make a minor dent in our emmissions. Unless we're willing to turn over most of the world's arable land to producing and burrying fast growing species such as bamboo, there simply is not enough land for the solution in TFA.
The simple soultion is to fix the root cause of the problem, ie: stop burning coal.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
But if we capture that methane, we can burn it to produce energy.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
In addition to this correct remark, decomposition of e. g. hydrocarbons not only leads to the production of CO2, but also of significant amounts of water: C6H12O6 + 6xO2 -> 6xCO2 + 6xH2O. Some animals do hardly need any water in their diet, because this water generated by "burning" is enough to feed their needs.
Therefore, the urine we piss and the sweat we transpire do contain some percentage of the solids we have ingested.
I believe so, because even if one were to replace every plant with nuclear you'll still have the carbon from other sources such as manufacture and cars, which one can capture using carbon filtering systems which capture sources of carbon like smog and can then compress it and ready it for disposal.
Also this would answer what to do with all the carbon we have created up to this point, and instead of just digging a hole or filling Al Gore's pockets we could actually do something useful for the whole of mankind with it, like the Terraform of Mars and spacecraft fuel.
I believe the supergun would allow us to turn what is now looked upon as a waste product that is slowly poisoning the planet into a source of space exploration and ultimately the creation of a second planet we humans could call home. what could be a loftier use of waste products than that?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.