City Dump, take 2
The idea of "biochar" has come up again, this time in WUWT.

Polistra handled this before (May 2008) so I'll just reprint the original entry:

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From the latest paper edition of New Superstitionist:

In a recent paper in the journal Carbon Balance and Management, Ning Zeng [at University of Maryland] calculated that if we buried half of the wood that grows each year, in such a way that it didn't decay, enough CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere to offset all our fossil-fuel emissions. It wouldn't be easy, but Zeng believes it could be done. .... Zeng's proposal is to thin forests regularly and to bury excess wood, forestry waste and even trees that have been grown specifically to be buried, in trenches between the remaining trees. To prevent the wood from decomposing, which would release carbon, it would need to be buried deep enough to avoid being broken down by soil fauna and fungi, or STORED ABOVE GROUND IN WATERTIGHT SHELTERS.

... Burying wood sounds like a lot of trouble for a small gain, but Zeng insists that unlike simple growing, this is a long-lasting and perhaps permanent carbon sink. He estimates that offsetting all the world's current emissions would be achievable with a WORKFORCE OF ONE MILLION PEOPLE, substantially fewer than those already employed in the forestry industry in the US alone. Even so, to offset all our emissions, most of the world's forests would have to run a wood burial scheme.

I can't even allow myself to comment on this; if I let myself start thinking about this, I'd end up ripping the city to shreds with a shovel.

The article goes on to introduce a surprisingly sane and ordinary idea, but without even realizing it's sane and ordinary.

Another approach to carbon burial has a much longer history. More than 500 years ago Amazonian people were creating almost pure carbon by smoldering their domestic waste and letting it work its way into the soil. This 'black earth' remains to this day. Such char can be created when organic matter is heated in the absence of air to around 350 degrees C, the kinds of temperatures reached in the Amazonian waste piles. The lack of air means the organic matter does not combust but most constituents other than carbon are driven off as gases or liquids.

Hmm. I understand that you enviro-commies are incapable of respecting an old idea unless it originates from your fellow human-sacrificing savages, but this particular idea was also common in non-savage areas of the earth. It was called the City Dump. It worked quite well until you enviro-commies required us to stop burning, and then required us to enclose it in plastic shields to prevent the carbon from working its way into the soil. I remember taking junk to the Manhattan city dump (which was not far from the Mill) and watching the yards-deep smoldering process. It was impressive.

Hmm again. Could the current rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 have started around the same time that City Dumps were required to stop burning and stop leaching?

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Yikes! The online version of the article is quite different from the paper version that I read. It turns out that Zeng was STARTING from the exact premise that I came around to at the end! He was wondering whether the rise in American CO2 started when we stopped burning landfills!

But if that's the case, why go through all that weird crap about a million workers growing forests for the sole purpose of cutting them down and storing them forever in above-ground watertight shelters? Why not just suggest burning the City Dumps again, perhaps with better precautions to insure airless smoldering? It's still crazy.


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end reprint.
  ¶ 3:10 PM