Dead trees keep surprisingly large amounts of carbon out of atmosphere

my old boss had an idea - "bury trees".

There's a bit of nuance to be filled out, like challenges of forest plantation monoculture and so on, but it always sounded quite practical to me. Iirc the idea derived from "coal".

Why do you have to bury them? Can’t you just let the logs sit on the forest floor?

Maybe we can make coal powered earth movers in order to bury the trees.

If you can do it without emitting more net carbon - chopping down and moving trees, digging holes - it might work.

Decomposition returns carbon dioxide to the air. Or worse, methane, if there isn't enough oxygen.

They release their carbon as they rot or otherwise consumed. That's why the article talks about wood in cold streams, which rots very slowly.

Better yet sink them in the deeper parts of the ocean. Below a certain depth wood loses its buoyancy due to the pressure levels of the water. (I think)

In the long term they will decompose and return vast majority of its carbon back into atmosphere. Blame fungi and bacteria.

Carbon sequestration!

I grew up in an area known for coal and logging. Ever since I heard of sequestration brought up I thought the area sounded perfect for it. Fell (maybe mulch) the trees, kiln dry to remove weight/moisture, and toss them down a mineshaft.

It always felt a bit peotic to 'reseed' a coal mine

Of course, ships sink all the time.

Unfortunately we don't really have enough deep freshwater to bury them in. Below the thermocline freshwater has little oxygen and logs can last till the turn to fossils.

With saltwater it's a bit trickier because it's decently oxygenated even to depth and there is a lot of life dedicated to breaking down wood in the ocean. If you can get it to sink into the muck it lasts a lot longer though.

1. Build out nuclear fission (100x current use)

2. Store spent fuel in massive wooden dry caskets. (500-1000x steel)

3a. Float caskets to Antarctica

3b. Offload via rail to South Pole

4. They stay frozen for a million years and don't rot. Problem solved.

I've considered something like this. Log on the lee side of a mountain range, haul the logs (downhill!) to the arid plain on the lee side, stack loosely, repeat. An electrified highway could allow much of the process to be powered via nuke energy.

Basically any place where you've got high timber production within a reasonably short distance of an arid area could make for a relatively low-tech sequestration/storage pipeline.

Problem is nuclear reactors just don't make all that much spent fuel, so the amount of wood used to crate it up would be negligible.

Edit: I think I've thought of a good alternative though. Instead of crating up the nuclear waste, it could be randomly dispersed in forests around the world to scare people away from those forests, thereby creating nature reserves which should last for generations.

The right forest fire will turn trees into charcoal and sequester the carbon. However doing this correctly is really tricky. There are many different forests and they all have slightly different needs. Make sure your government allocates enough money to proper forest management. Make sure that you oppose "environmental" groups that have heard smokey the bear years ago and think all fire is bad thus they get court injunctions against prescribed burning to the long term harm of the forest.

There has been a proposal to salt and bury biomass. At sufficiently high salt concentration anaerobic decomposition becomes energetically unfavorable. It wouldn't have to be wood from large trees.

Kiln drying is an interesting idea to speed it up and prevent premature rot, but might offset some of the carbon impact since most industrial kilns use fossil fuels directly or upstream if electric.

Maybe it would be more effective to drop wet lumber off in the desert for a few years by rail before moving the dry lumber to permanent underground storage. This assumes two stages of transport to and from the desert would cost less carbon than transport to a kiln and then to storage.

I’m not convinced that the wood even needs to be dried before burying, though.

Don’t things decompose underground as well?

The carbon stays underground.

Ehh if you are just going to bury it kiln drying wouldn't really be that helpful. Wood in open air will dry out pretty well just sitting for two years. Commercial wood is only really kiln dried so that nobody has to store it for a year or two first and they can sell it before as much of it warps and twists due to being cut while green which makes less of it able to be sold. With a large enough pile, even if it is left uncovered, only the top couple logs or boards will get wet from the rain and if a small percentage of it rots or grows some fungus, well it wasn't there to get built into other things anyways so it doesn't matter.