I've always wondered if someone could bio-engineer particularly dense wood as a way to sequester carbon. But I admit, I know next to nothing about how anyone would go about doing that and what the constraints would be, other than its extremely tough to make genetic engineering work.
There is active research into engineering crops for increased CO2 incorporation rates and subsequent passage to soils. In this case the carbon sink is the terrestrial landmass itself, not the plant. This would have the added benefit of restoring degraded soil.
Instead of scaling up like that, there are other ways that take advantage of positive feedback loops and decentralization — that is, a technology that can go “viral”.
There would not be a single source of failure. Such a system can be self -healing. It can potentially be adaptive if local people are able to implement it in ways that make sense for their place and community. (Otherwise, it runs into the same kind if globalist mindset from high modernity).
You don’t have to find a single tree species to do this. Instead, you look at what is already growing in the local area and plant those. Doing it that way solves way more problems than carbon emissions. We are talking about food forests (solve the food distribution problem), emotional and mental health (humans recover from illnesses better when they can see trees), resiliency (from decentralized food systems and biodiversity), and so on.
I mean you could in theory make a plant so good that it would outcompete almost any other plants. Then you might get a fungus or other disease that targets that monoculture and can now easily jump through the whole globe since it's covered in the same super plant. Being invasive is not a good feature.
> Once initialized, both processes produce net energy. For typical inputs, the energy required to run a "fast" pyrolyzer is approximately 15% of the energy that it outputs. Modern pyrolysis plants can use the syngas created by the pyrolysis process and output 3–9 times the amount of energy required to run.
Wow, that's impressive. I had not heard about this before, and I'm impressed that this is a sustainable process that may produce durable carbon sequestration. Thanks for the tip!
