Wood Harvest Sequestration (WHS) - drawbacks?
Toby Bryce
Tom Goreau
The reason is that termites, beetles, and fungi rapidly recycle most fallen wood unless they are buried under anoxic peat bogs or permafrost, both rapidly declining, due to drainage and global warming respectively.
In Amazonia I saw huge felled tree trunks turned into termite mounds and underground termite and ant nests farming fungi in just a couple of years.
Some people are proposing to dump wood in the ocean instead of soil, they seem to think out of sight means out of mind forever.
Since almost all wood floats, you’d have to weight each log with chains! I’ve seen Douglas Fir logs from British Colombia that had crossed the entire Pacific lying on atoll island beaches near Indonesia.
People used to think the deep ocean was barren of life. My old colleague, Ruth Turner, the world’s expert on wood-boring marine organisms (and I think first tenured woman Harvard Biology Professor) was astonished to find that wood pieces of various kinds weighted down on the deep ocean floor were riddled with holes and almost completely consumed when she dived in the Alvin submarine to check them, I think a year or so later. They don’t last long, hungry mouths are waiting! Seaweed sinking, as some propose, will decompose even faster, the bacteria and fungi will get them. But at least there is an ocean circulation delay in it returning to the atmosphere.
The best marine hope is to bury your logs at the bottom of an ocean dead zone. Due to expanding eutrophication from our failure to recycle waste sewage and agricultural nutrients on land, plus global warming reducing oxygen solubility, expect many more dead zones in the future!
Or, better yet, recycle them into biochar that builds soil carbon, retains soil water and nutrients, promotes biological production that cools soil and air by transpiration, which recycles moisture and rain to combat desertification. The biochar will last much longer in the soil than wood would! No point dumping biochar in the deep sea and wasting all the valuable benefits it provides on land.
Thomas J. F. Goreau, PhD
President, Global Coral Reef Alliance
Chief Scientist, Blue Regeneration SL
President, Biorock Technology Inc.
Technical Advisor, Blue Guardians Programme, SIDS DOCK
37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
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Books:
Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase
http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466595392
Innovative Methods of Marine Ecosystem Restoration
http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466557734
No one can change the past, everybody can change the future
It’s much later than we think, especially if we don’t think
Those with their heads in the sand will see the light when global warming and sea level rise wash the beach away
Geotherapy: Regenerating ecosystem services to reverse climate change
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Sev Clarke
Robert Höglund
The main reason to choose biomass burial over biochar would be that it is 5-10 times cheaper. You also get sequestration of all the carbon in the biomass, not just 50%.
In some cases, I would expect biochar to be the best option though, especially where the biochar is much needed for soil remediation.
Biomass burial seems to work, especially if submerged with groundwater, but I would like to see more papers that actually measure the decomposition, and that quantifies the methane emisisons. Does anyone know of other relevant papers with measurements than the ones below?
The decomposition of wood products in landfills in Sydney, Australia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X07004047
" No significant loss of dry mass was measured in wood products buried for 19 and 29 years, but where refuse had been buried for 46 years, the measured loss of carbon (as a percentage of dry biomass) was 8.7% for hardwoods and 9.1% for softwoods, equating to 18% and 17% of their original carbon content, respectively. The results indicate that published decomposition factors based on laboratory research significantly overestimate the decomposition of wood products in landfill"
The decay of engineered wood products and paper excavated from landfills in Australia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X17308759
Also see Carbon storage during biodegradation of municipal solid waste components in laboratory-scale landfills Barlaz, Morton A. https://ur.booksc.eu/book/20617972/eb40e0
And Barlaz, M. A., Staley, B. F., & de los Reyes, F. L. (2010). Anaerobic Biodegradation of Solid Waste. Environmental Microbiology, 281–299. doi:10.1002/9780470495117.ch12
This paper is also good but no direct measurements in it Achieving Net Zero Carbon Dioxide by Sequestering Biomass Carbon https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3715073
Andrew Lockley
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Anderson, Paul
Robert writes about biomass burial, which might have support for limited implementation. We need all possible solutions, but why present burial as an alternative to biochar or imply that biochar is less desirable? I certainly do not endorse the burial approach.
The comment about burial to be “5 – 10 times cheaper” than biochar can certainly be challenged. Burial has no prospect for income / product / increased value from the biomass disposal. Biochar has value in several ways, including the value of the energy released during the making of the biochar (if there is an energy use nearby). Burial in an existing pit can be cheap if excess biomass is nearby, but we need mega disposal with minimal handling and preparation of sites for burials.
In a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), the burial is the end of life, but biochar can provide benefits from within the soil, even for generations to come. The future holds improvements for biochar equipment, methods, production, and usage. For burial, improvements could be how? Maybe ways to make a larger pit?
Bury all that you want, but please examine and give an opportunity to use biochar methods when biomass is so abundant. Be sure to contact me about possible much larger versions of the low cost RoCC kiln technology for making biochar.
Paul
Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD --- Website: www.drtlud.com
Email: psan...@ilstu.edu Skype: paultlud
Phone: Office: 309-452-7072 Mobile & WhatsApp: 309-531-4434
Exec. Dir. of Juntos Energy Solutions NFP Go to: www.JuntosNFP.org
Inventor of RoCC kilns and author of Biochar white paper : See www.woodgas.energy/resources
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Robert Höglund
Biomass residuals from farming are currently tilled into the soil.Its a tough case to prove that the carbon stays in the soil because soil carbon fluxes are dynamic.We know that under the right conditions the biomass turns into crude oil - perhaps replicating those conditions (which obviously means that you can never disturb the site).UC Davis has an ongoing study “Century Study” following carbon fluxes for compost incorporated into the soil. After about 20 years, around 15 percent of the carbon remains in the soil.Rick
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Toby Bryce
- Valorization of waste biomass and perhaps WHS not the best / highest use
- Leakage of methane?
- Permanence / eventual leakage of CO2?
- Low-cost - low-tech, low-capex, low-energy (obvs must seek efficiency of transport and excavation)
- Relatively spatially efficient - 0.1Mt CO2E / 1ha
- Possible subsequent land uses of WHS sites e.g. parks, solar projects