Greg,
Great question you asked: “So, relative to the $ value of permanent avoidance or removal what is the formula for valuing forest offsets in the context of CO2 management?”
One response that shows real value is to lock up 40% of all of that forest carbon (or forest CO2equivalent) in biochar for many hundreds if not thousands of years. (40% is the fixed / permanent carbon in biochar, being 80% of the 50% of biomass carbon that transforms into biochar via pyrolysis.)
Keep the trees and the biomass refuse of crops growing, but avoid decay or burning to ash by using pyrolysis to make biochar to put into appropriate soils. And that also gives thermal energy.
Biochar does NOT remove CO2. It converts what the plants have removed into something that can be easily permanently sequestered.
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 for biochar and energy: See www.woodgas.com
Author of “A Capitalist Carol” (free digital copies at www.capitalism21.org)
with pages 88 – 94 about solving the world crisis for clean cookstoves.
From: carbondiox...@googlegroups.com <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>
On Behalf Of Greg Rau
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 5:28 PM
To: CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com <CarbonDiox...@googlegroups.com> <carbondiox...@googlegroups.com>; Andrew Lockley <andrew....@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [CDR] Up in smoke – California fires once again highlight dangers of forest offsets
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Dan,
Yes. I have in mind that there would be sensible management of the world’s biomass.
1. Protect the true nature reserves. Save old growth forests, etc.
2. But if the biomass is already dead or is a fire hazard or is crop residue that is being burned now with great air pollution, then it should be actively considered for pyrolysis to become biochar AND if possible to give useful heat if near a place that can use the heat (replacing fossil fuels).
3. And have some cultivation/harvesting of intentionally selected fast growing crops of short duration, especially if they also provide seed or fruit or fiber of value, and we can pyrolyze the “residue”. But for CDR purposes, we could grow it for the residue, and then the seed, etc. was just an extra benefit.
4. Another one is to have char-making cookstoves that each provide one ton of CO2equivalent-as-charcoal per year per family. Not much. But there are 500 million such families already cooking with poor stoves that use twice as much wood or biomass fuel as do the TLUD stoves. Help the poorest 40% of the world (they cook on wood and charcoal fires) and there would be 0.5 GIGATONS of long-term sequestration per year with half the current fuel usage. [This happens to be my specialty.]
Yes, we protect but also use the forests and other biomass (such as invasive species) to get true CDR that is possible now, today, no waiting for new technologies .
Thanks for asking.
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 for biochar and energy: See www.woodgas.com
Author of “A Capitalist Carol” (free digital copies at www.capitalism21.org)
with pages 88 – 94 about solving the world crisis for clean cookstoves.
A note on pyrolysis involving the removal of forest organics.
This is not recommended as 1) those organics are needed by forests
soils, even if they are excessive from woody material die-off.
Removing them robs the forest of carbon that should remain in the
forest carbon loop, especially in times of increased forest stress
from warming and drying, and 2) in a warmer climate soil
evaporation is a critical aspect of forest regeneration. Organic
surface debris act as a mulch to limit evaporation. Forests are
already failing to regenerate after fire because of excessive
evaporation induced by warming. This relationship can quite likely
extend to forest kill from insects and disease. See Stevens-Rumann
below.
Increasing fire intensity and burned area are not caused by
excess forest debris. In our old climate yes, of course, but in
our new climate, warming-caused evaporation and associated drier
fuels, and warming-caused increased ignition, both dwarf fire
response from increased forest floor fuel load. See Williams
below. (CalFire has stated that fires are now burning 400 degrees
F hotter - yikes!)
Relative to the health of our forests to regenerate and provide
ecosystems services for carbon removal, protecting the built
environment can and should proceed based upon established fire
protection strategies.
And the bottom line: it will not likely be possible to save our forests in a meaningful way with any amount of preservation efforts unless we reduce current warming to below the explosive fire thresholds we have witnessed lately. Mother Nature has an almost unlimited capacity to become more extreme, and we have only seen a half degree C warming above the maximum natural variability limit of about 0.5 degrees C above normal in our old climate where our forests evolved.
Beyond California, did you all realize that two weeks ago in
Colorado, the three biggest fires ever recorded there were all
active?
Yeesh,
B
Post-fire regeneration, regrowth, forest recovery – One third of burned forests are not regenerating at all… "For sites burned at the end of the 20th century vs. the first decade of the 21st century, the proportion of sites meeting or exceeding pre-fire tree densities (e.g. recruitment threshold of 100%) decreased by nearly half (from 70 to 46%) and the percentage of sites experiencing no post-fire tree regeneration nearly doubled (from 19 to 32%)… This negative relationship demonstrates the potential increased vulnerability and lack of resilience on hotter and drier sites, or of dry forest species, to climate warming… Tree seedlings may establish in response to short-term anomalous wetter periods in the future, but our results highlight that such conditions have become significantly less common since 2000, and they are expected to be less likely in the future… Further, persistent or long-lasting vegetation changes following wildfires have been observed worldwide."
Stevens-Rumann
et al., Evidence for declining forest resilience to wildfires
under climate,
Ecology Letters, December 12, 2017. (paywall)
Press Release, University of Montana -
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/tuom-sfr121317.php
Climate Change Caused Wildfires: Columbia University, University of Idaho, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Colorado Boulder... "During 1972–2018, California experienced a fivefold increase in annual burned area, mainly due to more than an eightfold increase in summer forest‐fire extent. Increased summer forest‐fire area very likely occurred due to increased atmospheric aridity caused by warming. Since the early 1970s, warm‐season days warmed by approximately 1.4 °C as part of a centennial warming trend, significantly increasing the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD). These trends are consistent with anthropogenic trends simulated by climate models. The response of summer forest‐fire area to VPD is exponential, meaning that warming has grown increasingly impactful. Robust interannual relationships between VPD and summer forest‐fire area strongly suggest that nearly all of the increase in summer forest‐fire area during 1972–2018 was driven by increased VPD. Climate change effects on summer wildfire were less evident in nonforested lands. In fall, wind events and delayed onset of winter precipitation are the dominant promoters of wildfire. While these variables did not change much over the past century, background warming and consequent fuel drying is increasingly enhancing the potential for large fall wildfires. Among the many processes important to California's diverse fire regimes, warming‐driven fuel drying is the clearest link between anthropogenic climate change and increased California wildfire activity to date."
Williams et
al., Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on
Wildfire in
California, American Geophysical Union, Earths Future, August
4, 2019
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019EF001210
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