Carbon Dioxide Removal to Solve the Climate Crisis

In 1977, the physicist Freeman Dyson¹ proposed the burial of biomass, as a scalable, economical solution to the CO2 problem.  Today we know² that the harvested vegetation should be buried in an engineered dry Environmental Chamber.  Plant biomass can be preserved for thousands of years by burial in a dry environment with sufficiently low thermodynamic “Water Activity”, which is the relative humidity in equilibrium with the biomass.  A “Water Activity” <60% will not support life, suppressing anaerobic organisms, thus preserving the biomass for millenia.  Current agriculture costs, and burial costs indicate US$60/tonne of sequestered CO₂ which corresponds to $0.53/gallon of gasoline.  If scaled to the level of a major crop, existing CO₂ can be extracted from the atmosphere and sequester a significant fraction of prior historical CO₂ emissions.

Speaker: Eli Yablonovitch, UC Berkeley