A recent discovery may give us a short-cut to isolate biomass from the biosphere for a very long time without extensive processing.
Limiting climate change requires achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Although substantial reduction in fossil fuel emissions is essential, it is insufficient for achieving the international goal of restricting global warming to 1.5° or 2°C above preindustrial levels. Achieving net-zero necessitates approaches that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
Engineering CDR methods, such as direct air capture, are expensive and energy-intensive. Nature-based CDR, such as reforestation and afforestation, are cheaper but face land-use competition, scalability, and carbon leakage risks.
Forests are central to climate change discussions because of their critical role as a dominant land carbon sink in natural carbon cycles. They sequester carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. This carbon is stored in wood with ∼50% carbon content that varies by species. The carbon is released back to the atmosphere through burning (forest fires or prescribed burning for fire risk management) or decomposition of woody biomass.
This paper describes a pathway to making deadwood carbon storage a reality. The authors present a CDR approach involving the burial of sustainably sourced wood in an underground engineered structure called a “wood vault” to prevent wood decomposition.