Re:Carbon Sequestration by Recycling Cement, Aggregates, and...
by lazylizard on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @10:45AM
(#41925567)
why not plant trees then build wooden houses with them?
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Re:Carbon Sequestration by Recycling Cement, Aggregates, and...
by noahbp on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @11:41AM
(#41926186)
Because it would take too long, and it wouldn't sequester enough carbon. By a rough estimate, 1 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere is the result of human activity since the 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...), and a 2,400 square foot wooden house only sequesters 28.5 tons of CO2 (https://cwc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/WOOD-Products-and-...).
1,000,000,000,000 tons of CO2 / (28.5 tons of CO2 per wooden house) = 35 billion wooden houses.
If you just want to achieve carbon neutrality, we're outputting 40 billion tons of CO2 per year.
(40,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year) / (28.5 tons of CO2 per wooden house) = 1.4 billion wooden houses, per year
That's not feasible for many reasons.
We need and use cement and aggregate anyway, and it's a large emitter of carbon. It's good that someone discovered a way to use it to sequester CO2 to reduce or offset its carbon emissions.