Would we sequester significant carbon if we stopped recycling wood fiber?

My question is this;

If we stopped recycling wood fiber, and instead put more already forested land into intensive pulpwood production, would we sequester significant carbon in the landfills? And how close to the Kyoto targets would that place us?

Also note that we would reduce the energy use involved in recycling, which is considerable, and which places additional carbon into the atmosphere.

Comments?

But it would work only to the extent that additional pulp wood growth was developed. If, however, the reduction in recycling only served to further reduce existing pulp wood forrestation, then it would make the problem worse as there would be less trees to absorb the carbon in the atmosphere.

Increasing the forrestation while increasing the recycling effort would sequester the most carbon.

Let the pulp industry know that recycling is to end, and that they will have tax incentives to reforest logged out areas for pulpwood, and it would happen.

Of course, you have to give this about a decade's lead time because even fast-growing pulpwood requires time to grow!

One way to shorten that interval is large scape fiber hemp agriculture, but that is a battle I don't think we can win.

As the paper rots, it will release the carbon contained in it.

Plastics made from reduced CO2 might, however be a better sequestering agent. Plastics however are not eternal, they also decompose into greenhouse gases, albeit more slowly.

Landfills are an important source of methane, amounting to about 24% of this gas released in 2003. Methane is a much more potent global warming gas than CO2, a gas that is also released from landfills.

http://www.epa.gov/methane/sources.html

Some of this methane is in fact, derived from the decomposition of paper.

http://www.awma.org/education/outreach/landfill.htm

Personally I think a better approach would be to pyrolyze paper and wood to give gases with properties like natural gas and even liquid fuels. This would work to create a carbon cycle rather than direct emission of fossil derived gas and fuels.

I had understood that landfills would hold of rotting of organic refuse for many decades, and that wood fibers were among the last things to go as the anaerobic processes in a landfill could not accept cellulose as input.

Forests and Dams WTF Newscientist climate page just ruined my day

Envisat a european research satellite can look at methane near the ground.

Tropical rainforest's were 4 per cent higher than expected
They didn't know why, maybe termites

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/mg18524925.400


Dams release methane

says Philip Fearnside from Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus (doesn't give numbers)

This article ties into tree rot

from the article
This is because large amounts of carbon tied up in trees and other plants are released when the reservoir is initially flooded and the plants rot. Then after this first pulse of decay, plant matter settling on the reservoir's bottom decomposes without oxygen, resulting in a build-up of dissolved methane. This is released into the atmosphere when water passes through the dam's turbines.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn7046

The ocean has more green plants than on dry land. Maybe more of a carbon sink

That ought to keep the carbon sequestered!

...unless they happened to fall into a peat bog. The only way I can see of reliably sequesting carbon would be: Grow lots of biofuel crops, make lots of liquid hydrocarbons and, err, pump them down into old oilfields. In other words, the same as we're doing now - only backwards.

Can't see it happening, though.

You would increase the green house effect.

Everything I've seen so far on our understanding of how this process works is based on natural carbon sequestration, with technical attempts being too little, too late.

For instance, several years ago, the pH of the oceans began to change, impairing carbon sequestration, and reducing the capacity of the oceans to act as a carbon sink. That's a very large sink, and short of some amazingly large-scale, energy-intensive effort, we're not going to be able to match it anytime soon.

Heck, every one of these proposed sequestration efforts seem to be energy-intensive, requiring even more energy than a full-on nuclear generator building program could handle. I don't understand how we can do anything about the carbon gasses in the atmosphere, other than just to dramatically reduce our carbon output and let nature take its course. We will probably need all the energy we can gather just to respond to climate changes, loss of cropland, and massive economic displacements.

Or am I wrong about this?

--p!

for the long term.

The only industrial program for doing any kind of sequestering on any scale approaching industrial is that practiced by the Norwegian oil company Statoil, which is pumping CO2 removed from natural gas into underground formations. No one really seems to know how effective this will be for the long term.

No one is recovering huge amounts of CO2 from coal and natural gas electric power plants and successfully sequestering it, although smaller quantities of CO2 have been recovered for industrial use which ultimately involve release to the atmosphere.

In any case, there is not a lot of time left for the development of such a technology or for that matter, and industrial plant. There are much better technologies for energy production already operating on vast industrial scales, notably nuclear energy.

The removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is certainly technologically possible. The flight of birds predicted the technological feasibility of heavier than air flight, and the existence of plants predicts the technological feasibility of removing CO2 from air for subsequent reduction to useful products such as fuels. But this is an area for research, not for commercial industrial application. The best, indeed the only, short term option is, for whatever its worth, nuclear.

carbon dioxide from ancient volcanoes into their depleting oil wells for 20-30 years without problems. Certainly, that is a millisecond geologically, but the history is longer than that of Statoil.

Additionally, the small coal (lignite) gasification project in North Dakota is sending its carbon dioxide stream to Saskatchewan oil wells for sequestration and tertiary production. So far so good there,too.

Apparently, it is easier to separate the CO2 in gasification plants. Perhaps that would be the case in pyrolysis operations as well.

In the controversial thermodepolymerization and similar operations, carbon in solid form seems to be a major resulting product. Perhaps sequestering that solid carbon would be one way of avoiding organic compound breakdown in landfills. I don't see these technologies as oil producers, but they may become more useful as a tool in waste disposal and recycling.

Most of these technologies however are demonstration scale. Few will be available in the short term crisis.

I suspect that while CO2 pressure is a useful technique for pushing out crude oil from geological formations, it really doesn't represent long term disposal of CO2. By definition, these formations are filled with boreholes. In one or two hundred years, after the last drop of oil has been squeezed out these wells (some of it with solubilized CO2 that will froth out of the oil when the pressure is released as in a soda can), invariably this "sequestered" CO2 will outgas.

However to the extent that CO2 can be reduced via hydrogenation, it is a potentially valuable resource. Thus the industrialization of separations technology is desirable. The recycling angle to me is more exciting than the waste disposal angle. My basic philosophy is that a goal of the environmentalist these days should be to make as many wastes as is possible into useful starting materials.