Climate geographers may be interested in the New Scientist article on
p. 14 of the 15 May issue "Into the Abyss" in which disposal of CO2
in liquid form into hydrates at the bottom of the oceans is proposed
to combat the Greenhouse Effect. But compressing CO2 to a liquid and
then taking it down to the ocean floor must be a rather energy
expensive process in itself, so producing more of the stuff. Has
anyone researched burying it on land instead? We have spent the last
few hundred years gleefully exhuming buried forests that took aeons
to convert to coal and especially since about 1770 reconverted them
to CO2. How about reversing the process? Grow fast growing trees
(possibly a use for that infamous Leylandii at last) chop them down
and bury them, possibly even in the vast holes left by open cast coal
mining eg in Germany, USA etc. This would neatly repay the "coal
debt" we have left to generations in the distant future. Of course we
would need to know that the carbon thus buried would not find its way
back to the surface again, and that the energy of chopping,
transporting, and burying the trees did not produce more CO2 - but if
feasible would also be a way of the world's poorer countries gaining
assets or cancelling debts. We pay less developed countries for
digging out useful substances like copper etc (well actually a lot of
that payment goes to the MNC's and straight back to the developed
countries, but...) so why not pay such countries for disposing of a
substance we don't want. A global body like the World Bank or the UN
could organise CO2 credits per timber buried, to be set against net
CO2 producers like the USA or EU. By further extension, burial of
carbon rich wastes, like paper, will also sequester away more CO2.
The main concern is, do we know if burial at a feasible depth and
cover by how much of what sort of material above will lock away this
carbon. Nature did it quite succesfully in the Carboniferous Period,
surely we can too?
Hillary Shaw, PG Geography, Leeds University
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