Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Earth Businesses

A Stealth Effort To Bury Wood For Carbon Removal Has Just Raised Millions (technologyreview.com) 144

A California startup is pursuing a novel, if simple, plan for ensuring that dead trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for thousands of years: burying their remains underground. From a report: Kodama Systems, a forest management company based in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded last summer. But MIT Technology Review can now report the company has raised around $6.6 million from Bill Gates's climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, as well as Congruent Ventures and other investors.

In addition, the payments company Stripe will reveal on Thursday that it's provided a $250,000 research grant to the company and its research partner, the Yale Carbon Containment Lab, as part of a broader carbon removal announcement. That grant will support a pilot effort to bury waste biomass harvested from California forests in the Nevada desert and study how well it prevents the release of greenhouse gases that drive climate change. It also agreed to purchase about 415 tons of carbon dioxide eventually sequestered by the company for another $250,000, if that proof-of-concept project achieves certain benchmarks. "Biomass burial has the potential to become a low-cost, high-scale approach for carbon removal, though there is a need for further investigation into its long-term durability," said Joanna Klitzke, procurement and ecosystem strategy lead for Stripe.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

A Stealth Effort To Bury Wood For Carbon Removal Has Just Raised Millions

Comments Filter:
  • These are scams (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:44PM (#63135894)
    Similar to recycling carbon capture is a scam used to trick people into thinking we don't need to make any changes to combat climate change.

    Let's be cleared, we do not need to reduce our quality of life. However we are going to need to build a proper public transportation Network. And people who own car companies I'm going to let that happen without a fight.

    What's going to be interesting is that automobiles are rapidly becoming too expensive for the majority of people to own but their tax dollars are still paying for all those roads they aren't going to really be able to use.
    • I agree it's a scam, but for the simple reason of preying on the green economy to make money doing hauling and excavation. I hope they're using Tesla Semi trucks charged with renewable energy...

      • by dbialac ( 320955 )
        Why? Manufacturing them creates a ton of CO2.
      • I hope they're using Tesla Semi trucks charged with renewable energy...

        I bet they're using trucks powered by biomass buried millions of years ago.

        For once, ICE vehicles make total sense for this company: diesel trucks are kind of like the end of the cycle they started.

      • the funding for these scams generally doesn't come from well meaning marks & suckers. It comes from billionaires.

        The scam isn't "the green economy", the scam is "look at this thing we're doing, now you don't have to worry about climate change! Just ignore all that pesky wind and solar power and use Clean Coal (tm) instead!"
        • FWIW, I wasn't saying the "green economy" was a scam. That was just my clumsy way of describing money going into green causes. And I'm pretty sure there are some billionaires feeding those project as well.
          You don't always have to be on the defense -- It's possible that you have been spending too much time in the trenches. Maybe we could start a GoFundMe to get you a vacation in Cuba. Sorry, that was uncalled for...but sounded funny in my head.

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      This particular startup seems to only exist because of the scams you mention, but in an effort to make them less of a scam. I believe it is a worthwhile goal to look at misguided practices in the industry and try to find ways to make them better, even if the best approach would be to stop the practice all together.

      Then again, there's a good chance they are just trying to capitalize on the scam with their own little twist. I guess I'm not thinking as cynically as usual today.

      • Seems like they are burning fuel to bury perfectly good firewood...so that it can't be used as fuel?
        • Seems like they are burning fuel to bury perfectly good firewood...so that it can't be used as fuel?

          Great question! Pine trees tend to have so much pitch content that people don't like to use them for fuel. They are fine for campfires, but the pitch residue fouls chimneys and creates a risk of chimney fires. The fouling problem would be even worse in a boiler, plus any commercial use would have to comply with particulate pollution rules. There are miles of piles of it laying around national forests and no one thinks it's even worth hauling off.

          If this organization thinks they can sell carbon credit

          • My guess is that they are just monetizing something that would be done anyways

            Bingo. And sadly, some people here are demonizing the company for it. If a company can monetize a waste process in a way that helps sequester some of that spare CO, more power to them.

          • Tons of pine wood pellets are used for fuel. Pellet stoves are very efficient and all of the pitch is burned.
        • Seems like they are burning fuel to bury perfectly good firewood...so that it can't be used as fuel?

          To me it seems like they're working on producing coal. In a few million years. For the next next next next next next next whatever generation to burn.
        • Seems like they are burning fuel to bury perfectly good firewood...so that it can't be used as fuel?

          There are places where wood (much of which is not construction-grade) needs to be sequestered somehow to avoid wild-fires. Pyrolysis might be a better answer, but this also requires spending energy.

          I don't think burying wood is a solution for every case, but it is a solution for some areas. As a result, it is part of a suite of solutions that, in the aggregate, helps to address carbon emissions.

          You don't even need to bury it deep, or all of it.

          Depending on the terrain and type of wood and intentions,

        • Seems like they are burning fuel to bury perfectly good firewood...so that it can't be used as fuel?

          Which brings me to two schemes I've been wondering about for a while.

          First, don't bother turning corn or other feedstocks into alcohol. Just ship them to coal power plants and burn them. Use the electricity for whatever you want.

          Second, take the trees, bake them into charcoal, use the syngas that generates in place of natural gas, and bury the charcoal. Charcoal doesn't decompose so it's quite stable. Basically, we're rebuilding coal beds.

        • by SJ ( 13711 )

          Fuel... which then releases the carbon back into the atmosphere, completely negating the entire point of the project.

          That's the entire point of burying it.

    • by dbialac ( 320955 )
      And overlooked is wiping out entire ecosystems that rely on decaying trees for food.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by cayenne8 ( 626475 )

      Let's be cleared, we do not need to reduce our quality of life. However we are going to need to build a proper public transportation Network.

      If we are then forced to use your said "proper public transportation network", then it would indeed be a reduction in quality of life.

      No thanks.

      I much prefer my door-to-door transportation, to haul as much or little as I need at the times of my choosing.

      • you'd need cities built for it, but if you have those then no, it doesn't reduce your quality of life. It improves it with cleaner air, less time commuting and easier access to amenities.

        There is one downside though. Easy access to amenities with public transport means easy access for everyone. That means if you're upper middle class you can't use various tricks to keep the poors out of your neighborhoods so you can have nice schools and parks for yourself but not for everyone else. This is what "white
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The reality of car ownership in many places is traffic jams and having to park a long way from the door, at considerable expense.

        I like having a car, but I'd also like the option to use a good public transport system for many journeys.

      • by SJ ( 13711 )

        It's ok. You won't be "forced" to give up your car.... It will just become too expensive to keep.

        $10/gal? $8k licensing? $80/day parking?

        Public Transport is starting to look pretty good isn't it....

    • by Jzanu ( 668651 )
      Instead they should pyrolize [wiley.com] the wood waste. It would not only store some of the carbon captured by the wood growth [wiley.com], it would reduce the demand for fertiziler when the resultant biochar is applied to soil first, and further produce carbon neutral pyrolysis oil which could also be stored for later use while potential emissions could be hedged by simple forestry practices.
    • If carbon capture is a scam then we are doomed, period. If all fossil CO2 release magically stopped tomorrow, we would still be in a world of shit without being able to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. It will be absolutely necessary to avoid severely damaging effects of global warming. Most of today's carbon capture offerings are scams, sure, and the idea of carbon capture being a substitute for fossil CO2 output reductions is a scam, but those are separate issues.

      Luckily it is indeed possible to draw

    • If buses were perfect - clean, comfortable and free - they'd still be more expensive than driving for anyone earning over about $30/hour. The problem is all the stopping and extra miles the bus has to travel for the other folks riding with you. This consumes your time relative to driving. And as everyone with even a little wealth knows: time is money.

    • Similar to recycling carbon capture is a scam used to trick people into thinking we don't need to make any changes to combat climate change.

      Literally 0% of the proponents of CCUS say that the technology means we don't need to make changes to combat climate change. Stop fighting made up conspiracies in your head.

      CCUS is just one of a myriad of technologies which will all need to be adopted to address various specific use cases to reduce carbon emissions.

    • Nah, they just have to bury enough trees to account for the 34 billion tonnes we release into the atmosphere each year. There's ~3 trillion trees in the world so I'm sure it can be done. Trees aren't much use anyway. All they do is stand there, growing slowly, looking all green & majestic. Cut 'em all down!
    • So many people declaring this is a scam, and no one presenting the tiniest bit of evidence to back it up.

      Carbon removal is not a scam. We've already exceeded the amount of CO2 we can safely add to the environment, and we're still adding more. Even the most optimistic targets don't call for the world to become carbon neutral until about 2050. By then we'll have added a lot more, and we'll need to start pulling it back out as fast as we can.

      I don't know if this is the best way of doing it, but it sounds li

  • they find and burn it. History repeating? Aliens?
    • they find and burn it. History repeating? Aliens?

      If the cockroaches have not found a better answer in a million years, they deserve whatever happens to them.

      • If the cockroaches have not found a better answer in a million years, they deserve whatever happens to them.

        Cockroaches don't care what happens in the next million years. They plan for the long term.

    • ikea.
      is this the place that is used for storage

  • Alternate idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:50PM (#63135926)

    Rather than just burying wood, wouldn't a program to turn all that wood into furniture or housing people can use make a lot more sense? That would sequester the carbon also.

    Why are they denying people housing?

    • wouldn't a program to turn all that wood into furniture or housing people can use make a lot more sense

      I may be missing something, but how would furniture take the carbon out of the system? A piece of furniture has a life measured in years or maybe decades, and then it gets thrown away, burnt or dumped in a landfill, where it decomposes and the carbon gets back in the atmosphere. By contrast, the buried wood (which I assume will be covered with dirt or something) is really out of the system, at least for hundreds or thousands or years.

      • A piece of furniture has a life measured in years or maybe decades, and then it gets thrown away, burnt or dumped in a landfill, where it decomposes and the carbon gets back in the atmosphere. By contrast, the buried wood (which I assume will be covered with dirt or something) is really out of the system, at least for hundreds or thousands or years.

        How are those two any different? Except in the first case somebody gets a chair to sit on for a while.

        • by smap77 ( 1022907 )

          Ever hear of "slash and burn"? Kodama is burying the slash, and not burning the slash.

          Nobody makes furniture out of slash.

          Yes, bury your urethane plastic coated furniture, too. Except the urethane part.

        • The difference is in disposal. Anything made of wood can sequester carbon if you dispose of it in a way that locks its carbon out of the atmosphere (as in not the usual burning or landfill). Burying the new wood just ensures it's disposed of in a carbon-negative way before it has a chance to perform any other useful function.

          Also the cost of wood is only a minor factor in housing and furniture prices, those are caused mainly by artificial scarcity due to zoning laws and labor costs respectively.

      • by edis ( 266347 )

        Why on earth you would waste carbon in an effort of moving out biomass, when you could use exactly the biomass to cover energy needs - with a single main thing being needed to resolve: capturing carbon released in the process of energy production. I do not get the point of converting biomass into crap of waste.

      • A piece of furniture has a life measured in years or maybe decades, and then it gets thrown away, burnt or dumped in a landfill

        No. A piece of cheap plastic furniture has a life measured in years. A piece of bespoke wooden furniture may well outlive you before someone throws it in the trash.

        Stop producing cheap shit, and things stop landing in the landfill.

      • I may be missing something, but how would furniture take the carbon out of the system?

        It takes it out of the air which is the key point. And wood based goods are carbon neutral, if the carbon is returned to the atmosphere there is no net gain. Unlike when we use plastics which have a dependency on sequestered carbon, petroleum and natural gas.

        A piece of furniture has a life measured in years or maybe decades, and then it gets thrown away, burnt or dumped in a landfill, where it decomposes and the carbon gets back in the atmosphere.

        And if the furniture replacing it is also wood we have the new furniture removing carbon from the atmosphere. Unlike plastics and other synthetics.

        By contrast, the buried wood (which I assume will be covered with dirt or something) is really out of the system, at least for hundreds or thousands or years.

        Burying the wood consumes energy, almost certainly fossil fuel based energy. Burning can use the heat to g

    • You can only build a house with cut timber. Quite a lot of the wood is not straight enough, or at the edge or gets turned into sawdust. This is the "waste" biomass they are talking off.

      Of course, whether this turns out to be the case in practice is a different question. In the UK, the Drax powerplant claims to only burn waste wood, but it burns 18,000 tons a day. You have to make a fair few chairs to have that many off cuts.

      • You can only build a house with cut timber. Quite a lot of the wood is not straight enough, or at the edge or gets turned into sawdust. This is the "waste" biomass they are talking off.

        All those materials are made into engineered lumber. A lot of it being stronger than normal wood.

      • We know that the Drax power plant doesn't just use "waste" wood products: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]

      • I believe "waste wood" in this case would be the parts that never make it onto the log truck to even get to the sawmill. If you're going to bury all those trimmings, I think doing it on-site would still be better than hauling it some distance away.
    • Re:Alternate idea (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @02:23PM (#63136066) Homepage

      It's obvious you don't live in the Sierra foothills. Absolutely everybody is giving away free firewood because so many trees had to chopped down for fire damage or control lines or defensible space the last few years since climate change hit hard. In many cases the wood is just sitting out in the open because they can't find somebody to take it yet.Nobody is experiencing a shortage of wood here.

      • All of that undergrowth wouldn't be there if it weren't for decades of fire suppression. The fuel load has nothing to do with climate change.
    • I suspect most of this is bad quality lumber, dead bushes, scrub, etc.

    • Wasn't there some statistic that there are more empty houses than homeless people in the US?

      https://checkyourfact.com/2019... [checkyourfact.com]

    • by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Why are they denying people housing?

      It never even occurred to you that other trees could be cut down for housing did it?

    • Rather than just burying wood, wouldn't a program to turn all that wood into furniture or housing people can use make a lot more sense?

      It takes more energy to turn wood into furniture or housing than burying it, so you have a catch-22 situation there. Also, for furniture, you will need demand. Otherwise, you'll have furniture piling up, just like wood piling up in the open. So we'll be wasting energy just piling up processed cellulose.

      Moreover, lack of housing is not due to a lack of building materials. That's a stupid assumption. The problem is multi-variable and pretending to shove wood to it (ant not all wood is construction-grade) is

    • Rather than just burying wood, wouldn't a program to turn all that wood into furniture or housing people can use make a lot more sense? That would sequester the carbon also.

      Why are they denying people housing?

      Why not bury used cardboard boxes, or paper?

      Reduce, Reuse... Sequester?

  • More climate scams (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Asynchronously ( 7341348 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:51PM (#63135928)

    Just goes to show the best way to scam people out of millions is to come up with horseshit like this so all the virtual signalers can feel good without actually having to do anything.

    • Then giant corporations that sell plastic crap manufactured in China buy "carbon credits" so they can slap a label on their marketing saying they're carbon neutral. Then when that crap wears out in three years, it gets chucked into "recycling" which usually can't actually recycle that plastic, and the process continues. With consumers feeling like they're helping the environment and politicians getting to kick the can down the road.

  • by grogger ( 638944 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:54PM (#63135934)
    This will just turn into another forest clearing project. We need to get at those dead trees, so we will have to cut our way through - and surprise, we have more dead trees! We are running out of dead trees, we will have to use live ones. No problem, they will grow back in 30 years and hey, more carbon will be captured! Any biomass effort will result in the death of forests for profit
  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @01:59PM (#63135954)

    I have a hard time believing that burying these trees would even make up for the extra carbon generated by the transport of the wood to the site, the digging of the holes, the placement of the wood in the holes, and backfilling them - not to mention the energy required in the manufacturing of the geotextile they say will be covering these buried trees.

    But hey, free grant money.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by quantaman ( 517394 )

      I have a hard time believing that burying these trees would even make up for the extra carbon generated by the transport of the wood to the site, the digging of the holes, the placement of the wood in the holes, and backfilling them - not to mention the energy required in the manufacturing of the geotextile they say will be covering these buried trees.

      But hey, free grant money.

      I agree.

      But given the scale of the problem (and cost of various solutions) I don't mind throwing a few million dollars* at the occasional harebrained idea to see if something pans out.

      * Bill Gates's dollars, not mine.

      • That's true. Gates can spend his dollars however he sees fit, regardless of my opinion.

        If it were tax dollars, I'd want to know that someone at least did a back-of-the-napkin calculation to show it *might* be feasible, before significant money were spent on it...

    • We've transported wood as fuel for centuries. There is a lot of energy (or a lot of carbon) in them. Look at another way, a lorry carries about 40 tons of wood, but has a tank carrying only hundreds of kilo's of fuel. So, it will probably do what they say. Besides, if it works, who says you need to dig a hole. You could just drop it in a open cast mine which are vast.

      The question is, how long does the carbon last (answer it will last a long time), what will it do to the surroundings and how much methane wil

    • It does seem odd. If this could be done with no energy it might make sense but not as described. If not buried deep enough it will just decompose and release CO2 eventually anyway. Maybe that's the purpose of the Nevada Desert to slow this down (or maybe that's the location where they can get cheap rights to the land).

      Better overall for means of extracting carbon directly from the air. Easiest way is with plants. The problem is to get the plants to grow and expand without cutting them down again to make

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I like how you start with a belief (or lack of) and then conclude "free grant money."

    • I have a hard time believing that burying these trees would even make up for the extra carbon generated by the [process of burying them]

      Not to mention how much MORE energy it takes to bury them for the carbon to STAY buried for geologic time, rather than just putting them under the dirt. Are they going to do a backward strip-mine, hauling a mountain of rock to make a hole deep enough for the trees to become an artificial coal-seam, then haulig it back over them once they're in the hole? Or are they just g

  • You know what takes A LOT of energy? Hauling around millions of kg of dead trees. OH WAIT, maybe the trucks run on electric. And somehow every single machine and raw material plant making the truck and the batteries runs on electric. Then they can plug the truck into the outlet that goes to the coal-burning...oh wait, no, solar panels. And the solar panel manufacturing and shipping also was only with electric vehicles. And all this effort just to destroy the local fungi and insect populations that depend on
    • by crow ( 16139 )

      By the time this would scale, the trucks will all run on batteries using electricity from carbon-free sources. Carbon sequestering is fundamentally a technology that doesn't make sense compared to carbon reduction, but once we've done the reduction, it may be a good idea.

  • Won't burying lumber end up generating a whole lot of methane? Are they going to line and cap the disposal beds?
    • Depends where it is, I guess. If it is in a dry part of the world, probably not so much. Or it is really, really wet like peat bog then also, no so much.

      If they do find a way of making methane that way, this might also be useful -- carbon capture and biogas at the same time.

    • I'm sorry, but they can't hear you over the sound of their virtue signaling.,
    • Per TFA:

      They plan to cover the biomass with a geotextile liner and then bury that under soil and a layer of native vegetation selected to absorb moisture. Given the region’s dry conditions, this will create a contained system that prevents “agents of decomposition from acting on the buried wood mass,” ensuring that the carbon stays in place for thousands of years, says Jimmy Voorhis, head of biomass utilization and policy at Kodama.

      Whether that works or not, I'm not really qualified to say. Also, whether that works or not, they'll already have their millions.

      • They plan to cover the biomass with a geotextile liner and then bury that under soil and a layer of native vegetation selected to absorb moisture. Given the regionâ(TM)s dry conditions, this will create a contained system that prevents âoeagents of decomposition from acting on the buried wood mass,â ... ... until the further drying out of the soil under the high-water-use "native vegetation" kills off said native vegetation, after which:
        * It gets replaced by low-water-use pioneer spec

  • I wonder if I could start a company harvesting all of the waste concrete and go bury it in the desert in Nevada and call it a carbon capture company? Or, rebrand the local landfill as a "carbon capture company" and rake in millions. Shout out to my hometown of Sonora, in any case
    • Concrete and cement is a massive generator of CO2, both during its creation and its use. But it's cheap therefore people are going to use it, and developing countries are going to use it, and with rising populations it's use it just going to increase. We have met the enemy and he is us.

  • Coal is is really, really old buried trees. We dug up that coal, burned it, and put the carbon in the air. Solution: Reverse the process by repeating the cycle... to a point.

    1. Choose a disused coal mine in a non-drought-susceptible area. (https://skytruth-org.carto.com/viz/743a74d4-6e94-11e5-9f65-0ecfd53eb7d3/embed_map)
    2. Grow trees to capture that carbon. Empress trees, for example, grow *extremely fast* (103 tons of carbon a year per acre) and are great for pollinators.
    3. Cut the trees down after X time.

  • If it's on the front page of Slashdot, it's not a "stealth" anything.

  • Coal is made from buried forests from millions of years ago. This is reversing the process. In theory, if we were worrying about carbon all along, we could have buried trees to replace the coal, backfilling the mines and making them close to carbon neutral. If we want to reverse climate change, we will need to sequester a lot of carbon, as we've likely released a lot more than natural processes will absorb anytime soon (though I'll admit I haven't studied that, so it's just my speculation; please confirm

  • It would likely be much more cost effective to bury plastic.
    Buried plastic supposedly takes thousands of years to decompose.
    You can get tons of contaminated plastic from recycle centers for free.
    Ironically though, that contaminated plastic already gets buried in landfills
    which effectively serves the same purpose.

    It makes no sense to bury trees while we still are removing dead trees in the form of coal or oil from the ground.
    It would make more sense to buy up coal mines and oil fields and cap them and shut t

  • It's kind of ironic that this is basically making more coal, just as it was made hundreds of millions of years ago.
  • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Friday December 16, 2022 @02:48PM (#63136192)

    Lets say you want to use this for to solve carbon overflow beyond 2 degrees warming. To make a dent, you probably have to bury on the order of 1 teraton of carbon, that means you are burying around 2 gigaton of potassium ... that's on the same order as the current known global reserves. Habitable climate is just one of the things peaking and endangering an earth useful for a technological civilization without massive Malthusian culling. This fundamentally can't fucking work at scale.

    Deep sea basalt storage can work, but the problem is how to get the CO2 from the air to there. You really need to recycle all your materials to the extreme to not just exhaust another Peak Fucking Everything resource when you're working with teratons.

  • When you bury organic matter, it rots and releases methane. Methane is 80X worse than CO2 https://www.edf.org/climate/me... [edf.org]
    Fire is natures natural method of cleaning by turning downed wood into Co2, providing nutrients into the soil and cracking seeds allowing them to germinate. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/natur... [pbs.org] This is a colossally ignorant plan that likely just a scam.
    The right forest management is small, controlled burns.
  • The Chicxulub event released gigatons of soot into the atmosphere, shading the planet and triggering the last ice age.

    If we want the earth to cool, we need to do the same thing, without causing global extinctions.

    Seems to me releasing soot would be ideal. Interesting fact, oceans were 400 feet lower during the last ice age than they are now.

  • Really. 65 million years later, the new humans (you know, the ones who re-evolved after the apocalypse of 2025) will be pumping that fossil fuel out to fuel their fancy cars. Burial is only a temporary reprieve as long as humans continue to infest the planet.

  • plan for ensuring that dead trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for thousands of years: burying their remains underground. Trees will decompose and gas off within 5 years at the most and they DON'T decompose/give off carbon dioxide for thousands of years !!!! Who actually believes this crap ????
  • We can do a lot better by sending wood to the moon. It will also have the benefit that future moon colonizers can use it for fuel to heat their homes on the dark side of the moon.

How many hardware guys does it take to change a light bulb? "Well the diagnostics say it's fine buddy, so it's a software problem."

Working...