Dear Mike, Tom: These are important zeroth-order questions!
I have not totally convinced myself on the question "why don't we simply burn the wood to replace fossil fuel". In fact, it seems to me we could certainly do more co-firing of wood chips with coal (limited to 10%). On the other hand, the fact that the industry has not embraced it probably has to do with several factors such as energy density, pollution (more volatiles than coal per energy), infrastructure, and cost. As for furniture and building use, their lifetime is typically no more than 100 years, and the cost is mostly not in the raw wood but added value, i.e, it would be too expensive to convert all the available wood into furniture/building material. So the key for wood burial/storage/submersion is that it can potentially provide some low cost ways of sequestering carbon. We estimated that there is a 10GtC/y coarse wood production potential, compared to 0.9 GtC/y current human usage, so there is a lot of extra capacity to utilize should we need to return CO2 to a low-enough level at one point (. Of course, various constraints will set practical limit on really how much can be used. Perhaps the easiest and cheapest methods to start with are where you get co-benefits such as: bury/ store deforested wood rather than burning; bury some potential fuel on the forest floor to reduce fire danger; bury/store the dead wood blown down by storms (per Renaud de_RICHTER's note; Katrina probably did more damage) or insect outbreaks (I am thinking of the dying pines in the America West). There is more discussion in this paper (http:// www.cbmjournal.com/content/3/1/1) which also lacks the answers to a lot of questions. Feedbacks/ideas will be appreciated. cheers, -Ning -- Ning Zeng, Associate Professor Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center Phone: (301) 405-5377 University of Maryland Fax: (301) 314-9482 2417 Computer and Space Sciences Building Email: z...@atmos.umd.edu College Park, MD 20742-2425, USA http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~zeng On Feb 5, 11:14 am, Mike MacCracken <mmacc...@comcast.net> wrote: > I remain confused about this proposal‹if one is going to go to all of the > effort to harvest and sink the wood, why not use the wood for fuel and not > mine and burn the coal? > > Mike > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
