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Comment by seunosewa | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated process of converting it to oil and burying it.

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Burying crude oil would at best be carbon neutral, but most likely carbon positive. Burying biomass has the potential to be carbon negative if the processes are refined enough because it's capturing atmospheric carbon and putting it into the ground.

How does that help clear the excess biomass produced by farming? The primary problem this solves isn't "carbon capture". It's great that it does, and it's what distinguishes it from other solutions in the same primary business: to help deal with the problem of harvest "waste".

You can buy oil and pump it back in the ground, but now you still need to solve the farming problem.

Corn and wheat post-harvest biomass is usually tilled into the ground to improve organic matter in the soil and return nutrients to the soil, or fed to cows and other ruminants by grazing or by cutting.

The point is to take carbon out of the cycle. Not mining petroleum would of course have the same effect but good luck getting people to do that.

In both cases you're burying a product of photosynthesis that would have been converted back to carbon dioxide through combustion or respiration. You're taking carbon out of the cycle. It doesn't matter whether the carbon was fixed millions of years ago or a couple of months ago. Carbon is carbon.

Funny how oil and corn aren't just carbon though. Almost as if thinking in terms of CO2 only is intentionally ignoring the actual fuels involved.

Except that now you have created a pending ecological disaster should the containers of crude oil break out of whatever vat you're storing them in and seep into the local water tables.

That and it would do nothing to remove CO2 or Methane from the atmosphere, so even the process of getting the oil to bury would be carbon positive in the first place.

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