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Carbon sequestration via wood burial

To mitigate global climate change, a portfolio of strategies will be needed to keep the atmospheric CO(2 )concentration below a dangerous level. Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in tren...

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Autor principal: Zeng, Ning
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2008
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18173850
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1
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author Zeng, Ning
author_facet Zeng, Ning
author_sort Zeng, Ning
collection PubMed
description To mitigate global climate change, a portfolio of strategies will be needed to keep the atmospheric CO(2 )concentration below a dangerous level. Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in trenches or stowed away in above-ground shelters. The largely anaerobic condition under a sufficiently thick layer of soil will prevent the decomposition of the buried wood. Because a large flux of CO(2 )is constantly being assimilated into the world's forests via photosynthesis, cutting off its return pathway to the atmosphere forms an effective carbon sink. It is estimated that a sustainable long-term carbon sequestration potential for wood burial is 10 ± 5 GtC y(-1), and currently about 65 GtC is on the world's forest floors in the form of coarse woody debris suitable for burial. The potential is largest in tropical forests (4.2 GtC y(-1)), followed by temperate (3.7 GtC y(-1)) and boreal forests (2.1 GtC y(-1)). Burying wood has other benefits including minimizing CO(2 )source from deforestation, extending the lifetime of reforestation carbon sink, and reducing fire danger. There are possible environmental impacts such as nutrient lock-up which nevertheless appears manageable, but other concerns and factors will likely set a limit so that only part of the full potential can be realized. Based on data from North American logging industry, the cost for wood burial is estimated to be $14/tCO(2)($50/tC), lower than the typical cost for power plant CO(2 )capture with geological storage. The cost for carbon sequestration with wood burial is low because CO(2 )is removed from the atmosphere by the natural process of photosynthesis at little cost. The technique is low tech, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and reversible, thus an attractive option for large-scale implementation in a world-wide carbon market.
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spelling pubmed-22667472008-03-11 Carbon sequestration via wood burial Zeng, Ning Carbon Balance Manag Research To mitigate global climate change, a portfolio of strategies will be needed to keep the atmospheric CO(2 )concentration below a dangerous level. Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in trenches or stowed away in above-ground shelters. The largely anaerobic condition under a sufficiently thick layer of soil will prevent the decomposition of the buried wood. Because a large flux of CO(2 )is constantly being assimilated into the world's forests via photosynthesis, cutting off its return pathway to the atmosphere forms an effective carbon sink. It is estimated that a sustainable long-term carbon sequestration potential for wood burial is 10 ± 5 GtC y(-1), and currently about 65 GtC is on the world's forest floors in the form of coarse woody debris suitable for burial. The potential is largest in tropical forests (4.2 GtC y(-1)), followed by temperate (3.7 GtC y(-1)) and boreal forests (2.1 GtC y(-1)). Burying wood has other benefits including minimizing CO(2 )source from deforestation, extending the lifetime of reforestation carbon sink, and reducing fire danger. There are possible environmental impacts such as nutrient lock-up which nevertheless appears manageable, but other concerns and factors will likely set a limit so that only part of the full potential can be realized. Based on data from North American logging industry, the cost for wood burial is estimated to be $14/tCO(2)($50/tC), lower than the typical cost for power plant CO(2 )capture with geological storage. The cost for carbon sequestration with wood burial is low because CO(2 )is removed from the atmosphere by the natural process of photosynthesis at little cost. The technique is low tech, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and reversible, thus an attractive option for large-scale implementation in a world-wide carbon market. BioMed Central 2008-01-03 /pmc/articles/PMC2266747/ /pubmed/18173850 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 Text en Copyright © 2008 Zeng; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research
Zeng, Ning
Carbon sequestration via wood burial
title Carbon sequestration via wood burial
title_full Carbon sequestration via wood burial
title_fullStr Carbon sequestration via wood burial
title_full_unstemmed Carbon sequestration via wood burial
title_short Carbon sequestration via wood burial
title_sort carbon sequestration via wood burial
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18173850
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1
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