Order of Kilopi
CO2 absorbs infrared radiation in the 4.3 micron band where water vapour is transparent to infrared and it also absorbs radiation at around 13 microns where water vapour is fairly transparent. So CO2 will act as a greenhouse gas even in areas of high humidity. Its effectiveness as a greenhouse gas is increased in areas of low humidity, such as over antartica.
Banned
Americans use 50 million tons of paper a year. 45 percent of that is recycled. most of the rest winds up in landfills.
Paper is composed largely of carbon.
Buried in land fills that remaining 27.5 million tons of paper is deprived of oxygen and does not decompose. That carbon stays in the ground to produce a coal bed in the future.
That's just the paper that winds up in land fills. There is also some carbon from wood scraps, demolition debris, food scraps and human waste that also winds up being removed from the apmospheric carbon cycle and buried.
This is not to say that there aren't some bad agricultural procedures that put more carbon in the air than would happen otherwise. Burning brazilian rain forrests for crops do that. But it's not the crops that do it it's the burning that puts the carbon that the forrests are made of into the air that does it.
It's been suggested that large industrial facilities be built to remove carbon from the air directly and pump it deep into the earth. Some large test facilities have already been built.
Another way would be to cultivate large, fast growing, fleshy plants and bury them. It would be less polluting, probably use less energy and we would at least have the oxygen they would produce while they are alive.
Order of Kilopi
how much energy is reuired to build and operate this facility to pump CO2 into the ground?
as for the "grow it then bury it" idea-we expend the energy, effort, and resources to grow stuff ,then just bury it..
i dunno.. seems kind of wasteful to me.
Order of Kilopi
An economical way to do this might be to grow plants and then burn them to generate electricity. A small amount of carbon, 2-3%, will be left behind as ash and this can be buried or hills made out of it or added to some soils to improve agricuture. This way you will have a process that slowly removes carbon from the atmosphere and at the same time can replace some fossil fuel use. This method is certainly economical where biomass of one sort or another is currently produced as an unwanted byproduct and many small power plants have been built and are being built to utilize it.how much energy is reuired to build and operate this facility to pump CO2 into the ground?
as for the "grow it then bury it" idea-we expend the energy, effort, and resources to grow stuff ,then just bury it..
i dunno.. seems kind of wasteful to me.
Banned
novaderrik,
Most of the energy to convert CO2 from the air into carbon in plants comes from the sun by photosynthesis. Some relatively small amount of energy goes into the cultivation process from fuel burning plows, transport, burial and such. All of the energy to extract CO2 directly from the air and pump it into the ground comes from generated power by fuel burning . It might be more efficiently done by using hydro electric or geothermal energy from locations that are too remote for the energy to be economically used for human consumption.
Ronald Brak,
You wouldn't want to burn the plants as that releases the carbon back into the air as CO2.
Order of Kilopi
Yes but the CO2 is captured again by growing plants which you burn again. And each time you you burn a plant a small amount of carbon (about 2-3%) in a very stable form is sequested. If you are interested in faster carbon sequestion then I suggest cokeing the plant matter, buring the burnable volitiles that are produced for energy similar to natural gas and seqestering the very stable carcoal that results.You wouldn't want to burn the plants as that releases the carbon back into the air as CO2.
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