Hacker News Reader

Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

You'll also need to store it in a way that does not release the wood's CO2 back to the atmosphere by biodegradation.

If you turn it into charcoal you keep most of the carbon locked up in a non-biodegradable form.

If you use it to build homes you provide shelter for more people.

Building houses is great, but if you're growing the trees in order to sequestrate carbon, you'd better be reasonably sure a decent proportion of the wood doesn't release it's carbon within the next fifty years. I don't live in a country where wood is a major building material, but I'm imagining that most wood that goes into building gets discarded within a few decades and ends up decomposing or being burnt.

and wood doesn't make for a building material that can go higher than a few stories.

Of course you're not getting skyscrapers from them but nowadays you can build at least five floors which is not that bad. Most buildings are below that I think.

Here's a 14 story wood-based apartment building in Norway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5XsqauBCX4

http://treetsameie.no/

There are many other wood-based buildings higher than that being planned. The key for most of them is the use of various hybrid wood-laminates.

If treated and maintained right it can last hundreds of years. So this is not really an issue and if you replace it with new wood it will still store carbon.

> if you replace it with new wood it will still store carbon.

Good point, although you need to be sure you aren't counting the wood you replace it with as more carbon storage. Every wooden house essentially provides a fixed amount of carbon storage, no matter how much of it is replaced, and only as long as it stands.

We need to unburn roughly as much coal as we've burned. We're talking about hundreds of billions of tons. You could probably plaster the whole surface of the planet with homes and not have used enough wood.

And you can add it to soil where it works wonderfully at increasing biomass, reducing water runoff and increasing the number and variety of microorganisms in the soil, sequestering more carbon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

Wood used in construction seems to degrade very slowly. I've lived in houses whose the floor alone was a couple hundred years old.

That's in dry conditions though, it'd probably be gone by now if there wasn't a roof.

Scorched timber can last a hundred years. I have seen a cabin from 1740 made of timber from trees that were scorched in a forest fire but remained alive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com