Actually, we usually want to go the other way: make agricultural waste *less* recalcitrant, so we can turn it into biofuel. Otherwise, your scheme would still require you to spend some money and energy to bury ag waste underground, and then you'd have to spend more money and energy pulling fossil fuel out of the ground. If you can turn ag waste into biofuel, you kill two birds with one stone.
-- Rice straw and husks are actually a significant problem right now. It degrades very slowly because of the high silica content. So rice growing regions wind up with these mountains of rice straw in the fields that take ages to degrade. Yes, I guess you could dump it into a landfill somewhere, but unless you can get some sort of carbon offsets for that, it's probably not economically feasible.
On Tuesday, June 3, 2014 8:36:23 AM UTC-7, Simon Field wrote:
On Tuesday, June 3, 2014 8:36:23 AM UTC-7, Simon Field wrote:
Here's an idea I have not yet explored quantitatively, but I thought I'd pass along for comments.In the Carboniferous era, plants had evolved lignin, but microbes had not yet evolved to degrade it. It took a hundred million years or so for that to happen. In that time, carbon got locked up in plant material which eventually got buried and formed our current coal supplies. As carbon got sequestered, and trees evolved, carbon dioxide levels fell, and oxygen levels rose.If we could engineer the lignin in our crops so that it was not degradable, we could lock up a lot of carbon as a by-product of our current activities.
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