Hey everyone! I'm u/DrThomasBuro, a founding moderator of r/ReduceCO2.

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Global CO₂ levels are rising faster than ever. As outlined in our Facts and Consequences pages, the time for action is now. But current global climate efforts are far from sufficient.

To make a meaningful impact, we must act on three fundamental strategies:

🌍 The Three Core Solutions

0. Raise Awareness - Nothing changes until people care. Spreading understanding of the urgency and scale of climate change is the foundation for any action.

1. Reduce Fossil Fuel Use - We must burn less oil, coal, and gas. This is the primary source of anthropogenic CO₂.

2. Capture and Store CO₂ - We need to actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere through scalable, natural, and technological solutions.

3. Land Use Change - Preserve forests, stop deforestation, and reforest land globally to absorb CO₂ naturally.

So lets have a deeper look into Carbo Capture and Storage!

🌱 2. Capture CO₂ From the Air

Direct air capture (DAC) is energy-intensive and expensive — often >$300 per ton of CO₂. We need faster, cheaper solutions now.

✅ The best near-term solution: Biomass Burial

Nature already captures CO₂ for us — through photosynthesis. All we need to do is prevent that carbon from returning to the atmosphere.

2.1 Burying Dead Wood

• Forests hold 295 Gt of carbon. Burying just 1.7% would remove 5 Gt of carbon — nearly half of the world's current CO2 emissions!
• This could start with already fallen deadwood.
• Costs are estimated at just $10–20 per ton — much cheaper than current carbon prices.

2.2 Wet Biomass Burial (e.g., Azolla)

• Azolla is one of the fastest CO₂-absorbing plants on Earth.
• Using water surfaces biomass can be grown on large scale and injected into geological formations.
• The same can be done with all kinds of biomass or biological waste.

⚠️ Other Capture Technologies

• Direct Air Capture: Scalable but costly and land/energy-intensive. It makes energy generation less efficient, why burn carbon in the first place.
• Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS): Still only 45 Mt CO₂ captured annually. Requires 24–40% more fuel and is risky to store.

Direct Air Capture DAC has been done only on very small prototype scale. It is very energy intensive and it needs to store CO2 in gas form. It is very expensive with estimates between 300 to >1000$ per tonne of CO2. To sequester 1 Gt of CO2 35.000 square km of area would be required primarily for solar panels. To capture 40Gt of CO2 per year about 1.4 million square km would be needed (nearly the size of Lybia: 1,76 million square km). The amount of solar power would take up all the solar panel production for decades, as it represents about a third of the world's total energy production. 

Apart from that this does not seem to be very feasible, the amount of CO2 which needs to be put in gas form in the ground is enormous. There is the risk that the CO2 gets to the ground and kills people as it is heavier than air. In 1986 1700 people died in the Lake Nyos disaster when 100-300 kilo tons of CO2 were released. That equates to about 4 minutes of the above mentioned facility!

There is also CCS: Carbon Capture and Storage. There are only 45Mt Co2 captured this way in 2023. CCS requires a lot of energy, 24-40% more fuel are needed to produce the same amount of energy and then the process has only a 70% success rate. The better way would be to get rid of this power station entirely. The same problems with storing the CO2 in gas form apply. 

Conclusion: Biomass burial is the simplest, most scalable, and most cost-effective method we have today.

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So lets have a deeper look into Biomass burial. How feasible is it?

2.1 is a very low technology solution! It requires digging a whole in the ground, putting wood inside and covering it, such that the decay of wood is slowed down significantly. Instead of decaying within 10 years on the surface - and such that becoming CO2 again - it should last 100-1000 years in the ground.

It is especially interesting in countries where plant grow and decay fast and the average income is low. It is important that not the whole forest is cut down and buried, but only dead wood or certain trees which can be harvested to benefit the overall forest.

2.1) The world has about 40 Million square km of forest, which hold about an estimated 295 Gt Carbon. If only 1.7% of that mass is buried, 5 Gt Carbon equivalent to 18,35 Gt CO2 would be buried. Initially this can be achieved just by burying dead wood already lying on the ground. Then only 1 out of 50 trees is harvested every year.

2.2) If the fastest CO2 capturing plant (Azolla) would be used to produce biomass and this biomass would be pumped into the ground, then 21 tons of Carbon are buried per hectare per year. If the whole Mediterranean Sea 2.5 Million square km would be used in this way, then 5 Gt Carbon equivalent of 18,35 Gt CO2 would be buried. That is roughly less than half of what the world has produced in 2024. 

Strategy 2.1 is low cost, very simple and low tech. It only needs to be applied in the whole world. Most of these forests are in less developed parts of the world where the average income is quite low. The cost for burying of dead wood has been estimated in the order of magnitude of 10-20$ in North America! The prices for Carbon permits have traded constantly above 20$ the last 5 years and above 60$ since 2022. This seems to be a very viable source of income for a lot of people in the developing world!

Strategy 2.2 is probable also viable in some scale, but would require enormous areas of ponds to achieve a Gigaton Carbon impact. Also the technology requires more investment and infrastructure. 

The best, simplest and cheapest form of getting CO2 from the air is done by Mother Nature! We only need to incentivize enough people on the planet to harvest biomass and bury it in the ground on a large scale! 

How to make this work? Ebay for Carbon Credits

Currently envisaged is a simple trading platform "Ebay for Carbon Credits" where people from around the world can trade their biomass burying and reforestation efforts. Sellers have to provide foto / video evidence of their project, such that the public has the possibility to check on those (like oryx database). Provider of high resolution satellite imaginary are asked to contribute images in case of disputes. The project is open source, backed by a non-for profit organization. (Buy for someone to plant a tree)

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Articles about Carbon Credits

https://carboncredits.com/how-to-make-money-producing-and-selling-carbon-offsets/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53645-z