What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
I wonder the same. This proposal sounds like it is leeching nutrients from the ground and storing it for a long time (on a scale of centuries in the proposal). How do these nutrients cycle back for growing the food that we need? Or, for that matter, for the next round of biomass to freeze?
On a tiny scale I store them via humification in the top soil. In agriculture they manage the humus content of their soil anyway, for example in greenhouses they might have 20% instead of 2% in the surrounding fields.
Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.
I had a very short back and forth with someone here. One thing makes you wonder about another.
You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant.
But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why do that. The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight.
Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
You can pyrolize the wood by cooking it in an oxygen-free environment, cooking off almost all of the nitrogen and other nutrients and leaving nearly pure carbon in the form of charcoal.
Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself.
Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer.
You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.
Sadly, I don't think so. Many of these carbon burial/sequestration proposals all advocate just taking all of the plant matter and tucking it away, including the N and P.
Eli Yablonovitch has been working on this for a while. I thought it was assumed that only the lignin would stay sequestered but I'm not finding those details.
I wasn't satisfied with his idea because it assumed that the biomass had to stay dry indefinitely, despite being locked behind an impermeable barrier. It's also not very convenient geographically, because raising crops (at least for low-value types like switchgrass) is not economically viable in the driest areas where they would be stored.
Serious question (I'm not a biologist): How did the nitrogen, etc. get released when the plant material (that became oil) first died and got buried? Is this fundamentally different?
It gets consumed and released by detrivores, i.e. fungus. This takes a long time, and wouldn’t work nearly as well these days because the fungus would eat the cellulose as well.
